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As a key part of human-computer interaction(HCI) and usability testing, the capturing and recording of key user interaction plays a center role for ensuring a reliable post-hoc analysis of collected user interaction data, thus improving the odds of insightful HCI and usability testing cycles for use cases such as the evaluation of interactive information retrieval Systems(IRR). As such, the practice of logging is of significant importance for multiple fields of study such as IIR, HCI and most recently also Living Lab approaches. Living lab approaches represent a user-centered research methodology with a focus on user involvement, experimental approaches and extensive collaboration for the sake of co-production of knowledge and as such, has a dire need for robust and easy to use logging solutions.
With past logging solutions being either expensive, hard to use or error-prone, recent conferences gave rise to new logging solutions using contemporary web technologies, which aim to improve the logging landscape within the research community. Over the course of this paper, two of these recent logging solutions, LogUI and Big Brother, are to be inspected for their key features and then evaluated, whether they are suitable logging solutions for living lab and IIR environments. Results and research indicate, that both logging solutions offer significant benefits for research using living lab and IIR approaches, with LogUI embracing many of the experimental paradigms that guide the living lab approach.
In the second decade of the 21st century, far-right ideas and groups have made themselves present and active in politics in the west, even winning local and national elections in some countries, such as the United States, Brazil and Hungary. While having specific ideological and cultural differences in its many forms in different countries, the far-right movement on an international scale has proven to be similar in its core and tactics.
This new-born far-right is in essence populist, defends conservative values, and navigates in what in popular use - and to some extent in academic discourse - is called post-truth politics. The concept of post-truth politics can be summarized as an increasing disregard to factual evidence in political discourse and decision-making. As the term “post-truth” suggests, facts regarding what is in discussion and the opinion of experts are secondary, if important at all, in comparison to emotional aspects being communicated. The condition for the success of the message is its appeal to the listener’s beliefs and values. Given this conjecture, conspiracy theories and science denialism can be powerful rhetorical tools in political discourse. A politician who constantly communicates using these tactics is Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Since before he was elected, the then candidate had always been heavily present in social media and been accused of spreading disinformation and fake news on his online profiles, which continued during his term. As the Covid-19 pandemic started, the executive organ of the Brazilian government minimized the importance and gravity of the situation in disregard to the orientation of the massive majority of the scientific community. In October 2021 Brazil reached over 600.000 deaths by COVID since the beginning of the pandemic, according to official data, which makes the country the 7th on the ranking of deaths per million.
This thesis aims to, firstly, discuss the interaction and causes of the rise of the far-right, post-truth politics, social media and the communication of conspiracy theories and science denialism in political discourse in general, but also to go deeper in the Brazilian context, in order to understand the events that lead to President Bolsonaro’s election, his ideology, rhetoric and communication. The second goal of this thesis is to identify conspiracy theories and science denialism in the official communication of the Brazilian government in regard to the COVID-19 pandemic; classify the content according to the structure of conspiracy theorization and science denialism; and analyze these findings within the scope of interactions described in the first part of the thesis. The third goal of this thesis is to discuss the findings of the second part and the outcomes (deaths, vaccination rate and willingness, adoption and disrespect of public health measures) of the pandemic in Brazil so far and to suggest topics for further research.
Information literacy in secondary schools in England : challenges to implementing a teaching tool
(2017)
The skills required to become an information literate person should be taught and learned in schools from an early age on. The focus in schools lies in raising student attainment and being information literate has a positive impact on the attainment. However, the teaching of IL is often overlooked in English schools. This thesis introduces the English educational system as well as the National Curriculum and analyses the situation in English secondary schools with focus on the challenges that school librarians face when trying to provide learning opportunities to gain IL skills. Several different IL frameworks, models and standards are evaluated for their suitability as a practical teaching tool for school librarians and teachers. It is concluded that there is a need for an easy-to-use scheme that can be adopted in any secondary school in England and other countries with a similar school system. Building on the analysis of the literature a new Scheme for Teaching IL in English Secondary Schools (STILESS) as well as an exemplary lesson plan will be developed. STILESS and the lesson plan are not only a practical teaching tool but also a useful instrument to promote IL in general across schools with leadership, teachers and students.
Research data which is put into long term storage needs to have quality metadata attached so it may be found in the future. Metadata facilitates the reuse of data by third parties and makes it citable in new research contexts and for new research questions. However, better tools are needed to help the researchers add metadata and prepare their data for publication. These tools should integrate well in the existing research workflow of the scientists, to allow metadata enrichment even while they are creating, gathering or collecting the data. In this thesis an existing data publication tool from the project DARIAH-DE was connected to a proven file synchronization software to allow the researchers prepare the data from their personal computers and mobile devices and make it ready for publication. The goal of this thesis was to find out whether the use of file synchronization software eases the data publication process for the researchers.
Analysing the systematics of search engine autocompletion functions by means of data mining methods
(2017)
In the internet era, the information that can be found about politicians online can influence
events such as the results of elections. Research has shown that biased search rankings can
shift the voting preferences of undecided voters. This shows the importance of studying
online search behaviour, especially in the pre-elections phase, when search results can
have a particular influence on the future political scene of a country.
This master thesis aimed to study the behaviour of online search engines in a period before
the German federal election in 2017. The aim was to ascertain if there is any pattern to be
found in the auto-suggestions for searches related to politicians.
In order to gather data for this experiment, a crawler browsed search engine web pages,
input a name and a surname of a politician, and saved that together with all autosuggestions
from the search engine. The autosuggestions were prepared for the analysis and
divided into semantic groups with the help of clustering algorithms.
Different statistical methods, such as correlation analysis, regression analysis, and clustering
were used to identify patterns in the data. The research showed that there are
no particularly strong patterns in the autosuggestions for searches related to politician’s
names. Only moderate dependence was found between gender and personal topics, and
showed that a higher amount of personal information autosuggestions correspond more
to female politicians.
As technology advances, the services offered by libraries and the roles of
librarians continue being reconsidered. This paper describes the traditional
model and development of liaison and embedded librarians, examines the
online visibility of liaison librarians and their services in an embedded sense,
especially regarding instruction, of selected Canadian Academic Libraries, and
provides a short view to German libraries and their subject librarians.
It has been shown that even if not clearly a development of liaison librarians to
certain embedment is emphasized for each library, it at least evolves to a usercentered
approach and a preference to stronger collaborations. The selected
libraries seek to broaden their scope of partnerships. In which deepness it is
realized, lastly depends on the willingness of both participators and capacities.
Libraries have stated their flexibility in various ways and are ready to step in at
the point of need. The one closest to embedded services is the instruction of
information literacy as its effectiveness requests a longer relationship in order to
flourish. Nevertheless research support in Health Sciences obviously has
become an integral part.
Präsentation des Vortrags "The role of OiF in the American library world", über die Arbeit des Office of Intellectual Freedom (Chicago) der ALA, gehalten am 6. Mai 2015 an der Fachhochschule Köln im Rahmen des berufsbegleitenden Masterstudiengangs "Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft".
Kein Abstract vorhanden.
In the last few years the issue of curation of research data has become a topic of enhanced interest in scientific communities. But there is no clear understanding of how to deal with curation of research data. Regarding the situation in Germany, there was no clear picture of the methods that different academic disciplines use to preserve and curate their research data. Even more there was no clear understanding and consensus which role libraries could or should play in this issue. A baseline study was conducted in cooperation with nestor and the D-Grid GmbH in Germany. The study gives more stable data to scientists, service infrastructure experts and politicians to foster strategic concepts for digital curation and preservation in and between the disciplines. The survey addressed eleven disciplines including the humanities, social sciences, psycholinguistics, pedagogics, classical studies, geoscience, climate research, biodiversity, particle physics, astronomy and medicine. Results can be seen as more or less representative for the situation in Germany. Findings show that libraries and data centers are involved but there is no clear result on the role libraries should or will play in the field. Libraries which are in close connection to scientists have an advantage in being addressed as institutions responsible for digital curation and preservation. Librarian’s competences regarding research data still have to be proofed. Nevertheless individual scientists and research data centers might need librarian´s expertise regarding the application of metadata standards and the provision of services in connection with the research data curated by institutions. Qualification and training regarding curation of research data is still at its beginning and should be addressed by programs of universities.