• Rural Digital Europe

Autor przybliża sylwetkę polskich humanistów cyfrowych na podstawie wyników europejskiego sondażu praktyk oraz potrzeb cyfrowych w humanistyce i naukach o sztuce przeprowadzonego na przełomie 2014 i 2015 roku przez Obserwatorium Cyfrowych Metod i Praktyk (Digital Methods and Practices Observatory – DiMPO) – grupę roboczą europejskiego konsorcjum DARIAH. Wyniki analizowane są w kontekście obecnej w literaturze przedmiotu koncepcji o falach humanistyki cyfrowej: pierwsza to prosta digitalizacji, druga – zastosowanie zaawansowanych metod cyfrowych, trzecia – krytyczny namysł nad epistemologią cyfrowych instrumentów. Autor proponuje stopniowalne definiowanie humanistów cyfrowych przez umieszczanie ich na spektrum, od tych korzystających z podstawowych narzędzi po najbardziej zaawansowanych użytkowników. To sketch a profile of Polish digital humanists, Maryl draws on the results of a European survey on scholarly practices and digital needs in the arts and humanities. This survey was conducted in 2014 and 2015 by the Digital Methods and Practices Observatory (DiMPO), a working group of the European consortium DARIAH. The results are analysed in the context of the concept of waves of digital humanities: the first wave is simple digitization, the second entails the use of advanced digital methods, the third harnesses critical reflection on the epistemology of digital instruments. Maryl proposes to classify digital humanists by placing them on different points on a spectrum, from those using basic tools to the most advanced users.

Reflecting on a methodological experiment, we discuss the use of computational techniques in anthropology. The experiment was based on a collaborative effort by a team of ethnographers to produce an archive on the digitalisation of everyday life that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. We describe how online ethnographic data collection took place using digitally mediated interviews, participant observation in virtual events, and mobile ethnography. We analyse the consequences of online ethnography for establishing rapport and present steps taken to create an infrastructure for navigating ethnographic material comprising more than 3000 pages of text generated by multiple ethnographers.

Digital history is a field that escapes easy definition due to its incorporation of an ever-growing variety of methods, disciplines and endeavours. However, this slim volume – part of Polity’s What is History series – provides a solid introduction to the terrain as it lies at the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Massive digitization makes histories appear as well as disappear. While digital archives facilitate the access to documents, recordings, films, and other s urces there is the risk that offlin sources get lost. Thus, the question about how digital collections are generated is essential for today’s film and media historians. Which artefacts are getting digitiz d – and which are not? In addition, for what reasons? Who is responsible for preserving historical material? Moreover, how can we access it? How can we make sense of the abundance of audio-visual sources, which are at the same time ephemeral? In this article, we analyse tools and methods useful for coping with digital archives and databases. Presenting a case study on the Syrian Archive, we discuss how concepts of authenticity and provenance relate to current media practices. We argue that besides posing productive research questions, conducting critical online search becomes more and more important in the humanities. Therefore, we examine not only what but also how the use of audio-visual material affects us. Furthermore, we argue that regarding the abundance of material the practice of curating – of selecting, structuring, and providing access – becomes a key activity in digital media practices.

As media policy research and the methods used for conducting such research (for this see Chapters 1 and 2 by Puppis and Van den Bulck) develop further, the question ‘What is next?’ arises near-spontaneously. Media sectors seem to be in a continuous turmoil. This can make one wonder whether the challenges that issues such as fake news, data protection, the further integration of media ownership, the pressure on press freedom, the limited accountability and liability of intermediaries, … create for policy makers, can be studied if one does not innovate at the methodological level too. That is one of the elements motivating this handbook on methods for conducting media policy research. The aim is to devote attention to those methods, techniques and approaches that have demonstrated their robustness, while at the same time exploring the value of genuinely innovative methods. In media policy research, two main fields of innovative activity can be observed. Firstly, not only the subject of our analysis, but also the meansto perform that analysis are becoming more digital. That applies to both data collection and data analysis and allows for the inclusion of an enormous amount of data in research, for example, algorithm-based content analysis of policy documents. It also allows existing types of analysis, such as network analysis, to become more solidly based in a vast amount of empirical data and less anecdotal in nature. Second, and at the metalevel, research endeavors are looking more at what those affected by policies think, complementary to how scientists and policy-makers themselves evaluate policies. This move can be regarded as a move from top-down to inclusive, bottom-up approaches. For example, analyzing the effectiveness of media literacy policies on the basis of documents and without including the recipients of certain initiatives seems a suboptimal approach. To some extent it can be argued that whereas digital methods of data collection and analysis can be part of both administrative and critical policy research, a genuine inclusive and bottom-up methodological approach fits within critical research only. The difference between administrative and critical policy research has been discussed by Just and Puppis (2012, p. 17) and is also discussed in the introductory chapters by Puppis and Van den Bulck in this book. These scholars argue that specifically critical, often normative and evaluative research on media policy is dominant within the field whereas purely descriptive, client-oriented research has become less important, certainly in a European context. Whereas one can indeed argue that participative approaches can be part of administrative research in so far they concern a basic consultation of consumers’ preferences, the participative approach discussed below sets out from an iterative and dialogical relationship between citizen and researcher. The chapter consists of the following parts. The first part contains a discussion of the focus in media policy research on the difference between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media policies, on formal government policies and on the reliance on traditional methods such as document analysis and expert interviews. On the basis of that analysis, some pitfalls and shortcomings of media policy research are addressed. The neglect of bottom-up aspects of media policy, for example, requires a more ethnographic approach. The second part in this chapter elaborates on the emerging practice of digital methods. Part three discusses the rise of ‘participatory action research for policy development’ methodologies. We conclude with some lessons for those interested in developing methods for media policy research in the twenty-first century.

The challenge for digital historians is deceptively simple: it is to do good history that combines the computer’s ability to search and summarize, with the researcher’s ability to interpret and argue. This involves both developing an understanding of how to use digital sources appropriately, and more importantly, using digital sources and methods to deliver new scholarship that enhances our understanding of the past. There are plenty of sources available; the challenge is to make use of them to deliver on their potential. There have been false dawns for digital history, or “history and computing,” in the past (Boonstra et al. 2004). Until very recently, computers were primarily associated with performing calculations on numbers. This has resulted in them becoming fundamental tools in fields such as economic history, historical demography and, through the use of geographical information systems (GIS)1, historical geography. These are, however, relatively small fields within the discipline as a whole and much of the work that has been done in them has taken place outside of History departments in, for example, Economics, Sociology, and Geography. As most historians work with texts, it is hardly surprising that this style of computing has made little impact on the wider discipline. Within the last few years, however, there has been a fundamental shift in computing in which, put simply, computers have moved from being number crunching machines to become an information technology where much of the information that they contain is in textual form. This has been associated with the creation of truly massive amounts of digital textual content. This ranges from social media and the internet, to private sector digitization projects such as Google Books and the Gale/Cengage collections, to the more limited investment from the academic and charitable sectors (Thomas and Johnson 2013). Thus, computers are now inextricably concerned with texts – exactly the type of source that is central to the study of history. As a consequence, many historians have become “digital historians” almost without realizing it through making use of the vast number of sources that are now available from their desktop. So is everything in the garden that is digital history currently rosy? The answer, judging by work such as Hitchcock (2013) and the responses to it (Knights 2013; Prescott 2013), seems to be a resounding no. Many criticisms are centered on the digital sources themselves, whose quality is lower than that might be hoped. Digitizing a document is usually a two-stage process: first a digital image of the document is created as a bitmap, then the textual content is encoded as machine readable text. The two are then often brought together such that a user can type a search term, this is located in the text, and then the user can be shown the appropriate image of the page. The first of the two stages is relatively simple using a scanner or camera and, if done properly, only results in relatively minor abstractions from the original as the result is a facsimile copy. The second stage, however, is hugely problematic involving either the text being manually typed, or optical character recognition (OCR) software being used to automatically identify letters from the bitmap image. Both of these are slow, expensive, and errorprone. OCR tends to be used on largescale projects: it is faster and cheaper but tends to result in far more errors. Whatever approach is used, checking the results is very difficult. Common approaches involve carefully typing up“gold standard”samples of parts of the source and comparing these with bulk-entered material to give a percentage of words or letters that have errors. Understanding what the consequences of these scores mean in practice is difficult. Even without error, if the text is removed from the page scans then they are heavily abstracted from the original and much potentially useful information is lost. Once created, digital sources are often interrogated using techniques that are not properly understood but are nevertheless used uncritically. The classic example that combines both the data capture and uncritical use problems is typing a keyword search into a web interface, which returns a list of hits sorted by “relevance.” As Hitchcock (2013) points out, most historians using digital sources do this without having any idea of the implications either of the data capture that created the digital copy of the source, and thus whether the search will miss words as a result of spelling variations derived from digitization errors, or of how the search engines decides what is – and, more importantly, is not – “relevant.” While using search engines may be problematic, in reality they are the only digital tool that most historians use, indeed there is a lack of widely used techniques that can be used to interrogate, summarize, and understand the large volumes of material that are available. So what do digital historians need to do? The answer, I would argue, is to remember that they are first and foremost historians and that historians fundamentally are in the business of taking complex, incomplete sources that are full of biases and errors, and interpreting them critically to develop an argument that answers a research question. Digital sources do not change this;

We consider the characteristics of one form of digital narrative—the blog—and what they may offer to personal narratives about mothering, families, and food and other resources. We draw on narrative analysis of six months of posts from two blogs about feeding families, written by mothers in the context of constrained economic, time, socioemotional, and environmental resources, to make a second-order analysis of the features of blogs that operate to support or transgress normative narratives. We focus on how, on the "About Me" pages of these blogs, the relations between the written and visual narratives, and the semantic multiplicities and contradictions, the styles and the cross-platform genres of the written stories, generate both normative and transgressive narratives around mothering and family, the bloggers' own involvements with the blog, and resource issues. In conclusion, we discuss the limitations of our analysis, and how and to what extent the features of blogs on which we have focused may work to generate narratives of political positioning and action. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs170178 Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, Vol 18, No 1 (2017)

Digital transactions are growing globally. India has embarked on this journey but still lags behind, in comparison to other countries. The paper attempts to find factors which affect behavioral intention among small merchants for adopting technology. Small merchants in unorganized sector are an important part of Indian business framework. The paper is a deductive research wherein it makes UTAUT model its base and adapts to the Indian context. The paper tests models and hypotheses with the help of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Few variables like performance expectancy, effort expectancy and habit were found to have an effect on intention to adopt cashless method; surprisingly factors profound to Indian consumers such as trust, perceived value and social influence were not found to have an effect on behavioral intension. The study is useful for the digital payment service providers, telecom companies, small merchants, Government and society. It also proposes strategic initiatives to boost digital transactions. It is unique as the survey is in the unorganized sector.

Die Anwendung von Mixed Methods bei der Erforschung von Digitalisierung und ländlicher Entwicklung hat zahlreiche Vorteile in Bezug auf die Integration verschiedener Datenquellen. In diesem Beitrag stellen wir einen neuen Mixed Methods-Ansatz vor, der digitale und analoge Methoden kombiniert. Wir untersuchten multilokale Arbeitsweisen von Wissensarbeitenden in der Schweiz, die hauptsächlich in einem zentralen städtischen Gebiet arbeiten, sich aber gelegentlich in periphere Bergregionen zurückziehen, um ihrer Arbeit in einem konzentrierten und ungestörten Umfeld nachzugehen. Um solche multilokalen Arbeitsweisen zu untersuchen, haben wir einen Mixed Methods-Ansatz verwendet, der sechs integrierte Methoden umfasst: Geotracking, Laptop- und Smartphone-Tracking, selbstverwaltete digitale Tagebücher, ethnographische Walk Along-Beobachtungen sowie qualitative halbstrukturierte Interviews. Unsere Studie zeigt, dass Mixed Methods in der Analyse zur Digitalisierung vertiefende Einblicke in ein zu erforschendes Phänomen gewähren, jedoch auch Einschränkungen damit verbunden sind. Zudem zeigen wir, wie hohe ethische Maßstäbe von digitalen Methoden eingesetzt werden können und sollten, um eine Vertrauensbasis zu Studienteilnehmenden zu schaffen und wie sich dies auf deren Rekrutierung auswirkt. The application of mixed methods in researching digitalisation and rural development has numerous benefits in terms of the integration of various data sources. In this paper, we present a novel, mixed methods approach that combines digital and analogue methods. We investigate multilocal work arrangements of knowledge workers in Switzerland who mainly work in a central urban area but occasionally withdraw to peripheral mountain regions in order to conduct their work in a concentrated and undisturbed environment. To analyse such multilocal work arrangements, we use a mixed methods approach that incorporates six integrated methods: geotracking, laptop and smartphone tracking, self-administered digital diaries, ethnographic walk-along observations and qualitative semi-structured interviews. Our study illustrates that mixed methods in digitalisation research provide in-depth insights, but that they also have limitations. Furthermore, we show how ethical standards can and should be used to create a basis of trust with the study participants and how this affects the recruitment of the sample.

This paper will demonstrate how to effectively measure the impact of a digital library and how this can enhance strategic planning. Measuring the impact of digital resources and how they affect the various benefitting communities improves evidence-based decision making. This paper will discuss how the recently developed Balanced Value Impact Model measures a digital resource by balancing both internal organizational and external community perspectives with social and economic considerations. This will be illustrated with research case studies from the Wellcome Library digitization programme and Europeana Impact Taskforce. The paper will further suggest means by which thinking about the value chain from activity, through output, to outcomes and impact can enhance strategic planning for digital libraries.