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Building on the findings of a British Academy-funded project on the development of digital forensics (DF) in England and Wales, the purpose of this paper is to explore how triage, a process that helps prioritise digital devices for in-depth forensic analysis, is experienced by DF examiners and police officers in four English police forces. It is argued that while as a strategy triage can address the increasing demand in the examination of digital exhibits, careful consideration needs to be paid to the ways in which its set-up, undertaking and outcomes impact on the ability of law enforcement agencies to solve cases.

The methodological approach adopted here builds on the ethnographic turn in criminology. The analysis draws on 120 h of ethnographic observations and 43 semi-structured interviews. Observational data of the working DF environment at each location and a systematic evaluation of internal documents, organisational settings and police priorities helped refine emergent analysis threads, which were analytically compared between sites and against the testimonies of members of different occupational groups to identify similarities and differences between accounts.

The findings emphasise the challenges in the triage of digital exhibits as they are encountered in everyday practice. The discussion focusses on the tensions between the delivery of timely and accurate investigation results and current gaps in the infrastructural arrangements. It also emphasises the need to provide police officers with a baseline understanding of the role of DF and the importance of clearly defined strategies in the examination of digital devices.

This paper aims to bridge policy and practice through an analysis of the ways in which DF practitioners and police officers in four English constabularies reflect on the uses of triage in DF to address backlogs and investigative demands. Highlighting the importance of digital awareness beyond the technical remit of DF units, it offers new insights into the ways in which police forces seek to improve the evidential trail with limited resources.

This paper presents a follow-on study that quantifies geolingual markers and their apparent connection with authorship collaboration patterns in canonical Digital Humanities (DH) journals. In particular, it seeks to detect patterns in authors' countries of work and languages in co-authorship networks.

Through an in-depth co-authorship network analysis, this study analysed bibliometric data from three canonical DH journals over a range of 52 years (1966–2017). The results are presented as visualised networks with centrality calculations.

The results suggest that while DH scholars may not collaborate as frequently as those in other disciplines, when they do so their collaborations tend to be more international than in many Science and Engineering, and Social Sciences disciplines. DH authors in some countries (e.g. Spain, Finland, Australia, Canada, and the UK) have the highest international co-author rates, while others have high national co-author rates but low international rates (e.g. Japan, the USA, and France).

This study is the first DH co-authorship network study that explores the apparent connection between language and collaboration patterns in DH. It contributes to ongoing debates about diversity, representation, and multilingualism in DH and academic publishing more widely.

This paper presents a co-authorship study of authors who published in Digital Humanities journals and examines the apparent influence of gender, or more specifically, the quantitatively detectable influence of gender in the networks they form.

This study applied co-authorship network analysis. Data has been collected from three canonical Digital Humanities journals over 52 years (1966–2017) and analysed.

The results are presented as visualised networks and suggest that female scholars in Digital Humanities play more central roles and act as the main bridges of collaborative networks even though overall female authors are fewer in number than male authors in the network.

This is the first co-authorship network study in Digital Humanities to examine the role that gender appears to play in these co-authorship networks using statistical analysis and visualisation.

As institutions forge forward with creating online learning experiences for college and university students, student affairs professionals should seek to create an experience that anticipates and supports their needs from expression of interest in the program to graduation. The term “student affairs” encompasses administrative and management functions created to meet the needs of students including extracurricular activities as well as academic and emotional support. Student affairs departments may be involved in residence life, advising, leadership development, career services, advocacy and support services, and more. All students, including online students, excel both academically and emotionally when they feel valued, welcomed, and supported. The following chapter provides recommendations on ways campuses can transform the existing ecosystem of support services and engagement opportunities to be inclusive of online learners. A systematic review of the current ecosystem of support has been made to analyze the ways in which access is provided remotely to online learners and to ensure that the language and engagement opportunities shared with students are inclusive of online learners. In addition to this expanding of current support systems, it is recommended that campuses should consider specific initiatives they can create and implement for their online population including online orientation, success coaching, library support services, and the use of predictive analytics for student success.

This paper aims to automate pre-ingest workflow for preserving digital content, such as records, through middleware that integrates potentially many information systems with potentially several alternative digital preservation services.

This design research approach resulted in a design for model- and component-based software for such workflow. A proof-of-concept prototype was implemented and demonstrated in context of a European research project, ForgetIT.

The study identifies design issues of automated pre-ingest for digital preservation while using middleware as a design choice for this purpose. The resulting model and solution suggest functionalities and interaction patterns based on open interface protocols between the source systems of digital content, middleware and digital preservation services. The resulting workflow automates the tasks of fetching digital objects from the source system with metadata extraction, preservation preparation and transfer to a selected preservation service. The proof-of-concept verified that the suggested model for pre-ingest workflow and the suggested component architecture was technologically implementable. Future research and development needs to include new solutions to support context-aware preservation management with increased support for configuring submission agreements as a basis for dynamic automation of pre-ingest and more automated error handling.

The paper addresses design issues for middleware as a design choice to support automated pre-ingest in digital preservation. The suggested middleware architecture supports many-to-many relationships between the source information systems and digital preservation services through open interface protocols, thus enabling dynamic digital preservation solutions for records management.

This chapter focuses on the impact of digitization on the conception, development and examination of the doctoral thesis in the contemporary university.

The approach taken is that of reflective inquiry. The author has taken a lead role in the editing of two handbooks for Sage: one on e-learning research and the other on the digital dissertation/thesis, and this chapter reflects on the changes taking place in higher education as a result of digitization. A number of examples are used to illustrate the possibilities afforded by digitization not only at doctoral levels but also in all dissertations.

It is proposed that digitization affects not only the conception and direction of doctoral research for the student but it has implications also for supervisors, those who ‘upgrade’ work from MPhil to PhD levels and also for examiners and librarians. Changes in the format of the presentation of the digital thesis allow moving image and sound, as well as still images, to be incorporated into the main body of the text rather than be relegated to an appendix (e.g. in a CD-Rom). The storage of the completed thesis in digital form, via a number of different repositories, allows for greater access and use.

One of the major implications of the digital thesis is that all universities must regularly re-visit their regulations to ensure that the parameters for doctoral research are clear, and that they are appropriate for the kind of research that is undertaken by students. Many universities are now making a digital copy of the thesis for principal submission, with print copies as optional.

Consideration of the implications of the digital thesis for students and universities is essential not only in terms of knowledge creation but also in terms of validation of such knowledge and its dissemination and use.

The COVID-19 pandemic situation has imposed changes in the way many services are being provided. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of lean thinking and digital transformation on services redesign of a higher education institution. The aim is to improve efficiency and incorporate new health and safety recommendations because of the pandemic situation.

This paper follows a case study approach to explore how lean thinking contributes to the digital transformation of services. The data was collected through student surveys from a Portuguese University, where three different academic services were selected.

This paper identifies important requirements for new and improved online alternatives to face-to-face interactions of the students with the academic services. It also shows that lean thinking is a driver for digital transformation of services.

This paper presents a dedicated roadmap to aid the implementation of a digital transformation process within student academic services of higher education institutions.

This paper addresses the digital transformation of services through a lean thinking perspective and considering four dimensions: quality, efficiency, cost reduction and health and safety.

While some may perceive technology as disruptive in higher education, this chapter makes a case that video technology can be used to increase collaboration and engagement in learning and teaching. It is argued that digital storytelling can be integrated as part of the assessment in graduate-level courses without compromising expectations related to academic rigor. Rather, digital storytelling advances multimedia literacy for the individual and supports the generation of bounded learning communities, specifically in online and blended programmes. Covering social presence, teaching presence and cognitive presence, the chapter draws on two examples of digital storytelling used in the MA in Conflict Analysis and Management and the MA in Global Leadership at Royal Roads University, Canada. Overall, the chapter makes a contribution to the conversation of how assessment formats can be updated to match the shift from traditional, lecture formats and brick-and-mortar institutions to applied, collaborative programmes that are often delivered in blended and online formats. Thus, as the field of higher education continues to evolve and adapt alongside technological innovations, the chapter suggests that digital storytelling can be one way to complement and update assessment formats to match the evolution of the twenty-first century.

The paper aims to investigate how accounting techniques, when embedded within data-driven public-sector management systems, mask and intensify the neoliberal ideological commitments of powerful state and corporate actors. The authors explore the role of accounting in the operationalisation of “instrumentarian power” (Zuboff, 2019) – a new form of power that mobilises ubiquitous digital instrumentation to ensure that algorithmic architectures can tune, herd and modify behaviour.

The authors employ a qualitative archival analysis of publicly available data related to the automation of welfare-policing systems to explore the role of accounting in advancing instrumentarian power.

In exploring the automation of Australia's welfare debt recovery system (Robodebt), this paper examines a new algorithmic accountability that has emerged at the interface of government, technology and accounting. The authors show that accounting supports both the rise of instrumentarian power and the intensification of neoliberal ideals when buried within algorithms. In focusing on Robodebt, the authors show how the algorithmic reconfiguration of accountability within the welfare system intensified the inequalities that welfare recipients experienced. Furthermore, the authors show that, despite its apparent failure, it worked to modify welfare recipients' behaviour to align with the neoliberal ideals of “self-management” and “individual responsibility”.

This paper addresses Agostino, Saliterer and Steccolini's (2021) call to investigate the relationship between accounting, digital innovations and the lived experience of vulnerable people. To anchor this, the authors show how algorithms work to mask the accounting assumptions that underpin them and assert that this, in turn, recasts accountability relationships. When accounting is embedded in algorithms, the ideological potency of calculations can be obscured, and when applied within technologies that affect vulnerable people, they can intensify already substantial inequalities.