The Artcast4D consortium of research, technology, culture, and media partners met in Valencia, Spain, to mark the project's achievements during its first year, working with artists, cultural organisations, creative businesses, museums, city, and local authorities to develop new, immersive experiences in public spaces.
Read more: Pioneering the Future of Immersive Art and Technology
Acceptance of the digital transformation—a comparison between the perception of opportunities and risks in the online population of the cyberworld in Switzerland and the US
Swiss users search for cyber risks three times more often than users in the USA. Due to the pandemic, we suddenly lived in a largely digital society, and according to the ITU, 8.01 mio. active people in Switzerland use the countless opportunities offered by the Internet on a regular basis. It is hard to imagine life without the Internet. But what are the most important opportunities and risks that actually concern the Swiss and the US population? For example, how widespread are the dangers of the cyber world, such as hate speech, cyberbullying or cybergrooming? What channels are used to search for and to find information about such topics? Do we have a much too strong risk awareness (bias) towards the risky cyber topics in Switzerland compared to the USA? Do Swiss users focus too little on the numerous online opportunities of the digital world, while Americans take full advantage of this potential without any concerns? This is what the present study is investigating. Until about the year 2000, people were concerned about equal access to the Internet and identified a “digital divide”. Today, this issue is no longer discussed, at least not in industrialized countries. The authors now rather speak of a new divide where people are afraid of the new technologies whereas others are fully profiting of the advantage of the online and digital opportunities as a matter of fact. Therefore, the authors identify a new “cyber divide” that today primarily divides between risk- and opportunity-aware users.
Read the full open access article in German: https://doi.org/10.1365/s40702-023-00971-3
A New Artcast4D Project Boosts Cultural Creative Industries in Europe.
Combining art and immersive technology for people to interact with culture and unleash creativity? This is what Artcast4D, a European consortium of research, technology, culture, and media partners is developing, working with artists, cultural organisations, creative businesses, museums, city, and local authorities to develop new, immersive experiences in public spaces.
Measuring online demand for candidates and topics of the Presidential Elections on the Web
The UMUSE-project aims to hit new ground for monitoring Users interest during eleven months (1st of January to 8th of November 2016) of Presidential Election campaigns in the United States. It has started to analyse by computer based content analysis the users search behaviour on various search engines and social networks. It also follows the public discussions in the US-Media. The UMUSE-project is systematically monitoring and collecting search patterns online for the US, UK, Canada and also worldwide. The project is based on preliminary analysis of former Presidential election campaigns going back to 2004 and 2008 elections. The project will show how issues and candidates evolve on time with regards of monitored Users interest and with respect to the media coverage. And it would like to emphasize the online user-perspective of the election campaign in addition to other, measurements and pollings. It is based on an independent, neutral, international scientific cooperation between University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland), Northwestern University (USA) in Boston, and IFAAR Institute in Berne (Switzerland).
In the 2016 election campaign the prognosis and all digital channels betted on Hillary Clinton to win. A group of Swiss computer scientists, analysing the public campaign on all US search and social media channels in September 2016 already claimed that Donald Trump was going to win. In 2020 they show again, with new computer-based monitorings of the user behaviour in the US, that Donald Trump’s campaign is leading digitally with a five times bigger search volume than Joe Biden’s! The analysis of the candidates tweets shows that Trump uses rather strong emotions like “fear” and “anger” whereas Biden’s tweets insist on moral values and critizise the actions of the Trump administration during the pandemic. On both campaign websites, Trump also “beats” Biden by communicating 6% closer to the interest of American citizens online.
Search volume analysis
Thanks to a new innovative technology, the project UMUSE2* identifies the number of search requests sent in the US to all search engines, social media and e-shops, with the names of the two candidates, namely “Donald Trump” and “Joe Biden”, but also with all the topics high on search. Based on these numbers, Donald Trump has a significant lead over his rival. During the first two weeks in August 2020, Joe Biden's popularity has seen a short surge with the announcement of running mate Kamala Harris while the popularity of Donald Trump is decreasing only slowly since the beginning of June. Big data shows that Internet users on all US channels are still significantly more interested in Trump than in his opponent, the democrat Biden...
Read more: media information of September 10th 2020
The worldwide media echo on Donald Trump’s Tweet of October 2nd has boosted his campaign in the US like never seen before. A group of Swiss computer-, big data- and political scientists are analyzing the public online campaign on all US search and social media channels again, similar to 2016. The real time measures of the searches of 247 million active users on all US online channels show, that the announcement of Donald Trump being infected by the Corona virus had an all-time high impact, also on his digital campaign: 100’559’000 on average monthly search volume on all US channels, whereas Joe Biden only made it up to 26’594’000.
The almost real time figures of the whole campaign show, that this year’s US elections are basically a referendum for or against Donald Trump and that the Biden campaign didn’t even come close to Hillary Clinton’s search volume of 2016! “The presence on the Internet and the active involvement of users is extremely important, if one wants to win an election in the US”, says Christoph Glauser, one of the election experts and Swiss political- and digital data scientist.
Read more: media information of October 12th 2020
A paper on the 2020 US presidential election has been published in the Journal of Political Science and Public Affairs.The paper written by Christoph Glauser in cooperation with the university of Neuchâtel is taking up the actual discussion about how digital channels are having an impact on democratic decision making processes in modern election campaigns. Systematic empirical monitorings of user search behaviors during the US Presidential Elections in 2016 and 2020 on multiple channels show first evidence on how search volumes are distributed over the online channels and how these searches have influenced the campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The Search engines Bing and Google dominated. However, high search volumes were also observed on the Chinese search engine Baidu. Altavista-Yahoo and Twitter as well as social networks like Facebook, Wikipedia and even e-shops follow on the spot. The data show how Donald Trump might even have created an “information overload” when he announced his positive Corona test result late in the campaign.
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