Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-79).

Does not include abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 62-68). / This essay explores how the creation of a fictional community is expressed through my body of work. These works do not reference an actual community as such, but are an "imagining"of a nonexisting one, so that they can be understood as a "fictional" or "imagined" community. The dynamic of this imagining is located in the exchange between the memories of my real-life Lithuanian community, and my investigation of the ways in which symbolic objects and group interactions create a sense of community. In this way, my work can be said to reference actual communities, but emphasise the symbolic, or"imaginary"ways in which they hang together.

archives@tulane.edu / 1 / Mitchell Craft

We live in a cultural environment in which computer based musical performances have become ubiquitous. Particularly the use of laptops as instruments is a thriving practice in many genres and subcultures. The opportunity to command the most intricate level of control on the smallest of time scales in music composition and computer graphics introduces a number of complexities and dilemmas for the performer working with algorithms. Writing computer code to create audiovisuals offers abundant opportunities for discovering new ways of expression in live performance while simultaneously introducing challenges and presenting the user with difficult choices. There are a host of computational strategies that can be employed in live situations to assist the performer, including artificially intelligent performance agents who operate according to predefined algorithmic rules. This thesis describes four software systems for real time multimodal improvisation and composition in which a number of computational strategies for audiovisual laptop performances is explored and which were used in creation of a portfolio of accompanying audiovisual compositions.

Opinion analysis is an area of research which deals with the computational treatment of opinion statement and subjectivity in textual data. Opinion analysis has emerged over the past couple of decades as an active area of research, as it provides solutions to the issues raised by information overload. The problem of information overload has emerged with the advancements in communication technologies which gave rise to an exponential growth in user generated subjective data available online. Opinion analysis has a rich set of applications which are used to enable opportunities for organisations such as tracking user opinions about products, social issues in communities through to engagement in political participation etc. The opinion analysis area shows hyperactivity in recent years and research at different levels of granularity has, and is being undertaken. However it is observed that there are limitations in the state-of-the-art, especially as dealing with the level of granularities on their own does not solve current research issues. Therefore a novel sentence level opinion analysis approach utilising clause and phrase level analysis is proposed. This approach uses linguistic and syntactic analysis of sentences to understand the interdependence of words within sentences, and further uses rule based analysis for phrase level analysis to calculate the opinion at each hierarchical structure of a sentence. The proposed opinion analysis approach requires lexical and contextual resources for implementation. In the context of this Thesis the approach is further presented as part of an extended unifying framework for opinion analysis resulting in the design and construction of a novel corpus. The above contributions to the field (approach, framework and corpus) are evaluated within the Thesis and are found to make improvements on existing limitations in the field, particularly with regards to opinion analysis automation. Further work is required in integrating a mechanism for greater word sense disambiguation and in lexical resource development.

The existing authorisation systems within the context of Web Services mainly apply two access control approaches – Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). The RBAC approach links an authenticated Web Service Requester to its specific access control permission through roles, but RBAC is not flexible enough to cater for some cases where extra attribute information is needed in addition to the identity. By contrast, the ABAC approach has more flexibility, as it allows a Web Service Requester to submit necessary credentials containing extra attribute information that can fulfil the policies declared by a Web Service Provider, which aims to protect the sensitive resources/services. RBAC and ABAC can only help to establish a unilateral trust relationship between two Web Services to enable a Web Service Provider to make an access control decision. Unfortunately, the nature of Web Services presents a high probability that two Web Services may not know each other. Therefore, successful authorisation may fail, if the Web Service Requester does not trust the Web Service Provider. Trust Negotiation (TN) is also an access control approach, which can provide a bilateral trust relationship between two unknown entities, so it sometimes can enable authorisation success in situations where success is not possible through RBAC or ABAC approaches. However, interoperability issues will arise between authorisation systems within Web Services, where a bilateral trust-based authorisation solution is applied. In addition, a lack of a unified approach that can address the interoperability issues remains as a research problem. This research aims to explore possible factors causing the lack of interoperability first, and then to explore an approach that can address the interoperability issues. The main contributions of this research are an improved interoperability model illustrating interoperability issues at different layers of abstraction, and a novel interoperability-solution design along with an improved TN protocol as an example of utilising this design to provide interoperability between authorisation systems within Web Services.

In contemporary society, advanced forms of technology and new media artworks are becoming more prevalent in the public realm each year. Nevertheless, many Canadians do not have access to the resources that enable them to critically analyze and interact with new forms of technology and new media artwork. This practicum intends to address this by creating a unique environment known as The Travelling New Media Centre. The design concept consists of exhibition and education spaces that address topics related to technology and new media in contemporary culture. The Travelling New Media Centre takes place in VIA Rail baggage cars with modified interior architecture that consists of interactive exhibitions using a contemporary and historical perspective. Site selection is based on communities that have minimal access to technology and little exposure to contemporary new media works. The train travels to the following northern Manitoba communities: Thicket Portage, Pikwitonei, and Ilford. / February 2017

From jazz clubs to cheese plates, the term curation has become a signifier of the growing need to organise and prioritise the seemingly endless possibilities of the digital sphere. The issue addressed here is in the associated meanings of the word curation and what it means to be a curator by examining the experience of the curatorial within a discrete context: the Irish curatorial landscape. The word curation comes from the Latin curare, to care for, and has long been associated with the professional duties of those selected as custodians for objects and knowledge deemed to be important to communities, nations, countries or even the world. However, as objects move from being purely physical to the digital, and knowledge changes from being transmitted through similarly physical media to digital formats that can be set free on the Web, what it means to curate has also changed. Curators are no longer necessarily identified as employed within museums or galleries; the word is now also applied to those who engage with and aid in the management and presentation of digital assets online. Curators have emerged in the online space much like their forerunners, bloggers or citizen journalists. We are now seeing the rise of citizen curators on the Web, which has not created these individually motivated curators, but has made their curatorial activities visible. Citizen journalists no longer need to have a printing press or publishing house to communicate with their audience; similarly, citizen curators do not need a private cabinet of curiosities or a job in a museum to allow them to curate or exhibit to an audience. The aims of this research are threefold: to examine the current terminology related to curation by those who identify as curators or engage in curation in Ireland; to define what it means to be a curator or a citizen curator within the Irish context; and to investigate the changing nature of exhibition spaces contained in the Irish context in light of the Web and digital spaces. The study will take the form of an autoethnography, exploiting my unique position within the museum and open knowledge community in Ireland to examine current understandings of curation and the phenomenon of the citizen curator. The focus will be on my work within Wikimedia Community Ireland (WCI), a branch of the Wikimedia Foundation which promotes the use of Wikipedia in Ireland in education, culture, and open knowledge. As an autoethnographer, I can act as an intermediary, part way between those working in cultural organisations and the public involved in knowledge building projects. The study will look at how those engaged in curation articulate the work they do by means of interviews and participant observation. These sources will allow for the development of a spectrum of curatorial practice. The spectrum will arise from the participants’ (both citizen curators and those working in Irish cultural institutions) own understanding and definitions of curation and what it means to curate. In placing these definitions of curation within a spectrum that takes in broader understandings of curatorial practice, the newer forms of digital curation, and a picture of how the citizen curator relates to these methods, will emerge. The disruptive effect which the digital, and in particular the concept of the Long Tail, has brought to bear upon understanding of the assembling, storing, and using of collections will be examined. It will answer many of the issues surrounding the discipline-specific definitions of curation and the curator while informing their relationship with each other. By drawing out curation into a spectrum, what unfolds is the movement of curation from a traditional and closed system of learnt practices, to one which is formed around more open and accessible conventions of curation. In identifying the citizen curator, their role in the larger curatorial debate can be acknowledged and better incorporated into the multitude of online curated projects. This hinges on the emergence of the Do It With Others ethos which pervades both online and offline creative communities, and it redefines curation from a solitary practice, to one which is demarcated by its participatory nature.

In today’s new media landscape, who tells the story and how it is told has changed from the traditional journalistic rituals of the past. This study examines four cases within sports media that challenge the sports media complex, a complicated partnership between sports organizations and personalities and the outlets that cover them. This research focuses on the impact of technological advances in communication on this institutionalized connection between media and sport and finds that while there are several factors that have affected the strength of the sports media complex, new media continue to serve as a catalyst in the erosion of the relationship between legacy media and sports’ governing bodies. / text

An observation of the evolution of the marketing messages of Telecommunications Company Vodafone between 2007 and 2013 sheds light on the significant changes that occurred in the communications arena throughout this period. The shift is not a hypothetical one; it is real and reflected in the shifting usage profiles of millions of mobile users. Moreover the shift is not limited to the changes in the technology which enables mediated conversation. Reference is made to existing literature to define the activity under study, understand the historical context of conversation, both in the mobile and online space, measure the present shifts and explore how findings can contribute to a better understanding of the future. In the context of the existing body of work and the significant changes that occurred over the past years, the research aims to propose a new model of conversation in response to the chosen research question, which asks, “how is conversation evolving as a result of take up of new media in Malta?“ A two‐step approach is adopted. The first research stream makes use of a data set of usage logs of a sample of smartphone adopters on the Vodafone network. A comparison of the usage logs before and after adoption is used to shed light on the influence of the device on the users’ conversations. The analysis is supported with two secondary experiments, one relating to the usage of mobile Internet on specific days during the year and the other extending the experiment to everyday conversation on Facebook. The second research stream consists of a review of the new media landscape with a specific focus on key themes. The findings are used to corroborate a model of shifting conversation. The model proposes that conversation is captured in three dimensions - a shift from synchronous to asynchronous conversation, from private to public and from transient to persistent exchanges.