1,720,975 research outputs found
Call to ACTT (Advancing Community, Technology and the Third Sector): Issues for Community Organisations
No full textIncluding a Diversity of Rural Women in a Communication Technology Access Project: Taking the Macro and Micro Contexts in Account
No full textSociotechnical Transformative Effects of an ICT Project in Rural Bangladesh
No full textThe purpose of this article is to provide lessons from the field about an Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) project (Participatory Research and Ownership With Technology, Information and Change [PROTIC]) concerned with the use of mobile phones by women in remote villages in Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi government considers that the role of ICT in social and economic transformation is significant for the country’s development. International nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also regard ICT as important but are challenged as how to use them effectively for their programs and how to deal with long-term sustainability, digital divides, gender, and cultural issues. This article considers the PROTIC project as a modeling force for innovation and pressure on established sociotechnical structures. In this analysis, we follow what Donner defines as the “interrelationship” perspective, as applied to ICT4D. In particular, the notions of niche, regime, and landscape will be used to frame the changes that a village-level project may activate or respond to at the micro, meso, and macro levels of sociotechnical interaction. A mixed methods approach has been implemented during the 4 years of the project to monitor its outcomes, including interviews with project participants, reports of monthly consultations and training with villagers, extensive surveys, analysis of the Facebook profile of the project, and field notes and interviews with local NGOs and international NGO staff. Results show that the women villagers have undergone a transformation in attitudes, skills, and practices associated with mobile phone use. Transformations at individual and community niche levels have in turn influenced the conceptual framework of local and international NGOs and have also contributed to the reorientation of other regime actors, such as universities, major NGOs, and the government. Methodological constraints as well as the complexity of conducting international fieldwork with multiple actors will also be discussed
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
After the smartphone has arrived in the village. How practices and proto-practices emerged in an ICT4D project
No full textThis paper presents a case study of an Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) project in rural Bangladesh, and examines the emergence of new practices connected through a theoretical lens. Social Practice Theory and different concepts of place provide a middle-range theory frame for interpretation. Two groups of 100 women living in different remote villages took part in the project and received smartphones and training. The project also established a call center and delivered timely agricultural information by voice, apps and short message service (SMS). A mixed design was used to evaluate the project progress. A baseline survey was completed in the two areas before the project started. After one year, the two groups of women involved in the project and two control groups completed a questionnaire on smartphone use practices. Episodic interviews were also conducted with a subsample of 40 participants. Project participants developed new skills and meanings associated with smartphones, which contributed to enhanced communication practices. The new practices and the emerging proto-practices at a micro-level also resulted in new perceptions of time and place and new locations for personal presence and interaction. The use of Social Practice Theory in conjunction with insights from theories of place provides a transferable framework with which to identify and emphasize what is meaningful to individuals and communities in the relationship between skills, materials and ideas with respect to different social-technical initiatives. In this regard, Social Practice and theories of place provide new insights into the integration of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in development projects
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