Digital, Volume 4, Issue 3 (September 2024) – 8 articles

Identifying and understanding visitor needs and expectations is of the utmost importance for a number of stakeholders and policymakers involved in the touristic domain. Apart from traditional forms of feedback, an abundance of related information exists online, scattered across various data sources like online social media, tourism-related platforms, traveling blogs, forums, etc. Retrieving and analyzing the aforementioned content is not a straightforward task and in order to address this challenge, we have developed the StreetLines platform, a novel information system that is able to collect, analyze and produce insights from the available tourism-related data. Its highly modular architecture allows for the continuous monitoring of varying pools of heterogeneous data sources whose contents are subsequently stored, after preprocessing, in a data repository. Following that, the aforementioned data feed a number of independent and parallel processing modules that extract useful information for all individuals involved in the tourism domain, like place recommendation for visitors and sentiment analysis and keyword extraction reports for professionals in the tourism industry. The presented platform is an outcome of the StreetLines project and apart from the contributions of its individual components, its novelty lies in the holistic approach to knowledge extraction and tourism data mining. Full article

The study empirically analyzed activism participants’ roles drawn from the lens of social media affordance and identified the activism opinion leaders based on the framework of network connectivity, message diffusion, and semantic relevancy through the case of the #Marchforourlives Twitter network, which has been rebranded as X. The study defines the #Marchforourlives Twitter network as a co-created activism network in collaboration with different degrees of contributors, such as the core advocates, the advocates, the supporters, and the amplifiers. The results showed that a very small number of tweets created by the core advocates played significant roles due to their extensive adoption by other participants, while many other original tweets were never mentioned or retweeted in the network. This study disclosed the extensive proportion of amplifiers as 95.13% among the examined participants. The study findings suggest that creating core agenda tweets with high amplifiability might be critical for successful hashtag activism to attract like-minded masses as networked protesters. Full article

ChatGPT has significantly increased in popularity in recent months because of its capacity to generate novel content and provide genuine responses to questions. Nevertheless, like all technologies, it is crucial to assess its limitations and features prior to implementing it into an educational setting. A major obstacle associated with ChatGPT is its tendency to produce consistent yet occasionally unreliable and inaccurate responses. Our study provides students with training in this area, and its objective was to analyse the opinion of those same university students studying education-related degrees regarding the efficacy of the usefulness of ChatGPT for their learning. We used a mixed methodology and two instruments for data collection: questionnaires and discussion groups. The sample comprised 150 university students pursuing degrees in teaching and social education. The results show that the majority of students are familiar with the technology but have not had any formal training in a university. They use this tool to complete academic assignments outside the classroom, and they emphasise the need for training in it. Furthermore, following the training, the students highlight an increase in motivation and a positive impact on the development of generic skills, such as information analysis, synthesis and management, problem solving, and learning how to learn. Ultimately, this study provides an opportunity to consider the implementation of educational training of this tool at the university level in order to ensure its appropriate use. Full article

Animated videos have been used in education for many years, and their efficacy in enhancing student motivation, engagement, and performance has been evaluated and reported in many studies. The aim of this study is twofold. First, after examining seventy-seven research articles, this study will attempt to provide an updated comprehensive literature review on the topic for the last decade. The articles were obtained from Google Scholar and Scopus following a certain methodology (search keywords, inclusion and exclusion criteria). The articles were examined for aspects such as the educational fields in which animated videos have been utilized over the last ten years, the researchers’ countries, the types of animated videos, the software tools used to create the educational animations, the research methods employed, and the aims and findings of the studies. The second part of this paper will present animated videos produced by teachers together with their experiences from the development process and classroom use. This study concentrates on the software tools the educators chose to use and their perceptions about developing their own animations. Findings indicate that when animated videos are produced by teachers, their creativity is boosted, and their communication skills are enhanced. Full article

By exploring the top three airports in Asia, this study explores the area of smart airport systems. With the goal of analyzing the significant elements of airport services that captivate travelers’ attention through online reviews and establishing a correlation between sentiment in reviews and numerical ratings given by travelers, the study analyzes what captivates travelers’ attention. Data mining, frequency analysis, sentiment analysis, and linear regression are employed in this study in order to analyze a dataset of 10,202 online reviews. The results indicate that the most common attributes of airport services significantly impact customer satisfaction, as well as how the sentiment expressed in online reviews correlates with the numerical ratings. A significant contribution of this study lies in its contribution to understanding the dynamics of customer satisfaction in the field of airport services as well as in identifying areas for improvement that could enhance the overall traveler experience in the burgeoning field of smart airports. In the context of smart airport systems, the analysis of exploratory and predictive data provides valuable insights into the optimization of airport operations, thus enriching the body of knowledge in this rapidly evolving area and providing the foundation for future research. Full article

Data envelopment analysis (DEA), which is frequently used in efficiency analysis, has also been applied to the measurement of entrepreneurial efficiency for the attainment of desired values of macroeconomic indicators (such as the objectives of sustainable economic growth). For this application, DEA takes into account the economic, environmental, and social impact of entrepreneurship as the three dimensions of sustainability. This paper aimed to investigate the potential for a scalable (in diversity, equity, and inclusion dimensions) DEA application in sustainable entrepreneurship performance (SEP) assessment through three channels (assessing SEP without ESG activities; ESG→SEP; ESG (DEI)→SEP) and present an empirical study related to economic growth assessment and its environmental, social, and governance (ESG), and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) determinants across selected Western Balkans (WB) and European Union (EU) companies, based on the use of the proposed scalable DEA. It highlights how crucial a scalable nonparametric approach to macroeconomic efficiency analysis is and provides a more comprehensive perspective to the researchers on this issue. This study used a non-oriented DEA model with variable return-to-scale in a group of 60 WB and 60 EU companies, all of which adopted ICT/Blockchain (BC) technologies (the 11 ESG metrics). The annual corporate data was collected for seven years from 2017 until 2023. We projected the selected data to three country particularities (mass acceptance, adoption, and implementation of ICT/BC; mass labor force return from overseas; and ethnic, cultural, and religious particularities) and performed statistical analysis. Our findings estimate the influence of these three particularities on economic growth potential. In all countries’ cases, we found a statistically sound (significant, positive) correlation between ESG and SEP’s economic growth quality performance. Particularly, when corporate social and DEI initiatives mediate (channel III), SEP’s economic growth gains the best performance (+18%) in countries with ethnic, cultural, and religious particularities (BiH, NM), a +17% in countries enjoying massive labor force return from overseas (AL) and performs well in quality (particularly in the innovation and integrity) SEP performance success dimensions (all WB and EU countries). The proposed scalable DEA shows clearly, by performing an empirical analysis, which modern business (adopting ICT/BC) is the most effective in achieving sustainability projected to country particularities, helping corporate management to improve economic growth efficiency. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI) has helped enhance the management of software development projects through automation, improving efficiency and enabling project professionals to focus on strategic aspects. Despite its advantages, applying AI in software development project management still faces several challenges. Thus, this study investigates key obstacles to applying artificial intelligence in project management, specifically in the project planning phase. This research systematically reviews the existing literature. The review comprises scientific articles published from 2019 to 2024 and, from the inspected records, 17 papers were analyzed in full-text form. In this review, 10 key barriers were reported and categorized based on the Technology–Organization–Environment (TOE) framework. This review showed that eleven articles reported technological challenges, twelve articles identified organizational challenges, and six articles reported environmental challenges. In addition, this review found that there was relatively little interest in the literature on environmental challenges, compared to organizational and technological barriers. Full article

Brain tumors are frequently classified with high accuracy using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to better comprehend the spatial connections among pixels in complex pictures. Due to their tiny receptive fields, the majority of deep convolutional neural network (DCNN)-based techniques overfit and are unable to extract global context information from more significant regions. While dilated convolution retains data resolution at the output layer and increases the receptive field without adding computation, stacking several dilated convolutions has the drawback of producing a grid effect. This research suggests a dilated parallel deep convolutional neural network (PDCNN) architecture that preserves a wide receptive field in order to handle gridding artifacts and extract both coarse and fine features from the images. This article applies multiple preprocessing strategies to the input MRI images used to train the model. By contrasting various dilation rates, the global path uses a low dilation rate (2,1,1), while the local path uses a high dilation rate (4,2,1) for decremental even numbers to tackle gridding artifacts and to extract both coarse and fine features from the two parallel paths. Using three different types of MRI datasets, the suggested dilated PDCNN with the average ensemble method performs best. The accuracy achieved for the multiclass Kaggle dataset-III, Figshare dataset-II, and binary tumor identification dataset-I is 98.35%, 98.13%, and 98.67%, respectively. In comparison to state-of-the-art techniques, the suggested structure improves results by extracting both fine and coarse features, making it efficient. Full article