World Cultures in English(es) at the School of Arts and Humanities Library, University of Lisbon: the Communication Platform Architecture and Its Critical Analysis (original) (raw)

ORIENT – A prototype of a web server dedicated to the communities, cultures and languages taught at INALCO in Paris

This technical report gives a systematic description of the: 1) principal cultural (and touristic) information services that have been specified out of the preliminary user requirement analysis (cf. the corresponding technical user requirements and needs report); 2) a user oriented short "simulation" of the typical consultation scenario of each service; 3) the interface display models of each service; 4) the computational and implementation particularities of each service; 5) the particularities concerning the life-cycles of each service (exploitation, quality control, information gathering and diffusion, ...).

Libraries for a Global Networked World: Toward New Educational and Design Strategies

The National Assembly Library Review of The National Assembly Library of the Republic of Korea, 2007

The growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web means that users expect access to information and the world’s knowledge regardless of geographic or political boundaries. Some approaches think of geographic distances as the primary barriers and use information and computer technologies (ICTs) to enable knowledge transfer across these distances (MacCormack 2002). The concept of a digital global library is a natural extension of these ideas, and the technology to accomplish this would seem to be available. However, as others have pointed out (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; von Krogh, Ichijo et al. 2000), the technologies used to manage knowledge have a decidedly western, if not North American, perspective. Culture is rarely taken into account in the design of systems intended to help organizations manage knowledge (Mason 2003). This paper posits that developments in Internet technologies can have a profound effect on the concept of a global library. These technical developments enable new ways for people to interact and for communities to form, and the combined technical and social changes challenge the conventional notion of a library as primarily a means for providing access to information. Future library design and the education of library professionals will benefit from conceiving of a global library as a space and infrastructure that enables different ethnic communities and national value systems to create and maintain “third cultures” (Packman and Casmir 1999) in which knowledge from the distinct communities can be shared and new knowledge developed. Such a conceptualization of the future library suggests that we should reassess the skills and systems that will need to emerge if library professionals are to continue to provide leadership for global knowledge sharing.

Communicability in multicultural contexts: A study with the International Children’s Digital Library

IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 2008

This paper presents some contributions of semiotic engineering to the identification of cultural issues involved in the design and evaluation of multicultural systems (i.e. systems designed for users from different cultures). We carried out a communicability evaluation of the International Children's Digital Library. Participants of test sessions had different nationalities and spoke different native languages. We paid special attention to communicability problems stemming from language understanding and language use issues. Our goal was not to make generalizations from our findings, but rather to uncover and understand some of the users' experience with multicultural systems. In addition to this understanding, we have gained relevant insights to inform the cultural adaptation of ICDL to the Brazilian context, and believe that they can be useful in other cultural contexts as well.

The DIALLS Platform: Supporting Cultural Literacy and Understanding of European Values Over the Internet

2021

In this chapter we present the process of designing and developing a novel online platform for supporting cultural literacy learning, involving the elaboration and understanding of European values in collaborative dialogue between students, with teacher-led reflection on wordless texts. Wordless texts are books or videos that comprise sequences of pictures which stimulate student readers to reconstruct the attendant narratives (see Chapters 10.1007/978-3-030-71778-0_5 and 10.1007/978-3-030-71778-0_6, this volume). The narratives in question, available publicly, are designed to stimulate discussions relating to European values, notably tolerance, empathy and inclusion (Lähdesmäki et al. in Intercultural dialogue in European education policies: A conceptual approach. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2020). The main questions for platform design were therefore how to facilitate productive discussions involving European values, on or around such wordless texts, and to structure such discus...

Communicating across cultures

2021

The arrival of increasing numbers of refugees and immigrants has caused large increases in multicultural school populations. This interdisciplinary paper describes an ongoing study which began in 2012, discussing the role of the school library in multicultural, multilingual school communities and offering suggestions about how the school library could become a multicultural learning environment. It provides information to help school library staff to look closely at these issues and to provide help and useful suggestions to the entire school community. The prime objective is to help the school community to safely and constructively deal with the dynamics of a multi-cultural society, using the school library as a base. Safe facilitation requires “trained” leaders from the school community. An e-learning program for school librarians is being adapted for this purpose.

Facilitating Communication Between Languages and Cultures: a Computerized Interface and Knowledge Base

2003

Abstract The Universal Networking Language (UNL) deals with communication, information, knowledge, language, epistemology, computer sciences, and related disciplines. This interdisciplinary endeavor calls for theoretical and applied research, which can result in a number of practical applications in most domains of human activities. Specially, it can help solving some of the most critical problems emerging from current globalization trends of markets and geopolitical interdependence among nations.

Collaborative platform for multilingual resource development and intercultural communication

Intercultural …, 2007

The Internet has already connected people and established a mature online community. The use of WWW is also in the main stream of disseminating one's information and services. In the present information borderless society, we still need a lot of fundamental tools as well as the standard reference resources to facilitate our daily communications across the languages and cultures for better understanding or smoothing the communications. To develop such fundamental linguistic tools, we need to put efforts in cross language study and multilingual resource development. Online collaborative works are efficiently conducted among expert groups via many existing services such as Sourceforge, Wiki or Weblog. Each has already gained its user potential in several online communities. However, in the process of multilingual resource development and intercultural communication we still need to fulfill the requirements in well-structured design of the database, communication tools that provide necessary linkages between records of intention to particular assertions, and functions to realize selectional preference in case that there are more than one assertion. In this paper, we propose a new platform, called Knowledge Unifying Initiator (KUI), for building an online community for a particular purpose corresponding to the activities in human's thinking process: starting from issuing a topic of interest which can be branched into localization, polling and publichearing corresponding to the maturity of the proposal. We conducted a study on multilingual medical text collaborative translation and the initiative in Asian WordNet development to evaluate our proposed platform.

i-Librarian – Free online library for European citizens

2012

The emergence of the WWW as the main source of distributing content opened the floodgates of information. The sheer volume and diversity of this content necessitate an approach that will reinvent the way it is analysed. The quantitative route to processing information which relies on content management tools provides structural analysis. The challenge we address is to evolve from the process of streamlining data to a level of understanding that assigns value to content. The solution we present incorporates human language technologies in the process of multilingual web content management. i-Librarian is a website built with an open-source software platform ATLAS. ATLAS complements a content management software-asa-service component used for creating, running and managing dynamic content-driven websites with a linguistic platform. The platform enriches the content of these websites with revealing details and reduces the manual work of classification editors by automatically categorisi...

"E-CULTURE FOR ALL: AN INITIATIVE TO BROADEN HORIZONS. CREATING CONVERGENCES OUT OF A FRAGMENTED GLOBAL SCENARIO"

EJTS European Journal of Transformation Studies, 2023

Faced with several crises, such as climate change, social asymmetries and more, this article summarises key points in the field of e-Culture to engage audiences in raising awareness on current issues. Analysing the latest situation from both a local and global approach brings some key points, such as questions and strategies to emphasize the co-creation of sustainable information and communication highways for e-Culture. In conclusion, the article reinforces the value of educating future teachers as a cornerstone for shaping and transforming society. This education becomes a catalyst for generating a cognitive convergence capable of raising awareness of the creative human capacities needed to build a sustainable future, together with a robust training strategy in the digital humanities to address various crises, present or future.