Assessing e-government capacity to increase voter participation: Evidence from the U.S.

One of the great promises of e-democracy is the potential it holds for increasing citizen participation. Much of the research related to this topic has focused on inputs, identifying the tools and technologies of e-democracy, or factors associated with adoption and/or diffusion of these technologies across units of governments or public organizations. By contrast there has been less research examining how these inputs translate into outcomes, or impacts that e-democracy has on changes in civic behavior or citizen engagement. Our study helps fill this knowledge gap by examining the impact that a specific set of information communication technologies (ICTs) have on a common form of civic engagement: voting. This research creates and tests two unique measures, the online election information index (OEII) and the e-registration service index (ERSI) to examine the extent to which local governments offer online information and utilities that help to educate voters and promote turnout. The index is tested on a sample of 396 county governments in the US to examine the extent to which governments' use of voting ICTs impacts voter participation, while accounting for other institutional and demographic factors that are known to shape voter turnout. We find that voter turnout is indeed higher in communities where local governments offer more voting ICTs, and the availability of these online resources may be particularly influential in boosting turnout in places where state policies serve to constrain or limit turnout.     

Is e-government a way to e-democracy?: A longitudinal study of the Iranian situation

Some scholars have supported e-government as a path to e-democracy, whereas others have been more cautious about the subject. In this article, we review the similarities between the concepts of e-government and e-democracy as well as evaluate e-government initiatives and e-democracy requirements in the case of Iran. We used a longitudinal study at two points in time to evaluate the path from e-government to e-democracy using two different methods: a systematic evaluation based on a checklist and a questionnaire survey. The trend of change in e-government initiatives was positive but low from 2008 to 2009, whereas the trend of change in e-democracy requirements was negative and substantial during the same period. We conclude that an emphasis on e-government as a way to e-democracy is not recommended in countries such as Iran.     

Scientific impact assessment cannot be fair

In this paper we deal with the problem of aggregating numeric sequences of arbitrary length that represent e.g. citation records of scientists. Impact functions are the aggregation operators that express as a single number not only the quality of individual publications, but also their author's productivity.We examine some fundamental properties of these aggregation tools. It turns out that each impact function which always gives indisputable valuations must necessarily be trivial. Moreover, it is shown that for any set of citation records in which none is dominated by the other, we may construct an impact function that gives any a priori-established authors’ ordering. Theoretically then, there is considerable room for manipulation in the hands of decision makers.We also discuss the differences between the impact function-based and the multicriteria decision making-based approach to scientific quality management, and study how the introduction of new properties of impact functions affects the assessment process. We argue that simple mathematical tools like the h- or g-index (as well as other bibliometric impact indices) may not necessarily be a good choice when it comes to assess scientific achievements.     

The Use of Communication Technology in Thailand's Political Process

Thailand's political landscape has changed dramatically during the past five years. The rapid growth of communication technology in Thailand has been instrumental in generating political participation in the national elections of 2001 and 2005. In this article we provide the results of a benchmark study that assesses the early period of this political transformation. Specifically, we examined the use of television and of the Internet for political information by interviewing 500 urban residents. Our results indicate that likely voters actively gathered political knowledge from television advertisements and political party websites. Although use of television and the Internet for political purposes did not increase direct involvement in political parties, it did promote participation in the 2001 national election. Implications of these findings for future research on the use of communication technology for political communication in Asia are discussed.     

From conventional governance to e-democracy: Tracing the evolution of e-governance research trends using network analysis tools

The adoption of e-governing practices has revolutionised the administrative machinery of governments worldwide by improving efficiency, transparency, and accountability. Researchers and administrators often aim to identify emerging research fronts and the timeline of the evolution to forecast and implement technology. In this work, we systematically investigate the trajectory of the global evolution and emerging research fronts as well as the prospects for e-governance using citation network analysis. The growth curve fitted to the number of articles published per year shows that the research activities are still in the ascendant phase. We visualise the global main path of the citation network and investigate the patterns to trace the knowledge diffusion path, major milestones, and emerging research fronts. The cluster analysis identifies the major topics of research as administration and information system management, e-governance framework design, efficiency or quality evaluation, and the application of social networks and open data leading to e-democracy. The adoption of open data and social networking for user interactions with government that leads to participatory governance are the emerging research trends. We also identify research that can have a future impact based on network parameters. The results contribute to the literature by setting the focus of future research, and assisting administrators in selecting suitable models and methodologies, and manufacturers with the development of required technical devices suitable for the upcoming phase of symbiosis.     

An exploratory study of the perceived benefits of electronic bulletin board use and their impact on other communication activities

Electronic bulletin boards have become popular with the advent of inexpensive computers, easily available channels, and large networks. With public message posting, millions with like interests can post, read, and provide immediate feedback. This study focused on adoption and social impact issues the characteristics bulletin board users possess and how board use affects other communication media. A random sample of bulletin board users was selected from two services, CompuServe and Prodigy, and interviewed on‐line. These groups were cross analyzed for the two areas of interest. A typology of uses was constructed through a content analysis for future analyses     

Socializing the h-index

A variety of bibliometric measures have been proposed to quantify the impact of researchers and their work. The h-index is a notable and widely used example which aims to improve over simple metrics such as raw counts of papers or citations. However, a limitation of this measure is that it considers authors in isolation and does not account for contributions through a collaborative team. To address this, we propose a natural variant that we dub the Social h-index. The idea is to redistribute the h-index score to reflect an individual's impact on the research community. In addition to describing this new measure, we provide examples, discuss its properties, and contrast with other measures.     

Measuring risk in science

Risk plays a fundamental role in scientific discoveries, and thus it is critical that the level of risk can be systematically quantified. We propose a novel approach to measuring risk entailed in a particular mode of discovery process – knowledge recombination. The recombination of extant knowledge serves as an important route to generate new knowledge, but attempts of recombination often fail. Drawing on machine learning and natural language processing techniques, our approach converts knowledge elements in the text format into high-dimensional vector expressions and computes the probability of failing to combine a pair of knowledge elements. Testing the calculated risk indicator on survey data, we confirm that our indicator is correlated with self-assessed risk. Further, as risk and novelty have been confounded in the literature, we examine and suggest the divergence of the bibliometric novelty and risk indicators. Finally, we demonstrate that our risk indicator is negatively associated with future citation impact, suggesting that risk-taking itself may not necessarily pay off. Our approach can assist decision making of scientists and relevant parties such as policymakers, funding bodies, and R&D managers.     

Challenges of measuring software impact through citations: An examination of the lme4 R package

The rise of software as a research object is mirrored by increasing interests in quantitative studies of scientific software. However, inconsistent citation practices have led most existing studies of this type to base their analysis of software impact on software name mentions, as identified in full-text publications. Despite its limitations, citation data exists in much greater quantities and covers a broader array of scientific fields than full-text data, and thus can support investigations with much wider scope. This paper aims to analyze the extent to which citation data can be used to reconstruct the impact of software. Specifically, we identify the variety of citable objects related to the lme4 R package and examine how the package’s impact is dispersed across these objects. Our results shed light on a little-discussed challenge of using citation data to measure software impact: even within the category of formal citation, the same software object might be cited in different forms. We consider the implications of this challenge and propose a method to reconstruct the impact of lme4 through its citations nonetheless.     

Google Scholar and Web of Science: Examining gender differences in citation coverage across five scientific disciplines

Many studies demonstrate differences in the coverage of citing publications in Google Scholar (GS) and Web of Science (WoS). Here, we examine to what extent citation data from the two databases reflect the scholarly impact of women and men differently. Our conjecture is that WoS carries an indirect gender bias in its selection criteria for citation sources that GS avoids due to criteria that are more inclusive. Using a sample of 1250 U.S. researchers in Sociology, Political Science, Economics, Cardiology and Chemistry, we examine gender differences in the average citation coverage of the two databases. We also calculate database-specific h-indices for all authors in the sample. In repeated simulations of hiring scenarios, we use these indices to examine whether women's appointment rates increase if hiring decisions rely on data from GS in lieu of WoS. We find no systematic gender differences in the citation coverage of the two databases. Further, our results indicate marginal to non-existing effects of database selection on women's success-rates in the simulations. In line with the existing literature, we find the citation coverage in WoS to be largest in Cardiology and Chemistry and smallest in Political Science and Sociology. The concordance between author-based h-indices measured by GS and WoS is largest for Chemistry followed by Cardiology, Political Science, Sociology and Economics.     

Public memories and private tastes: The shifting definitions of museums and their visitors in the UK

There is no doubt that museums now operate in a distinctly different market to those of the past. Rottenberg [Rottenberg, B. (2002). Museums, information and the public sphere. Museum International, 54(4), 21-28] identifies the two major trends in museums in the latter years of the 20th century as being ‘the prevalence of a new market-orientated ideology that stressed the importance of revenue generation’ and ‘the introduction of new technologies that transfixed not only the museum profession, but also the world’. The main impact, which these and other changes have had is the revision of the museum into a setting for recreational experiences [Foley, M. and McPherson, G. (2000). Museums as leisure. International Journal of Heritage Studies 16(2), 161-174; Stephen, A. (2001). The contemporary museum and leisure: Recreation as a museum function. MuseumManagement and Curatorship 19(3), 297-308], rather than an educative one. This paper attempts to address some of these shifts in ideology and purpose.The main concern that museums face as they become more ‘recreation-focused’ is that they will lose what has long been believed to be their ‘integrity’, and thus stray from their original missions to preserve and educate, with critics suggesting that they may simply become arenas for pleasure rather than education.This paper concludes that in future, it seems inevitable that museums will become ‘hybrid places, combining recreation and learning, allowing visitors diversions from the intense stimuli of strolling through galleries and viewing multitudinous objects’ [Kotler, N. (2004). New ways of experiencing culture: the role of museums and marketing implications. Museum Management and Curatorship, 19(4), 417-425], with entertainment and education working together to fulfil the museum's mission. Museums need not be afraid of using entertainment, but should embrace it as a tool for learning, potentially attracting a wider and more diversified public.     

Dealing with temporal variation in patent categorization

In this paper, we quantify the existence of concept drift in patent data, and examine its impact on classification accuracy. When developing algorithms for classifying incoming patent applications with respect to their category in the International Patent Classification (IPC) hierarchy, a temporal mismatch between training data and incoming documents may deteriorate classification results. We measure the effect of this temporal mismatch and aim to tackle it by optimal selection of training data. To illustrate the various aspects of concept drift on IPC class level, we first perform quantitative analyses on a subset of English abstracts extracted from patent documents in the CLEF-IP 2011 patent corpus. In a series of classification experiments, we then show the impact of temporal variation on the classification accuracy of incoming applications. We further examine what training data selection method, combined with our classification approach yields the best classifier; and how combining different text representations may improve patent classification. We found that using the most recent data is a better strategy than static sampling but that extending a set of recent training data with older documents does not harm classification performance. In addition, we confirm previous findings that using 2-skip-2-grams on top of the bag of unigrams structurally improves patent classification. Our work is an important contribution to the research into concept drift for text classification, and to the practice of classifying incoming patent applications.     

Scenario planning in public libraries: a discussion

The authors explore the use of scenario planning in public libraries via a Q&A discussion. They discuss the impact of unexpected events and unwelcome trends on libraries’ future, explain the distinction between scenario work and forecasting, and outline a practical approach to devising and delivering scenario planning activities at a local library level. This discussion, which took place at Oxford University’s Said Business School on 23 August 2018, explores the use of scenario planning in public libraries.     

A Typology of News Sourcing: Routine and Non-Routine Channels of Production

ABSTRACT

This article presents a novel typology for analysing the routinisation of news and daily newsroom practices. Drawing inspiration from the work of Sigal, Tuchman and others, the framework—comprising eight categories—provides a reconceptualisation of routine and non-routine channels of news production to facilitate an exploration of source material, focusing on initial story triggers. One contribution which is particularly useful relates to the subcategorisation of the traditionally singular “routine” channel; although the broad concept of routine source material is familiar, it has generally not been systematically deconstructed in previous analyses. Considering different types of routine news allows for a deeper understanding of how these channels are integrated into contemporary daily news production and the role of internal newsroom and external actor dynamics. This is particularly relevant in an era in which there is a high usage of information subsidies, passive news reporting, cannibalised content, and desk-bound work. As such, the application of this model provides insights into the dominance and subordinate use of various channels in contemporary newsrooms. The discussion also illustrates how such a typology can aid empirical research with reference to the content analysis study from which this framework was developed.     

Access vs. Ownership:

Throughout the entire history of libraries, the primary objective of any library has been to collect and house information of interest to the specific clientele which it serves. Libraries operated under the premise that materials would be obtained by the library for use on site by those persons authorized to have access to that information. As we move towards the twenty-first century, this concept of the primary function of the library must be questioned. Due to several factors, the library can no longer function solely as a warehouse of information. In order to survive as information professionals for the future, librarians must shift their emphasis from one based on ownership to one based on access. This paper will examine the factors behind the need for such changes and will also examine their impact on the role of the librarian as an information professional.     

Not all undecided voters are alike: Evidence from an Israeli election

The literature dealing with undecided voters – a growing group of citizens in many democracies that can determine who wins in election campaigns – suggests two very different profiles. The first approach describes undecided voters as being generally uninformed about politics, while the second sees undecideds as sophisticated citizens who follow a campaign closely before making their final voting decision. The current study tries to make sense of this contrast, while examining differences between sophisticated and less sophisticated undecideds (their level of sophistication was based on their political interest and knowledge). Using two panel surveys, conducted before and after the April 2019 elections in Israel (N = 1427; N = 912), we examine a number of hypotheses about differences in terms of the undecided citizens' demographic backgrounds, how they search for political information during the election campaign, how they come to make their final decisions, and whether they ended up voting. The findings indicate that the typical sophisticated undecided voter is a citizen from a more privileged social background, exhibits greater trust in traditional media, consumes more news to follow the campaign (from various traditional news outlets and social media), is more likely to carry out online discussions about the elections, is more likely to base his or her decision on policy issues, is more likely to debate between parties within the same ideological camp (internal floater), and more likely to vote than less sophisticated undecided voters. Our typology, which makes a distinction between sophisticated and less sophisticated undecided voters, as well as these findings (and the comparison to the committed voters), can help political scientists and practitioners widen their understanding regarding this important group of voters in todays' complex political reality.     

高校系资料员应向学科馆员发展

通过对昔日系资料员的回顾和未来学科馆员的展望，可以看出二的工作职责有许多相似之处，同时在服务深度和服务模式方面却存在着很大的差距。并分析了系资料员向学科馆员角色转换的客观条件和主观条件。     

Theory-to-research-to-theory strategy: A research-based expansion of radical change theory

Theory use and development in research are significant to all disciplines. Scholarly literature serves as a venue to share the diverse and detailed methods about how theories are used and developed in research. This research study, which investigated information behavior of digital age youth, applied and further developed radical change theory by adopting the theory-to-research-to-theory strategy. Radical change theory guided development of the research questions. The research design incorporated radical change theory to provide structure to the systematic data collection and analysis. Finally, radical change theory was further developed by the study's results. The study's primary finding is the development of a typology of youth information behavior in the digital age. The typology presents innovative information behaviors that operationalize radical change theory's concepts. The typology creation contributes to the expansion of the theory and lays the groundwork for future research.     

BLOGS BOTHER ME

This paper grew out of the authors’ interest in updating the journalism curriculum at AUT (Aukland University of Technology) to better reflect the impact of online media, including social media, on the work of journalists. The challenge for journalism educators is to remain relevant in rapidly changing news and education environments. Our study suggests that while the vast majority of students have some engagement with social media, particularly social networking, and are aware that it can be a powerful tool for journalists, they are still not entirely comfortable with its techniques and they are not experimenting with social media as a production platform as much as we first thought. In short, it appears that they do not have command of professional fluency with social media tools. In response to these findings we have begun to introduce some social media tools and processes directly into the units we teach, in particular: digital story-telling techniques; the use of Twitter and location-based applications; encouraging the ethical use of Facebook etc. for sourcing stories and talent for interviews; podcasting, soundslides and video for the Web, Dreamweaver, InDesign and PHP-based content management systems. We do not see the work to date as the end-point of the changes that we know are necessary, but we are acutely aware of the limitations (structural, institutional and financial) that suggest we should continue with this small-steps approach for the foreseeable future.