Sher Doruff: The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram (2006)

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram – an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for real-time, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal.

Doctor of Philosophy, SMARTlab Programme in Performative New Media Arts, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts, London
288 pages

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PDF (Appendix “The KeyWorx Interviews: Transcripts of Interviews and Conversations with KeyWorx Artists”)

Jose Felipe Ortega Sotó: Wikipedia: A Quantitative Analysis (2009)

This doctoral thesis offers a quantitative analysis of the top ten language editions of Wikipedia, from different perspectives. The main goal has been to trace the evolution in time of key descriptive and organizational parameters of Wikipedia and its community of authors. The analysis is focused on logged authors (those editors who created a personal account to participate in the project). The comparative study encompasses general evolution parameters, a detailed analysis of the inner social structure and stratification of the Wikipedia community of logged authors, a study of the inequality level of contributions (among authors and articles), a demographic study of the Wikipedia community and some basic metrics to analyze the quality of Wikipedia articles and the trustworthiness level of individual authors. This work concludes with the study of the influence of the main findings presented in this thesis for the future sustainability of Wikipedia in the following years.

The analysis of the inequality level of contributions over time, and the evolution of additional key features identified in this thesis, reveals an untenable trend towards progressive increase of the effort spent by the most active authors, as time passes by. This trend may eventually cause that these authors will reach their upper limit in the number of revisions they can perform each month, thus starting a decreasing trend in the number of monthly revisions, and an overall recession of the content creation and reviewing process in Wikipedia. Finally, another important contribution for the research community is WikiXRay, the software tool we have developed to perform the statistical analyses included in this thesis. This tool completely automates the process of retrieving the database dumps from the Wikimedia public repositories, massaging it to obtain key metrics and descriptive parameters, and loading them in a local database, ready to be used in empirical analyses.

As far as we know, this is the first research work implementing a comparative analysis, from an quantitative point of view, of the top ten language editions of Wikipedia, presenting complementary results from different research perspectives. Therefore, we expect that this contribution will help the scientific community to enhance their understanding of the rich, complex and fascinating working mechanisms and behavioral patterns of the Wikipedia project and its community of authors. Likewise, we hope that WikiXRay will facilitate the hard task of developing empirical analyses on any language version of the encyclopaedia, boosting in this way the number of comparative studies like this one in many other scientific disciplines.

Doctoral Thesis
Ingeniero de Telecomunicación
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieria de Telecomunicación, Madrid, 2009
Supervisor: Jesús M. González Barahona
Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License

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Anne Goldenberg: La négociation des contributions sur les wikis publics: Légitimation et politisation de la cognition collective (2010) [French]

Les wikis sont des sites hypertextuels éditables dont chaque modification est publiquement consignée. L’usage de ces artefacts s’est notamment répandu pour de grands projets de production de connaissances (encyclopédie, documentation en ligne). Dès lors, les participants doivent s’organiser pour surveiller et discuter de ce qui constitue une contribution. Nous avons d’abord réalisé une enquête par questionnaires en ligne autour du concept de contribution suivi d’entretiens qualitatifs menés auprès des participants à trois wikis publics1. Ceux-ci l’ont défini comme une activité de production de connaissances, en tension entre intérêt personnel et collectif, besoin de reconnaissance et disposition d’anonymat et dont les principes de pertinence sont régulièrement discutées. Ces mises en débat semblent structurantes dans la mesure où les contributeurs et contributrices parviennent à distinguer ce qui relève d’une dispute sociale ou d’un débat d’ordre épistémique (relatif aux connaissances). L’usage de wikis publics dans une perspective épistémique amène les contributeurs à faire face à deux contradictions : L’ouverture à la contribution publique entre en tension avec le besoin de valider les connaissances diffusées. La participation du plus grand nombre est mise au défi par l’établissement de conventions sociales qui complexifient l’adhésion au projet. Que révèle l’étude de la négociation des contributions au regard des problèmes de justesse et de justice propre aux wikis publics ? Une analyse plus poussée de la gestion des désaccords dans les trois communautés étudiées a bien permis de relever une violence latente malgré les conventions sociales et épistémiques en place. Mais l’étude a aussi revélé l’importance du rôle des participant investis dans l’organisation, la mise en relation et la contextualisation des interventions. L’émergence d’une culture de la contribution serait ainsi tributaire d’une responsabilisation vis-à-vis des enjeux politiques et épistémiques impliqués dans la production participative de connaissances.

Sociology and Communication dissertation thesis
Faculté de communication, L’Université du Québec à Montréal et Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis
324 pages

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