Suchergebnisse

open ; Il lavoro affronta il tema della costruzione identitaria all'interno dei social network sites, e intende leggere le attività di pubblicazione di contenuti personali sui social network in continuità con la tradizione di ricerca su identità e narrazione di sé, indagando come questi ambienti online possano "rimediare" dispositivi classici della narrazione personale all'interno delle dinamiche caratteristiche dei networked publics e interrogandosi sul potenziale in termini riflessivi delle tracce lasciate sul web dagli utenti. La ricerca si concentra in particolare su Facebook, sia per il livello di penetrazione del servizio, sia per il fatto che, rispetto ad altri SNS, è quello che maggiormente si basa sul paradigma della condivisione personale. Un'attenzione particolare è dedicata alla recente trasformazione dell'interfaccia utente nel cosiddetto "diario personale": l'introduzione della timeline ha infatti reso più immediata la navigazione temporale all'interno del profilo, andando ad incidere sulle strategie di gestione e revisione dei contenuti, con possibili ricadute in termini di riflessività personale. La ricerca si concentra sulle coorti giovanili di utenti italiani (fasce 13-18, 19-24 e 25-30 anni) comprendendo così sia coloro che nel nostro paese sono stati gli early-adopters di Facebook, sia l'attuale fascia adolescenziale, che può essere definita come la prima generazione italiana completamente "naturalizzata" all'utilizzo dei social network. ; Scienze Della Comunicazione ; new media, social media, media literacy, media education, mobile learning ; open ; Bruni, Isabella ; Bruni, Isabella

Beziehungen und Interaktionen zwischen Bauern und Viehhaltern sind in Westafrika keine Neuerscheinung. Sie existieren bereits seit langer Zeit und waren bereits Gegenstand vielerlei Forschungstätigkeiten. Ihre Beziehung wird sowohl als konfliktgeladen als auch kooperativ bezeichnet. Neu sind allerdings Berichte über die Zunahme von gewalttätigen Konflikten zwischen Bauern und Viehhaltern in vielen Teilen Ghanas. Strukturelle und neo-Malthusianistische Theorien dominieren hierbei die Interpretation der Konflikte. Diese Theorien beinhalten zum Beispiel den Mangel an Ressourcen, Klimawandel, zunehmende Migrationswellen aus dem Sahel, die Zerstörung von Plantagen und Viehdiebstahl als treibende Kräfte. An dieser Stelle muss auch hervorgehoben werden, dass sich eine Reihe von sozialen Interaktionen, Verteilung von Ressourcen sowie Netzwerke ausbilden. Es ist bis jetzt Forschungen und Diskussionen nicht gelungen, herauszufinden, was tatsächlich der Antrieb dieser mehrdimensionalen Beziehung ausmacht, sei sie konfliktgeladen oder kooperativ. Fragen bestehen: Woraus bestehen die Bauern-und Viehhalter-Beziehungen? Bei welchen Ereignissen entsteht eine konfliktgeladene oder kooperative Beziehung zwischen diesen beiden? Eine weitere Frage muss deshalb gestellt werden, nämlich warum einige Bauern und Viehhalter sich in Konflikte begeben, während andere koexistieren und kooperieren. Inwiefern trägt der Klimawandel und Mangel an Ressourcen zur Ausbildung der Beziehungen zwischen den Parteien bei? Welche sozialen Netzwerke existieren zwischen Bauern und Viehhaltern und welche Rolle spielen diese Netzwerke bei Konfliktverschärfung oder kooperativem Zusammenhalt? Die vorliegende Arbeit setzt sich mit den oben angeführten Schlüsselfragen und Ereignissen innerhalb dieser Beziehungen zwischen Viehhaltern und Bauern in Ghana auseinander. Es wird Bezug auf einigen Theorien genommen, um nicht nur dieser Fragestellung nachzugehen, sondern auch sie zu konzeptualisieren, mit dem Ziel, den Prozess zu verstehen, der der Bauern-und Viehhalter- Beziehung unterliegt. Um das Eskalieren konfliktgeladener Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Bauern und Viehhaltern zu verstehen, stützt sich die Untersuchung auf eine prozedurale, politische und ökologische Perspektive; dazu wird einerseits die Konzeptualisierung bzw. die Rolle der Nachbarschaft der Untersuchung des Phänomens zugerechnet und andererseits Analysen sozialer (kultureller) Netzwerke zur Darlegung sozialer Interaktionen zwischen ihnen eingeschlossen. Ein qualitatives Datenerhebungsverfahren wurde zur Datenverarbeitung und -bewertung verwendet. Diese Datenerhebungsmethoden beinhalten: Erweiterte Fallstudien, vergleichende Fallstudien, Interviews, Analysen sozialer Netzwerke sowie Fokus-Gruppendiskussion. Die Untersuchung wurde in Agogo, einer Gegend im südlichen Ghana und in Gushiegu, einer Gegend im nördlichen Ghana durchgeführt, mit Follow-Up-Studien in Karaga, Sekyere Kumawu, Konongo, Accra, Kumassi und Tamale. Die Auskunftspersonen waren lokale Bauern, Fulani-Viehzüchter, Viehbesitzer, Bewohner, Dorfoberhäupter, Ansprechpartner, ältere Menschen und Regierende. Es wurde festgestellt, dass die Bauern-Viehhalter-Beziehung multidimensional ist, ob konfliktgeladen oder kooperativ, denn sie hat sich weiterentwickelt und weist mehre Ebenen auf. Diese Ebenen sind unter anderem ihre gemeinsame Geschichte, Zuwanderung von Viehzüchtern, ihre Sesshaftigkeit und die Art der sozialen Interaktionen, die sie während längerer Zeit hindurch mit den Bewohnern bzw. den Einheimischen verknüpft hatten. Die Untersuchung begreift Bauern und Viehhalter als Nachbarn, die kulturelle Gemeinsamkeiten aufweisen, insofern dass sie sich kulturell überschneiden. Sie schließen jeden Tag Friedensabkommen ab und kooperieren trotz bestehender Konflikte. Sie beanspruchen dieselben Ressourcen (Wasser, Land und Futter); sie verhandeln und bilden enge Beziehungen miteinander (Freundschaften, Tierdeckung und Solidarität). Daher können diese konfliktgeladenen Auseinandersetzungen nicht nur aus dem Blickwinkel des Klimawandels und des Ressourcenmangels betrachtet werden, sondern auch aus dem der politischen und historischen sowie sozio-ökologischen aber auch menschliche Faktoren bzw. Ereignisse, die den Nährboden für solche Konflikte und darstellen. Es steht folglich fest, dass eine Reduzierung der Bauern- und- Viehhalter- Konflikte auf nur ökologische Gründe - sowohl aus der Perspektive von Knappheit als auch aus der Wahrnehmung von Bauern und Viehhaltern - komplexer ist als angenommen. Es gibt ebenbürtige Bestimmungsgrößen und Aspekte wie Kooperation, soziale und kulturelle Netzwerke, Verteilung und Zugang der Ressourcen, die kaum erforscht werden. Die Untersuchung empfiehlt, dass die Komplexität der Beziehungen durch Kooperation zunutze gemacht werden können. Theoretisch stellt die Studie vereinfachende und pauschale Konzeptualisierungen von Landwirt-Hirten-Beziehungen in Frage und fordert erweiterte Fallstudien und multi-theoretische Studien der Beziehungen zwischen Studien dieser Beziehungen. Ein besseres Verständnis und eine Analyse der Gesamtheit der Beziehungen ist deshalb nötig. Das Buttom-Up-Verfahren aus Seiten der Betroffenen, das heißt, der Bauern und Viehzüchter, und nicht das Top-Down-Verfahren, das von den Regierenden ausgehend genutzt wird, ist vonnöten, um den gewalttätigen Konflikten zur begegnen (Bottom-up Peace Approach). Weiterhin werden klare nationale und lokale Leitlinien gebraucht. Der Mangel an ausreichenden Daten zu Migrationsbewegungen, Konflikt, Zensus-Daten der Fulani-Viehhalter sowie Zahlen zur benötigten Landgröße für Landwirtschaft und Viehhaltung sind auch erforderlich. ; Farmer-herder relations and interactions are not new in West Africa. They have existed for a long time and have been the subject of scholarship. These relations are presented as marked by conflict, cooperation and complementarity. What is new, however, are widespread reports of the increase in violent farmer-herder conflicts in many parts of Ghana. Structural and neo-Malthusian/environmental scarcity theories have tended to dominate interpretations of these violent conflicts. These interpretations focus on scarce resources and environmental change, increased herder migrations from the Sahel, increased crop destruction, cattle rustling and armed robbery as drivers of farmer-herder violence. Interestingly, despite these violent conflictive relations in Ghana, one can find cooperation and resource sharing as well as the building of social ties/networks between farmers and herders. However, several studies, discussions and discourse have not actually examined what determines and drives farmer-herder relations, be it conflict or cooperation. Questions remain as to what actually constitutes farmer-herder relations. What processes shape and determine a conflictual or cooperative relation between farmers and herders? How do we explain similar instances where some farmers and herders are engaged in violent conflicts whilst others co-exist and cooperate? What roles do environmental change and resource scarcity play in shaping farmer-herder relations? What social networks/ties exist between farmers and herders and how do these networks influence conflict and/or cooperation between them? This study, therefore, examines these key questions and issues within the context of farmer-herder relations in Ghana. A number of theories helped to contextualise the study in order to understand the processes and underlying and mediating factors in farmer-herder relations. Theoretically, therefore, the study adopts a processual approach in studying the escalation of farmer-herder conflicts; a conceptualisation of cultural neighbourhood is used to study cooperative relations; and social network analysis is used to see the influence/effect of social ties in enhancing conflictual and/or cooperative relations between farmers and herders. A qualitative approach was used in the data collection and analysis of the study. These methods included extended case studies, comparative case studies, interviews, social network analysis and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs). The study was conducted in Agogo (southern Ghana) and Gushiegu (northern Ghana), with follow-up studies in Karaga, Sekyere Kumawu, Konongo, as well as in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale. Respondents comprised local farmers, Fulani herders, cattle owners, inhabitants of the communities, chiefs and opinion leaders/elders and government officials. The study shows that farmer-herder relations, whether conflictual or cooperative in terms of resource access and use, are multi-dimensional, complex and develop through several processes. These include a long history of interaction and contact; herder migrations, long-time settlements among local people and the nature and type of social networks that exist between them. The study contextualises farmers and herders as cultural neighbours who share cross-cutting ties, build everyday peace and cooperate even in the midst of violent conflicts. The two equally exchange and share natural resources (water, land, pasture), trade and build personal relationships (friendships, cattle entrustment and social solidarity). Further, reducing farmer-herder conflicts to just structural factors and to environmental/climate change and resource scarcity, from the perspectives of both the environmental scarcity/security school and that of farmer-herder perceptions, is far more complex than assumed. Rather, a plethora of political, historical, social and ecological factors drives violent conflict escalation. In addition, violent conflict escalation develops through a process, social networks and a constellation of diverse actors who play significant roles in their escalation. The study recommends that the complexity of farmer-herder relations calls for a harnessing of issues that are common to cooperation and cross-cutting ties between local farmers and herders. Theoretically, the study questions simplistic and general conceptualisations of farmer-herder relations and calls for extended case studies and multi-theoretical studies of farmer-herder relations. Thus, better comprehension and analysis of the totality of farmer-herder relations are needed. Besides, a Bottom-up Peace Approach from the local level from the perspective of local peoples, instead of the top-down national government approach, is needed to address violent farmer-herder confrontations. Moreover, clear national and local policies are required to deal with issues of land use and access, cattle rearing and pastoralism in general. Issues regarding the unavailability of accurate data on pastoralists' migration trends, conflict, census data of Fulani pastoralists, land size required for both farming and cattle keeping and climatic data must also be addressed.

In this study, we developed a social network model of the global trade of maize: one of the most important food, feed, and industrial crops worldwide, and critical to food security. We used this model to analyze patterns of maize trade among nations, and to determine where vulnerabilities in food security might arise if maize availability were decreased due to factors such as diversion to non-food uses, climatic factors, or plant diseases. Using data on imports and exports from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database for each year from 2000 to 2009 inclusive, we summarized statistics on volumes of maize trade between pairs of nations for 217 nations. There is evidence of market segregation among clusters of nations; with three prominent clusters representing Europe, Brazil and Argentina, and the United States. The United States is by far the largest exporter of maize worldwide, while Japan and the Republic of Korea are the largest maize importers. In particular, the star-shaped cluster of the network that represents US maize trade to other nations indicates the potential for food security risks because of the lack of trade these other nations conduct with other maize exporters. If a scenario arose in which US maize could not be exported in as large quantities, maize supplies in many nations could be jeopardized. We discuss this in the context of recent maize ethanol production and its attendant impacts on food prices elsewhere worldwide.

The present paper aims at briefly summarizing the impact the 2019 - 2020 pandemic outbreak had on the educational field, when, with no prior preparation, all classes in the academic environment moved in the cyberspace, unveiling challenges for both teachers and students. The paper discusses the concepts of both online teaching and learning, their use to meet the needs of a specific category of students in different parts of the world as well as similarities and differences between the traditional and the online means of educating. The shift to mass online education has proved to be challenging, even impossible in certain areas, unveiling difficulties for all stakeholders involved. Though technology is widely used nowadays in all aspects of our lives, special focus is laid on teachers' and students' challenges, their expectations as well as their feelings regarding the new reality – that of attending all classes online in order to reach the goal: the acquisition of information and knowledge necessary in their future professional lives.

Complex Systems is a new field of science studying how parts of a system give rise to the collective behaviours of the system, and how the system interacts with its environment. Graph theory is a fundamental tool in the study of social systems and economic issues. The input-output tables are precisely one of the main examples of it. We use the interpretation of labour market through networks to get a better understanding on its overall functioning. One benefit of the network perspective is that a large body of mathematics exists to help analyse many forms of networks models. If an economic system has a suitable model, then it becomes possible to utilize relevant mathematical tools, such as general systems theory, graph theory and discrete chaos theory, to better understand the way the labour market works. In this article, we apply concepts including structural functions, coverage and invariant sets to a social system's modelling. ; This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation of the Spanish Government, through the Modelado del Comportamiento de Entidades Digitales Mediante Tecnologías del Lenguaje Humano Project, under Grant RTI2018-094653-B-C22, in part by the Spanish Research Agency (AEI), and in part by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), through the CloudDriver4Industry Project, under Grant TIN2017-89266-R.

The network approach to urban studies can be differentiated from other approaches by its emphasis on the primacy of structures of interpersonal linkages, rather than on the classification of social units according to their individual characteristics. Network analysis is also a methodology for the investigation of these structures. Substantive issues related to interpersonal ties in the city, migration, resource allocation, neighborhood, and community are examined in terms of the network structures and processes that order and integrate urban activities. Finally, a view of the city itself as a network of networks is proposed. It is the organization of urban life by networks that makes the scale and diversity of the city a source of strength rather than of chaos, while it is precisely that scale and diversity which makes the existence of a complex and widely ramified network structure possible.

Intro -- Acknowledgments -- About the Book -- Praise for Fourierist Communities of Reform -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Chapter 1: Introduction to Intentional Communities and Social Change -- Utopias, Communes, and Intentional Communities -- The Life and Worldview of Charles Fourier -- Understanding the Long-Term Impacts of the Fourierist Communal Experiments -- Accessing the History of Intentional Communities -- Understanding Communitarians: The Challenges Facing Historians -- Finding a Shared Language: A Note on Terms -- Chapter 2: Reverberations of Reform Activism: The Lasting Impact of Trumbull Phalanx -- Fourier's American Followers -- Forming a Community: The Founding of Trumbull Phalanx -- Opposing Approaches to Community: Angelique Le Petit Martin and Nathaniel Meeker -- Gender and Race in the Nineteenth Century -- Angelique Martin's Feminism -- The Language of Reform -- Life After Community: Social Reformers -- The Next Generation: Lilly Martin Spencer's Social Activism Through Art -- Chapter 3: Demonstrating Racial Diversity Within Community: The Northampton Association of Education and Industry -- A New Type of Communal Experiment -- Life at the Northampton Association: Experiences Filtered Through the Lens of Gender and Race -- Rituals and Religions -- Truth's Sojourn -- Reformers Meet -- The End of a Community, Continuation of a Movement -- The Outcomes of Community -- Chapter 4: Contested Community: The Wisconsin Phalanx and the Western Frontier -- Creating Group Identity Within Community -- Founding a Community on Another's Land -- A More Perfect Community: The Ideological Underpinnings of the Wisconsin Phalanx -- Religion, Ritual, and Community Cohesion at the Wisconsin Phalanx -- Reforming Society by Rejuvenating the Body and Soul -- Gendered Perspectives on the Wisconsin Frontier.

Inspired by the potentials of web-based collaboration, in 2014, a group of social scientists, students and information specialists started tinkering with software and methodology for open online collaborative research. The results of their research led to a gathering of academics at the #ethnography Conference Amsterdam 2014, where new material was collected, shared and collaboratively interpreted. Following the conference, they continued to develop software and methodology. In this contribution, we report on the aims, methodology, inspiring examples, caveats and results from testing several prototypes of open online research software. We conclude that open online collaborative interpretation is both feasible and desirable. Dialogue and reflexivity, we hold, are able to transcend separated perspectives and stimulate agreement on a set of distinct interpretations; they simultaneously respect the multiplicity of understandings of social phenomena whilst bringing order into this diversity.

Our study investigates the role of infrastructures in shaping online news usage by contrasting use patterns of two social groups—millennials and boomers—that are specifically located in news infrastructures. Typically based on self-reported data, popular press and academics tend to highlight the generational gap in news usage and link it to divergence in values and preferences of the two age cohorts. In contrast, we conduct relational analyses of shared usage obtained from passively metered usage data across a vast range of online news outlets for millennials and boomers. We compare each cohort's usage networks comprising various types of news websites. Our analyses reveal a smaller than commonly assumed generational gap in online news usage, with characteristics that manifest the multifarious effects of the infrastructures of the media environment, alongside those of preferences.

In the study of social processes, the presence of unobserved heterogeneity is a regular concern. It should be particularly worrisome for the statistical analysis of networks, given the complex dependencies that shape network formation combined with the restrictive assumptions of related models. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of explicitly accounting for unobserved heterogeneity in exponential random graph models (ERGM) with a Monte Carlo analysis and two applications that have played an important role in the networks literature. Overall, these analyses show that failing to account for unobserved heterogeneity can have a significant impact on inferences about network formation. The proposed frailty extension to the ERGM (FERGM) generally outperforms the ERGM in these cases, and does so by relatively large margins. Moreover, our novel multilevel estimation strategy has the advantage of avoiding the problem of degeneration that plagues the standard MCMC-MLE approach.

In relational event networks, the tendency for actors to interact with each other depends greatly on the past interactions between the actors in a social network. Both the volume of past interactions and the time that has elapsed since the past interactions affect the actors' decision-making to interact with other actors in the network. Recently occurred events may have a stronger influence on current interaction behavior than past events that occurred a long time ago–a phenomenon known as "memory decay". Previous studies either predefined a short-run and long-run memory or fixed a parametric exponential memory decay using a predefined half-life period. In real-life relational event networks, however, it is generally unknown how the influence of past events fades as time goes by. For this reason, it is not recommendable to fix memory decay in an ad-hoc manner, but instead we should learn the shape of memory decay from the observed data. In this paper, a novel semi-parametric approach based on Bayesian Model Averaging is proposed for learning the shape of the memory decay without requiring any parametric assumptions. The method is applied to relational event history data among socio-political actors in India and a comparison with other relational event models based on predefined memory decays is provided.