Digital, Volume 3, Issue 1 (March 2023) – 7 articles

The social media application TikTok allows users to view and upload short-form videos. Recent evidence suggests it has significant potential for both industry and health promoters to influence public health behaviours. This protocol describes a standardised, replicable process for investigations that can be tailored to various areas of research interest, allowing comparison of content and features across public health topics. The first 50 appearing videos in each of five relevant hashtags are sampled for analysis. Utilising a codebook with detailed definitions, engagement metadata and content variables applicable to any content area is captured, including an assessment of the video’s overall sentiment (positive, negative, neutral). Additional specific coding variables can be developed to provide targeted information about videos posted within selected hashtags. A descriptive, cross-sectional content analysis is applied to the generic and specific data collected for a research topic area. This flexible protocol can be replicated for any health-related topic and may have a wider application on other platforms or to assess changes in content and sentiment over time. This protocol was developed by a collaborative team of child health and development researchers for application to a series of topics. Findings will be used to inform health promotion messaging and counter-advertising. Full article

This study offers a comprehensive examination of the literature surrounding technology and tools in the hospitality industry. A bibliometric analysis was performed on 709 Scopus-indexed publications from 2000 to January 2023, with a focus on identifying key players, institutions, research trends, and the co-occurrence of keywords. The results shed light on the scientific landscape of technology and tools in the hospitality sector, emphasizing the significance of big data and the customer experience in the sharing economy. The study also presents the architecture of new software that offers guests the ability to customize their hotel stay, classified as part of the first cluster in the co-occurrence of keywords analysis. This approach highlights the growing importance of big data and customer experience and makes a valuable contribution to the field by offering a tool for hotel booking customization. Furthermore, the study underscores the importance of collaboration between academic institutions and private companies in providing a mutually beneficial platform that exceeds the expectations of both hotels and guests. Full article

Heralded by promises for the long-awaited economic empowerment of digital art and the paradigmatic shift of creative production, the art market’s fusion with blockchain technologies and the crypto economy has polarized opinions among artists, cultural workers, and economists. Its capricious dynamics and exuberance largely shroud the continuation of the art market’s ideology and the reinforcement of the disturbing political vectors of the crypto/blockchain complex. In this paper, I address several interrelated aspects of art tokenization in a compact and comprehensive critical framework that may be useful for a constructive discourse of contemporary digital art. By focusing on the core poetic principles of artmaking—which concern the historically informed autonomy of expression and socially responsible freedom of creative thinking—I identify some of the prospects for advancing digital art towards an ethically coherent and epistemologically relevant expressive stratum. The opening sections Introduction, Markets, and Contrivances outline the art market, its adoption of crypto technologies, and its influences on the production and expressive modes of digital art. Sections Ideologies and Myths describe the ideological and technical issues of the crypto economy, while Shams and Fallouts delve into the conceptual shortcomings and ethical, political, and creative consequences of the standard art tokenization rhetoric. The closing sections Options and Conclusion present the considerations for a productive assessment of blockchain technologies in digital art and summarize some of the alternative approaches for navigating and interfacing with the crypto art world. Full article

Suboptimal performance of cross-lingual word embeddings for distant and low-resource languages calls into question the isomorphic assumption integral to the mapping-based methods of obtaining such embeddings. This paper investigates the comparative impact of typological relationship and corpus size on the isomorphism between monolingual embedding spaces. To that end, two clustering algorithms were applied to three sets of pairwise degrees of isomorphisms. It is also the goal of the paper to determine the combination of the isomorphism measure and clustering algorithm that best captures the typological relationship among the chosen set of languages. Of the three measures investigated, Relational Similarity seemed to capture best the typological information of the languages encoded in their respective embedding spaces. These language clusters can help us identify, without any pre-existing knowledge about the real-world linguistic relationships shared among a group of languages, the related higher-resource languages of low-resource languages. The presence of such languages in the cross-lingual embedding space can help improve the performance of low-resource languages in a cross-lingual embedding space. Full article

Today, augmented reality (AR) applications are being used in many fields, such as advertising, entertainment, tourism, and education. Location-based augmented reality (AR) is a technology where interactive digital content is associated with real-world locations and their geo-based markers. The merging of the real-world environment with the digital content occurs when the user reaches these locations. Location-based AR applications are typically experienced using mobile devices with the ability to report the user’s location via GPS. These applications are increasingly used in education, since it has been shown that they positively affect student satisfaction and engagement. Furthermore, it is known in the literature that learner satisfaction and engagement increase when gamification and storytelling techniques are incorporated into the educational process. The aim of the study is to present two location-based, educational augmented-reality applications that utilize gamification and storytelling to provide cultural heritage knowledge about a prehistoric lake settlement. The study also aims to provide ideas and guidance to educators who wish to create applications that transform educational visits to archeological sites and museums into engaging augmented-reality experiences. Both applications underwent a preliminary evaluation using a sample of 71 higher-education students and a sample of 58 school students. The findings showed that the applications scored well in aspects such as ease of use, student satisfaction, and perceived educational usefulness. Full article

The rapid proliferation of social media has been redefining every facet of the old marketing and customer engagement tactics, not only for low-end and mass-market products but also for luxury brands. In this context, brands are dealing with the challenge of maintaining a balance between using mass marketing strategies concurrent with accentuating the exclusivity of their offerings. Social media can be considered beneficial if brands employ it to reach the right audience and use the right platform and incorporating the right content. In this work, we propose a sector-specific, integrated, and holistic investigation of the social media strategies of luxury brands together with the impact they generate in terms of the engagement level of the users as an indicator of their success. We provide empirical validation of the methods used in the Italian market of the luxury fashion sector, providing a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the content shared on social media, considering the type, timing, and modality of the sharing. We evaluate consumer-brand engagement in different contexts, including important live events in the field. Full article