This thesis studies processes of cultural mediation and the role of digital media within them. It is based on the experiences of a group of cultural mediators within a particular music scene in contemporary Chile, and focuses on actors’ meaningful repertoires of action, their material arrangements and their relation with information and communication technologies (ICTs). ‘Mediation’ in a broader sense means processes through which human and non-human agencies produce and shape meanings, attaching them to various cultural flows such as information, images, and identities. As cultural mediators, actors define the music scene, curating and circulating through digital media various flows which they deem worthy of being considered by audiences, and distinguishing themselves across different fields. The thesis is based on nine months of fieldwork (2011) in Santiago, following the everyday practices of the creators of eight music websites through which global and local cultural flows are mediated, organised, and circulated. It analyses how various technological devices facilitate individuals’ construction of networks where cultural flows circulate, and through which their uses of taste are displayed and objectified. It proposes the concept of ‘digital capital’ as an assemblage of actors, practices, objects, and meanings, which is convertible into other types of capital (e.g. economic) and exchangeable in various fields. It is a mode of practice and expertise through which, using digital technologies, individuals create networks where cultural flows circulate. Through the making of websites, music fans become cultural mediators, developing their digital capital as cultural and technical expertise. This expertise is convertible into economic capital and positionality across different fields, especially the field of advertising. Digital capital can be summarised in the question: ‘what are the connections and associations between technical knowledge, cultural flows, and social position, as well as conversions of capital, behind someone who is using Twitter or Facebook, or making a website about a music scene?’ Against this backdrop, it is explored how actors produce and perform ‘cultures of mediation’, commoditising culture as consumption goods.

This work focused on the investigation of the question how the concept of relevance in Information Retrieval can be validated. The work is motivated by the consistent difficulties of defining the meaning of the concept, and by advances in the field of cognitive science. Analytical and empirical investigations are carried out with the aim of devising a principled approach to the validation of the concept. The foundation for this work was set by interpreting relevance as a phenomenon occurring within the context of two systems: An IR system and the cognitive processing system of the user. In light of the cognitive interpretation of relevance, an analysis of the learnt lessons in cognitive science with regard to the validation of cognitive phenomena was conducted. It identified that construct validity constitutes the dominant approach to the validation of constructs in cognitive science. Construct validity constitutes a proposal for the conduction of validation in scenarios, where no direct observation of a phenomenon is possible. With regard to the limitations on direct observation of a construct (i.e. a postulated theoretic concept), it bases validation on the evaluation of its relations to other constructs. Based on the interpretation of relevance as a product of cognitive processing it was concluded, that the limitations with regard to direct observation apply to its investigation. The evaluation of its applicability to an IR context, focused on the exploration of the nomological network methodology. A nomological network constitutes an analytically constructed set of constructs and their relations. The construction of such a network forms the basis for establishing construct validity through investigation of the relations between constructs. An analysis focused on contemporary insights to the nomological network methodology identified two important aspects with regard to its application in IR. The first aspect is given by a choice of context and the identification of a pool of candidate constructs for the inclusion in the network. The second consists of identifying criteria for the selection of a set of constructs from the candidate pool. The identification of the pertinent constructs for the network was based on a review of the principles of cognitive exploration, and an analysis of the state of the art in text based discourse processing and reasoning. On that basis, a listing of known sub-processes contributing to the pertinent cognitive processing was presented. Based on the identification of a large number of potential candidates, the next step consisted of the inference of criteria for the selection of an initial set of constructs for the network. The investigation of these criteria focused on the consideration of pragmatic and meta-theoretical aspects. Based on a survey of experimental means in cognitive science and IR, five pragmatic criteria for the selection of constructs were presented. Consideration of meta-theoretically motivated criteria required to investigate what the specific challenges with regard to the validation of highly abstract constructs are. This question was explored based on the underlying considerations of the Information Processing paradigm and Newell’s (1994) cognitive bands. This led to the identification of a set of three meta-theoretical criteria for the selection of constructs. Based on the criteria and the demarcated candidate pool, an IR focused nomological network was defined. The network consists of the constructs of relevance and type and grade of word relatedness. A necessary prerequisite for making inferences based on a nomological network consists of the availability of validated measurement instruments for the constructs. To that cause, two validation studies targeting the measurement of the type and grade of relations between words were conducted. The clarification of the question of the validity of the measurement instruments enabled the application of the nomological network. A first step of the application consisted of testing if the constructs in the network are related to each other. Based on the alignment of measurements of relevance and the word related constructs it was concluded to be true. The relation between the constructs was characterized by varying the word related constructs over a large parameter space and observing the effect of this variation on relevance. Three hypotheses relating to different aspects of the relations between the word related constructs and relevance. It was concluded, that the conclusive confirmation of the hypotheses requires an extension of the experimental means underlying the study. Based on converging observations from the empirical investigation of the three hypotheses it was concluded, that semantic and associative relations distinctly differ with regard to their impact on relevance estimation.

This thesis addresses the challenges of producing digitally mediated healthcare information, a high-stakes arena which is conceptualised as a complex discourse and its diverse producers as interlocutors within this discourse. The study is located theoretically in the tradition of universal or formal pragmatics, the foundation of Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Building on this theoretical core a conceptual framework is developed that integrates insight from several other traditions, including communication studies. The notion of communicative transparency is aligned with the idealised goal of a rich informational context supporting a range of perspectives in movement towards a balanced and consensual understanding by lay and expert actors of healthcare in our world. The central research question is: Can digital mediation increase the transparency of healthcare communication? The empirical focus rests on two organisations involved in the creation of digital information products. Key mediators of meaning in digital healthcare information are identified as the diverse types of expertise of its producers, the materiality of digital artefacts, and the communicative mechanisms, processes and practices that often lead to departures from the normative idealised standard of transparency. The methodology is a comparative case analysis based on field research employing principally interviews to build a rich corpus, analysed using a recursive in-depth thematic coding procedure to reveal the ways in which digitally mediated healthcare meanings are shaped and shared. The study demonstrates how communicative transparency emerges from shared frames of reference and common models of communication. It is concluded that digital mediation can indeed increase the transparency of healthcare information by supporting the deepening of Habermasian rational discourse, providing that validity claims to truth, truthfulness, and rightness can be raised and resolved at all stages in the discourse among all interlocutors, whatever their role and status.

This thesis addresses the representation of, and reasoning on, musical knowledge in the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web that aims at describing information that is distributed on the web in a machine-processable form. Existing approaches to modelling musical knowledge in the context of the Semantic Web have focused on metadata. The description of musical content and reasoning as well as integration of content descriptions and metadata are yet open challenges. This thesis discusses the possibilities of representing musical knowledge in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) focusing on chord sequence representation and presents and evaluates a newly developed solution. The solution consists of two main components. Ontological modelling patterns for musical entities such as notes and chords are introduced in the (MEO) ontology. A sequence pattern language and ontology (SEQ) has been developed that can express patterns in a form resembling regular expressions. As MEO and SEQ patterns both rewrite to OWL they can be combined freely. Reasoning tasks such as instance classification, retrieval and pattern subsumption are then executable by standard Semantic Web reasoners. The expressiveness of SEQ has been studied, in particular in relation to grammars. The complexity of reasoning on SEQ patterns has been studied theoretically and empirically, and optimisation methods have been developed. There is still great potential for improvement if specific reasoning algorithms were developed to exploit the sequential structure, but the development of such algorithms is outside the scope of this thesis. MEO and SEQ have also been evaluated in several musicological scenarios. It is shown how patterns that are characteristic of musical styles can be expressed and chord sequence data can be classified, demonstrating the use of the language in web retrieval and as integration layer for different chord patterns and corpora. Furthermore, possibilities of using SEQ patterns for harmonic analysis are explored using grammars for harmony; both a hybrid system and a translation of limited context-free grammars into SEQ patterns have been developed. Finally, a distributed scenario is evaluated where SEQ and MEO are used in connection with DBpedia, following the Linked Data approach. The results show that applications are already possible and will benefit in the future from improved quality and compatibility of data sources as the Semantic Web evolves.

This thesis presents work carried out over a number of years within the field of railway vehicle instrumentation. The railway industry is currently moving to be more heavily “data driven”. This means that railway organisations are putting policies into place whereby decisions have to be justified based on recorded and citable data. To achieve this, the railway industry is increasingly turning to greater and greater levels of instrumentation to deliver the data on which to base these decisions. This thesis considers not only this increased requirement for data, but the frameworks and systems that must be put into place in order first to obtain it, and then to extract useful information from it. In particular the author considers the issue of contextualisation of data, where multiple datastreams may be used to provide context for, or allow more accurate and beneficial interpretation of each other in order to support better decision making. In order to obtain this data, the thesis explores, through a series of case studies, a number of options for different instrumentation system architectures. This culminates in the development of a distributed system of embedded processors arranged in an extensible modular framework to provide a rich, coherent and integrated dataset which can then be processed contextually to yield a better understanding of the railway system.

Over the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in the volume of digital content created from museum, library and archive collections but research on how this material is actually used, particularly in digital learning environments, has fallen far behind the rate of supply. In order to address this gap, this thesis examines how communities of practice (CoPs) involved in the supply and use of digital artefacts in the Higher Education sector in the UK interact with content and what factors affect this process. It focuses on a case study involving the digitisation of Shakespeare collections used in postgraduate research, and the testing of use in a range of different learning environments. This produced a number of significant findings with implications for the HE and cultural sectors. Firstly, similar patterns of artefact use were found across all users suggesting there are generic ways in which everyone interacts with digital artefacts. However, distinct forms of use did emerge which correspond with membership of particular communities of practice. Secondly, members of a CoP appear to share a particular learning style and this is influenced by the learning environment. Finally, the research indicates that a mixed method for analysing and measuring use, piloted and tested in the case study, is possible.

Over the past decade (2000-), the management of vestibular schwannomas has been in a state of flux. An increasing availability of magnetic resonance imaging has allowed clinicians to monitor tumour progression and increasingly, it has become recognised that once diagnosed, a significant proportion of lesions do not continue to grow. As a result, a number of neurotological centres have advocated conservative management as appropriate for small-medium sized tumours. Birmingham has been one of these centres, and this thesis presents data gathered over the past fifteen years that reflects this change in management, drawing upon the Birmingham Vestibular Schwannoma Database maintained by the author. The thesis addresses issues pertinent to conservative management: growth rates among observed tumours, risk factors for growth, the evolution of hearing while under observation and proposes a radiological surveillance protocol. More broadly, the thesis examines other themes important in the management of patients with vestibular schwannomas: the role of functional surgery and the possibility of rehabilitation in single-sided deafness. A number of chapters from the thesis have been published in peer-reviewed journals and are presented here in updated or amended form.

The thesis addresses the evolution of West Africa’s djembe drumming, with particular reference to the changing habitus of the djembefola. It investigates how the djembe has developed from the rural system of tribal ritualistic music intended for ceremonies to a practice enacted in the Western world, in both geographical and virtual spaces, including the social networking platform Facebook. It also highlights how, at present, djembe related activities are subject to business transactions orientated towards generation of profit for both the djembefola and other parties. Conceptually, the thesis draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), Victor Turners approach to liminality in The Forest of Symbols (1967) and The Ritual Process (1997) and the concept of cultural paradigm, as used in anthropological studies (Douglas, 1985; Rogoff et al., 2014). Additionally, it explores the implications of the evolution of djembe drumming over time for our understanding of the organisation of the djembe. This is discussed in the context of the political, economic, social and technological conditions underlying djembe practice. Empirically, the research adopts an interpretive, ethnographic and netnographic approach, comprising four case studies. Fieldwork was conducted in the Gambia and in the virtual space represented by social media. The data included material obtained through interviews with djembe teachers and students, as well as Facebook posts contributed by members of djembe related interest groups. The analysis demonstrates that, at present, the djembe habitus has entered a new phase, which the thesis identifies as a fourth cultural paradigm, concomitant with the most contemporary version of the djembe habitus.

Although early predictions that an emerging 'cyberspace' could exist in separation from offline life have been largely discarded, anthropological studies of the internet have continued to find notions of 'virtual reality' relevant as individuals use these technologies to fulfil the "pledges they have already made" (Boellstorff, 2008; Miller & Slater, 2001: 19) about their own selfhood and their place in the world. There are parallels between this concept of 'virtual reality' and the on-going spiritual labour of Charismatic Christians in the UK, who seek in the context of a secularising nation to maintain a sense of presence in the “coming Kingdom” of God. The everyday production of this expanded spiritual context depends to a large extend on verbal genres that are highly gendered. For women, declarations of faith are often tied to domestic settings, personal narratives, and the unspoken testimony of daily life (e.g. Lawless, 1988; Griffith, 1997). The technologies of the internet, whose emerging genres challenge boundaries between personal and social, public and private, can cast a greater illumination on this inward-focused labour. This doctoral thesis is based on ethnographic research in four Charismatic Evangelical congregations and examination of the online practices of churchgoers. I have found that the use of the internet by Charismatic Christian women fits with wider religious preoccupations and patterns of ritual practice. Words posted through Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and other online platforms come to resemble in their form as well as their content Christian narratives of a life with meaning.

Music collections available to listeners have grown at a dramatic pace, now spanning tens of millions of tracks. Interacting with a music retrieval system can thus be overwhelming, with users offered ‘too-much-choice’. The level of engagement required for such retrieval interactions can be inappropriate, such as in mobile or multitasking contexts. Music recommender systems are widely employed to address this issue, however tend toward the opposite extreme of disempowering users and suffer from issues of subjectivity and confounds, such as the equalisation of tracks. This challenge and the styles of retrieval interaction involved are characterised in terms of user engagement in music retrieval, and the relationships between existing conceptualisations of user engagement is explored. Using listening histories and work from music psychology, a set of engagement-stratified profiles of listening behaviour are developed. A dataset comprising the playlists of thousands of users is used to contribute a user-centric approach to feature selection. The challenge of designing music retrieval for different levels of user engagement is first explored with a proof of concept, low engagement music retrieval system enabling users to casually retrieve music by tapping its rhythm as a query. The design methodology is then generalised with an engagement-dependent system, allowing users to denote their level of engagement and thus the specificity of their music queries. The engagement-dependent retrieval interaction is then explored as a component in a commercial music system. This thesis contributes the engagement-stratified profiles and metrics of listening behaviour, a corresponding design methodology for interaction, and presents a set of research and commercial applications for music retrieval.