Semantic Enrichment of Memory Archives: Case Study on Jurka.net

Sonet Demonstration LiveMemories 26 11 09

View more presentations from Bruno Kessler Foundation.

Today I presented the first case study of the LiveMemories project: a joint work with SoNet, Opera Universitaria, Portobeseno, Cooperativa Mercurio, and Studiare a Trento.

In summary, the goal of the case study was to assess which web platforms people in Trentino would use for sharing memories, and how; and to collect memories from the local community and suggest how LiveMemories techniques can enrich them.

Our main activities in the case study were to:

• Identify a specific community of people (in this case, localized in a specific district of Trento)
• Test different ways in which they might share memories, both
  
• Offline: interviews, events, collection of memories in a photo format
• Online: providing web tools (Flickr, Facebook, Jurka.net)
  
• and reported how they used them, and what was most successful
• Imagine what kind of web services LM could offer to enrich memory archives

So, we chose to investigate the collection of memories, the fostering of a community, and the potential value of LiveMemories to such communities in a geographically limited case study, where the memories refer to a well defined place:
The district of San Bartolomeo

Enjoy!

Here's the agenda of the whole day:

10.00 Welcome
Andrea Zanotti (FBK – President)
Paolo Traverso (FBK‐ Centre for Information Technology‐irst – Director)

10.15 LiveMemories Demonstration Day
Bernardo Magnini (FBK‐irst)

10.30 Demonstrator 1: Content Extraction and Content Integration on Newspaper Archives (Case Study on L’Adige and Vita Trentina)
Massimo Poesio (Uni. Trento), Luciano Serafini (FBK‐irst) and Paul Lewis (Uni. Southampton)

11.00 Break

11.30 Demonstrator 2: Semantic Enrichment of Memory Archives (Case Study on Jurka.net)
Paolo Massa (FBK‐irst) and Michela Ferron (FBK‐irst)

12.00 Invited Talk: Semantic Search and Different Visualization Models in Media Archives
Waltraud Wiedermann (Austria Press Agentur – CEO), Rüdiger Baumberger (Austria Press Agentur – Technical Director)

12.30 Invited Demonstration: Visual Media Analysis for the General Public
Michael Granitzer and Wolfgang Kienreich (Know Centre – Graz)

13.00 Buffet lunch

14.00 Demonstrator 3: Content Presentation (Case Study on Blog Stories)
Fausto Giunchiglia (UniTN)

14.30 Demonstrator 4: Searching, Navigating and Visualizing Digital Memories: Trento's Municipal Assembly case study
Marco Ronchetti (UniTN)

15.00 Conclusion
Paolo Traverso (FBK‐irst – Director)

Special Guests

Luciano Paris (SIE – CEO)
Marta DeMarchi (RTTR – President)

I hold my breath. Do you?

I was browsing the Internet looking for more information on continuous partial attention and how Linda Stone defines it, when I found this interesting issue of "email apnea". This post explains better what I am talking about. One day, Linda Stone realized that while checking emails, exploring the messages and thinking what to answer first, what to do next, etc., she was holding her breath.
She wondered if this could have somehow some effect on her (and I wonder it too). So she called Dr. Margaret Chesney at the National Institute of Health (NIH). In brief, Chesney explained that breath-holding and hyperventilating can affect our body's balance of oxygen, CO2, and NO.
NO is Nitric oxide, which is used by our body to fight different kinds of infections, and tumors. It is associated with learning, memory, sleeping, feeling pain, and probably depression, and it also mediates inflammations and rheumatism.

Breath-holding seems also to be related to the vagus nerv, which goes from the head to the neck, chest and abdomen, and mediates the autonomic nervous system, which is formed by the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. Now, shallow breathing, breath-holding and hyperventilating "activate" our sympathetic nervous system in a "fight or flight" response, which causes the liver to dump glucose and cholesterol into our blood, our heart rate to increase, our sense of satiety to be compromised, and our body to anticipate the physical activity that once was associated with a physical fight or flight response. Quite ironically, when our only physical activity is sitting and responding to email, we're sort of "all dressed up with nowhere to go."

Well, moral of the story: breathe!

Michela @UAB (Barcelona): Theory, methods and applications of social networks. Dynamic Analysis with SIENA

This was the first day here @UAB (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), and I feel like I have learned much more in one day than in one month on my own. Wow...
Anyway, the course is an introduction to the theory and methods of social networks and especially in dynamic analysis of social networks with SIENA, but it also includes some sessions about other software and other kinds of analysis.
Today José Luis Molina introduced social network analysis and the three main kinds of social networks: sociocentric, egocentric and personal network. The major field here at UAB is on ego and personal networks.
In the morning we analysed a sociocentric network with UCINET and visualized it with Netdraw, and in the afternoon we created our own personal network through Egonet, a software that allows you to create and manage questionnaires with different "name generators" and many other characteristics of 'ego' and 'alters'.
Tomorrow, with Jürgen Lerner, we will see Visone, a software for network visualization.
I have already received some useful suggestions concerning the research I am carrying on with my group at FBK, and I am sure I will learn many other things by the end of the week, especially with regard to dynamic network analysis, which will be explained through SIENA by William J. Burk, and which (I discovered) is the field of study of one of the participant to the course, who works with Netlogo.

Memoria tra Passato e Futuro - June 3, 2009

The workshop "Memoria tra Passato e Futuro" has been organized in the frame of Livememories, and will be held at Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Trento, Via S. Croce 77, on the 3rd of June 2009.
The workshop aims at discussing on the conception of collective memory, its meaning and its social role considering the newest advancement in the Web technologies. An interdisciplinary discussion on these issues will be of a central part of the workshop. More information can be found on livememories.org.

Workshop Programme:

9.00	Welcome speech - Massimo Poesio, Bernardo Magnini
9.30	Kieron O’Hara - Memories for life: individual, social and technological contributions to extended cognition
10.30	Coffee break
11.00	Alessandro Cavalli - The social construction of collective memories
12.00	Maurizio Giangiulio - Le società ricordano? Maurice Halbwachs e dintorni
13.00	Lunch
14.30	Stef Scagliola, Franciska de Jong - Access to content: the after sales of conducting oral theories
15.30	Anna Lisa Tota - Public memory and cultural trauma theories
16.30	Coffee break
17.00	Final discussion

Scientific Committee

Silvia Gherardi - Sociology and social research Department, UniTN
Maurizio Giangiulio - Philosophy, History and Cultural heritage, UniTN
Bernardo Magnini - HLT Research Unit, FBK
Massimo Poesio - Information Engineering and Computer Science Department/CIMEC, UNiTN

Jurka! May, 19th at San Bartolameo (Trento)

Showcase selection for the LiveMemories project

Yesterday we presented our joint work on the case study of LiveMemories to the project's partners , and proposed the showcase for the first year.
Here it is!

Showcase selection for LiveMemories

View more presentations from Bruno kessler Foundation.

WereYouThere? A social network for memories

WereYouThere is a social network which brings people together through shared memories of their life and of other major social events, and gives people a place to browse stories about personal experiences of commonly shared events.

An interesting aspect of Were You There is that it focuses not only on larger events, but also on very personal memories like, for example, that of Manvivar, who reminds of the day when he was told John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed: at that time he was in the 3rd grade at elementary school, and when when he got on the school bus to go home, he noticed that the bus drivers was crying.

Indeed, WereYouThere has been built on the premise that everyone has a story to tell, and where there are stories to be told, there are also people who want to hear them.

"The concept grew out of my own passion for storytelling both as a former TIME magazine bureau chief in Jerusalem and Chicago and a bestselling novelist. Over the years I’ve received many letters from readers who were moved to share some of the unforgettable moments in their own lives, hopeful that someone might listen. Because what are stories without an audience? At heart, we are all storytellers, telling and retelling our stories to give structure and meaning to our lives. I started looking online for a place where these memories might come together in a meaningful and organized way, whether from a recent trip or a battlefield long ago, but to my surprise I couldn't find one. So I created WereYouThere."

To begin, at WereYouThere you can join a community, start your own, or simply browse various categories, such as:

• Events: John F. Kennedy's assassination, 9/11, Woodstock, Hurricane Katrina, Attack on Pearl Harbor, The Cuban Missile Crisis, The Holocaust, ...
  
• Places: Venice, Gettysburg National Military Park, Prague, Somme, The Vietnam Memorial, Ground Zero, The Vatican, Westminster Abbey, ...
  
• People: Elvis Presley, Pope John Paul II, The Beatles, Roger Maris, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jim Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, Frank Sinatra, ...
  
• Schools: Harvard University, New Canaan High, University of Oregon, New Trier High School, St. Joseph Senior High School, ...
  
• Eras: The Sixties, The Great Depression, Civil Rights Movement, The Cold War, ...
  
• Organizations: 4-H, Boy Scouts of America, The Peace Corps, Greenpeace, Rotary International, Doctors without Borders, ...
  
• Military: Tet Offensive, World War Two, 80th Infantry Division, Navy, Fort Bragg, Army, Veterans of Foreign Wars, ...

At WereYouThere you can also:

• Share stories, photos and videos of growing up in your hometown, your old hangouts, high school or college.
• Remember the March from Selma, Woodstock or what it was like to live through Katrina.
• Reunite with others who served in your combat unit at Omaha Beach, Chosin Reservoir, Da Nang or Takrit.
• Relive the sites and sounds of the Summer of Love, your favorite travel spot or the Whisky a Go Go when The Doors took stage.
• Share a passion for ‘56 Chevys, Elvis or Coltrane.
• Recall the everyday scenes of a time gone by, from the fads and fashion to the cars, the music and the dreams that defined your generation.

You can also have full privacy controls, so you can choose if you prefer to post anounymously, to block others from seeing your profile page, to give access to approved friends, etc.

To me, it seems there can be interesting starting points for reflection even for LiveMemories (Active Digital Memories of Collective Life), a new project started on the 1st of October 2008 and scheduled to run for three years, funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento, and coordinated by Fondazione Bruno Kessler, in collaboration with several departments of University of Trento and of University of Southampton.

How big is your social network?

Can the cognitive capabilities of our brain set a limit to the maximum number of our acquaintances? Robin Dumbar, an anthropologist working at Oxford University, starting from the study of the social networks and the brain sizes of apes, suggested the size of our human brain should allow stable networks of 148-150 members.

Such quite small groups should allow to reduce bureaucracy, because almost everyone knows everyone elses. But sociologists make a distinction between one's wider network and the smaller "social core". With regard to this, Cameron Marlow, sociologist at Facebook, states that the average number of "friends" in Facebook is 120, even if women tend to have slightly more friends than men.

But, and this is consistent with the "social core" hypothesis, this average man (with 120 connections) generally responds to the postings of seven friends, while the average woman responds to 10. If we consider two-way communication (e-mails and chats), the average man interacts with 4 people, the woman with 6. When it comes to those who have networks of 500 people, the average men leave comments for 17 and communicate with 10 friends, women leave comments for 26 and communicate with 16.

In conclusion, it seems that, even though human beings can advertise themeselves in a more efficient way, they still have smaller circles of intimate friends.

View image's source

Friendship as a Health Factor

Interesting interview with Jennifer Couzin on how behaviors (like obesity, smoking, and others) "spread" in social networks!

Read the article

Listen to the interview

FBK retreat - The future of scientific and technological research

On Thursday 29 and Friday 30, January 2009 here in FBK there will be the Retreat event “New Directions for Scientific and Technological Research”. Here you can find the programme. You can also connect to the online streaming, starting from the 29th of January. The retreat is organized by the Centers “Materials and Microsystems” and “Information Technology”, and aims to share insights on the future of the Internet and on Nano & Micro Technologies. There will be great invited speakers, such as Peter Seitz (Vice-President Nano-medicine, CSEM SA) - Switzerland, Mark Maybury (Executive Director – MITRE) – USA, Hendrik Berndt (VP & CTO of DoCoMo Eurolabs) – Germany/Japan, Roger Kilian-Kehr (Research Architekt, SAP Research Center CEC Karlsruhe), João da Silva (Director of the Network & Communication DG-INFSO), Malik Ghallab (CEO for Science and Technology – INRIA) - France, Yuichi Matsushima (Vice President of NICT) – Japan, Prabhakar Raghavan (Head of Yahoo! Research) – USA, Wolfgang Wahlster (CEO and Scientific Director of DFKI) - Germany, ...and many others!