JCDL2017

Felix Hamborg, Norman Meuschke and Bela Gipp. Matrix-based News Aggregation: Exploring Different News Perspectives (Full)

*Best Student Paper Award Nominee

News aggregators are able to cope with the large amount of news that is published nowadays. However, they focus on the presentation of important, common information, but do not reveal the different perspectives within one topic. Thus, they suffer from media bias, a phenomenon that describes differences in news, such as in their content or tone. Finding these differences is crucial to reduce the effects of media bias. This paper presents matrix-based news analysis (MNA), a novel design for news exploration. MNA helps users gain a broad and diverse news understanding by presenting them various news perspectives on the same topic. Furthermore, we present NewsBird, a news aggregator that implements MNA to find different perspectives on international news topics. The results of a case study demonstrate that NewsBird broadens the user’s news understanding while it also provides similar news aggregation functionalities as established systems.

Nicholas Cole, Alfie Abdul-Rahman and Grace Mallon. Quill: A Framework for Constructing Negotiated Texts - with a Case Study on the US Constitutional Convention of 1787 (Full)

*VB Best paper nominee

This paper describes a new approach to the presentation of records relating to formal negotiations and the texts that they create. It describes the architecture of a model, platform, and web-interface that can be used by domain-experts to convert the records typical of formal negotiations in to a model of decision-making (with minimal training). This model has implications for both research and teaching, by allowing for better qualitative and quantitative analysis of negotiations. The platform emphasizes the reconstruction as closely as possible of the context within which proposals and decisions are made. A generic platform, its usability and benefits are illustrated by a presentation of the records relating to the 1787 Constitutional Convention that wrote the Constitution of the United States.

Kevin Page, Sean Bechhofer, Georgy Fazekas, David Weigl and Thomas Wilmering. Realising a Layered Digital Library: Exploration and Analysis of the Live Music Archive through Linked Data (Full)
Building upon a collection with functionality for discovery and analysis has been described by Lynch as a 'layered' approach to digital libraries. Meanwhile, as digital corpora have grown in size, their analysis is necessarily supplemented by automated application of computational methods, which can create layers of information as intricate and complex as those within the content itself. This combination of layers -- aggregating homogeneous collections, specialised analyses, and new observations -- requires a flexible approach to systems implementation which enables pathways through the layers via common points of understanding, while simultaneously accommodating the emergence of previously unforeseen layers.

In this paper we follow a Linked Data approach to build a layered digital library based on content from the Internet Archive Live Music Archive. Starting from the recorded audio and basic information in the Archive, we first deploy a layer of catalogue metadata which allows an initial -- if imperfect -- consolidation of performer, song, and venue information. A processing layer extracts audio features from the original recordings, workflow provenance, and summary feature metadata. A further analysis layer provides tools for the user to combine audio and feature data, discovered and reconciled using interlinked catalogue and feature metadata from layers below.

Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of the system through an investigation of 'key typicality' across performances. This highlights the need to incorporate robustness to inevitable 'imperfections' when undertaking scholarship within the digital library, be that from mislabelling, poor quality audio, or intrinsic limitations of computational methods. We do so not with the assumption that a 'perfect' version can be reached; but that a key benefit of a layered approach is to allow accurate representations of information to be discovered, combined, and investigated for informed interpretation.