Z-library, an electronic books (ebooks) website, was shut down in November 2022 for cybercriminal activity. This created a milieu to investigate its educational significance in higher educational institutes. Adopting social representation theory, this article explores 134 comments in r/Z-Library a Reddit subforum populated across social media during the takedown. These users' views are contextualised against opinions from 103 Higher Education (HE) postgraduate students in China, who were engaged in a qualitative study including a survey, focus group and ethnographic observation of a classroom debate. Analysis found an overlap between both groups and suggests that universities need to re-consider digital divides faced by socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Academic poverty, caused by the cost of academic literature and journals, was found to drive students and social media users towards piracy. The article concludes by recommending that universities must consider how to reduce piracy, as institutional libraries move into post-digital futures. These recommendations highlight, then, that if learners must resort to 'academic cybercrime' a rethink is needed about how universities enable a culture of lifelong learning.

Thai Higher Education (Thai HE) is changing, due to international reform. This paper presents data collected in a longitudinal study carried out in Thailand during 2017–2018 using the US version of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and qualitative interviews. We offer a case study about the cultures and engagement of three groups of students found at an international private university in Thailand. The groups studied were international students, Chinese students in a mixed Thai/English curriculum and Thai students studying in Thai, all situated in a Thai HE institutional community. The (NSSE) was administered to 179 students: 89 in an International College, 54 Chinese students and 36 Thai students, as a control. Our results showed different attitudes toward studying, teachers, memorisation, participation, critical thinking, and empathy. This paper concludes with a discussion of how students in an international university in Thailand arrange themselves socially, and why this matters.

Summary Sociolinguists suggest language death entails significant cultural, personal, and ecological loss. Socio-cultural and socio-political factors exacerbate language erosion and encourage supplantation by another more dominant language. Hence, we ask: what are the sociocognitive principles which make language death hurtful and symbolic? Within this article, we attempt to outline a sociocognitive account of language death, situating the Hallidayan perspective of language as a “social-semiotic” system alongside a Cognitive Linguistic approach. We further contextualise language as inseparable from culture, drawing insight from the sociological thought of Bourdieu. We contend that language death entails psychological trauma, representing the destruction of cultural genealogy and the loss of knowledge intrinsic to personal self-imagery and identity. To this end, we present a case study of the Māori languaculture in Aotearoa (New Zealand), tracing the impact of colonialism and marginalisation to current efforts and ambitions to ensure the languacultural survival of Māori and reclaim space in Aotearoa as a respected knowledge system and means of expression, particularly in the socio-technical age of artificial intelligence (AI) and the Web. We argue that our analysis bodes practical implications for language maintenance and revitalisation, concluding that sociolinguistic practitioners should consider a socio-cognitivist as well as socio-technical paradigm for language intervention. In closing, we discuss leveraging AI technologies towards language heritage, archival, and preservation to limit the destructive impact of the death of a language.

Throughout 2020 and into 2021, set against a global pandemic, Thai emancipatory activism unfolded. This paper offers a postmodernist theoretical discourse about such activism, built around the emergent discipline of Web Science. Drawing on a review of surveillance culture insights from Michel Foucault, Manuel Castells, Bruno Latour, Hans Kelsen and David Hume, and textual analysis insights from media studies, we frame acts of internalised colonisation by a powerful government. We suggest these are contested by ‘emergent postcolonialism’ via hashtag activism. As a basis for future research, we offer the theoretical model of a socio-technical political pendulum. Across it, digitally native Thais challenge internal colonialism, through counter-power drawn from the Internet as a postcolonial structure. In doing so, they propel or attract other actors. This momentum creates an emergent emancipatory society where many are still caught in the middle of shifting opinion, which is problematic to mediation. We conclude that Web Science offers a basis for educational reform in Thailand.

Inseparable from the communication of knowledge through the World Wide Web, the study of online social interaction and communication in South East (SE) Asia is growing. The teaching of digital media literacy raises challenging debates for those in Higher Education (HE), especially in a burgeoning digital economy such as Thailand. The advances in technology, growth in mobile connectivity and social media have proliferated online political, social and personal movements, as well as providing a convenient alternative for offline communication. Thailand is emerging into a digital renaissance, but its education system is still lacking pedagogy to support learning for young digital natives. The Thailand 4.0 initiative, a government reform, seeks just that; it challenges Thai HE to innovate teaching a digitally empowered, connected body of students who are now interconnected global actors, shaping complex heterogeneous networks as influencers, users, contributors, and critics. The increase in not only their power but knowledge of how to use the Web, an asset to extend their cultural identity and social capital, raises critical questions about such a burgeoning ‘Thai digital renaissance'. Undoubtedly, we need new ways to equip students as critical learners who can reflect on the inescapable interdisciplinary practice of complicated topics in their study, which includes issues like fake news, revenge pornography, social media journalism and even domestic law in SE Asia, which impact censorship and digital rights. Problematically, these are not simply social or technical phenomena; they are interwoven, which for students new to thinking critically is hard to comprehend. Yet, an emerging discipline, Web Science, offers an interdisciplinary approach to solve this, one changing the view that studying the Web is technical, so understood through knowing how to make lines of code. In this paper, we conceptually integrate two core knowledge components that are intrinsic to Web Science, that of interdisciplinarity and sociotechnical heterogeneity, with current issues surrounding public opinion in Thailand, to offer a reintroduction, for a new audience of researchers, to a discipline we playfully conclude as #webscithai. So, a call to the academic community of Thailand to embrace a sociotechnical pedagogy useful for educating and empowering students in Thailand as global digital citizens.

– In 2018 and 2019, as part of the UK Legal Deposit Libraries’ sponsored ‘Emerging Formats’ project, the British Library’s digital preservation team undertook a program of research into the preservation of new forms of content. One of these content types was eBooks published as Mobile Apps. Research considered a relatively small number of apps in an attempt to better understand the preservation challenges associated with them and make recommendations for a way forwards. It found that whilst the content landscape is extremely varied, the technical challenges are similar for both Android and Apple apps. The greatest challenges appear to lie in the acquisition and access areas, particularly in enabling delivery to appropriate rendering environments and devices, though other challenges remain around the use of device sensors and content stored on remote servers rather than the user’s device. Whilst these challenges may be surmountable with sufficient resource and investment, the lack of growth in this content area in recent years makes large scale investment questionable.

This article introduces the British Library’s Flashback project, which is exploring the practical challenges of preserving digital content currently stored on physical media (magnetic and optical disks). It reports on a Flashback proof of concept that conducted experiments on a sample of content from hybrid collection items dating from between 1980 and 2000. It describes some of the activities undertaken by the proof-of-concept stage of the project from July 2015 to February 2016, including the initial collection profiling and sampling of content, the extraction of content from the disks, and the project team’s experiments with identifying and applying preservation approaches to the content, which included both emulation and migration. It concludes with some general observations on the approaches taken by the proof of concept and shares some recent findings from the second phase of the project, which is concerned with the practical challenges of developing an implementation strategy for the Library’s capture and preservation of digital content currently stored on physical media.

ABSTRACT Neonatal bacteremia Escherichia coli strains commonly belong to the K1 capsular type. Their ability to cause invasive neonatal disease appears to be determined by other virulence factors that have yet to be identified. We report here the genome sequences of four E. coli neonatal bacteremia isolates, including that of the archetypal strain RS218.