Articoli taggati con ‘Big Data’
Connected refugees: (liquid) surveillance or computer management of migration?
In the time of covid-19, a lack of data can mean social invisibility, the cancellation of fundamental rights, and death. In the current political and pandemic climate, in Italy, in Europe, and other countries around the world the migration discourse still creates huge public debates and conflicts between institutions and citizens. Despite this, for some years now, there has been discussion about the addition of new digital identity systems that would promote a more effective policy of collaboration and management of the migration phenomenon. What is needed is a knowledge base on the technical and bureaucratic dangers, the difficulties of defending privacy and obtaining full and informed consent, and the challenges of identity data protection for all actors in the ecosystem. Institutions and stakeholders can use this knowledge to ensure that adequate technical and organizational safeguards are in place before digital identity systems are developed, implemented, and integrated. This is the only way to realize the benefits of trusted socio-technical systems and at the same time protect the fundamental rights of vulnerable and marginalized populations. The new challenge for institutions today is to manage, also digitally, the phenomenon of international migration. Through an in-depth analysis of the international literature, we investigated the relationship between digital infrastructure, migration management, and surveillance, and possible technological, identity, and cultural risks.
What Big Data Is and How Can We Use It
In recent years, we have witnessed an exponential growth of the amount of data we are generating. As an example, consider the numbers depicted in Figure 1, that shows what happens in one minute in Internet, for both the years 2016 and 2017. In a single minute, approximately 150 million email are sent, 350 thousand new tweets appear in Twitter, and 40 thousand posts in Instagram, both in 2016 and in 2017. But the figure allows us also to see the impressive growth, in a single year, of some statistics: the search queries in Google raised from 2.4 to 3.5 million, video views in Youtube jumped from 2.78 to 4.1 million, and Uber Rides almost triplicated, from approximately 1300 to 3800. WhatsApp messages exchanged went from 20 to 29 million. There is an explosion of data, and the natural question is whether we can use it to improve our daily lives. We already witnessed some examples in which we can exploit the data: Google Maps has real time information about traffic data, and suggests us the fastest route available according to this info. Amazon knows what we bought, i.e., what we like, and can suggest us similar items based on shopping preferences of people that have similar tastes. Apple (and other companies) can recognize our friends in the pictures, that are geolocalized thanks to the built-in GPS in our smartphones, and helps us in retrieving and organizing them. We choose restaurants and hotels based on the feedback of thousands of customers in Tripadvisor. Big Data is already in our lives. In the following section, we will try to provide a better picture of what Big Data is. Then, the natural question become “How can we use it?”
When quality measures the distance between valorization and commodification
There is a shared vision which wants that every kind of good and service can be transformed in a product. It doesn’t matter what kind of good or service is. This perspective is not so bad as it could sound to many, and above all, looking at our daily lives, it is not so far from the reality. We use and consume every kind of good and service, whether it is a cultural good, a relational good or an industrial good. Though, when we talk about cultural goods, the setting-up of a value-chain or a value-system, obviously scares humanists. Indeed, there is a point that we need to fix and to underline: there is a huge difference between valorization and commodification, and the measure of this difference is named quality. Quality of the processes trough which we transform cultural or non-cultural assets in cultural products. Skilled human resources, clever investments and proper management principles lead to a high-quality deliverable that, despite its market-driven approach, could improve knowledge, culture and social value more than a pure-cultural-driven approach. It is the same difference that measures the distance between “territorial development” and “territorial marketing”. Having a look at both the definitions remove any doubt about it. While “Territorial marketing can be defined as a process whereby local activities are related as closely as possible to the demands of targeted customers” the “Territorial development designates development that is endogenous and spatially integrated, leverages the contribution of actors operating at multiple scales and brings incremental value to national development efforts”. However, looking at the cultural sector, despite the glaring differences between these definitions, the output of these approaches could appear very similar. Both the approaches, indeed, produce cultural services, cultural goods and touristic goods that third-sector organizations, enterprises and Public Administrations offer on the market. So, what kind of variable should we use to interpret a cultural or touristic good as the result of a marketing approach or, on the contrary, of a territorial development approach? Once again, quality could be the answer.
Big-Data to understand touristic and cultural dynamics: a fractal framework.
The Big-Data revolution has been immediately accepted in several industries, in particular the military and defense industries, by various economic and social actors, usually linked to multinational corporations, as a fresh source of innovation. In the cultural sector, these new technologies acceptance has been less common met some oppositions. These oppositions have been mainly due to a general lack of competences on the new technologies and on advanced data analysis by most of the actors in this sector. Lacking the needed competences, these actors have often been unable to grasp the opportunities that Big-Data could have opened to them. In this paper, we propose to highlight the main results and main positive effects coming out from the first stages of Big-Data utilization in the Cultural Heritage sector using a fractal model.
Transforming Historical Cities in Smart Cities by Using Geospatial Technologies
The term geospatial in the Anglo-Saxon world – but also in the scientific and technical Italian elite – is slowly replacing the word Gis, acronym of Geographic Information System. Geospatial is interpreted as a synonym of geographical notions, in a system that can include more than two dimensions, normally represented by the latitude and the longitude, introducing geographical information in a landmark that could be developed in three, or, by now, also in four dimensions. The simplest examples are the google maps, which in the classical plane dimension of the chart sheet have put together the three-dimensional place with a fourth dimension time-slider. The impact of geospatial technology in our daily life has become rather relevant, showing itself as a global reference overview in our environment. The impact of all the innovations that form the Geospatial technology is increasing in our lives. It reached such a relevance to become a key point in our environment. This is particularly recognizable in urban envirornment, as it allow us in using Location Based Sevices technologies, which are able to transform every georeferenced object in a smart object, inserting it in a network of objects through position relationship among which the objects in the network transmit data and information each other. The common use of these networks of objects in our urban environment, could represent the structural network of the Smart Cities. When we use mobile devices in our trips, or when we share our feelings or other personal information on Social Network such as Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, we communicate also our geografical position (if we allowed it in our privacy agreement). Many of the services offered by search engines, using our position, are able in showing us restaurants, hotels, shops, banks, drugstores and everything we need, even classifying the showed results on the basis of the appreciation of other users. Thus, it is clear that geospatial technology is already present in the very core of our lives.
Before Web-Marketing. Digital research for cities and cultural institutions
1. Cultural sites Online Visibility Online visibility of a a cultural site can be considered a strong indicator of the institutional ability to activate the cultural heritage. Hand in hand with the spread of the Internet and its penetration into everyday social practices of millions of people, the search for contents relating to a travel destination or a specific monument, has gradually shifted in terms of strategic influence from traditional channels – such as print media, television broadcasts, word of mouth – to online information resources (websites, blogs, forums, social networks). This holds particularly true for Culture and Tourism search, generally conducted by people with medium-high education levels and some experience in the use of Internet. The spread of smartphones and the increased connectivity accelerate such trends, so that an ever growing number of people plan their trips via websites or mobile applications. A study on The Impact of Online Content on the European Tourism [1] highlighted a positive correlation between the presence on the internet, resulting in greater availability of data and information accessible online and the ability to some destinations to attract increasing flows of visitors: Destinations that make greater use of the internet in reaching customers have performed better than their peers in recent years. These destinations have gained market share from competitors, even after accounting for some other factors. Developed markets which have seen the largest gains in market share all have relatively high internet penetration, making good use of online channels to reach customers. Theory […] suggests that this is largely due to improved information flow supporting the market. Greece, Italy and Spain all have low internet penetration and only Italy has experienced any notable gains in market share over recent years (Oxford Economics 2013, p. 17).
