• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Open Access close
• Research software close
• Other research products close
• University of Hertfordshire Researc... close

Contemporary design is simultaneously global, regional and national. ‘Italian’ cars, for example, may be designed by Britons and Brazilians and manufactured in Poland and Pakistan, on behalf of multi-national owners, for consumption in Switzerland and Swaziland. At the same time, international developments in higher education, the continuing influence of post-colonial theory, and the contemporary focus on sustainability, have led design historians to critique a bias towards Western industrialised nations based on a definition of design derived from its separation from industrial manufacture. Design historians are now looking further afield in writing Global Design History (to use the title of a 2011 anthology). National histories are criticised as unsuited to a new ‘global gaze’ in which contemporary society and historical narratives are to be freed from the geo-political straightjacket of nation states. Appadurai (1996) has even claimed that the nation state has become obsolete as a marker of identity construction. Is the nation simply imagined (Anderson, 1983), a modern myth, as Ernest Gellner (1983) claimed? Or can this admittedly complex construction still be a valuable framework for histories of design? The nation state is no longer the only socio-cultural or political-economic unit forming our identities and experiences, but national and regional histories of design have demonstrated cogent frameworks for the discussion of common socio-economic, cultural and identity issues. With contributions from all five continents, this book will provide a timely examination of the historiographic value of national frameworks and ask whether moves to discard them are premature. Kjetil Fallan, Grace Lees-Maffei, Eds, ‘Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization’, (Oxford & New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), ISBN 1785331558. Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization edited by Kjetil Fallan and Grace Lees-Maffei is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Final Published version

The growing dependence of modern society on the Web as a vital source of information and communication has become inevitable. However, the Web has become an ideal channel for various terrorist organisations to publish their misleading information and send unintelligible messages to communicate with their clients as well. The increase in the number of published anomalous misleading information on the Web has led to an increase in security threats. The existing Web security mechanisms and protocols are not appropriately designed to deal with such recently developed problems. Developing technology to detect anomalous textual information has become one of the major challenges within the NLP community. This paper introduces the problem of anomalous text detection by automatically extracting linguistic features from documents and evaluating those features for patterns of suspicious and/or inconsistent information in Arabic documents. In order to achieve that, we defined specific linguistic features that characterise various Arabic writing styles. Also, the paper introduces the main challenges in Arabic processing and describes the proposed unsupervised learning model for detecting anomalous Arabic textual information. Final Published version

The citation management program Zotero is a wonderful tool for researchers everywhere. Citations from the web may be "grabbed" simply by clicking on a in your web browser address bar. The citation information displayed on the screen is then saved to your Zotero collection with little or no additional effort. However, for this to work, each and every website must either follow standardized metadata guidelines, or must have its own personal "translator" that tells Zotero which words on the screen correspond with which bibliographic fields. Computers are stupid; translators make them smart. Most users who know about the citation capture feature are enthralled by it and want more. The Zotero forums receive multiple requests daily from users hoping their favourite site will be given this capability. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough Zotero programmers around to keep up with the demand for translators, and more intensive coding-projects take priority. Luckily, Zotero translators are fairly easy to create (as far as computer programming goes). This guide seeks to help take some of that load away from the Zotero staff by teaching the community of Zotero users how to create their own translators and to share them with others.

Peer reviewed

Peer reviewed

Peer reviewed

Peer reviewed