The academic excellence of universities around the globe has always been a matter of extended study and so has the quality of an institution’s presence in the World Wide Web. The purpose of this research is to study the extent to which a university’s academic excellence is related to the quality of its web presence. In order to achieve this, a method was devised that quantified the website quality and search engine optimization (SEO) performance of the university websites of the top 100 universities in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) Shanghai list. A variety of tools was employed to measure and test each website and produced a Web quality ranking, an SEO performance ranking, as well as a combined overall web ranking for each one. Comparing these rankings with the ARWU shows that academic excellence is moderately correlated with website quality, but SEO performance is not. Moreover, the overall web ranking also shows a moderate correlation with ARWU which seems to be positively influenced by website quality and negatively by SEO performance. Conclusively, the results of the research indicate that universities place particular emphasis on issues concerning website quality, while the utilization of SEO does not appear to be of equal importance, indicating possible room for improvement in this area.

The English language is the most dominant language in the Western world and its influence can be noticed in every aspect of human communication. It’s increasing diffusion, especially since the turn of the century, is hard to measure with conventional means. The present research studies the use of language in websites of European Union (EU) member states, in order to collect data about the prevalence of the English language in the different countries and regions of the European Union. To achieve a realistic representation of today’s landscape of the European Web, this study uses a vast population of websites and a representative sampling size and methodology. By analyzing and processing the findings from over 100,000 websites from every country in the EU, a solid foundation is set that is used to explore the dominance of the English language in the European World Wide Web in general. This is the first study that examines the presence of English content in the websites of all EU member countries and provides statistical evidence regarding the ratio of English content availability for each country. Conclusively, the results of the research demonstrate that the English language is available on more than one quarter of all websites of non-English speaking EU member states. Moreover, it is available in the vast majority of multilingual and bilingual websites, while at the same time being the only language that is available in a number of monolingual websites. In addition, it is shown preference over the national language in a significant number of cases. A moderate negative correlation is found between a member state’s population and the availability of English in these countries’ websites and the same holds true for a member state’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Both these correlations indicate that smaller countries tend to provide more content in English in order to establish a stronger presence in the international environment. Taking into account the role of language in the expression of national identity, this study provides data and insights which may contribute to the discussion about the changes underway in the national identity of EU member states.

Since the dawn of the new millennium and even earlier, a coordinated effort has been underway to expand the World Wide Web into a machine-readable web of data known as the Semantic Web. The field of art and culture has been one of the most eager to integrate with the Semantic Web, since metadata, data structures, linked-data, e.g., the Getty vocabularies project and the Europeana LOD initiative—and other building blocks of this web of data are considered essential in cataloging and disseminating art and culture-related content. However, art is a constantly evolving entity and as such it is the subject of a vast number of online media outlets and journalist blogs and websites. During the course of the present study the researchers collected information about how integrated the media outlets that diffuse art and culture-related content and news are to the Semantic Web. The study uses quantitative metrics to evaluate a website’s adherence to Semantic Web standards and it proceeds to draw conclusions regarding how that integration affects their popularity in the modern competitive landscape of the Web.

Online learning has been on an upward trend for many years and is becoming more and more prevalent every day, consistently presenting the less privileged parts of our society with an equal opportunity at education. Unfortunately, though, it seldom takes advantage of the new technologies and capabilities offered by the modern World Wide Web. In this article, we present an interactive online platform that provides users with learning activities for students of English as a foreign language. The platform focuses on using audiovisual multimedia content and a user experience (UX) centered approach to provide learners with an enhanced learning experience that aims at improving their knowledge level while at the same time increasing their engagement and motivation to participate in learning. To achieve this, the platform uses advanced techniques, such as interactive vocabulary and pronunciation assistance, mini-games, embedded media, voice recording, and more. In addition, the platform provides educators with analytics about user engagement and performance. In this study, more than 100 young students participated in a preliminary use of the aforementioned platform and provided feedback concerning their experience. Both the platform's metrics and the user-provided feedback indicated increased engagement and a preference of the participants for interactive audiovisual multimedia-based learning activities.

This paper presents the digital tools, online platform and methodology created during the implementation of BYZART, a European co-funded project for the enrichment of Europeana collections with heritage objects for Byzantine art and archaeology provided by the partners of the project. The creation of the platform and its usability are thoroughly described as well as the importance of such tools for the preservation and promotion of world cultural heritage. Also, the paper discusses the adaptation of the methodology to other projects, for the engagement of communities in the field of heritage datafication, and we demonstrate how existing content can be re-used by “meta-creators” to develop new content, applications and presentation paradigms.

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Studying searcher behavior has been a cornerstone of search engine research for decades, since it can lead to a better understanding of user needs and allow for an improved user experience. Going beyond descriptive data analysis and statistics, studies have been utilizing the capabilities of Machine Learning to further investigate how users behave during general purpose searching. But the thematic content of a search greatly affects many aspects of user behavior, which often deviates from general purpose search behavior. Thus, in this study, emphasis is placed specifically on the fields of Art and Cultural Heritage. Insights derived from behavioral data can help Culture and Art institutions streamline their online presence and allow them to better understand their user base. Existing research in this field often focuses on lab studies and explicit user feedback, but this study takes advantage of real usage quantitative data and its analysis through machine learning. Using data collected by real world usage of the Art Boulevard proprietary search engine for content related to Art and Culture and through the means of Machine Learning-powered tools and methodologies, this article investigates the peculiarities of Art-related online searches. Through clustering, various archetypes of Art search sessions were identified, thus providing insight on the variety of ways in which users interacted with the search engine. Additionally, using extreme Gradient boosting, the metrics that were more likely to predict the success of a search session were documented, underlining the importance of various aspects of user activity for search success. Finally, through applying topic modeling on the textual information of user-clicked results, the thematic elements that dominated user interest were investigated, providing an overview of prevalent themes in the fields of Art and Culture. It was established that preferred results revolved mostly around traditional visual Art themes, while academic and historical topics also had a strong presence.