Crowsourcing

This mixed study aims to highlight the impact of social media in the Arab world, specifically Twitter's impact on translators' communities. For this purpose, the role of hashtags among translators will be examined by investigating one particular Arabic hashtag, its purpose, target users, and the classification of content. The hashtag is ‫,#اﻟﻤﺘﺮﺟﻢ_ﻓﻲ_ﺧﺪﻣﺔ_اﻟﻤﺘﺮﺟﻢ‬ #transla-tor_serving_translator. 1) An online survey of six closed questions was employed and posted on Twitter, and 249 responses show that users are from fourteen Arab countries, and the majority is from Saudi Arabia. Hashtag users are translators, freelancers, or TS students. Some are active users who post tweets and answer questions, others only ask questions, and the rest only read tweets. The general attitude toward employing hashtags among translators' communities was positive. 2) Employing a content analysis approach, the content is classified into two main categories of sharing information and seeking assistance with seven subcategories of each.

Book Chapter: Integral to some conceptualizations of the “smart city” is the adoption of web-based technology to support civic engagement and improve information systems for local government decision support. Yet there is little to no literature on the “smartness” of gathering information about historic places within municipal information systems. This chapter provides three case studies of technologically augmented planning processes that incorporated citizens as sensors of data about historic places. The first case study is of SurveyLA, a massive effort of the city of Los Angeles to comprehensively survey over 880,000 parcels for historic resources. A second case study involves Motor City Mapping, an effort to identify the condition of buildings in Detroit, Michigan and a parallel historical survey conducted by volunteers. In Austin, Texas, a university-based research team designed a municipal web tool called the Austin Historical Survey Wiki. This chapter offers insights into the...

Vetrina 3. Il passato e la sua eredità: Studi e ricerche che guardano al passato come risorsa da scoprire e ri-scoprire, condividere e utilizzare per tracciare un futuro consapevole

L’avvento delle nuove tecnologie digitali, determinanti nel far emergere
l’inespresso “fabbisogno di passato”, nel favorire l’accessibilità ai dati e la valorizzazione delle testimonianze del passato, ha messo allo scoperto la vulnerabilità della ricerca storico archeologica di fronte a fenomeni di polarizzazione dei pubblici, di personalizzazione, spettacolarizzazione e di estrema semplificazione del dibattito. A ciò, anche off-line, si aggiungono i rischi di manipolazione non controllata delle opinioni e nuove forme di esclusione sociale, derivanti dalle differenti possibilità di accesso alle tecnologie. In un
ambiente di apprendimento profondamente mutato, la formazione diventa strategica per lo stato di salute della democrazia, favorendo la diffusione di un pensiero libero e critico, anche attraverso la disseminazione delle componenti cognitive proprie del metodo scientifico. Prendendo in esame il problema dell’utilizzo del passato nell’età della disintermediazione, il contributo presenta alcuni percorsi di ricerca attualmente in corso che, orientando l’operatore storico-archeologico alla definizione di procedure riguardanti la qualità delle informazioni acquisite attraverso metodi partecipativi (crowdsourcing), sono tesi a garantire un futuro equo e sostenibile mediante un più facile e protetto accesso democratico alla costruzione del discorso storico-archeologico e delle c.d. “comunità d’eredità” (Convenzione di Faro, 2005).

How can state-of-the-art computational linguistic technology reduce the workload and increase the efficiency of language teachers? To address this question, we combine insights from research in second language acquisition and computational linguistics to automatically generate text-based questions to a given text. The questions are designed to draw the learner's attention to target linguistic forms-phrasal verbs, in this particular case-by requiring them to use the forms or their paraphrases in the answer. Such questions help learners create form-meaning connections and are well suited for both practice and testing. We discuss the generation of a novel type of question combining a wh-question with a gapped sentence, and report the results of two crowdsourcing evaluation studies investigating how well automatically generated questions compare to those written by a language teacher. The first study compares our system output to gold standard human-written questions via crowdsourcing rating. An equivalence test shows that automatically generated questions are comparable to human-written ones. The second crowdsourcing study investigates two types of questions (wh-questions with and without a gapped sentence), their perceived quality, and the responses they elicit. Finally, we discuss the challenges and limitations of creating and evaluating question-generation systems for language learners.