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The authors’ goal is to investigate variations in the writing style of book reviews published on different social reading platforms and referring to books of different genres, which enables acquiring insights into communication strategies adopted by readers to share their reading experiences.

The authors propose a corpus-based study focused on the analysis of A Good Review, a novel corpus of online book reviews written in Italian, posted on Amazon and Goodreads, and covering six literary fiction genres. The authors rely on stylometric analysis to explore the linguistic properties and lexicon of reviews and the authors conducted automatic classification experiments using multiple approaches and feature configurations to predict either the review's platform or the literary genre.

The analysis of user-generated reviews demonstrates that language is a quite variable dimension across reading platforms, but not as much across book genres. The classification experiments revealed that features modelling the syntactic structure of the sentence are reliable proxies for discerning Amazon and Goodreads reviews, whereas lexical information showed a higher predictive role for automatically discriminating the genre.

The high availability of cultural products makes information services necessary to help users navigate these resources and acquire information from unstructured data. This study contributes to a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics of user-generated book reviews, which can support the development of linguistically-informed recommendation services. Additionally, the authors release a novel corpus of online book reviews meant to support the reproducibility and advancements of the research.

The purpose of this study is to examine how young people imagine civic futures through speculative fiction writing about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The authors argue that young people’s speculative fiction writing about AI not only helps make visible the ways they imagine the impacts of emerging technologies and the modes of collective action available for leveraging, resisting or countering them but also the frictions and fissures between the two.

This practitioner research study used data from student artifacts (speculative fiction stories, prewriting and relevant unit work) as well as classroom fieldnotes. The authors used inductive coding to identify emergent patterns in the ways young people wrote about AI and civics, as well as deductive coding using digital civic ecologies framework.

The findings of this study spotlight both the breadth of intractable civic concerns that young people associate with AI, as well as the limitations of the civic frameworks for imagining political interventions to these challenges. Importantly, they also indicate that the process of speculative writing itself can help reconcile this disjuncture by opening space to dwell in, rather than resolve, the tensions between “the speculative” and the “civic.”

Teachers might use speculative fiction writing and the digital civic ecologies framework to support students in critically examining possible AI futures and effective civic actions within them.

Speculative fiction writing offers an avenue for students to analyze the growing civic concerns posed by emerging platform technologies like AI.

This study aims to determine college/university students’ mobile phone practices to understand key user preferences and set a baseline understanding for the development of prospective library informational mobile services.

This study is based on the results of an online-survey method. The authors recruited students majoring in the Information Science program in School of Information at Pratt Institute (USA) (74 participants) and in Kyiv National University of Cultural and Arts (Ukraine) (89 participants).

The general trends in the use of mobile technologies by American and Ukrainian students were identified. Key components of library mobile services are offered. Such services may include information and reference service via messengers; development of library mobile applications of audio and video content; access to educational, scientific, popular science literature and fiction; and supplementing online services with library chatbots.

This study was limited to only students majoring in information science at university; however, the data obtained helps outline several general trends common to student youth who are actively working with information.

The obtained results will be useful in the practical activities of libraries and other information institutions for the development of a comprehensive information service based on mobile technology.

This study contributes to understanding how to improve library informational service considering users habits and preferences. Libraries management and librarians can use the findings as a basis for prioritizing the improvement of library informational mobile service.

This paper aims to discuss the complexity of predicting the future and of making tourism futuristic predictions. It argues that tourism cannot be separated from the world context in which it operates and explores the various impacts of tourism on people and planet both in a near and more distant future.

This paper revises several reports and research by world economic and tourism authorities as they provide arguments for the study of trends and the complexity of the evolution of the travel and tourism industry.

There is no certain way to know what the future will bring to the tourism industry or how it will interact with society and the physical environment. What the author does know is that from the beginning of time, events do not occur in isolation and that travel and tourism will impact everything that it touches. It is impossible to make exact predictions as to what tourism will be like in the near and distant future, what the author does know is that humans will want to travel, to explore and to learn, and this desire will interact not only with tourism but with the course of history.

By exploring the evolution of tourism in the context of science, the author cannot even be certain where tourism will occur, if only on the same planet, within the other planets of the solar system or in the vastness of space. Science fiction predicts the latter, but only the unfolding of history will teach of the accuracy of future predictions and how the future of travel will be.

Governments worldwide have been trying to direct more students towards STEM specialty areas, but the number of students majoring in STEM and seeking a STEM career path is not proportional to their efforts. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the surface the unrealistic expectations and false assumptions held by the general public about STEM fields. These have mainly been shaped by the “T” in the acronym, substituting technology for science. This brief urges for a policy shift in STEM and science education to reveal the true nature of science, emphasizing that science is not about providing definite answers nor granting miraculous solutions but about creating and disseminating knowledge based on the most accurate outcome informed by empirical evidence. Such a policy change will have a dual effect. First, it will ensure students authentically appreciate the nature of science, serve as agents of scientific thinking and reasoning within their communities, and become more oriented towards STEM majors. Secondly, this policy shift will prompt more realistic expectations and valid assumptions about science for the general public, which will help reduce public confusion and uncertainty, specifically at times of pandemics or emergencies.

Research shows that postsecondary students are largely unaware of the impact of algorithms on their everyday lives. Also, most noncomputer science students are not being taught about algorithms as part of the regular curriculum. This exploratory, qualitative study aims to explore subject-matter experts’ insights and perceptions of the knowledge components, coping behaviors and pedagogical considerations to aid faculty in teaching algorithmic literacy to postsecondary students.

Eleven semistructured interviews and one focus group were conducted with scholars and teachers of critical algorithm studies and related fields. A content analysis was manually performed on the transcripts using a mixture of deductive and inductive coding. Data analysis was aided by the coding software program Dedoose (2021) to determine frequency totals for occurrences of a code across all participants along with how many times specific participants mentioned a code. Then, findings were organized around the three themes of knowledge components, coping behaviors and pedagogy.

The findings suggested a set of 10 knowledge components that would contribute to students’ algorithmic literacy along with seven behaviors that students could use to help them better cope with algorithmic systems. A set of five teaching strategies also surfaced to help improve students’ algorithmic literacy.

This study contributes to improved pedagogy surrounding algorithmic literacy and validates existing multi-faceted conceptualizations and measurements of algorithmic literacy.

The rise of the metaverse has brought profound changes to the economic and social operation models and injected new vitality into academic research. Although a large number of studies have emerged, there are few quantitative analyses of development frontiers and trends.

From a bibliometric perspective, this paper selects 183 pieces of metaverse-related literature in the WoS core database since 2000 as the object of analysis. This paper sums up the characteristics of the literature using the methods of descriptive statistical analysis, keywords analysis, thematic evolution analysis and summarizes the core themes and the laws of metaverse development in each stage.

The digital economy vision brought by the metaverse has led to an increasing number of researchers and achievements in this field. But the depth and breadth of research are still insufficient and unevenly distributed in the region, and the cross-fertilization fields need to be expanded. From the industry's point of view, VR games represented by Second Life and My World have contributed to the popularity of the metaverse. As technology progresses, the research hotspots in the field of metaverse gradually develop from conceptual research to artificial intelligence, blockchain, NFT and other technical applications. However, academic research has not yet caught up with the industry's pace and stays more in the concept discussion and preliminary application stage.

A systematic overview of the current status, knowledge structure and hot issues of metaverse research is shown, which provides a thematic axis for this field, enriches and improves the quantitative analysis of its literature and provides a clear picture for researchers to continuously promote the development of this field. At the same time, it is necessary to warn that technological development is a double-edged sword. The process of metaverse development should return to rationality, respect the laws of its development and guarantee the healthy development of the metaverse by strengthening legal regulation and the ethical review of science and technology.

With the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI), it is important to consider how young people are making sense of these tools in their everyday lives. Drawing on critical postdigital approaches to learning and literacy, this study aims to center the experiences and perspectives of young people who encounter and experiment with generative AI in their daily writing practices.

This critical case study of one digital platform – Character.ai – brings together an adolescent and adult authorship team to inquire about the intertwining of young people’s playful and critical perspectives when writing on/with digital platforms. Drawing on critical walkthrough methodology (Light et al., 2018), the authors engage digital methods to study how the creative and “fun” uses of AI in youths’ writing lives are situated in broader platform ecologies.

The findings suggest experimentation and pleasure are key aspects of young people’s engagement with generative AI. The authors demonstrate how one platform works to capitalize on these dimensions, even as youth users engage critically and artfully with the platform and develop their digital writing practices.

This study highlights how playful experimentation with generative AI can engage young people both in pleasurable digital writing and in exploration and contemplation of platforms dynamics and structures that shape their and others’ literate activities. Educators can consider young people’s creative uses of these evolving technologies as potential opportunities to develop a critical awareness of how commercial platforms seek to benefit from their users.

This study contributes to the development of a critical and humanist research agenda around generative AI by centering the experiences, perspectives and practices of young people who are underrepresented in the burgeoning research devoted to AI and literacies.

This paper aims to challenge the fashion of ubiquitous artificial intelligence (AI) and the effects which it will have upon society. In doing so it argues that the effects of AI will be minimal but important.

This argument is based upon the Socratic method and explores the Utilitarian background in which AI is based while drawing upon classical literature and other examples to illustrate the argument.

The findings are encompassed in the argument and show that we need to be more open and careful when considering AI and its effects. We also need to be more realistic when considering potential benefits.

This argument has significant implications for the adoption of AI.

The social implications are equally profound and will impact upon our application of AI solutions to current problems and upon humanity more generally.

This is the first paper which relates AI to human successes.