• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publicationsclose
• Research dataclose
• Research softwareclose
• Other research productsclose
• Open Access close
• Article close
• 0509 other social sciences close
• 050904 information & library sciences close
• European Commission close
• IT close
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage close

In this article, the Mingei Online Platform is presented as an authoring platform for the representation of social and historic context encompassing a focal topic of interest. The proposed representation is employed in the contextualised presentation of a given topic, through documented narratives that support its presentation to diverse audiences. Using the obtained representation, the documentation and digital preservation of social and historical dimensions of Cultural Heritage are demonstrated. The implementation follows the Human-Centred Design approach and has been conducted under an iterative design and evaluation approach involving both usability and domain experts.

The role of employment uncertainty as a fertility driver has previously been studied with a limited set of constructs, leading to inconclusive results. We address this oversight by considering perceived stability of employment and perceived resilience to potential job loss as two key dimensions of employment uncertainty in relation to fertility decision-making. The present study relies on the 2017 Italian Trustlab survey and its employment uncertainty module. We find that perception of resilience to job loss is a powerful predictor of fertility intentions, whereas perception of employment stability has only a limited impact. The observed relationship between resilience and fertility intentions is robust to the inclusion of person-specific risk attitude and does not depend on the unemployment rate or the share of fixed-term contracts in the area of residence. We conclude that the notion of employment uncertainty includes distinct expectations towards the future, which should be considered separately to understand fertility decision-making.Supplementary material for this article is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2021.1939406.

This article pursues a translational approach to the securitization of migration. It argues that sociotechnical processes of identification at the border can be conceived of as translations into legible identities of individuals who are unknown to authorities. The article contributes to the materiality debate on securitization across Critical Security Studies (CSS) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) by answering the call to conduct empirical explorations of security, and by revisiting the potential of the early sociology of translation (i.e. actor-network theory) to account for the identification of border crossers. Data collection was conducted at four identification facilities in the Hellenic Republic. Three sets of implications for the CSS-STS debate on the materiality of securitization are discussed. First, a translational approach can replace a representational understanding of identity with a performative apprehension of identification. Second, adopting a translational approach leads to acknowledge that the identification encounter is mediated by multiple, heterogeneous actors. It thus helps to open technological black boxes and reveal the key role of material qualities, affordances and limitations of artefacts. Third, a translational approach to the securitization of migration can help advance the field of ‘alterity processing’ by appreciating the de facto re-arrangements of institutional orders elicited by techno-political alignments with global security regimes.

Digital Libraries (DLs), especially in the Cultural Heritage domain, are rich in narratives. Every digital object in a DL tells some kind of story, regardless of the medium, the genre, or the type of the object. However, DLs do not offer services about narratives, for example it is not possible to discover a narrative, to create one, or to compare two narratives. Certainly, DLs offer discovery functionalities over their contents, but these services merely address the objects that carry the narratives (e.g. books, images, audiovisual objects), without regard for the narratives themselves. The present work aims at introducing narratives as first-class citizens in DLs, by providing a formal expression of what a narrative is. In particular, this paper presents a conceptualisation of the domain of narratives, and its specification through the Narrative Ontology (NOnt for short), expressed in first-order logic. NOnt has been implemented as an extension of three standard vocabularies, i.e. the CIDOC CRM, FRBRoo, and OWL Time, and using the SWRL rule language to express the axioms. On the basis of NOnt, we have developed the Narrative Building and Visualising (NBVT) tool, and applied it in four case studies to validate the ontology. NOnt is also being validated in the context of the Mingei European project, in which it is applied to the representation of knowledge about Craft Heritage.

AbstractProminent among the social developments that the web 2.0 has facilitated is digital social reading (DSR): on many platforms there are functionalities for creating book reviews, ‘inline’ commenting on book texts, online story writing (often in the form of fanfiction), informal book discussions, book vlogs, and more. In this article, we argue that DSR offers unique possibilities for research into literature, reading, the impact of reading and literary communication. We also claim that in this context computational tools are especially relevant, making DSR a field particularly suitable for the application of Digital Humanities methods. We draw up an initial categorization of research aspects of DSR and briefly examine literature for each category. We distinguish between studies on DSR that use it as a lens to study wider processes of literary exchange as opposed to studies for which the DSR culture is a phenomenon interesting in its own right. Via seven examples of DSR research, we discuss the chosen approaches and their connection to research questions in literary studies.

Recent studies have shown higher uncertainty to be associated with fertility decline. This study considers the role of social trust as a coping mechanism when general uncertainty increases. We analyse the fertility data of Italian provinces from 2004 to 2013, thereby incorporating the period of economic recession, which unexpectedly and exogenously increased uncertainty across the population. We find a robust and significantly positive impact of social trust on fertility, which is stronger among younger age groups. Moreover, we find that the buffer effect of trust decreases with the level of public childcare provision, suggesting that low trust endowments may be counterbalanced through public policy.

AbstractMany believe that the quality of a scientific publication is as good as the science it cites. However, quantifications of how features of reference lists affect citations remain sparse. We examined seven numerical characteristics of reference lists of 50,878 research articles published in 17 ecological journals between 1997 and 2017. Over this period, significant changes occurred in reference lists’ features. On average, more recent papers have longer reference lists and cite more high Impact Factor papers and fewer non-journal publications. We also show that highly cited articles across the ecological literature have longer reference lists, cite more recent and impactful references, and include more self-citations. Conversely, the proportion of ‘classic’ papers and non-journal publications cited, as well as the temporal span of the reference list, have no significant influence on articles’ citations. From this analysis, we distill a recipe for crafting impactful reference lists, at least in ecology.

The COVID-19 pandemic invites a question about how long-standing narratives of alterity and current narratives of disease are entwined and re-enacted in the diagnosis of COVID-19. In this commentary, we discuss two related phenomena that, we argue, should be taken into account in answering this question. First, we address the diffusion of pseudoscientific accounts of minorities’ immunity to COVID-19. While apparently praising minorities’ biological resistance, such accounts rhetorically introduce a distinction between “Us” and “Them,” and in so doing produce new and re-enact old narratives of alterity. Second, these unsubstantiated narratives thrive on fake news and scarcity of data. The second part of this commentary thus surveys the methods through which the COVID-19 test is administered in various countries. We argue that techniques used for data collection have a major role in producing COVID-19 data that render contagion rates among migrants and other minorities invisible. In the conclusion, we provide two recommendations about how COVID-19 data can instead potentially work towards inclusion.

Why are conditional degrees of belief in an observation E, given a statistical hypothesis H, aligned with the objective probabilities expressed by H? After showing that standard replies (ratio analysis of conditional probability, chance-credence coordination) are not satisfactory, I develop a suppositional analysis of conditional degree of belief, transferring Ramsey’s classical proposal to statistical inference. The analysis saves the alignment, explains the role of chance-credence coordination, and rebuts the charge of arbitrary assessment of evidence in Bayesian inference. Finally, I explore the implications of this analysis for Bayesian reasoning with idealized models in science.

AbstractA fluid terminology was used in antiquity to refer to scientific or philosophical writings that, in some respects, may be equated with what one would call today a handbook or manual. In particular, this paper will explore a group of treatises that may be counted as examples of ancientencheiridia, a Greek term that could mean ‘hand-knife’, ‘handbook’ and even ‘napkin, towel’. All these meanings have something to tell us about the nature and the history of ancientencheiridia, some of which can be identified with well-known pieces of Graeco-Roman literature. However, the spectrum of ancientencheiridiacan be further enlarged by exploring sources that are often neglected. After giving an up-to-date overview of ancient ‘handbooks’, the article will discuss the termencheiridionin Graeco-Egyptian alchemical literature. In fact, fresh textual investigations of the Syriac tradition of Zosimus of Panopolis point to the circulation of ancient recipe books that bore this title. On the one hand, this investigation will shed new light on the tradition of other important collections of alchemical recipes, such as the medievalMappae clavicula. On the other, it will highlight some strategies that ancient alchemical authors developed in selecting, reorganizing and legitimizing earlier alchemical recipes.