The Intention to Notice: the collection, the tour and ordinary landscapes is concerned with how ordinary landscapes and places are enabled and conserved through making itineraries that are framed around the ephemera encountered by chance, and the practices that make possible the endurance of these material traces. Through observing and then examining the material and temporal aspects of a variety of sites/places, the museum and the expanded garden are identified as spaces where the expression of contemporary political, ecological and social attitudes to cultural landscapes can be realised through a curatorial approach to design, to effect minimal intervention. Three notions are proposed to encourage investigation into contemporary cultural landscapes: To traverse slowly to allow space for speculations framed by the topographies and artefacts encountered; to [re]make/[re]write cultural landscapes as discursive landscapes that provoke the intention to notice; and to reveal and conserve the fabric of everyday places. A series of walking, recording and making projects undertaken across a variety of cultural landscapes in remote South Australia, Melbourne, Sydney, London, Los Angeles, Chandigarh, Padova and Istanbul, investigate how communities of practice are facilitated through the invitation to notice and intervene in ordinary landscapes, informed by the theory and practice of postproduction and the reticent auteur. This community of practice approach draws upon chance encounters and it seeks to encourage creative investigation into places. The Intention to Notice is a practice of facilitating that also leads to recording traces and events; large and small, material and immaterial, that encourages both conjecture and archive. Most importantly, there is an open-ended invitation to commit and exchange through design interaction.

Everyday life revolves around the discovery and curation of digital information. People search the Web continuously, from quickly looking up the information needed to complete a task, to endlessly searching for inspiration and knowledge. A variety of studies have modeled information seeking strategies and characterized information seeking and curation activities on the Web. However, there is a lack of research on how existing Web applications support the discovery and curation of information, especially concerning the motivations behind them and how different approaches can be compared. In this thesis, I present a study of information discovery tools and how they relate to the nature of information seeking. I propose a conceptual framework that deals with Web application design elements that support different aspects of information discovery and curation. This framework can be used when designing, evaluating or updating Web applications. / Graduate / 0984

This thesis explores the role of curation in the design and development of brand experience in the luxury retail environment. Three research objectives seek firstly, to gain an understanding of the meaning of curation in luxury retailing and identify the role, purpose and value to luxury retailers; secondly, to explore the different ways in which curation manifests itself in the luxury retail environment by examining sole brand and multi brand luxury retailers, and lastly, to identify how curation is brought to life through the curatorial roles within luxury retailers. In light of increasing global competitive pressures and fast-paced technology advances associated with mobile devices, the rise of omnichannel retailing has led luxury brands to be ubiquitous, with the resulting challenge for luxury retailers to develop seamless and experiential omnichannel brand experiences in order to continue to differentiate and grow. However, there is a paucity of literature regarding the design and development of luxury brand experiences, suggesting a gap in the literature. In addition, ‘curation’, a term traditionally associated with museology, is being increasingly used in the business environment in terms of creating differentiated experiences or collection of products both online and in-store. Little attention has been paid to curation in the literature, with the result of limited understanding of the role of curation in the design and development of brand experience, suggesting a second gap to be addressed in the research. The research was an investigative, qualitative and thematic analysis-based study. The data collection focused on face-to-face semi-structured interviews with 17 senior professionals from the luxury retail and cultural environments in the UK. Braun and Clarke’s (2006) Six Stages of Thematic Analysis and NVivo software were utilised to analyse the data, resulting in 9 key themes. My original contribution to the literature is this research is one of the first empirical studies to explore the role of curation in the design and development of brand experience in the luxury retail environment, resulting in three key contributions. Firstly, the role of curation is an influential one in the design and development of brand experience in the luxury retail environment and is manifested in four forms of curation across sole brand and multi brand luxury retailers. Secondly, curation in luxury retail has evolved from the traditional art-historian discipline of curation and is emerging as a new discipline and modus operandi in its own right, creating strategic, organisational, financial and experiential value. Thirdly, a strategic curation management toolkit consisting of three strategic frameworks was developed that contributes to both the brand literature and management practice. The toolkit provides managers with a common vernacular to develop their curatorial capabilities and identify strategic opportunities where they can harness curation as a strategy to design and develop omnichannel luxury brand experiences as a route to competitive advantage and build a platform for future growth.

This practice of traditional male circumcision among the Xhosa people in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa is accompanied by a high level of secrecy: details of the practice may not be shared with non-members such as women, uninitiated boys and strangers. To address the issue of injuries and deaths resulting from poorly performed unhygienic circumcision by untrained practitioners, the Department of Public Health in the Eastern Cape passed the Application of Health Standards in Traditional Circumcision Act No 6 of 2001. In order to explore the conflicting interests between public health and custodians of indigenous knowledge of curation and dissemination of information about Xhosa initiation rites, sociocultural theory through a systematic review of literature is used. Meta-ethnography design and a qualitative research approach is also used, as well as NVivo 11 qualitative data analysis software to analyse the data. Eighteen databases were used, and searches were conducted on 9 June 2016 and 13 October 2018. Using the systematic review screening process and PRISMA checklist, articles were screened against inclusion criteria, resulting in nine articles being included in the final review. Apart from the aforementioned findings that the practice excludes non-members from participating and disseminating information, and that traditional practitioners lack basic skills and knowledge necessary for procedures, findings also showed that the establishment of the Circumcision Act was the major reason for the conflict that exists between public health and Xhosa people: Xhosa people do not want secret information about the practice to be disseminated to non-members. In conclusion it is recommended that the Xhosa-speaking community make some Traditional Male Circumcision (TMC) information available while still preserving the fundamental secret information for traditional purposes. For example, access to pertinent information should be given to public health officials to enable assistance in addressing botched circumcisions.

Data generation has vastly exceeded manual annotation in several areas of astronomy, biology, economy, geology, medicine and physics. At the same time, a public community of experts and hobbyists has developed around some of these disciplines thanks to open, editable web resources such as wikis and public annotation challenges. In this thesis I investigate under which conditions a combination of collaborative and automated curation could complete annotation tasks unattainable by human curators alone. My exemplar curation process is taken from the molecular biology domain: the association all existing enzymes (proteins catalysing a chemical reaction) with their function. Assigning enzymatic function to the proteins in a genome is the first essential problem of metabolic reconstruction, important for biology, medicine, industrial production and environmental studies. In the protein database UniProt, only 3% of the records are currently manually curated and only 60% of the 17 million recorded proteins have some functional annotation, including enzymatic annotation. The proteins in UniProt represent only about 380,000 animal species (2,000 of which have completely sequenced genomes) out of the estimated millions of species existing on earth. The enzyme annotation task already applies to millions of entries and this number is bound to increase rapidly as sequencing efforts intensify. To guide my analysis I first develop a basic model of collaborative curation and evaluate it against molecular biology knowledge bases. The analysis highlights a surprising similarity between open and closed annotation environments on metrics usually connected with “democracy” of content. I then develop and evaluate a method to enhance enzyme function annotation using machine learning which demonstrates very high accuracy, recall and precision and the capacity to scale to millions of enzyme instances. This method needs only a protein sequence as input and is thus widely applicable to genomic and metagenomic analysis. The last phase of the work uses active and guided learning to bring together collaborative and automatic curation. In active learning a machine learning algorithm suggests to the human curators which entry should be annotated next. This strategy has the potential to coordinate and reduce the amount of manual curation while improving classification performance and reducing the number of training instances needed. This work demonstrates the benefits of combining classic machine learning and guided learning to improve the quantity and quality of enzymatic knowledge and to bring us closer to the goal of annotating all existing enzymes.

Poster from University of Arizona 2016 IT Summit / Are you or the researchers you work with writing a grant proposal that requires a data management plan? Are you working on a research project and have questions about how to effectively and efficiently manage your research data? Are you interested in sharing your data with other researchers? We can help! For the past several years, the University of Arizona (UA) Libraries, in collaboration with the Office of Research and Discovery and the University Information Technology Services, has been providing data management services and resources to the campus. We are interested in tailoring our services and resources to what you need. We conducted a research data management survey in 2014 and are currently working on the Data Management and Data Curation and Publication (DMDC) pilot. This poster will describe what data management and curation services we are currently providing, and ask for your feedback on potential new data management services and resources.

Dendrochronological collections include continuously expanding multi-taxon records of tree growth that encompass millennia and often offer irreplaceable sources of biological, environmental, and cultural information. Nevertheless, each departure of a scholar from the field—whether because of death, retirement, career change, shift in research priorities, or even move to a new institution—places collections in increased danger of being lost as viable resources. Without an organized and concerted effort to address outstanding and future issues of specimen curation, dendrochronology as a whole may become mired in the same trap that befalls many other scientific fields: collections apathy. Dendrochronological collections exist as a result of decades of effort and should function to support current and future scientific endeavors, education, and outreach, but cannot do so without adequate attention to their future. Intended as a ‘‘call to arms’’ this paper, focused on dendrochronology in the academic and public sector, aims to encourage discussion and, more importantly, to provide a foundation for and to instill a sense of urgency regarding long-term preservation of dendrochronological specimens.

Concurrent with a bloom of interest in the archive within academic discourse, an intense cultural fascination with museums, archives, and memorials to the past has flourished within the United States. The ascendency of digital technologies has contributed to and magnified this “turn” by popularising and habituating the archive as a personal memory tool, a key mechanism through which the self is negotiated and fashioned. This dissertation identifies a sustained exploration of the personal archive and its place in contemporary life by American novelists in the twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of the archive and the collection, this dissertation analyses the parameters of the curated self through close-readings of recent novels by five US authors. The first two chapters read Paul Auster’s Sunset Park through trauma theory and Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved through psychoanalysis, noting that in each the system of archiving generates moments of catharsis. The two chapters argue that, for the subject shattered by trauma, archiving activates and fulfils psychoanalytic processes that facilitate the self’s reintegration and prompts a discursive revelation about the painful past. The texts, thus, discover in the archive strategies for achieving, however provisionally, a kind of stability amongst unexpected change. The next two chapters reveal the complicity of archival formations with threats posed in the digital age and articulate alternative forms of self-curation that counteract these pernicious forces. To ward off information overload, E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley advocates the ethical flexibility of “blind” narration that, wending through time, accommodates a broad range of perspectives by refusing to fantasise about its own ultimate and total claim to accuracy. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, meanwhile, diagnoses the cultural anxiety over increasingly invasive surveillance measures. While the novel situates the digital archive, or database, at the heart of this new dataveillance, it recommends investing the self in material collections, where personal meaning is rendered in the inscrutable patois of objects that disintegrate over time. For Egan, the material archive thereby skirts the assumed readability and fixity of data on which this surveillance thrives. The conclusion analyses Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, observing within it and the other novels a consistent concern with archival destruction, erosion, and stagnation. Together, the texts suggest that the personal archive is persistently stalked by disintegration and failure. Yet, within this contemporary moment in which curation has become a widespread means of self-fashioning, they also show how these hazards can be creatively circumvented or actively courted, can threaten the subject or be harnessed by it.

QTAGG has designed a real-time autonomous system that continuously calculates an optimum propulsion plan controlling the engines and propellers of a vessel. In this way, the precision of the signals that are used is very important, as any little error in the signal can produce incorrect control effects and cause critical damages to the equipment or passengers. This thesis describes the mathematics and implementation of a system to detect and correct disturbances in the data signals of a vessel. The system applies a signal curation based on mathematical modelling and statistics leading to clean data to use in QTAGG’s control system.

In the 150 years since Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel (1865/1866) first published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, various illustrators have found inspiration in this story to recreate its images again and again. Since Carroll and Tenniel, Wonderland has concerned itself with sociocultural ideas and the work of artists who re-illustrated this story provide ways to trace history of these ideas. Accordingly, the purpose of this project was to examine connections and breaks with tradition in illustration that contribute to an evolution of meaning in the Wonderland story. Additionally, through this project, I worked to interpret ideas from different artists in different times and spaces in an attempt to understand intersecting ideas of culture and Wonderland illustration. Through this work, I developed the concept of curation as a visual research methodology in order to make sense of and share my discoveries. Wonderland offers a rich context to explore and elucidate the arts-based qualitative methodology of curation because of its literary merits, artistic interpretations, and persistence and pervasion worldwide over the last century and a half. Curation allowed me flexibility in thinking about thematic interpretations of the illustrations I studied. Specific curatorial methods led me to identify the scene of Alice's decent to Wonderland, visual characterizations of the Hatter character, and depictions of the playing card characters as signals of sociocultural changes. When examined together, these interpretations point to an ever-shifting relationship between author, illustrators, and readers in classic, illustrated novels. Specifically, through the illustrations in Wonderland, Alice is no longer portrayed as a particular girl and illustrators over time have placed readers as the subject of the adventures. In recent times, Wonderland has gained some ability to cross over from its pages into the real world and take a look at its readers. This shift in perspective in Wonderland speaks to a current sociocultural environment wherein reality is hyper-subjective and nothing is quite as it seems.