Humanities & Social Sciences

The book collects the interventions at the seminar "Images of Italy and Europe in literature and travel documentation in the 18th and 19th centuries", held at the Department of Historical and Geographical Studies of the University of Florence in 1999-2001. It addresses the problem of the creation of borders (political, administrative, linguistic, religious) in Europe and in Brazil from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 20th century, with particular regard to the period between the 17th and 18th centuries. The theme of the constitution of borders is a classic of the relationship between history and geography and involves the entire range of human sciences, enabling the comparison with international research results.

The use of advanced digital technologies such as 3D printing, advanced robotics, drones, big data analytics and artificial intelligence is spreading. These technologies have uncertain implications for labour demand. Affected workers may need to re-train to adapt to changing tasks or new jobs. At the same time, it is unclear whether or not advanced digital technologies encourage firms to invest in workforce re-training. Using firm-level data covering the 27 EU countries, the UK and the US, this paper shows that employers tend to reduce investment in training per employee, after adopting advanced digital technologies. It estimates, with a control function approach, firm-level production functions augmented with two factors: training per employee and digital technology use. We show that these are in fact substitutes in production, implying that an increase in the former negatively affects the marginal productivity of the latter, and that a decline in the cost of introducing advanced digital technologies reduces employers’ investment in training per employee. These findings point to challenges in realising high levels of firm-sponsored training for employees in increasingly digital economies.

Light detection and ranging, or LiDAR, is an advanced active remote sensing technology developed in the last 30 years to measure variable distances to the Earth. This book explains the fundamental concepts of LiDAR technology and its extended spaceborne, airborne, terrestrial, mobile, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms. It addresses the challenges of massive LiDAR data intelligent processing, LiDAR software engineering, and in-depth applications. The theory and algorithms are integrated with multiple applications in a systematic way and with step-by-step instructions. Written for undergraduate and graduate students and practitioners in the field of LiDAR remote sensing, this book is a much-needed comprehensive resource. FEATURES Explains the fundamentals of LiDAR remote sensing, including theory, techniques, methods, and applications Highlights the dissemination and popularization of LiDAR remote sensing technology in the last decade Includes new advances in LiDAR data processing and applications Introduces new technologies such as spaceborne LiDAR and photon-counting LiDAR Provides multiple LiDAR application cases regarding topography mapping, forest investigation, power line inspection, building modeling, automatic driving, crop monitoring, indoor navigation, cultural heritage conservation, and underwater mapping This book is written for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students taking courses in remote sensing, geography, photogrammetric engineering, laser techniques, surveying and mapping, geographic information systems (GIS), forestry, and resources and environmental protection. It is also a comprehensive resource for researchers and scientists interested in learning techniques for collecting LiDAR remote sensing data and processing, analyzing, and managing LiDAR data for applications in forestry, surveying and mapping, cultural relic protection, and digital products.

Critical mapping—a problematizing, reflective approach—is the process of compiling and analyzing existing design outcomes (DOs) that address a wicked problem (e.g., food insecurity) in a way that creates a synthesis between equity, justice, and environmental responsibility. Critical mapping begins with identification and operationalization of the wicked problem leading to an integrative literature review of multidisciplinary scholarly sources to identify peer-reviewed DOs that contribute to addressing the wicked problem sustainably. Next, it progresses to charting the sustainable DOs affinitively with four quadrants—top-down and local, top-down and memetic (i.e., widespread), bottom-up and memetic, bottom-up, and local. The resulting visualization, introduced as a wicked solution, facilitates analysis to identify places to intervene in the system, where one can synthesize the impact of existing sustainable DOs to understand where gaps exist for future design innovation or appropriation that has the potential to cumulatively solve the wicked problem over time.

This open access book positions itself at the intersection of world literature studies, literary anthropology and philosophical critiques of 'world' and 'globe' concepts. Doing so, it investigates how literature imagines and shapes worlds for its readers through linguistically specific cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics, both at the level of textual engagement and on a material level of textual production and circulation. Moving from textual analyses in Part One – 'Worlds in Texts' – to combined analyses of texts, media and agents in the literary field in Part Two – 'Texts in Worlds' – the concerns of these nine chapters range from multilingualism, genre and style to material forms such as the little magazine or the scrapbook archive and finally to activities such as travel (as a writing profession) and literary promotion. With this focus on practice – which geographically engages with Constantinople, China, Russia, western Europe, North America, southern Africa and India – contributors demonstrate methodologically how world literature studies can bring the empirically specific detail to bear on global modes of analysis. It is precisely through such a dual optic that the world-making capacity of literature becomes apparent.

An investigation of music videos as a form, a practice, and a literacy.Music videos were once something broadcast by MTV and received on our TV screens. Today, music videos are searched for, downloaded, and viewed on our computer screens—or produced in our living rooms and uploaded to social media. In We Used to Wait, Rebecca Kinskey examines this shift. She investigates music video as a form, originally a product created by professionals to be consumed by nonprofessionals; as a practice, increasingly taken up by amateurs; and as a literacy, to be experimented with and mastered. Kinskey offers a short history of the music video as a communicative, cultural form, describing the rise and fall of MTV's Total Request Live and the music video's resurgence on YouTube. She examines recent shifts in viewing and production practice, tracing the trajectory of music video director Hiro Murai from film student and dedicated amateur in the 1990s to music video professional in the 2000s. Investigating music video as a literacy, she looks at OMG! Cameras Everywhere, a nonprofit filmmaking summer camp run by a group of young music video directors. The OMG! campers and counselors provide a case study in how cultural producers across several generations have blurred the line between professional and amateur. Their everyday practices remake the notion of literacy, not only by their collaborative and often informal efforts to impart and achieve literacy but also by expanding the definition of what is considered a valuable activity, worthy of dedicated, pleasurable pursuit.

Reflexion wird als notwendig für die professionelle Entwicklung von Lehrer:innen und die Verbesserung von Unterricht angesehen, wenngleich aus theoretischer Sicht große Uneinigkeit über den Begriff selbst, den Reflexionsprozess und die damit verbundenen Kompetenzen herrscht.Ziel dieser Arbeit war die Entwicklung, Untersuchung und Weiterentwicklung eines Reflexionsmodells mit einem theoriebasierten, klaren Konzept des Reflexionsprozesses und einem passenden Anspruch an die Reflexionsleistung der Reflektierenden. Grundlage für die empirische Untersuchung waren N = 132 Selbstreflexionstexte von N = 22 Studierenden aus dem Praxissemester Physik. Zur Codierung der Texte wurden vier mittels qualitativer Inhaltsanalyse entwickelte Manuale angewandt. Mit quantitativen Methoden wurden Zusammenhänge zwischen strukturellen Elementen, Begründungen, Inhalten und dem Qualitätsmerkmal Reflexionstiefe überprüft. Es zeigte sich ein "Überhang an Negativität": negative Bewertungen, negative Reflexionsauslöser und negative Inhalte hängen signifikant positiv mit größerer Reflexionstiefe zusammen. Auf Grundlage der empirischen Ergebnisse wurde das Reflexionsmodell mit externaler und internaler Zielorientierung (REIZ) entwickelt. Zudem wurde darauf aufbauend eine Definition für Reflexionstiefe in vier Argumentationsclustern formuliert. Für die Lehrkräftebildung wird der in REIZ dargestellte differenzierte Ansatz der Zielorientierung von Reflexion empfohlen.

From the late Sixties on, industrial development in Italy evolved through the spread of small and medium sized firms, aggregated in district networks, with an elevated propensity to enterprise and the marked presence of owner-families. Installed within the local systems, the industrial districts tended to simulate large-scale industry exploiting lower costs generated by factors that were not only economic. The districts are characterised in terms of territorial location (above all the thriving areas of the North-east and Centre) and sector, since they are concentrated in the "4 As" (clothing-fashion, home-decor, agri-foodstuffs, automation-mechanics), with some overlapping with "Made in Italy". How can this model be assessed? This is the crucial question in the debate on the condition and prospects of the Italian productive system between the supporters of its capacity to adapt and the critics of economic dwarfism. A dispassionate judgement suggests that the prospects of "small is beautiful" have been superseded, but that the "declinist" view, that sees only the dangers of globalisation and the IT revolution for our SMEs is risky. The concept of irreversible crisis that prevails at present is limiting, both because it is not easy either to "invent", or to copy, a model of industrialisation, and because there is space for a strategic repositioning of the district enterprises. The book develops considerations in this direction, showing how an evolution of the district model is possible, focusing on: gains in productivity, scope economies (through diversification and expansion of the range of products), flexibility of organisation, capacity to meld tradition and innovation aiming at product quality, dimensional growth of the enterprises, new forms of financing, active presence on the international markets and valorisation of the resources of the territory. It is hence necessary to reactivate the behavioural functions of the entrepreneurs.

What are the practical effects of the Network Enforcement Act, which came into force in 2017 and was controversial from the start? Which compliance structures have the big three social networks Facebook, YouTube and Twitter implemented with regard to the removal of illegal user content? In addition to a presentation and evaluation of previous studies, monitoring reports and NetzDG reports from the social networks, possible criteria for “over-blocking” are identified and subsumed in this third volume of the series. On the occasion of the NetzDG evaluation commissioned by the federal government, the study was carried out additionally and independently of this. It is not based on any commissioning by public or private bodies.

Cross-regional scholarly dialogue inspired by the work of the pioneering Cuban scholar. Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) coined the term “transculturation” in 1940. This was an early case of theory from the South: concepts developed from an explicitly peripheral epistemological vantage point and launched as a corrective to European and North American theoretical formulations. What Ortiz proposed was a contrapuntal vision of complexly entangled processes that we, today, would conceptualize as cultural emergence. Inspired by Ortiz, this volume engineers an unprecedented conversation between Mediterraneanists and Caribbeanists. It harnesses Ortiz’s mid-twentieth-century theoretical formulations to early twenty-first-century issues pertinent to both regions, including migration, territorial sovereignty, and cultural diversity. The contributors explore this perspective (arguably formed during Ortiz’s youth in late nineteenth-century Menorca) in a dialogue between scholars of the contemporary Caribbean and Mediterranean to enable novel analytics for both regions and to more broadly to probe the promises and limits of Ortiz’s contribution for contemporary anthropological research and theorizing.

This volume, a follow up to Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene (2021), continues a transdisciplinary conversation around reconceptualizing science education in the era of the Anthropocene. Drawing educators from many walks of life and areas of practice together in a creative work that helps reorient science education toward the problems and peculiarities associated with this contemporary geologic time. This work continues the mission of transforming the ways communities inherit science and technology education: its knowledges, practices, policies, and ways-of-living-with-Nature. Our understanding of the Anthropocene is necessarily open and pluralistic, as different beings on our planet experience this time of crisis in different ways. This second volume continues to nurture productive relationships between science education and fields such as science studies, environmental studies, philosophy, the natural sciences, Indigenous studies, and critical theory in order to provoke a science education that actively seeks to remake our shared ecological and social spaces in the coming decades and centuries. This is an open access book.

This book aims to provide an overview of theoretical and practical considerations in terms of self-directed multimodal learning within the university context. Multimodal learning is approached in terms of the levels of multimodality and specifically blended learning and the mixing of modes of delivery (contact and distance education). As such, this publication will provide a unique snapshot of multimodal practices within higher education through a self-directed learning epistemological lens. The book covers issues such as what self-directed multimodal learning entails, mapping of specific publications regarding blended learning, blended learning in mathematics, geography, natural science and computer literacy, comparative experiences in distance education as well as situated and culturally appropriate learning in multimodal contexts. This book provides a unique focus on multimodality in terms of learning and delivery within the context of self-directed learning. Therefore, the publication would not only advance the scholarship of blended and open distance learning in South Africa, but also the contribute to enriching the discourse regarding self-direction. From this book readers will get an impression of the latest trends in literature in terms of multimodal self-directed learning in South Africa as well as unique empirical work being done in this regard.

Edition of the 57 preserved letters from the third year of the registers of pope Innozent III.

As a result of inclusion efforts in education, children with intellectual disabilities are increasingly being taught in mainstream schools. The effects of this practice on teaching have been little researched to date. As part of a video study, Helena Krähenmann examines the design and quality of inclusive maths lessons in terms of classroom management, social-emotional and content-related support at primary level.

Dieses Buch befasst sich mit dem in der theoretischen linguistischen Literatur stark diskutierten Phänomen der lexikalischen Adjektiv-Intensivierung. Dabei wird ein graduierbares Adjektiv – z. B. schön – durch eine Intensitätspartikel modifiziert. Der Strand ist ∅ schön. Positiv Der Strand ist sehr schön. Deskriptiv Der Strand ist mega schön. Expressiv Durch die Modifikation erfährt das Adjektiv eine Bedeutungsverstärkung, die sich in einer gesteigerten Intensität und einer höheren Position auf einer zugehörigen mentalen Skala niederschlägt. Im Fokus steht die experimentelle Untersuchung von deskriptiven und expressiven Intensitätspartikeln. Expressive Intensivierer (Gutzmann & Turgay 2012) wie mega und super treten vor allem in der Umgangssprache auf, meist in Gestalt von Adjektiven, und erfüllen eine ähnliche Funktion wie „deskriptive Intensivierer“ (ebd.), etwa die deutsche Standard-Intensitätspartikel sehr. In beiden Fällen wird im Vergleich zum Positiv ein höheres Ausmaß der bezeichneten Eigenschaft ausgedrückt; bei expressiven Intensivierern wird dieser Grad jedoch – so die in der Literatur vorherrschende Annahme – intuitiv als stärker empfunden. Zudem offenbaren expressive Partikeln aufgrund einer emotional-expressiven Zusatzkomponente mutmaßlich auch die persönliche Einstellung der sprechenden Person zum Sachverhalt, die nicht Teil der Proposition ist. Obwohl die Erforschung von Expressivität in der formal orientierten Sprachwissenschaft in den letzten drei Jahrzehnten erheblich an Dynamik gewonnen hat, ist die Gültigkeit dieser grundlegenden Annahmen bislang nicht empirisch abgesichert. Die noch bestehende Lücke an experimentellen Untersuchungen zu schließen, ist eines der zentralen Ziele dieser Arbeit. Aufbauend auf der aktuellen Forschungslage unternimmt sie den ersten Versuch, durch eine breit angelegte Untersuchung neue Erkenntnisse über den semantischen Unterschied zwischen deskriptiven und expressiven Intensitätspartikeln zu gewinnen. Hierfür wird auf eine systematisch aufeinander aufbauende Kombination aus verschiedenen linguistischen Methoden wie Korpusanalyse (Empirieteil I) und Rating-Experimente (Empirieteil II) zurückgegriffen, mithilfe derer die aus der Literatur hergeleiteten Forschungshypothesen erstmals überprüft werden.