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Idea readability and complexity in online user innovation communities: effects on implementation and advocacy
Full text linkDespite the importance of online user innovation communities (OUICs) as venues for capturing novel ideas for innovation and new product development, little research has examined how idea characteristics, such as readability and complexity, interplay with firms’ implementation decisions and the advocacy of other community members. Drawing on stakeholder engagement theory and leveraging data from 11,985 ideas collected and 657 ideas implemented, this study investigates how user idea-contribution behaviors in OUICs influence performance. The findings indicate that idea complexity is negatively associated with both implementation and advocacy, whereas idea length is negatively associated only with implementation. Additional moderating analyses show that discussion of ideas can mitigate the negative effect of textual complexity. Taken together, these results underscore the importance of idea readability and offer direct implications for firms that manage and promote OUICs
A tripartite model examining language ideologies: exploring dangerous, celebratory, and hegemonic multilingualism in United Nations language policy
No full textThe concepts of ‘dangerous’, ‘celebratory’, and ‘hegemonic’ multilingualism provide a valuable heuristic to explore language ideologies within supranational organizations like the United Nations. Adopting a critical stance in relation to the functions and values assigned to multilingualism and applying corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this study examines three ideological manifestations: verbalizations, metapragmatic acts, and linguistic practices in United Nations debates on the 1995 multilingualism resolution. The study analyses how member state representatives index their ideological stance: metadiscursively via verbalizations within the context of language policy debates, via acts of voting, and via their use of multilingualism as positioning devices within these debates. Unlike previous investigations of language ideology which have predominantly and exclusively focussed on discursive analyses of texts, this article forwards a tripartite analytic framework. We argue that this model serves to afford a holistic examination of practised and stated attitudes towards multilingualism, which in turn have consequences for language policy outcomes
A dataset of collections dispersal following museum closures in the UK during 2000–2025
Full text linkThis dataset details the closures of 479 museums in the UK between the 1st of January 2000 and the 31st of July 2025. The data records the reasons why museums closed, what happened to the collections, and the actors involved. We developed new taxonomies to code event and actor types; the objects are described using Wikidata items; and each museum is linked to its entry in the Mapping Museums database. The data was collected from a range of sources including historical documents, reports, news articles, and personal accounts. It can be integrated with a broader range of data relating to the UK’s changing cultural sector
Possible identification of the Luna 9 Moon landing site using a novel machine learning algorithm
Full text linkDetecting and cataloguing spacecraft hardware on the lunar surface remains challenging even after six decades of exploration. We present a lightweight computer vision system, YOLO-ETA (You-Only-Look-Once – Extraterrestrial Artefact), adapted from TinyYOLOv2 for identifying anthropogenic objects in high-resolution Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) imagery. Trained on Apollo landing-site data, YOLO-ETA achieved balanced precision–recall (F1 ≈ 0.60) and an 80% mean confidence score for lander detections in previously unseen images and correctly localised the Luna 16 spacecraft. Applying the model to a 5 × 5 km region surrounding the historically uncertain Luna 9 landing area yielded several high-confidence detections of artificial objects near 7.03° N, –64.33° E. Topographic analysis indicates that the candidate site’s horizon geometry is potentially consistent with Luna 9 surface panoramas. These findings identify promising locations for follow-up imaging and demonstrate that compact, edge deployable machine-learning models can support future orbital surveys of lunar artefacts and surface assets
Shadow Libraries and Pirate Infrastructures
No full textSusan Leigh Star’s infrastructure principles famously include the characteristics of embeddedness, transparency, breadth of reach, and visibility on breakdown. However, our acclimatization to such architectures routinizes their presence such that, to study infrastructure, Star claims, is to study ‘boring things.’
Yet what happens when we assume that infrastructures must be free and therefore reframe paying for infrastructure as a ‘breakdown,’ as has happened with the open access movement to scholarly research? What new archives are emerging to take the place of the apparently broken, ‘boring things’ of legitimate scholarly publishing? And what might we glean from studying the pirate libraries of research?
This chapter argues that we have much to learn from the so-called ‘shadow libraries’ of Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, and Memory of the World, each of which also seems to be an illegal enterprise in the eyes of copyright law. Providing access to the vast majority of the world’s research without permission, the lessons from these libraries are sociotechnical and span their discursive embeddedness to their technical architectures.
The chapter examines the rhetoric of legality and legitimacy for these pirate archives, exploring the discursive contexts within which they situate themselves and within which they find themselves situated. This includes such diverse areas as appeals to the UN declaration of human rights to education, with a set of attendant data ethics, to the legacy of the term ‘shadow’ in heraldic imagery, where it refers to illegitimate family members. Even the terminologies of ‘archive’ – so contested already – and ‘library,’ let alone ‘pirate,’ confer various statuses of veridiction upon these infrastructures.
The chapter next describes the technicalities of the infrastructures in question, examining their metadata frameworks, archive sizes, and scalability limits. Ranging from discussion of community-created backup torrent archives to future-envisaged de-centralization through IPFS, I also note the brazenly public nature of the spaces where these discussions occur. As such, these archives can serve, I here argue, as ‘archives of dissent,’ with cross-applicability to many more legitimate enterprises.
The chapter closes by turning to the intersections of new, legal infrastructures with these pirate architectures, arguing that the shadow libraries’ shaping influence belies their name. For by implying their occlusion, we can miss the fact that their design principles are reflected upon our official research edifices, be that in the emergent concept of scholarly ‘megajournals’ or the open principles that are now more and more embedded in official discourse. The development of shadow libraries has forever altered the shape of our legitimate research systems
In conversation with Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
No full textOn the Tuesday of the festival, at UTC 13.00-14.00, I will be interviewed by/in conversation with Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, with time for audience questions. Matthew Kirschenbaum was the Chair of the SHARP Board of Directors from 2021–25 and is Commonwealth Professor of Artificial Intelligence and English at the University of Virginia and the 2009 winner of the George A. and Jeanne S. DeLong Book History Book Prize for Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008). He is, in short, one of my academic heroes; an intellectual with a consistently fresh way of looking at and understanding technology and its histories. My recent book was sincerely indebted to his work as an intellectual foundation for thinking about technologies and reading them (I hope he thinks this is a good thing). I am absolutely thrilled that we will be having this discussion. I hope many of you can join us
Paid to play: football club owner ambitions on promotion to the English Premier League and impact on the league
Full text linkPurpose: What can be inferred about the financial and sporting ambitions of football club owners when promoted to the English Premier League (EPL)? Does this effect the competitive balance of the league? Do parachute payments effect sporting outcomes in the EPL?
Design/methodology/approach: The expected financial gain and additional expenditure on talent for clubs promoted to the EPL are calculated and compared to a hypothetical scenario where clubs spend at least the full gain. The league competitive balance is compared to a hypothetical league without newly promoted clubs.
Findings: More owners are concerned with retaining expected gains than with avoiding relegation. This did not significantly adversely affect competitive balance in the EPL. Clubs promoted without parachute payments were more successful in avoiding relegation from the EPL.
Originality/value: Owners of clubs promoted to the EPL are less ‘win oriented’ but more successful if not promoted with a parachute payment
Discursive and language-based methods
No full textThe purpose of this chapter is to document the use of critical language-based methodologies to study work and organizational psychology (W/OP) and related phenomena. We examine three specific methodologies: critical thematic analysis, critical discourse analysis and critical narrative analysis. For each, we describe the method and its implications for data collection and analysis, with examples of published studies to illustrate each. Some examples are from W/OP publications, but we have also drawn on adjacent disciplines (management, communication and organization studies) where these investigate W/OP concepts. We highlight the contribution that each method makes to knowledge and our understanding of such W/OP concepts, and its potential in future research. To conclude, we reflect on issues and opportunities regarding the development and use of these language-based methodologies in W/OP
Beauty, ugliness and ideas of difference: the politics of the personal
No full textUgliness and beauty have become politicized in the modern period – used to marginalize and silence, and also to empower. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current climate of “body shaming” and “body positivity,” in which feeling empowered and attractive has become a marketable commodity. This chapter charts the mobilization of aesthetics: within the eugenics movement and “unsightly beggar” ordinances in the early decades of the twentieth century; through the politics of commemoration and protest following World War I, and in the new discourse of rights starting in the 1960s and 70s. Aesthetics becomes a battleground in the Black is Beautiful movement, second-wave feminism, and in attempts to destigmatize homosexuality, disability and non-normative bodies generally. Bodily difference in the modern world is routinely subject to legal definition, professional scrutiny, photographic documentation, and medical correction. But as the universality of aesthetic categories wanes it becomes possible to think of beauty and ugliness as fluid and contested terms open to creative and political re-appropriation
Weaponising the supply chain: Yemen's blockade and the contradictions of maritime logistics capital
Full text linkThis paper examines the 2023–2025 naval blockade imposed by Yemen in the Red Sea. It argues that the blockade's success in disrupting global trade stemmed from the potent confluence of asymmetric military tactics and the structural vulnerabilities inherent within global maritime logistics capitalism. The pursuit of efficiency through carrier consolidation, vessel gigantism, and just‐in‐time scheduling has created a brittle, hyper‐concentrated system with minimal slack, concentrating risk at infrastructural chokepoints such as deepwater ports and mega‐hubs. By examining the interplay between Yemen's blockade against the genocide in Gaza and its targeting of these logistical frailties, this paper contributes to critical geographies of infrastructure and logistics. It demonstrates how the very architecture of global capital circulation can become a terrain of effective struggle for non‐state actors, revealing the central contradiction between capital's drive for logistical efficiency and its systemic vulnerability to disruption
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