The question of how the Internet affects existing geo-cultural or geo-linguistic communities in relation to nation-states has continued to receive attention among academics and policymakers alike. Language-based technologies and services that aggregate, index, and distribute materials online may reshape pre-existing boundaries of the relationship between users and content, for instance with different language versions of user-generated encyclopaedias or different local versions of search engines. By comparing two major Chinese online encyclopaedias, Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia, this thesis investigates whether the Internet overcomes, shifts, or reinforces boundaries among Chinese language users. The Chinese language provides an excellent case for examining the boundary question. While the Internet can potentially connect the largest number of native speakers around the world, the majority (i.e. those from mainland China) face an Internet censorship and filtering regime that may limit this very potential. Modern Chinese history has also complicated the cultural-political boundaries among the regions of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. This thesis compares the conditions and outcomes of their respective editorial processes, content features, and users’ reception. Multiple findings emerge from a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including content analysis, webometrics, and search engine result visibility tests. These methods show that boundaries are drawn in the process of creating, linking, and searching content on the Chinese Internet. Their geolinguistic extent differs, a phenomenon that reflects the cultural-political division between mainland China and the rest of Chinese-speaking world. Both the findings and methods of the thesis have important implications for research and policy for understanding the globalizing regionalization and nationalization effects of the Internet.

La collaboration et le contenu généré par les usagers, aussi appelé « Web 2. 0 », sont des phénomènes nouveaux, qui bâtissent sur l'ouverture et le foisonnement d'Internet. Les environnements numériques qui emploient ces moyens mettent à contribution la communauté qui gravite autour d'une présence virtuelle afin d'en enrichir l’expérience. Suivant une approche constructiviste, nous explorons commnent la collaboration peut servir les usagers d'une banque de donnée de jugements en accès libre par Internet, comme le site de l'Institut canadien d'information juridique (www.CanLIT.org). La collaboration s'articule grâce à un gabarit d'analyse que nous nommons «Cadre de diffusion de la collaboration». Il comporte deux classes d'objets, les usagers et les documents, qui interagissent selon quatre relations : les liens documentaires, les échanges entre usagers, l'écriture (de l'usager vers le document) et la consommation (du document vers l'usager). Le Cadre de diffusion de la collaboration met en lumière les modalités de la collaboration comme mécanisme de création de contenu dans un contexte numérique, au profit d'une classe de documents. Suite à une analyse les modalités de la jurisprudence comme système documentaire et d'un exposé illustratif des besoins des usagers de la société civile, le Cadre de diffusion de la collaboration est employé pour explorer les mécanismes à retenir pour enrichir le contenu d'un système diffusant des jugements par Internet. / User generated content and collaboration, also called « Web 2.0 », offer new possibilities in the context of a thriving and open Internet. Digital environments that employ these production mecanisms allow user communities to enrich a virtual space. Using a constructivist approach, we explore how collaboration can serve the users of an open access database of court rulings, namely the Canadian Legal Information Institute's website (www.CanLU.org). Collaboration is set within a framework that we name the « Collaboration Framework ». There are two classes of objects, users and documents, that interact following four relationships: links between documents, exchanges between users, writing (from users to documents) and consumption (from documents to users). In turn, we can better understand how collaboration functions, given a specific class of documents. Following an analysis of court rulings as a system of documents and an illustration of user needs in civil society, the Collaboration Framework is applied to an open access database of court rulings in order to determine how users can enrich the system's content.

USERNAME TAB PASSWORD RETURN Social Networking Site, User Generated Content, Screen Identity, Gender, Sexuality, YouTube, Booty Video, Reaction Video, Digital Culture, Archive

This diploma thesis aims to explore the increasing activity of internet users who intensively create, publish and spread their own content. The majority of this content is related to news and traditional forms of mass media organizations, which now must contend with the new means in which to disseminate information. The theoretical portion of this thesis describes the development of network media and strives for ground active user participation in media discourse and a historical context. Kinds of user-created contents will be introduced, defining their characteristics and analyzes these users who are called "prosumers" or "produsers" in the Web 2.0 era. Attention is also focused on user-generated content accessed by news websites and citizen journalism. The second part analyzes how the foremost world news media use and benefit from user-generated content. Examined media are iReport CNN, uReport Fox News and Have Your Say BBC. The text also analyzes the Czech news media, especially ČT24 news channel and main Czech news websites. The thesis closes with a comparison between Czech and world media and offers analysis of different media organizations approaches to user-generated content. Both parts of the thesis focus on web and television news service.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T14:23:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Caio Assis Capasso.pdf: 1551637 bytes, checksum: c0c126f85ced7a9208f93a493d6d39d8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-03-12 / This research aims to verify how videogames allow the creation, sharing and collaboration of user-generated content, and the characteristics of fan communities that are created to such objective. For this work we minimally define videogames as digital games that are dependent of a computational support for its realization. Some useful videogames for the better understanding of the activities of creation and alteration of content by players and the manner they happen, particularly the creation of mods: the name commonly used to refer to the practice of alteration of a videogame s characteristics through the manipulation of files and/or processes that are constitute it, resulting in a different experience from the one originally planned by its developer. With this we try to offer clues and pointers towards a deeper understanding of the manners the roles of producer and consumer, author and user, player and fan are transforming with the ascension of new technologies and now (digital) media. With this intent we give special attention to the players turned modders amateur content creators for a specific videogame -, through the online communities engaged in the creation and distribution of this kind of content. Three author groupings are used as theoretical foundation for this research. The first é composed by authors that helps us to think questions regarding participatory culture and the promises of the internet, among them we can cite Howard Rheingold, Sherry Turkle, clary Shirky, Axel Bruns and particularly Mizuko Ito and Henry Jenkins. In the second grouping Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman and Jesper Juul offer the concepts that allow us to take into account the expressive dimensions od videogames. The third grouping, with a special emphasis in the works of Olli Sotamaa, David Nieborg and Julian Kucklich that offers us empirical study cases for us to study the questions related to modding as a productive practice. We attempt to operationalize a theoretical perspective that deal with the expressive potential of videogames and how the interventions characterized as mods are one of the most intriguing ways to subvert the author/user and producer/consumer relationships. We also attempt to suggest similarities and differences between videogames and other media. Other objective is to enrich the debate regarding online participation and the artifacts it produces, trying to think participatory culture and the media convergence in the contemporary consumption and production practices through videogames / Nesse trabalho discutimos videogames, definidos como jogos digitais dependentes de um suporte computacional para sua realização, que nos ajudam a entender melhor as formas que as atividades de criação e alteração de conteúdo por jogadores se dão. Atenção especial é dada à criação de mods : termo comumente utilizado para denominar a alteração de características de um videogame através da manipulação de arquivos e/ou processos que o constituem e que resultam em uma experiência diferente da originalmente pretendida. A intenção dessa pesquisa é verificar como os videogames permitem a criação, troca e colaboração de conteúdo criado por usuários e as características das comunidades de entusiastas que são formadas para tais fins. Os videogames, e o modding em particular, são objeto de estudo valioso num período onde a crescente agência de consumidores sobre objetos midiáticos pode ser percebida tanto como estratégia de libertação quanto de exploração, pois se encontra na interseção entre atividade lúdica e trabalho, produção amadora e indústria. São fornecidos pistas e apontamentos na direção de um entendimento mais profundo das maneiras como os papéis de produtor e consumidor, autor e usuário, jogador e fã vêm se transformando com o desenvolvimento das novas tecnologias e das mídias digitais, a partir de um ponto de vista sociológico e historiográfico. Também damos atenção especial e aos modders jogadores que se tornam criadores amadores de conteúdo para videogames. Utilizamos três grupos de autores na fundamentação teórica. O primeiro é composto por autores que ajudam a pensar questões referentes à cultura participativa e as potencialidades da internet, especialmente Mizuko Ito e Henry Jenkins. No segundo Katie Salen e Eric Zimmerman e Jesper Juul oferecem os conceitos que permitem considerar as dimensões expressivas dos videogames. O terceiro grupo, com ênfase especial a Olli Sotamaa e Julian Kucklich, oferecem os casos práticos utilizados para estudar as questões relativas ao modding enquanto prática produtiva. Nossa intenção é operacionalizar uma perspectiva teórica que trabalhe o potencial expressivo de um videogame e como as intervenções que classificamos como mod são uma das maneiras mais intrigantes de subversão das relações autor/usuário e produtor/consumidor. Pretendemos também apontar semelhanças e diferenças entre videogames e outras mídias e enriquecer o debate a respeito da participação online e dos artefatos que ela produz, e pensar a cultura participativa e a convergência midiática nas práticas de consumo e produção da sociedade contemporânea através dos videogames

Online applications that are open to participation lack reliable methods to establish the integrity of user-generated information. Users may unknowingly own compromised devices, or intentionally publish forged information. In these scenarios, applications need some way to determine the "correctness" of autonomously generated information. Towards that end, this thesis presents a "trust-but-verify" approach that enables open online applications to independently verify the information generated by each participant. In addition to enabling independent verification, our framework allows an application to verify less information from more trustworthy users and verify more information from less trustworthy ones. Thus, an application can trade-off performance for more integrity, or vice versa. We apply the trust-but-verify approach to three different classes of online applications and show how it can enable 1) high-integrity, privacy-preserving, crowd-sourced sensing 2) non-intrusive cheat detection in online games, and 3) effective spam prevention in online messaging applications.

In dieser Bachelorarbeit wird eine Beispiel-E-Learning-Lektion zum Import von GPS Daten in die Kartenherstellungssoftware OCAD erstellt. Dabei liegt im theoretischen Teil der Hauptschwerpunkt auf nutzergenerierten Daten (Volunteered Geographic Infor-mation; kurz: VGI). Nach einer kurzen, allgemeinen Einführung wird auf die Bedeutung der Kartographie im Zusammenhang mit VGI eingegangen. Der zweite Teil beinhaltet Didaktik mit Schwerpunkt E-Learning. Dazu werden das Goal Based Scenario Modell und das Cognitive Apprenticeship Modell kurz vorgestellt und anschließend das Projekt GITTA mit der enthaltenen ECLASS-Struktur näher erklärt. Den immer wichtiger werdenden Content Management Systemen (CMS) widmet sich der dritte Theorieteil. Für die Realisierung der zu erstellenden Lektion wird das Open-Source CMS Joomla! ausführlicher erläutert. Die Implementierung beschreibt die Umsetzung der E-Leraning-Lektion mittels Joomla! und die Nutzung des ECLASS-Modells. Bevor auf die Vorgehensweise eingegangen wird, enthält der Implementierungsteil die Erstellung eines groben Gesamtkonzeptes für eine komplette E-Leraning-Anwendung zu OCAD mit entsprechenden Erläuterungen. Anschließend folgen eine Zusammenfassung und ein Ausblick über die Weiterführung der E-Learning-Anwendung.

Der Einfluss sogenannter nutzergenerierter Inhalte im Web hat in den letzten Jahren stetig zugenommen. Auf Plattformen wie Blogs, sozialen Netzwerken oder Medienportalen werden durch Anwender kontinuierlich Textnachrichten, Bilder oder Videos publiziert. Auch Inhalte, die aktuelle gesellschaftliche Ereignisse, wie beispielsweise den Euromaidan in Kiew dokumentieren, werden durch diese Plattformen verbreitet. Nutzergenerierte Inhalte bieten folglich das Potential, zusätzliche Hintergrundinformationen über Ereignisse direkt vom Ort des Geschehens zu liefern. Diese Arbeit verfolgt die Vision einer Nachrichtenplattform, die unter Verwendung von Methoden des Information Retrievals und der Informationsextraktion Nachrichtenereignisse erkennt, diese automatisiert mit relevanten nutzergenerierten Inhalten anreichert und dem Leser präsentiert. Zur Suche nutzergenerierter Inhalte kommen in dieser Arbeit maßgeblich geographische Entitäten, also Ortsbezeichnungen zum Einsatz. Für die Extraktion dieser Entitäten aus gegebenen Nachrichtendokumenten stellt die Arbeit verschiedene neue Methoden vor. Die Entitäten werden genutzt, um zielgerichtete Suchanfragen zu erzeugen. Es wird gezeigt, dass sich eine geounterstützte Suche für das Auffinden nutzergenerierter Inhalte besser eignet als eine konventionelle schlüsselwortbasierte Suche.

In this thesis I survey the terrain of digital interactions between youth, corporations and pop culture texts in order to complicate current visions of participatory culture. I argue that popular images of the empowered young users of a new digital democracy need to be complicated by asking questions about the politics of digital participation: about whose voices are heard, about where attention is centred, about how interactivity is defined, about who is rewarded for creative labour. The opening chapter introduces key issues within a critical examination of digital participation, including commodification, user agency and intellectual property. It also outlines my methodologies and my choice of research site – namely internet television, and the proliferation of corporate and youth practices around digitized television texts. The next two chapters provide case studies that identify and evaluate not only the interactions between corporate producers and young users, but also the power relations between the two. First, I analyze young women‘s video remixes of the program Gossip Girl. I consider the remixes as gendered texts that contribute new aesthetics and concerns, even as they reproduce dominant interpretations of contemporary girlhood. I also consider the distribution of the videos on YouTube, noting how their circulation simultaneously challenges corporate ownership and creates profit and promotion for those same corporate owners. Next, I examine interactions around the The Colbert Report. Focusing on the program‘s official discussion boards, I demonstrate how young fans have taken up Stephen Colbert‘s invitation to join in the parody by creating a vibrant, dialogic and rowdy community that has frequently come into conflict with Comedy Central producers. In their attempts to address these conflicts and create alternative spaces of their own, these young people gesture towards larger tensions over the control of public digital dialogue. The final chapter draws on my research and experience as a teacher to consider how these case studies might help us to frame our own educational projects. I call for a digital literacy curriculum that provides both a place for students to reflect on their daily activities within mediated environments and the opportunity to experiment with digital production.

La collaboration et le contenu généré par les usagers, aussi appelé « Web 2. 0 », sont des phénomènes nouveaux, qui bâtissent sur l'ouverture et le foisonnement d'Internet. Les environnements numériques qui emploient ces moyens mettent à contribution la communauté qui gravite autour d'une présence virtuelle afin d'en enrichir l’expérience. Suivant une approche constructiviste, nous explorons commnent la collaboration peut servir les usagers d'une banque de donnée de jugements en accès libre par Internet, comme le site de l'Institut canadien d'information juridique (www.CanLIT.org). La collaboration s'articule grâce à un gabarit d'analyse que nous nommons «Cadre de diffusion de la collaboration». Il comporte deux classes d'objets, les usagers et les documents, qui interagissent selon quatre relations : les liens documentaires, les échanges entre usagers, l'écriture (de l'usager vers le document) et la consommation (du document vers l'usager). Le Cadre de diffusion de la collaboration met en lumière les modalités de la collaboration comme mécanisme de création de contenu dans un contexte numérique, au profit d'une classe de documents. Suite à une analyse les modalités de la jurisprudence comme système documentaire et d'un exposé illustratif des besoins des usagers de la société civile, le Cadre de diffusion de la collaboration est employé pour explorer les mécanismes à retenir pour enrichir le contenu d'un système diffusant des jugements par Internet. / User generated content and collaboration, also called « Web 2.0 », offer new possibilities in the context of a thriving and open Internet. Digital environments that employ these production mecanisms allow user communities to enrich a virtual space. Using a constructivist approach, we explore how collaboration can serve the users of an open access database of court rulings, namely the Canadian Legal Information Institute's website (www.CanLU.org). Collaboration is set within a framework that we name the « Collaboration Framework ». There are two classes of objects, users and documents, that interact following four relationships: links between documents, exchanges between users, writing (from users to documents) and consumption (from documents to users). In turn, we can better understand how collaboration functions, given a specific class of documents. Following an analysis of court rulings as a system of documents and an illustration of user needs in civil society, the Collaboration Framework is applied to an open access database of court rulings in order to determine how users can enrich the system's content.