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Private politics refers to situations in which activists or NGOs try to push firms to conform to social standards (regarding, for instance, human rights and environmental protection) without public policy intervention. The existing literature on private politics has focused on large campaigns such as consumer boycotts, and looked at the impact of those boycotts on firms’ financial performance and on the likelihood that firms comply with activist demands. Even though these large campaigns are important, focusing on them leads to neglecting the fact that a large portion of the time and resources that activists consecrate to private politics is used to monitor firms and criticize them through Internet posting and media statements, rather than to launch high profile campaigns. Little is known, however, about what drives these activists when they criticize companies, why they target certain companies and not others, and whether this criticism should be considered as a primary step in the production of full-fledged campaigns. In this paper, we fill this gap by exploring a unique international database of CSR-based criticisms against Fortune 500 companies for the 2006–2009 period. This database allows us to look at the impact of a broad range of factors including industry differences, country/institutional differences and firm-specific dimensions, on the likelihood that a certain firm will be targeted by activist critique. Results indicate that criticism is driven by strategic intents. Similar to previous literature, large and visible firms in certain industries are more targeted than others. In addition, these firms also tend to come from countries with strong institutions and high standards of living.

The confrontational nature of the construction industry is as much a threat to effective research as it is to effective construction management. In methodological terms, it presents particular challenges of emotion, sensitivity, tension, stress, pressure and uncertainty which a researcher has to address. The present paper discusses the methodological challenges of conducting research within a confrontational environment and presents a model of solutions developed to meet these problems. This model will be of value to all researchers involved within construction projects, but particularly those interested in construction conflict.

By mapping-out the capabilities, challenges and limitations of named-entity recognition (NER), this article aims to synthesise the state of the art of NER in the context of the early modern research field and to inform discussions about the kind of resources, methods and directions that may be pursued to enrich the application of the technique going forward.

Through an extensive literature review, this article maps out the current capabilities, challenges and limitations of NER and establishes the state of the art of the technique in the context of the early modern, digitally augmented research field. It also presents a new case study of NER research undertaken by Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane's Catalogues of his Collections (2016–2021), a Leverhulme funded research project and collaboration between the British Museum and University College London, with contributing expertise from the British Library and the Natural History Museum.

Currently, it is not possible to benchmark the capabilities of NER as applied to documents of the early modern period. The authors also draw attention to the situated nature of authority files, and current conceptualisations of NER, leading them to the conclusion that more robust reporting and critical analysis of NER approaches and findings is required.

This article examines NER as applied to early modern textual sources, which are mostly studied by Humanists. As addressed in this article, detailed reporting of NER processes and outcomes is not necessarily valued by the disciplines of the Humanities, with the result that it can be difficult to locate relevant data and metrics in project outputs. The authors have tried to mitigate this by contacting projects discussed in this paper directly, to further verify the details they report here.

The authors suggest that a forum is needed where tools are evaluated according to community standards. Within the wider NER community, the MUC and ConLL corpora are used for such experimental set-ups and are accompanied by a conference series, and may be seen as a useful model for this. The ultimate nature of such a forum must be discussed with the whole research community of the early modern domain.

NER is an algorithmic intervention that transforms data according to certain rules-, patterns- or training data and ultimately affects how the authors interpret the results. The creation, use and promotion of algorithmic technologies like NER is not a neutral process, and neither is their output A more critical understanding of the role and impact of NER on early modern documents and research and focalization of some of the data- and human-centric aspects of NER routines that are currently overlooked are called for in this paper.

This article presents a state of the art snapshot of NER, its applications and potential, in the context of early modern research. It also seeks to inform discussions about the kinds of resources, methods and directions that may be pursued to enrich the application of NER going forward. It draws attention to the situated nature of authority files, and current conceptualisations of NER, and concludes that more robust reporting of NER approaches and findings are urgently required. The Appendix sets out a comprehensive summary of digital tools and resources surveyed in this article.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study exploring the emerging field of data science from the library and information science (LIS) perspective.

Content analysis of research publications on data science was made of papers published in the Web of Science database to identify the main themes discussed in the publications from the LIS perspective.

A content analysis of 80 publications is presented. The articles belonged to the six broad categories: data science education and training; knowledge and skills of the data professional; the role of libraries and librarians in the data science movement; tools, techniques and applications of data science; data science from the knowledge management perspective; and data science from the perspective of health sciences. The category of tools, techniques and applications of data science was most addressed by the authors, followed by data science from the perspective of health sciences, data science education and training and knowledge and skills of the data professional. However, several publications fell into several categories because these topics were closely related.

Only publication recorded in the Web of Science database and with the term “data science” in the topic area were analyzed. Therefore, several relevant studies are not discussed in this paper that either were related to other keywords such as “e-science”, “e-research”, “data service”, “data curation”, “research data management” or “scientific data management” or were not present in the Web of Science database.

The paper provides the first exploration by content analysis of the field of data science from the perspective of the LIS.

Based on the approach of Timljonavich and Vogelsang, the purpose of this paper is to present empirical evidence of the role of the federal transfers on the β‐convergence process in Canadian provinces.

The paper uses information on annual personal income for the period 1926‐1999 to present empirical evidence about the notion of β‐convergence for the ten Canadian provinces.

The principal conclusion is that the inter‐provincial transfers were not determinant or decisive to the attainment of deterministic convergence in the Canadian provinces.

While the issue of convergence has been analyzed especially using cross‐sectional data or panel data, this paper uses a time‐series methodology with statistics recently proposed by Vogelsang and Bunzel, which are robust to the presence of I(0) or I(1) disturbances.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse incidents of personal information leakage in Japan based on Japanese socio‐cultural characteristics of information privacy and to consider how best to develop an effective personal information protection policy that conforms to Japanese situations as well as to the global requirement of personal information protection.

After describing recent incidents of personal information leakage in Japan, the paper examines the defects of the Act on Protection of Personal Information (APPI) that permit these incidents to continue. Subsequently, these incidents and the responses of the Japanese people in a manner that reflects the unique Japanese socio‐cultural characteristics of information privacy are analysed. Finally, the paper proposes a revision of APPI that conforms to these Japanese socio‐cultural characteristics as well as to the global requirement for personal information protection.

Personal information leakage cases and social responses in Japan reflect three Japanese socio‐cultural characteristics: Uchi/Soto awareness, insular collectivism and Hon'ne/Tatemae tradition. An effective law protecting personal information in Japan's cultural environment cannot be made simply by copying the privacy protection laws in western nations. Instead, legal protection of personal information should be drafted that reflects and takes into account these socio‐cultural characteristics.

This paper conducts analysis of incidents of personal information leakage in Japan based on Japanese socio‐cultural characteristics. A revision of APPI is proposed on the basis of the analysis. The paper's analysis and proposal would provide a good clue to develop effective measures to protect personal information and the right to information privacy in the global, multicultural information society.

The purpose of this study is to capture the variety of issues that concern patients and to examine the extent to which personal characteristics of patients, such as education, ethnicity, age, gender and conditions of hospitalisation, influence the tendency to “express (negative) voice” and raise “critical views”.

Using data obtained from the 2014 Survey of Health Satisfaction in Israel, the study focuses on patients' responses to an open-ended question regarding the medical care experience in hospitals.

The analysis reveals that “the voice of patients” spreads across a wide variety of issues, including the physical condition of the hospital and caregiver behaviour. Multivariate regression models show that subgroups with greater access to social and economic resources (i.e. in Israel, individuals who are Jewish), academics, women and younger patients are more likely to express critical voice regarding the hospitalisation experience. Likewise, inferior hospitalisation conditions are likely to increase expression of negative “voice” and criticism.

The findings underscore the importance and value of open-ended questions in evaluating healthcare satisfaction, suggesting that the likelihood of expressing critical voice is higher among patients of high socio-economic status – perhaps because they are more likely to expect, demand and feel entitled to high-quality care. Likewise, inferior hospitalisation conditions increase the critical voice.

Upcycling is conceptualised as a digital historical research practice aimed at increasing the scientific value of historical data collections produced in print or in electronic form between the eighteenth and the late twentieth centuries. The concept of upcycling facilitates data rescue and reuse as well as the study of information creation processes deployed by previous generations of researchers.

Based on a selection of two historical reference works and two legacy collections, an upcycling workflow consisting of three parts (input, processing and documentation and output) is developed. The workflow facilitates the study of historical information creation processes based on paradata analysis and targets the cognitive processes that precede and accompany the creation of historical data collections.

The proposed upcycling workflow furthers the understanding of computational methods and their role in historical research. Through its focus on the information creation processes that precede and accompany historical research, the upcycling workflow contributes to historical data criticism and digital hermeneutics.

Many historical data collections produced between the eighteenth and the late twentieth century do not comply with the principles of FAIR data. The paper argues that ignoring the work of previous generations of researchers is not an option, because it would make current research practices more vulnerable and would result in losing access to the experiences and knowledge accumulated by previous generations of scientists. The proposed upcycling workflow takes historical data collections seriously and makes them available for future generations of researchers.

A key issue in the literature about research libraries concerns their potential role in managing research data. The aim of this paper is to study the arguments for and against associating this task with libraries and the impact such an association would have on information professionals, and consider the competitors to libraries in this field.

This paper considers the nature of data and discusses data typologies, the kinds of data contained within databases and the implications of criticisms of the data-information-knowledge (DIK) hierarchy. It outlines the many competing agencies in the data curation field and describes their relationships to different kinds of data.

Many data are organically connected to the activities of large, domain-specific organizations; as such, it might be difficult for research libraries to assume a leadership role in curating data. It seems more likely that the qualifications of information professionals will come to be needed in such organizations and that the functions of research libraries will shift toward giving greater prevalence to their role as specialists in scholarly communication. In some cases, however, research libraries may be the best place to select, keep, organize and use research data. To prepare for this task, research libraries should be actively involved in domain-specific analytic studies of their respective domains.

This paper offers a theoretical analysis and clarification of the problems of data curating from the perspective of research libraries.