Publications

RECENT DISSERTATIONS AT THE DEPARTMENT

Brita Ytre-Arne: Women’s magazines and their readers. Experiences, identity and everyday life

Ytre-Arne's thesis explores women's magazine reading as a media experience, and ask how regular readers of women's magazines experience these publications, and how these experiences can be related to readers’ everyday lives and to their sense of identity. A central ambition of the thesis is to suggest and demonstrate analytical approaches that are new to research on women's magazines. Throughout the thesis, women's magazine reading is conceptualized as a multifaceted media experience that encompasses perceptual, aesthetic, technological, cognitive, emotional, social and cultural dimensions. More here

Helle Sjøvaag: Journalistic Ideology. Professional Strategy, Institutional Authority and Boundary Maintenance in the Digital News Market

Sjøvaag's dissertation examines how journalistic ideology is mobilised when the profession is met by exogenous forces that challenge journalistic authority, primarily by looking at how the Norwegian commercial public service broadcaster TV 2 engages journalistic ideology as part of its news market strategies. Fundamental to journalistic ideology and its mobilisation in these encounters is the concept of a social contract operating as the driving force behind professional strategies. These issues are further contextualised within Anthony Giddens' concept of the duality of structure to illustrate the recursive nature of journalistic ideology for the maintenance of professional boundaries. More here

Heng Wu: Museum and Change: Regional Museums in the People’s Republic of China

Wu's thesis explores the correlation between museum and political and policy changes in the Peoples Republic of China with selected regional museums as the research object. Wu explores what changes have taken place in selected Chinese regional museums with the aim to understand what roles political and policy changes in the country have had on the process. Pertinent issues include diversity and unity, regional identity and national identity, representation of identity, regional development policy and cultural tourism. The research revealed that policy has a strong influence on all the museums studied but there are also differences between regions. More here

Lars Jacob Hove: Drawing visual query images: use, users and usability of query by drawing interfaces for content based image retrieval systems

Hove’s thesis presents an empirical study of Query by Drawing (QBD) as an approach to Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) - systems where users express their image needs by drawing an image representative of the images they wish to retrieve. The role of the user in image retrieval systems is a relatively unexplored area, and little empirical data has been collected on the expectations, needs and behaviour of these users. Even with the current challenges facing these systems, the feedback from the respondents in this study indicates that, given some changes, users may find QBD CBIR systems a very useful tool, particularly when combined with text based queries. More here

Bjørnar Solhaug: Policy Specification Using Sequence Diagrams. Applied to Trust Management

Solhaug's thesis addresses the problem of capturing, specifying and developing policies - rules governing the choices in the behavior of systems, the enforcement of which ensures that the system meets the relevant requirements. Solhaug proposes a language suitable for the specification of policies across domains, at various abstraction levels, and that facilitates human interpretation. The thesis proposes a method for the development of trust management policies that facilitates the modeling and analysis of trust within systems, and the evaluation of the risks and opportunities to which the system is exposed as a consequence of trust-based decisions.  More here

Sonja Wilhelmsen: Maximising Organisational Information Sharing and Effective Intelligence Analysis in Critical Data Sets. A case study on the information science needs of the Norwegian criminal intelligence and law enforcement community

This dissertation focuses on the information needs sourced through the critical data sets of law enforcement organisations; specifically the Norwegian criminal intelligence and law enforcement community represented by the National Criminal Investigation Service (Kriminalpolitisentralen (Kripos)). Information sharing is particularly important in these communities due to consequences for alleged perpetrators, victims and witnesses. More here

Jan Fredrik Hovden: Profane and Sacred. A study of the Norwegian Journalistic Field

In this thesis, using the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of social fields as a guide, Hovden analyses the structures of the Norwegian journalistic field and the journalists’ habitus, based on a survey of Norwegian journalists. Hovden argues journalists' increased autonomy from external influences - in particular from political parties and the state - has contributed to the construction of a particular informal social structure, what Bourdieu calls a social field. In this way Hovden's thesis is a study of the strong constraints latent in any prospect of “free and independent” journalism. More here