Luciano Moreira

Abstract During the Decade of Ocean Science, oceans and the deep sea have gained attention for their vital ecological roles, prompting increased scientific investment. However, this growing body of research has not effectively reached the public, especially regarding deep-sea ecosystems. Public perception studies are limited, particularly those focused on the deep sea. This article compares findings from a U.S. study with previous research in Portugal on social representations of the deep sea. A total of 521 U.S. participants completed tasks assessing representations, perceptions, and attitudes. Results mirror the Portuguese study, revealing vague and conflicting representations. Both populations use contrasting terms (known vs. unknown, literal vs. abstract) to describe the deep sea. Despite cultural differences, similar results emerge: the deep sea is linked to education, science, and climate, while perceived threats reflect current concerns. Attitudes are generally positive toward preservation, economic use, and scientific exploration, contrasting earlier findings that showed skepticism toward economic exploitation. This study highlights the value of cross-cultural comparisons in understanding public views on complex environmental topics and supports the need for tailored communication strategies.

Abstract <jats:p>In this workshop, we explored a research example on the field of utopian studies and, within it, feminist criticism to illustrate text analysis with R language using metadata from the Lyman Tower Sargent Bibliography. Participants were introduced to the research topic, the R Studio environment, and guided through the iterative process of text analysis (word frequency and network analysis) with the Quanteda library. We aimed to show that visualizations are, more than results, part of a process that triggers new, more complex research questions</jats:p>

Abstract Travel writing reflects placed subjective human experience and participates in the collective processes of assembling stable, consensual, or polemical geographical entities and identities. In this chapter, we reflect on the contributions of Critical Digital Humanities to the communication of travel writing studies. Using R language, we are exploring the Anglophone Travelers in Portugal databases—which provide annotated information on almost 200 foreigner travel accounts in English published since the eighteenth century—to visualize geographical entities, analyze topics, and design visualization tools for non-expert audiences. In the process, four contributions of Critical Digital Humanities became evident. First, toponymical and semantic sources of ambiguity require us to develop a strong understanding of data as an artifact or capta (Drucker, Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1–21, 2011) construed in the annotating process that may affect the accuracy of automatic geocoding and processing based on named entity recognition. Critical digital humanist scholars, even if aware of such issues, lack creative solutions to express ambiguity as informative per se of the liquid nature of social labeling. Second, digital humanities open doors to enhanced interactivity (for instance, web applications) but require thoughtful, parsimonious solutions to express complexity which raises issues related to minimal computing (Risam and Gil, Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 2, 2022). Third, Critical Digital Humanities helped to understand that communicating foreign perspectives may impact the audiences’ understanding of the traveled territory, but also of the travelers as an exogroup, a social category built on stereotyped views. Fourth, Critical Digital Humanities allowed us to better communicate the entangled nature of traveling and socio-historical circumstances. The challenge is to use such information to promote meaningful, centrifugal travel experiences rather than centripetal, massive travel itineraries. In the future, the project aims to grow via participatory citizen science (crowdsourcing) and to extend its scope to online digital sources related to travel (for instance, blogs). These new steps will foster the need to examine web scraping and text cleaning techniques and develop suitable storytelling approaches to engage people and create narratives that reflect their inputs in a critical way. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.