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Movement analysis is complex due to many different factors: different forms of data, different levels of precision, strongly influenced by context, for which diverse sets of tasks require different visualizations and algorithmic approaches. There is a vast scope of previous work that researches, for diverse tasks, several approaches to visualization designs and data processing methods. The scope of tasks, potential visualization methods, and data processing that is yet to research is vast. To help reach a higher precision when describing contributions of researchers, we define a framework that characterizes information, from its recording into data to the way it is presented to the user and the terms used to communicate about it for evaluations. Within this thesis, we explain how our original research scope directed us from establishing the current state of the art for visualization methods for movement analysis while accounting for context into a characterization of visualizations, data processing methods, and communication approaches. This results in the framework that is the main contribution of our thesis. This thesis also presents several studies that refine our understanding of the impact of data complexity over diverse tasks, using precise terms. We also discuss how our system can be used to set up and analyze studies based on vague terms. Furthermore, we discuss the strength and weaknesses of existing designs for exploration tasks of contextually rich data movement, and potential design approaches to investigate in future work. These discussions include the tasks for which the designs could be most useful and how they fit within different characterizations of information and data.

The railway has played a vital role in public transportation and has also been identified as the safest mode of land transport for decades. Key to this is the efficient and constantly improving safety management of some of its major subsystems. Among these, the inspection of railway tracks is an essential part. It ensures that the quality of the rails in operation meets relevant standards and supports appropriate remedial actions to prevent further deterioration or accidents. Rail inspection covers both internal and external defects. External defects, also known as surface defects, are normally derived from long-term rolling contact. They are more common and normally are the point of origin of more severe internal defects. Therefore, the inspection of surface defects is always a significant concern to the industry which should aim to make such inspections more accurate and efficient. In recent years, the development of advanced sensory technologies has automated a lot of rail inspection tasks, which has considerably improved the performance of rail inspection. By considering the performance of the individual inspection technologies alongside the increased capability of the integrated muti-sensing solution, and through the incorporation of intelligent algorithms that apply complex techniques to the newly available integrated data stream, this thesis demonstrates that an integrated approach provides improved inspection performance.

Background Acknowledged issues with the RCT focus of EBM and recognition of the value of patient input have created a need for new methods of knowledge generation that can give the depth of qualitative studies but on a much larger scale. Almost half of the global population uses social media regularly, with increasing numbers of people using online spaces as either a first- or second-line health information and exchange resource. Estimates suggest the volume of online health related data grew by 300% between 2017 and 2020. As a data source, this unstructured freeform textual data is a form of patient generated health data, containing a mass of patient centred, contextually grounded detail about the perceptions and health concerns of those who post online. Methods for analysing it are at an early stage of development, but it is seen as having potential to add to clinical understanding, either by augmenting existing knowledge, or in aiding understanding of real-world usage of healthcare interventions and services. Objectives To explore how large-scale analysis of SGOPE can help with understanding patient perspectives of their conditions, symptoms, and self-management behaviours, assess the effectiveness of interventions, contribute to the process of knowledge and evidence creation, and consequently help healthcare systems improve outcomes in the most efficient manner. A secondary aim is to contribute to the development of methods that can be generalised across other interventions or services. Methods Using Modafinil as a case study, a multistage approach was taken. First, an exploratory study, comparing both qualitative and basic NLP techniques was undertaken on a small sample of 260 posts to identify topics, evaluate effectiveness and identify perceived causal text. An umbrella scoping review was then undertaken exploring how and for what purposes SGOPE data is currently being used within healthcare research. Findings from both then guided the main study, which used a variety of unsupervised NLP tools to explore the main dataset of over 69k posts. Individual methods were compared against each other. Results from both studies were compared and for evaluation. Results In contrast to the existing inconclusive systematic review evidence for Modafinil for anything other than narcolepsy, both studies found that Modafinil is seen as by posters as effective in treating fatigue and cognition symptoms in a wide range of conditions. Both identified the topics mentioned in the data, although more work needs to be done to develop the NLP methods to achieve a greater depth of understanding. The first study identified eight themes within the posts: reason for taking, impact of symptoms, acquisition, dosage, side-effects, comparison with other interventions, effectiveness, and quality of life outcomes. Effectiveness of Modafinil was found to be 68% positive, 12% mixed and 18% negative. Expressions of causal belief were identified. In the main study, effectiveness was measured with sentiment analysis, with all methods showing strong positive sentiment. Topic modelling identified groups of themes. Linguistic techniques extracted phrases indicating causality. Various analysis methods were compared to develop a method that could be generalised across other health topics.

The advantages of composing and delivering software applications in the Cloud-Based Software as a Service (SaaS) model are offering cost-effective solutions with minimal resource management. However, several functionally-equivalent web services with diverse Quality of Service (QoS) values have emerged in the SaaS cloud, and the tenant-specific requirements tend to lead the difficulties to select the suitable web services for composing the software application. Moreover, given the changing workload from the tenants, it is not uncommon for a service composition running in the multi-tenant SaaS cloud to encounter under-utilisation and over-utilisation on the component services that affects the service revenue and violates the service level agreement respectively. All those bring challenging decision-making tasks: (i) when to recompose the composite service? (ii) how to select new component services for the composition that maximise the service utility over time? at the same time, low operation cost of the service composition is desirable in the SaaS cloud. In this context, this thesis contributes an economic-driven service composition framework to address the above challenges. The framework takes advantage of the principal of technical debt- a well-known software engineering concept, evolutionary algorithm and time-series forecasting method to predictively handle the service provider constraints and SaaS dynamics for creating added values in the service composition. We emulate the SaaS environment setting for conducting several experiments using an e-commerce system, realistic datasets and workload trace. Further, we evaluate the framework by comparing it with other state-of-the-art approaches based on diverse quality metrics.

In this thesis, I analyse how young audiences engage with nostalgic media texts. In recent years, from remakes or reboots to media texts set in previous decades, nostalgia has become a key ingredient of recent media production. Hence, I address two specific research questions: 1) how do young audiences interpret the past represented in nostalgic media texts; and 2) how do the national context and social identities of young audiences mediate their engagement with nostalgic media texts? For this, I conducted a media consumption habits survey, 13 focus group discussions, and 35 paired interviews in one private and one public secondary education school in Costa Rica. My intention is to explore the reception of nostalgic media texts in a nation of the Global South in which the past has recently generated political and social tensions. Thus, I first argue that these young audiences interpret the past represented in nostalgic media texts through an aestheticisation of the past and by employing a particular nostalgic social imaginary. Following textual cues and national discourses, these young people idealise the styles of the past but exhibit a critical awareness in terms of some social tensions of previous decades. Then, I argue that nostalgia is a structure of feeling which emerges from an unsatisfying present. By exploring the social identities of the participants, I discuss how nostalgia is differently articulated depending on the social position of these young people. I identify how the students from the private school experience an aesthetic nostalgia, based on the romanticisation of the styles of the past but characterised by an optimistic appraisal of the future, and how the students from the public school experience a material nostalgia, an idealisation of the past derived from daily experiences of economic deprivation and the expectation of a precarious future.

Nowadays sex has become increasingly public, with not only the visibility of different sexualities, but with the salience of sexual themes in popular culture. Arguably, the Internet has brought the biggest shift in how young people think and learn about sex and sexuality. This has brought new anxieties and concerns accompanied by a political call for parents and educators to police young people's technology-mediated sexual behaviors. The focus on overemphasising the negative consequences of the Internet, however, is inevitably shutting down important conversations and positive outcomes associated with it. This investigation seeks to contribute to the debate by turning directly to young people to explore technology-mediated sexual behaviors through their own experience and understanding. The research followed a qualitative approach for the purpose. The first phase, focus groups, were concerned with the overall role the Internet play in the personal and social lives of young people including for sexual purposes. The results from four focus group discussions revealed that on a daily basis young people use multiple online platforms to maintain supportive relationships, for self-expression, to stay informed on important contemporary topics (including sexuality), and for recreation (e.g. gaming). This led the study to the second phase, individual interviews, in order to explore how the Internet informs participants' sexuality among other sources. Findings indicated that young people use multiple sources to make sense of their emerging sexuality, but conversations with peers/romantic partners and engagements with the Internet were ranked as the most meaningful. In addition, interviews indicated that young people are not passive consumers of online practices and they have the ability to critically evaluate the impact of online engagement such as viewing porn or sexting. Overall, what became evident through young people's stories is that, although amplifying experiences, the Internet and technology-mediated practices are just another context for societal and cultural habits to be displayed and there is an urgent need for more overreaching sexual education.

This thesis examines the use and value of fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic and fuzzy inference in wireless positioning systems and solutions. Various fuzzy-related techniques and methodologies are reviewed and investigated, including a comprehensive review of fuzzy-based positioning and localisation systems. The thesis is aimed at the development of a novel positioning technique which enhances well-known multi-nearest-neighbour (kNN) and fingerprinting algorithms with received signal strength (RSS) measurements. A fuzzy inference system is put forward for the generation of weightings for selected nearest-neighbours and the elimination of outliers. In this study, Monte Carlo simulations of a proposed multivariable fuzzy localisation (MVFL) system showed a significant improvement in the root mean square error (RMSE) in position estimation, compared with well-known localisation algorithms. The simulation outcomes were confirmed empirically in laboratory tests under various scenarios. The proposed technique uses available indoor wireless local area network (WLAN) infrastructure and requires no additional hardware or modification to the network, nor any active user participation. The thesis aims to benefit practitioners and academic researchers of system positioning.

This thesis evaluates and analyses China's Internet censorship policy according to whether it effectively advances goals associated with what I call the 'responsive authoritarianism' of the Chinese government. The theory of responsive authoritarianism, as the macro framework for interpretation, is combined with the adapted McConnell public policy evaluation framework at the micro-level to scrutinize the policy in terms of policymaking (process), implementation (programme), and political impact (politics). Under consideration is whether the policy gains the Communist Party of China government basic legitimacy through responding to the public; and whether it achieves the internal goal of social stability and the external goal of benefiting from Internet-facilitated international trade to acquire further government legitimacy. To that end, in-depth interviews and surveys were conducted. Additionally, documents were analysed, while several cases were analysed. It is found that the policy succeeds in gaining the legitimacy of the government, but not without problems: though policymaking involves multiple stakeholders within and outside the government, non-governmental stakeholders could have played a more substantive role. Moreover, the policy is designed to decrease collective activities, but in real practice, some implementers chose to filter other information, like criticism of local government's misconduct or the needs of the public. Politically, the policy has been regarded as bringing the Chinese more benefits than trouble. Nevertheless, factors such as the vagueness of the policy, which leaves rooms for mis-implementation, need improvement. Otherwise, in the long run, the achievements so far would be counteracted. This study not only analyses the success and failure of the Chinese Internet censorship policy but also adds a new perspective to previous works from both liberal and pro-economic authoritarian positions by interpreting the policy in its own context. Moreover, the macro-and-micro-framework and the approaches employed herein can be used to study other Chinese policies or those of other authoritarian states.

This thesis defines art museums' online resources as narratives in response to the following question: How can online resources, such as online exhibitions, online publications, and similar resources, be accurately and systematically defined? The aim of this definition is to provide a detailed, clear, and critical understanding of certain types of online resources, namely online exhibitions and online publications, that share attributes and functions. The two types of online resources contain and display exhibitions and artworks information, use similar interfaces and media, can serve similar audiences, and narrate the stories of the artworks. Based on the narrative character of both types, the definition comprehensively examines the spectrum of attributes online resources have and the implications of such attributes. Thus, the definition not only indicates what are online resources and their characteristics but also explains why online resources are the way they are and have certain characteristics, and how they function as narratives. These attributes are authorship, readership, temporality, spatiality, and mediality. In order to construct the definition, a systematic review of narratology and museum studies literature on narratives was pursued. The review of the literature was key to develop a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon. Moreover, the methodology used in this thesis revised the traditional usage of narratology in museum studies research integrating empirical evidence. In this way, the narratological analysis moves away from the narrative text itself and also considers the production and consumption mechanisms of the narrative. The thesis employs six art museums' online resources from Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom as sources for the research. Data from seven museum professionals involved in the creation of those resources was collected with interviews. In the case of the scholarly audience, twenty scholars performed think-aloud protocol sessions while visiting the online resources.

According to the British Heart Foundation, UK, there is a population of around 7 million living in the UK with heart and circulatory diseases; about 25% of all the deaths in the UK are caused by cardiovascular diseases and more than 30,000 people a year suffer cardiac arrest out-of-hospital. As people all over the world, continue to live busy and stressful lives, a vast majority of people start showing cardiac arrhythmia-related symptoms which, if not treated in time may lead to a serious heart condition or even sudden cardiac death. To identify the early-warning signs in cardiac arrhythmia, methods to identify the precursors to fatal arrhythmia were developed in this research study, using a wearable kit. To enable accurate classification between arrhythmic beats, novel feature extraction algorithms using spectral components were developed. Often a fatal cardiac arrhythmia, or a serious injury, may lead to trauma and in such situations, it becomes imperative that the critical care teams have adequate information about the patient's health status at remote location following an ambulatory response. A real-time trauma scoring algorithm was developed, and correlation and regression analyses were performed to arrive at these scores using the physiological parameters and vital signs. It was found that with appropriate feature extraction algorithms, supervised learning classifiers could identify the precursors to arrhythmia in real time and on a resource-constrained device, regardless of time and location. The trauma scoring algorithm, implemented using ICU patients' dataset, produced values that agreed with the patients' status and events could be logged to electronic health records using standard clinical coding systems. It could, therefore, be concluded that regardless of situation and location of an individual, fatal arrhythmia and trauma events could be identified ahead of time before reaching a state of emergency.

Given its soft nature and the fact that it's difficult to make explicit, tacit knowledge is certainly the most critical form of knowledge to deal with. Often referred to as know-how, practical experiences and insights; tacit knowledge is known to have a significant impact on one's quality of work and professional efficacy. A review of the literature has revealed that many studies address the questions related to the capacity of e-Learning environments to create conditions that are conducive for participants to share, acquire and retain tacit knowledge. Still, there is debate about learners' ability to gain tacit knowledge in settings that are devoid of face-to-face contact, simply because of the lack of empirical or experimental studies on the subject. Assuming it's even possible, there is a lack of models and practical guidelines addressing the acquisition of tacit knowledge at the individual level in online education. This study applies adult learning principles, Knowledge Management and e-Learning design best practices to posit a subject-specific e-Learning model based on Knowledge Objects and learning activities led in the spirit of Community of Practice. The model is tested in order to assess learners' tacit knowledge and influencing factors that impact the acquisition of this knowledge. The business presentation field was chosen to meet the objectives of the research since the mere memorization of facts does not make an effective presenter. Using a control group design, learners' tacit knowledge of the experimental group (n=231) and control group (n=212) was examined via a validated instrument (TKIBP). Twenty-three learners were closely monitored, and a panel of experts evaluated their performances at three different stages. Learners' perceptions of the model were also examined on a number of variables like delivery effectiveness and knowledge acquisition. Results showed that a well-prepared e-Learning environment can create a strong potential to support the activities and learning processes necessary for learners to acquire tacit knowledge. The model proposed in this study is a viable approach to facilitate the acquisition of tacit knowledge in e-Learning environments; in a given field. Experience in the field, English as a first language, self-competence, perceived usefulness, self-directed learning and motivation all play a major role in learners' capacity to acquire tacit knowledge in e-Learning environments. This study unveils evidence-based information for the better implementation of e-Learning. It also gives a conceptual framework for scholars to advance research related to tacit knowledge acquisition in online education.

This work is concerned with the role of online information in the building, management, and evaluation of personal reputations. The main contributions of the research relate to: (1) the means by which people evaluate the personal reputations of others from the online evidence available to them, and (2) strategies for the building and management of personal reputations through the use of online information. The findings extend knowledge within the domain of Information Science, notably with respect to the established body of research on human information behaviour and use. They are set against a theoretical framework that is anchored to research in bibliometrics (for example on citation practice and citation analysis), and takes into account the multidisciplinary nature of the field of Information Science. A multi-step data collection process was implemented following the practice of extant studies in Information Science and human information behaviour and use. This focused on a sample of forty-five UK-based social media users. A qualitative analysis of data collected from participant diaries and interviews was undertaken using NVivo10.The main contribution of this work with respect to the evaluation of personal reputations on the basis on online evidence is that the information available is largely consumed and evaluated in a passive manner: social media users are more interested in the content of the information that is shared on social media platforms than they are in the signals that this information might convey about the sharer(s). Closer attention is paid in cases where the information shared is in stark contrast to the opinions and practices of those who consume it. In terms of the management of personal reputations through the use of online information, this work introduces and develops new concepts related to managing the "blur" that occurs at the intersection between private and professional lives, and online and offline environments.

This thesis explores an important yet underexplored aspect of management studies, which is field-level responses to the entrance of a disruptive technology in an institutional field. Despite the relevance of digital technologies (such as the 3D printer) that not only improve competitive advantage of organisations but also alter consolidated settlements in the distribution, appropriation and use of resources within a field (for example, user-generated objects), current studies of institutional theory and technology have overlooked how actors respond to technologies that could potentially weaken their positions. Instead, existing studies have focused on how actors embed their interests in new technologies. Using qualitative methods in three empirical standalone papers, this dissertation explores three cases of how actors respond to the entrance of a disruptive technology in an institutional field. In Paper 1, co-authored with my thesis supervisors, we explore technology's affordances as integral to threats of disruption to institutional settlement in the light of the introduction of the electronic book in the field of trade book publishing. In this case, we found that incumbents used rules/affordances bundles to temper the disruptive potential of the technology. In Paper 2, I explore the case of scholarly book publishing in which the possibilities afforded by Internet technologies make research available in Open Access, thus threatening to disrupt established institutional settlements (commercial publishers' business models that are in place). In this case, the incumbents (the commercial publishers) address threats to undermine their privileged positions and interests effectively when they are not in a position to oppose a reconfiguration of current arrangements. In the third paper, I explore the case of the introduction of digital technologies into the music industry, in which unorganised and non-strategic actors - consumers - catalyse institutional change that organised actors adopt later. The dissertation's main contribution is to the literature on institutional theory. The three empirical papers generated insights into how, despite the arrival of technologies with disruptive potential, changes driven by the search for a new settlement between conflicting interests led the incumbents and organised actors to responses that co-opted the disruptive potential of the technology, leading to alternative explanations to straight processes of institutional change. Instead of explaining straight processes of institutional change, I put forward the three following accounts: the dialectal interaction between opposing frames as driven by the dual forces of material interests and social positioning, the co-existence between institutional change and stability, and the accommodation between opposing interests.

This research reported in this thesis explores job search networking amongst 16-24 year olds living in Scotland, and the role of social media platforms (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) during this process. Networking is treated as an information behaviour; reflecting this, the study is underpinned by a prominent model from the domain of information science. A sequential, mixed methods approach was applied to gather data. This included the use of interviews, focus groups, and a survey questionnaire. The interviews incorporated ego-centric network methods to develop a relational perspective of job search networking. The findings show that young people accrue different types of information from network contacts which can be useful for all job search tasks. Indeed, frequent networking offline and on social media is associated with positive job search outcomes. This is especially true of engaging with family members and acquaintances, and frequent use of Facebook for job search purposes. However, demographic and other contextual factors have a substantial impact on the nature of networking behaviours, and the extent to which they can influence outcomes. Additionally, young jobseekers face a range of barriers to networking, do not always utilise their networks thoroughly, and are more likely to use social media platforms as supplementary tools for job search. A key contribution of this work is that it provides a detailed insight into the process of networking that has been neglected in previous studies. Its focus on social media also reveals a new dimension to the concept which has received little attention in the job search literature. Given its focus on young jobseekers living in Scotland, the findings have also been used to create a detailed list of recommendations for practitioners.

This mixed-methods investigation explores how image professionals in online journalism search for, select and use images from large online collections. Further, findings from this exploration are used to devise and evaluate a needs-based practical solution for improvement to image retrieval. The exploratory stage included semi-structured interviews and observations in situ and provided several important contributions to the current understanding of the needs and behaviour of image users in fully disintermediated environment of the online newsroom. This study found that these image users are creative professionals and self-taught, yet, confident image searchers. When illustrating news content, they apply a shared knowledge of how a specific image function (e.g., dominant image) must be presented visually to reach its full communication potential. This common understanding of image communicative functions has two implications on how these professionals search for and select images. Firstly, they begin searches with clear image needs pre-defined on multiple levels of image description, including visual image features, and their behaviour is consistent with targeted searching. This contradicts previously reported preference for browsing as the typical mode of searching in online image collections. Secondly, they do not easily compromise on image needs related to visual features. When searches prove ineffective, they resort to editing skills and tailor the available images to match their original needs. Further, it was found that the choice of images for headline content can in fact be predicted by a set of 11 visual image features. The features were extracted from a collection of artefacts created in the observation sessions and described by means of the Visual Social Semiotics (VSS) framework. The feature set was implemented as a filtering mechanism in a prototype and evaluated in a within-subjects experimental design study with image professionals. This experiment showed a significant positive change in the behaviour of users when interacting with images pre-filtered strictly to their visual needs, not observed in the baseline system. This was demonstrated through users' ability to immediately engage in the inspection of images on a level of detail, and to make straightforward selections. Images from the experimental sets required no or only minimal tailoring as confirmed in the final VSS-based survey with independent image experts. Other important contributions of this investigation include the updated models. Firstly, the illustration task process framework, originally proposed in Markkula and Sormunen (2000), has been refined to include the image tailoring phase where creative professionals apply editorial treatment before publication. Further, the observations revealed that verifying of images, consistent with the feature in Ellis et al.'s model (Ellis et al., 1993), was an activity critical to making selection decision in online journalism. Therefore, Conniss et al.'s model of the image searching process (Conniss et al., 2000) has been updated to include the verifying phase. The investigation concludes that in order to meet the needs of creative image professionals in online journalism, image retrieval systems must support targeted searching, and facilitate direct access to required images that can be easily verified for authenticity. The proposed multi-feature filtering system firmly rooted in the image users' needs, appears to be a step towards automating image retrieval.

Today’s smart phones are used for wider range of activities. This extended range of functionalities has also seen the infiltration of new security threats. Android has been the favorite target of cyber criminals. The malicious parties are using highly stealthy techniques to perform the targeted operations, which are hard to detect by the conventional signature and behaviour based approaches. Additionally, the limited resources of mobile device are inadequate to perform the extensive malware detection tasks. Impulsively emerging Android malware merit a robust and effective malware detection solution. In this thesis, we present the PIndroid ― a novel Permissions and Intents based framework for identifying Android malware apps. To the best of author’s knowledge, PIndroid is the first solution that uses a combination of permissions and intents supplemented with ensemble methods for malware detection. It overcomes the drawbacks of some of the existing malware detection methods. Our goal is to provide mobile users with an effective malware detection and prevention solution keeping in view the limited resources of mobile devices and versatility of malware behavior. Our detection engine classifies the apps against certain distinguishing combinations of permissions and intents. We conducted a comparative study of different machine learning algorithms against several performance measures to demonstrate their relative advantages. The proposed approach, when applied to 1,745 real world applications, provides more than 99% accuracy (which is best reported to date). Empirical results suggest that the proposed framework is effective in detection of malware apps including the obfuscated ones. In this thesis, we also present AndroPIn—an Android based malware detection algorithm using Permissions and Intents. It is designed with the methodology proposed in PInDroid. AndroPIn overcomes the limitation of stealthy techniques used by malware by exploiting the usage pattern of permissions and intents. These features, which play a major role in sharing user data and device resources cannot be obfuscated or altered. These vital features are well suited for resource constrained smartphones. Experimental evaluation on a corpus of real-world malware and benign apps demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can effectively detect malicious apps and is resilient to common obfuscations methods. Besides PInDroid and AndroPIn, this thesis consists of three additional studies, which supplement the proposed methodology. First study investigates if there is any correlation between permissions and intents which can be exploited to detect malware apps. For this, the statistical significance test is applied to investigate the correlation between permissions and intents. We found statistical evidence of a strong correlation between permissions and intents which could be exploited to detect malware applications. The second study is conducted to investigate if the performance of classifiers can further be improved with ensemble learning methods. We applied different ensemble methods such as bagging, boosting and stacking. The experiments with ensemble methods yielded much improved results. The third study is related to investigating if the permissions and intents based system can be used to detect the ever challenging colluding apps. Application collusion is an emerging threat to Android based devices. We discuss the current state of research on app collusion and open challenges to the detection of colluding apps. We compare existing approaches and present an integrated approach that can be used to detect the malicious app collusion.

Current sentiment analysis on Twitter is hampered by two factors namely, not all accounts are genuine and not all users have the same level of influence. Including non credible and irrelevant Tweets in sentiment analysis dilutes the effectiveness of any sentiment produced. Similarly, counting a Tweet with a potential audience of 10 users as having the same impact as a Tweet that could reach 1 million users is not accurately reflecting its importance. In order to mitigate against these inherent problems a novel method was devised to account for credibility and to measure influence. The current definition of credibility on Twitter was redefined and expanded to incorporate the subtle nuances that exist beyond the simple variance between human or bot account. Once basic sentiment was produced it was filtered by removing non credible Tweets and the remaining sentiment was augmented by weighting it based upon both the user’s and the Tweet’s influence scores. Measuring one person’s opinion is costly and lacking in power, however, machine learning techniques allow us to capture and analyse millions of opinions. Combining a Tweet’s sentiment with the user’s influence score and their credibility rating greatly increases the understanding and usefulness of that sentiment. In order to gauge and measure the impact of this research and highlight its generalisability, this thesis examined 2 distinct real world datasets, the UK General Election 2015 and the Rugby World Cup 2015, which also served to validate the approach used. A better more accurate understanding of sentiment on Twitter has the potential for broad impact from providing targeted advertising that is in tune with people’s needs and desires to providing governments with a better understanding of the will and desire of the people.

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.

Maintaining accessibility to and understanding of digital information over time is a complex challenge that often requires contributions and interventions from a variety of individuals and organizations. The processes of preservation planning and evaluation are fundamentally implicit and share similar complexity. Both demand comprehensive knowledge and understanding of every aspect of to-be-preserved content and the contexts within which preservation is undertaken. Consequently, means are required for the identification, documentation and association of those properties of data, representation and management mechanisms that in combination lend value, facilitate interaction and influence the preservation process. These properties may be almost limitless in terms of diversity, but are integral to the establishment of classes of risk exposure, and the planning and deployment of appropriate preservation strategies. We explore several research objectives within the course of this thesis. Our main objective is the conception of an ontology for risk management of digital collections. Incorporated within this are our aims to survey the contexts within which preservation has been undertaken successfully, the development of an appropriate methodology for risk management, the evaluation of existing preservation evaluation approaches and metrics, the structuring of best practice knowledge and lastly the demonstration of a range of tools that utilise our findings. We describe a mixed methodology that uses interview and survey, extensive content analysis, practical case study and iterative software and ontology development. We build on a robust foundation, the development of the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment. We summarise the extent of the challenge facing the digital preservation community (and by extension users and creators of digital materials from many disciplines and operational contexts) and present the case for a comprehensive and extensible knowledge base of best practice. These challenges are manifested in the scale of data growth, the increasing complexity and the increasing onus on communities with no formal training to offer assurances of data management and sustainability. These collectively imply a challenge that demands an intuitive and adaptable means of evaluating digital preservation efforts. The need for individuals and organisations to validate the legitimacy of their own efforts is particularly prioritised. We introduce our approach, based on risk management. Risk is an expression of the likelihood of a negative outcome, and an expression of the impact of such an occurrence. We describe how risk management may be considered synonymous with preservation activity, a persistent effort to negate the dangers posed to information availability, usability and sustainability. Risk can be characterised according to associated goals, activities, responsibilities and policies in terms of both their manifestation and mitigation. They have the capacity to be deconstructed into their atomic units and responsibility for their resolution delegated appropriately. We continue to describe how the manifestation of risks typically spans an entire organisational environment, and as the focus of our analysis risk safeguards against omissions that may occur when pursuing functional, departmental or role-based assessment. We discuss the importance of relating risk-factors, through the risks themselves or associated system elements. To do so will yield the preservation best-practice knowledge base that is conspicuously lacking within the international digital preservation community. We present as research outcomes an encapsulation of preservation practice (and explicitly defined best practice) as a series of case studies, in turn distilled into atomic, related information elements. We conduct our analyses in the formal evaluation of memory institutions in the UK, US and continental Europe. Furthermore we showcase a series of applications that use the fruits of this research as their intellectual foundation. Finally we document our results in a range of technical reports and conference and journal articles. We present evidence of preservation approaches and infrastructures from a series of case studies conducted in a range of international preservation environments. We then aggregate this into a linked data structure entitled PORRO, an ontology relating preservation repository, object and risk characteristics, intended to support preservation decision making and evaluation. The methodology leading to this ontology is outlined, and lessons are exposed by revisiting legacy studies and exposing the resource and associated applications to evaluation by the digital preservation community.

In recent years, such vast archives of video information have become available that human annotation of content is no longer feasible; automation of video content analysis is therefore highly desirable. The recognition of semantic content in images is a problem that relies on prior knowledge and learnt information and that, to date, has only been partially solved. Salient analysis, on the other hand, is statistically based and highlights regions that are distinct from their surroundings, while also being scalable and repeatable. The arrangement of salient information into hierarchical tree structures in the spatial and temporal domains forms an important step to bridge the semantic salient gap. Salient regions are identified using region analysis, rank ordered and documented in a tree for further analysis. A structure of this kind contains all the information in the original video and forms an intermediary between video processing and video understanding, transforming video analysis to a syntactic database analysis problem. This contribution demonstrates the formulation of spatio-temporal salient trees the syntax to index them, and provides an interface for higher level cognition in machine vision.

Unrestricted accessible scholarly resources are increasingly considered essential to knowledge creation and socio-economic development. In order to facilitate this, university libraries at National Research Universities (NRUs) in Thailand have established institutional repositories (IRs). The development of the Open Access publishing movement also provides opportunities and challenges to NRUs’ IRs and scholarly community. Like others, the IR projects in Thailand have experienced low awareness and content contribution from stakeholders. Accordingly, this study aims to optimize the established IR projects in NRUs in Thailand by exploring the stakeholders’ research publishing behaviour, and the perception, participation, and utilisation of IRs. This study advances the understanding of IRs in NRUs in Thailand from the perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups. This inductive qualitative study employs Constructivist Grounded Theory as a research methodology. Theoretical sampling, convenient sampling, and purposive sampling were used to recruit key participants in Thai scholarly communication at three NRUs. An in-depth semi-structured interview method was used to collect data and Charmaz’s Grounded Theory Method of Open coding and Focused coding was used to analyse it. The analysis resulted in the generation of the 4Cs (/foresee/) Model for the Development of University-based IRs. It composes of “Communication” “Collaboration”, “Copyright understanding”, “Control” and “Local academic culture”. This innovative model provides an explanatory framework identifying the factors for the availability and accessibility of full-text digital research publications in Thai university-based IRs. Moreover, the 3Rs – Rethinking, Redefining, and Re-collaborating- are recommended as key activities to be considered when confronting the difficulties in the development of IRs. In addition, this study also proposes the “2PSC model for operational excellence – Policies, Procedure, Services, and Competencies” as a practical and effective mechanism for managing IRs. Further, the study offers theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to the understanding of IRs in NRUs in Thailand from the perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups.

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.

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.

Industry reports indicate that the number of security incidents happened in healthcare organisation is increasing. Lessons learned (i.e. the causes of a security incident and the recommendations intended to avoid any recurrence) from those security incidents should ideally inform information security management systems (ISMS). The sharing of the lessons learned is an essential activity in the “follow-up” phase of security incident response lifecycle, which has long been addressed but not given enough attention in academic and industry. This dissertation proposes a novel approach, the Generic Security Template (GST), aiming to feed back the lessons learned from real world security incidents to the ISMS. It adapts graphical Goal Structuring Notations (GSN), to present the lessons learned in a structured manner through mapping them to the security requirements of the ISMS. The suitability of the GST has been confirmed by demonstrating that instances of the GST can be produced from real world security incidents of different countries based on in-depth analysis of case studies. The usability of the GST has been evaluated using a series of empirical studies. The GST is empirically evaluated in terms of its given effectiveness in assisting the communication of the lessons learned from security incidents as compared to the traditional text based approach alone. The results show that the GST can help to improve the accuracy and reduce the mental efforts in assisting the identification of the lessons learned from security incidents and the results are statistically significant. The GST is further evaluated to determine whether users can apply the GST to structure insights derived from a specific security incident. The results show that students with a computer science background can create an instance of the GST. The acceptability of the GST is assessed in a healthcare organisation. Strengths and weaknesses are identified and the GST has been adjusted to fit into organisational needs. The GST is then further tested to examine its capability to feed back the security lessons to the ISMS. The results show that, by using the GST, lessons identified from security incidents from one healthcare organisation in a specific country can be transferred to another and can indeed inform the improvements of the ISMS. In summary, the GST provides a unified way to feed back the lessons learned to the ISMS. It fosters an environment where different stakeholders can speak the same language while exchanging the lessons learned from the security incidents around the world.

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.

The problem with e-texts are related to the way texts are displayed on a screen, with multiple and different aspects that affect legibility, making readers prefer to read a paper format rather than e-resources. This research describes the factors that affect the legibility of online texts aimed at obtaining a better understanding of the usability of electronic Arabic texts for learning purposes within the field of electronic reading; mainly reading Arabic texts for students aged 9 to 13. This study sets out three particular aims: (1) building a reading strategy for Arabic schoolbook in both formats electronic and paper format based on users’ cognitive and behavioural processes; (2) defining the influence of three typographical variables that affect reading Arabic texts on a screen (font size, font-type and line length); and (3) studying the efficiency of reading Arabic texts and the related factors impacting the efficiency of reading and comprehension. Based on the nature of the research questions and objectives, positivism and phenomenology are adopted as the underlying philosophy for this research. The empirical research was divided into three phases; the first phase focused on collecting data about using the internet among students in primary schools by means of a questionnaire. This has helped in the selection of samples and determined the extent of the students’ reluctance to read from a screen. The second phase was to investigate the reading process of school book in two formats [ paper and electronic format] to build reading model based on users’ cognitive and behavioural processes. The third phase was to examine the factors that affect negatively the usability of electronic texts by examining three issues: font size [10, 14, 16 and 18], font type [Arabic traditional, Arial, Times New Roman, Simplified Arabic, and Courier New], and line length [single column and double columns]. Observation was applied as a tool to collect the data. The study has made a significant contribution to the understanding of electronic reading of Arabic language. This contribution addressed five aspects: (1) Two models of reading process for schoolbook using Arabic language were built according to users’ interaction with the school textbook in two formats ( electronic and paper). These models will not only help define the interaction amongst users and e-books, but will also help designers to understand user behaviour of e-books and thereby to establish the most appropriate functions/features when building an e-book interface. (2) Identify the optimal font size for reading an Arabic script from screen by children aged 9 to 13. (3) Based on collecting data from experiments (2) and (3) and comparing this date with other researches that have done in the same field, new model explains the interaction between three topographical variables [font size, font type and line length] and their relationships with independent variables were provided. (4) Test a new display technique to improve the legibility of reading Arabic online texts by using colour to increase the ability to focus vision when moving from one line to another so as to improve the screen display. And (5) according to quantitative and qualitative several of the rules were recommended for designers and educators to follow when designing and presenting Arabic text on screen. On the other hand, some recommendations for future research have been derived from this thesis, such as the following. (1) Investigating the effect of the colour factor on improving the legibility of Arabic texts on screen for children, e.g. using different colours to distinguish between dots and vowels. (2) Exploring and developing an e-reading model based on all the factors recorded in the empirical studies in the reading field which will lead to building a theory on e- reading. (3) Investigating the influence of a variable effect reading process and the variables that have a positive or negative impact on it. (4) Applying a model that used colour to increase the ability to focus using different age-range and type of information such as journals or books.

This study assesses information-seeking and perceptions of expertise in Electronic Networks of Practice (ENoPs). ENoPs are a particular type of online community focused on sharing information related to a specific work-related profession (Wasko and Faraj, 2005). To date, there has been little empirical work on the dynamics of information exchange in ENoPs (Whelan, 2007). The little we do know is based on face-to-face communities, which cannot be generalized to online interactions due to changes in size, purpose, and method of communication. Understanding the type and perceived value of information is an important line of theoretical inquiry because it has the potential to identify the specific informational needs these communities fulfil and the types of people most likely to fulfil them. This research was conducted in an ENoP focusing on the exchange of information related to the practice of engineering. The community studied, Eng- Tips, is a thriving network focusing on the practice of engineering that has produced over 150,000 posts, and is comprised of engineers from twenty-one different specialties. Interactions take place solely through the use of virtually mediated technology, and focus primarily on practice-related issues. The format of interaction is typically based on a query and a stream of ensuing replies. Data were collected through metrics and a coding procedure that allowed me to identify the most common queries in the ENoP. My data revealed queries in the ENoP tended to focus on obtaining solutions, meta-knowledge, or validation. The high emphasis on validation was similar to that found in face-to-face friendship networks, and was contrary to Cross et al.’s (2001) anticipated results, most likely due to the presence of anonymity. I also found that experience of interacting with multiple specialties (i.e. interactional expertise) was positively associated with perceived expertise. Finally, I discovered that replies, giving out nominations, and frequently logins were positively associated with the number of expert nominations one received in the community. This research makes contributions to both theory and practice. I contribute to theory on information-seeking by extending Cross et al.’s (2001) research to the online environment, and articulating the type of informational benefits sought in the ENoP. I contribute to theory on expertise by exploring the characteristics associated with perceived expertise, and exploring the reasons why interactional expertise may be particularly valued in ENoPs. My work in this area reveals that—in the context of the ENoP studied—a ‘common practice’ is highly fragmented and loosely knit, further distinguishing this entity as a unique organizational form. My findings in this area call into question the validity of a practice-based approach for examining these entities, and for these reasons, I suggest they may be better conceptualized as Electronic Networks of Discourse. Practical ramifications focus on describing the type of information members want to obtain from their involvement in the community, which may benefit members, organizations, and managers of the ENoP.

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.

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.

Online memorials are an Internet phenomena of the 21st century which have been identified as a growing contemporary mourning practice mediated by online computer networks. Online memorials offer a logical discursive platform for a unique form of personalised yet communal virtual memorialising which is mirroring the needs of a fractured and geographically divided society and affords twenty four hour access to all those who use the internet. Online memorials have also been identified as a virtual location where stigma, disenfranchisement and loss of voice in bereavement can be publically noted and challenged. Current research surrounding the use of online memorials has identified that little is known about the creation and use of private memorial sites as they are problematical for researchers to access. This study aimed to address this gap in the research by exploring the creation and use of an online memorial which is both private and relating to a death by suicide which is often considered a socially stigmatised bereavement. The study used auto/biographical research methods utilising a single case study design to explore the narratives of a naturally occurring online memorial alongside an asynchronous email interview with the memorial author. Thematic analysis of the data provided insights into the motivating factors, creation and use of this example of an online memorial. The research also offered insights into the life of the deceased and that of a survivor of bereavement by suicide and in so doing has explored the distinctions between the life lived, the life experienced and the life as told through a form of cultural memorial expression increasingly prevalent in current society. The study also offers consideration of the potential for therapeutic benefit from creating and using online memorials as a mourning activity which could influence Occupational Therapy practice and in so doing identified areas that would benefit from greater research attention to explore further the use/therapeutic use of online memorials.

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.

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.

This submission addresses the change to the electronic environment in libraries. It presents eight selected research papers which cumulatively contribute to knowledge regarding the management issues arising from this change. The specific elements of the research programme focused primarily on changes in academic libraries and secondly in public libraries. The implications of changes in different countries were investigated. The research programme evolved over time, as its applicability and relevance extended to other players in the developing library electronic resources field. The need for effective communication and marketing regarding electronic resources was identified as key, and it became increasingly evident that libraries needed to adopt marketing techniques appropriate to the changing environment and different to those techniques traditionally used. The linked elements of the research programme involve managing changing user needs in line with a changing user base, which includes remote users, and the requirements for changing staff skills. Further elements include work in a virtual environment alongside a physical environment and collaboration and consortia working. The central aim of the research programme was to identify solutions for best practice, and funding was obtained for many of the research elements. Originality is demonstrated by investigation into an emerging area, using library websites at the time of their development and applying an experimental research technique. Research methods from different research paradigms - positivist and interpretivist - were employed. Quantitative data was obtained to establish hard facts. Qualitative approaches enabled the acquisition of multiple perspectives and understanding of social constructions of meaning and knowledge, such as respondents' attitudes, feelings and perceptions. The extent and modes of discussion with respondents facilitated triangulation of methods that resulted in multiple views for synthesis so as to clarify understanding. All of the research was underpinned by an on-going literature review, which was vital in order to assess both what existed and current developments. The research methods used were applied in a sequence of eight stages as the electronic environment in libraries developed. The research aimed to provide a fully rounded picture, investigating the issues arising from the introduction of electronic resources in libraries, and it achieved this by considering developments over a period of time just in excess of the past decade. The papers present findings that can be applied by players in the field of electronic resource provision. Foremost amongst these was the requirements for educating library users, often in a remote environment, in the use of the new electronic resources, which were derived and the vital importance of operating different marketing and communication techniques, which was demonstrated.

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 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 describes research which explores the importance and feasibility of involving older people as equal partners in the creative design of digital devices for an ageing population. In exploring this topic, I have carried out two preliminary studies, a pilot study and a major empirical study. Firstly, I invited three groups of people, including very old people, active older people and postgraduate students, to evaluate a mock-­‐up model of an interactive device intended for older people that was designed using a standard design process. The results of this study suggested that products without an adequate contribution from older people would not always meet their needs. Secondly, I carried out observations of very old people, active older people, and young designers to identify factors that influence the way in which both older people and young designers can be involved in the creative design process. These factors included experiences with technology, processes and approaches currently applied with older people and designers, factors that stimulate or inhibit creativity, and practical constraints such as health issues. The results of these observations fed into the design of a pilot study, where I tested the content of a creative design process and a procedure for analysing data for the main empirical study. The main study involved three creative workshops where the same creative methods were employed with different sets of people: young designers, mixed groups (with older people and designers) and older people only. The results show that older people are able to participate in a creative design process; however, certain practical constraints have to be taken into account. Also, older people perform better when they work together with designers. Finally, the mixed groups with older people, who have relevant life experiences, and designers, who are familiar with the newest technology, may be more suitable for designing appropriate products for the older population.

This thesis presents an automated framework for quantitative vascular shape analysis of the coronary arteries, which constitutes an important and fundamental component of an automated image-based diagnostic system. Firstly, an automated vessel segmentation algorithm is developed to extract the coronary arteries based on the framework of active contours. Both global and local intensity statistics are utilised in the energy functional calculation, which allows for dealing with non-uniform brightness conditions, while evolving the contour towards to the desired boundaries without being trapped in local minima. To suppress kissing vessel artifacts, a slice-by-slice correction scheme, based on multiple regions competition, is proposed to identify and track the kissing vessels throughout the transaxial images of the CTA data. Based on the resulting segmentation, we then present a dedicated algorithm to estimate the geometric parameters of the extracted arteries, with focus on vessel bifurcations. In particular, the centreline and associated reference surface of the coronary arteries, in the vicinity of arterial bifurcations, are determined by registering an elliptical cross sectional tube to the desired constituent branch. The registration problem is solved by a hybrid optimisation method, combining local greedy search and dynamic programming, which ensures the global optimality of the solution and permits the incorporation of any hard constraints posed to the tube model within a natural and direct framework. In contrast with conventional volume domain methods, this technique works directly on the mesh domain, thus alleviating the need for image upsampling. The performance of the proposed framework, in terms of efficiency and accuracy, is demonstrated on both synthetic and clinical image data. Experimental results have shown that our techniques are capable of extracting the major branches of the coronary arteries and estimating the related geometric parameters (i.e., the centreline and the reference surface) with a high degree of agreement to those obtained through manual delineation. Particularly, all of the major branches of coronary arteries are successfully detected by the proposed technique, with a voxel-wise error at 0.73 voxels to the manually delineated ground truth data. Through the application of the slice-by-slice correction scheme, the false positive metric, for those coronary segments affected by kissing vessel artifacts, reduces from 294% to 22.5%. In terms of the capability of the presented framework in defining the location of centrelines across vessel bifurcations, the mean square errors (MSE) of the resulting centreline, with respect to the ground truth data, is reduced by an average of 62.3%, when compared with initial estimation obtained using a topological thinning based algorithm.

People’s activities on the internet have expanded from mainly retrieving information to communicating with each other in virtual settings. Thus, research investigating social interactions in online communities is becoming more and more important. However, the multi-faceted approaches of existing studies for the analysis of online communities make it difficult to combine the findings into a comprehensive understanding. This shows the need for holistic investigations of online communities. This thesis provides such a holistic approach by investigating a combination of different aspects of a selected online support community for older people. MOSuC (Model of Online Support Communities), a model describing the key aspects of online support communities was developed based on existing theories of computer-mediated communication (CMC) as well as theoretical perspectives on social support. Five studies were conducted, each addressing one of the different aspects of the case study community: (i) the message content, (ii) the conversations structure, (iii) the social network of related community members, (iv) the roles that online community members take on, and (vi) the taget population’s needs concerning the exchange of social support in online communities. The findings of these individual studies were then combined in context of MOSuC in order to provide a holistic description of the community. As a result, this thesis provides detailed insight into the characteristics of the case study community as well as the interplay and dependencies between different aspects of the community. Based on the integration of multiple studies, the thesis sheds light on two main issues: the characteristics of the individual aspects of the community as well as how these aspects are related to and affect each other. In addition to the findings of the studies, the thesis also contributes MOSuC, which serves both as a theoretical framework of the aspects of online support communities, as well as a practical tool for integrating the individual studies. In addition, the application, modification and integration of multiple methods in this thesis provide a novel methodological way for an integrative analysis of online support communities.

In this study an in depth investigation of successful competitive strategies for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is undertaken. The overall aim of this study is to analyse the strategic orientation of UK Manufacturing SMEs. In the process, it will test Porter’s (1980, 1985) theoretical framework of generic strategies and thus evaluate firms’ preferred strategic synthesis. It will, therefore, test the efficacy of the value chain and develop any specific pattern that relates to a combination strategy. The investigation of the above objectives is undertaken utilising a mixed research methodology with the purpose of examining the applicability of existing competitive strategy frameworks (phase 1) and testing a new theoretical framework that incorporates additional dimensions of strategy (phase 2). During phase 1, Porter’s framework is employed to investigate SMEs’ strategic orientation as a means to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. A semi-structured questionnaire is employed and the analysis is carried out by means of factor and cluster analysis to identify strategic variables currently employed by SMEs. During phase 2, the theoretical framework is operationalised to bridge the gap within the literature and existing empirical research. Its purpose is to identify forms of successful competitive strategies of UK MSMEs as they are formulated and implemented in firms’ value chain activities. The data was collected through a number of semi-structured interviews and the analysis was based on data categorisation. The findings indicate that Porter’s (1980) single generic strategies are not the best option for UK MSMEs for gaining competitive advantage and that the

Advances in ubiquitous computing have resulted in changes to the way we access and use everyday applications, e.g. reading mail and booking tickets. At the same time, users interact with these applications in a variety of ways, each with different characteristics, e.g., different degrees of bandwidth, different payment schemes supported and so on. These are highly dynamic interactions, as some of the applications might become unavailable (either temporarily or permanently) or their behaviour may change. As the user has to deal with a large number of proactive and dynamic applications every day, he will need a personal assistant that possesses similar characteristics. The agent paradigm meets this requirement, since it exhibits the necessary features. As a result, the user will provide its personal agent assistant with a goal, e.g. I need a smartphone which costs less than three hundred pounds, and the agent will have to use a number of applications offering information on smartphones so that it finds the requested one. This, in turn, raises a number of issues regarding the organisation and the degrees of access to these services as well as the correctness of their descriptions. In this work, we propose the organisation of applications around the concept of artificial agent societies, to which access would be possible only by a positive evaluation of an agent's application. The agent will provide the Authority Agent with the role it is applying for and its competencies in the context of a protocol, i.e., the messages that it can utter/understand. The Authority Agent will then check to see if the applicant agent is a competent user of the protocols; if yes, entry is granted. Assuming that access is granted, the next issue is to decide on the protocol(s) that agent receives. As providing the full protocol will cause security and overload problems, we only need to provide the part required for the agent to play its role. We show how this can be done and how we can repair certain protocols so that they are indeed enactable once this role decomposition is performed.

When learning mathematics, deaf children of primary school age experience difficulties due to their disability. In Jordan, little research has been undertaken to understand the problems facing deaf children and their teachers. Frequently, children are educated in special schools for the deaf; the majority of deaf children tend not to be integrated into mainstream education although efforts are made to incorporate them into the system. Teachers in the main stream education system rarely have knowledge and experience to enable deaf students to reach their full potential. The methodological approach used in this research is a mixed one consisting of action research and Human Computer interaction (HCI) research. The target group was deaf children aged nine years (at the third grade) and their teachers in Jordanian schools. Mathematics was chosen as the main focus of this study because it is a universal subject with its own concepts and rules and at this level the teachers in the school have sufficient knowledge and experience to teach mathematics topics competently. In order to obtain a better understanding of the problems faced by teachers and the deaf children in learning mathematics, semi-structured interviews were undertaken and questionnaires distributed to teachers. The main aim at that stage of research was to explore the current use and status of the e-learning environment and LMS within the Jordanian schools for the deaf in Jordan. In later stages of this research, semi-structured interviews and questionnaires were used again to ascertain the effectiveness, usability and readiness of the adopted e-learning environment “Moodle. Finally pre-tests and post-tests used to assess the effectiveness of the e-learning environment and LMS. It is important to note that it was not intended to work with the children directly but were used as test subjects. Based on the requirements and recommendations of the teachers of the deaf, a key requirements scheme was developed. Four open source e-learning environments and LMS evaluated against the developed key requirements. The evaluation was based on a software engineering approache. The outcome of that evaluation was the adoption of an open source e-learning environment and LMS called “Moodle”. Moodle was presented to the teachers for the purpose of testing it. It was found it is the most suitable e-learning environment and LMS to be adapted for use by deaf children in Jordan based on the teachers requirements. Then Moodle was presented to the deaf children’s to use during this research. After use, the activities of the deaf and their teachers were used and analysed in terms of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) analysis. The analysis includes the readiness, usability, user satisfaction, ease of use, learnability, outcome/future use, content, collaboration & communication tools and functionality.

XML has become the standard way for representing and transforming data over the World Wide Web. The problem with XML documents is that they have a very high ratio of redundancy, which makes these documents demanding large storage capacity and high network band-width for transmission. Because of their extensive use, XML documents could be retrieved according to vague queries by naive users with poor background in writing XPath query. The aim of this thesis is to present the design of a system named “XML Compressing and Vague Querying (XCVQ)” which has the ability of compressing the XML document and retrieving the required information from the compressed version with less decompression required according to vague queries. XCVQ first compressed the XML document by separating its data into containers and then compress these containers using the GZip compressor. The compressed file could be retrieved if a vague query is submitted without the need to decompress the whole file. For the purpose of processing the vague queries, XCVQ decomposes the query according to the relevant documents and then a second decomposition stage is made according to the relevant containers. Only the required information is decompressed and submitted to the user. To the best of our knowledge, XCVQ is the first XML compressor that has the ability to process vague queries. The average compression ratio of the designed compressor is around 78% which may be considered competitive compared to other queriable XML compressors. Based on several experiments, the query processor part had the ability to answer different kinds of vague queries ranging from simple exact match queries to complex ones that require retrieving information from several compressed XML documents.

Citizen sensor networks are open information systems in which members of the public act as information providers. The information distributed in such networks ranges from observations of events (e.g. noise measurements or monitoring of environmental parameters) to probabilistic estimates (e.g. projected traffic reports or weather forecasts). However, due to rapid advances in technology such as high speed mobile internet and sophisticated portable devices (from smart-phones to hand-held game consoles), it is expected that citizen sensor networks will evolve. This evolution will be driven by an increase in the number of information providers, since, in the future, it will be much easier to gather and communicate information at a large scale, which in turn, will trigger a transition to more commercial applications. Given this projected evolution, one key difference between future citizen sensor networks and conventional present ones is the emergence of self-interested behaviour, which can manifest in two main ways. First, information providers may choose to commit insufficient resources when producing their observations, and second, they may opt to misreport them. Both aspects of this self-interested behaviour are ignored in current citizen sensor networks. However, as their applications are broadened and commercial applications expand, information providers are likely to demand some kind of payment (e.g. real or virtual currency) for the information they provide. Naturally, those interested in buying this information, will also require guarantees of its quality. It is these issues that we deal with in this thesis through the introduction of a series of novel two-stage mechanisms, based on strictly proper scoring rules. We focus on strictly proper scoring rules, as they have been used in the past as a method of eliciting truthful reporting of predictions in various forecasting scenarios (most notably in weather forecasting). By using payments that are based on such scoring rules, our mechanisms effectively address the issue of selfish behaviour by motivating information providers in a citizen sensor network to, first, invest the resources required by the information buyer in the generation of their observations, and second, to report them truthfully. To begin with, we introduce a mechanism that allows the centre (acting as an information buyer) to select a single agent that can provide a costly observation at a minimum cost. This is the first time a mechanism has been derived for a setting in which the centre has no knowledge of the actual costs involved in the generation of the agents' observations. Building on this, we then make two further contributions to the state of the art, with the introduction of two extensions of this mechanism. First, we extend the mechanism so that it can be applied in a citizen sensor network where the information providers do not have the same resources available for the generation of their observations. These different capabilities are reflected in the quality of the provided observations. Hence, the centre must select multiple agents by eliciting their costs and the maximum precisions of their observations and then ask them to produce these observations. Second, we consider a setting where the information buyer cannot gain any knowledge of the actual outcome beyond what it receives through the agents' reports. Now, because the centre is not able to evaluate the providers' reported observations through external means, it has to rely solely on the reports it receives. It does this by fusing the reports together into one observation which then uses as a means to assess the reports of each of the providers. For the initial mechanism and each of the two extensions, we prove their economic properties (i.e. incentive compatibility and individual rationality) and then present empirical results comparing a number of specific scoring rules, which includes the quadratic, spherical, logarithmic and a parametric family of scoring rules. These results show that although the logarithmic scoring rule minimises the mean and variance of an agent's payment, using it may result in unbounded payments if an agent provides an observation of poor quality. Conversely, the payments of the parametric family exhibit finite bounds and are similar to those of the logarithmic rule for specific values of the parameter. Thus, we show that the parametric scoring rule is the best candidate in our setting. We empirically evaluate both extended mechanisms in the same way, and for the first extension, we show that the mechanism describes a family of possible ways to perform the agent selection, and that there is one that dominates all others. Finally, we compare both extensions with the peer prediction mechanism introduced by \cite{trustsr1} and show that in all three mechanisms the total expected payment is the same, while for both our mechanisms the variance in the total payment is significantly lower.