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Digital Twins (DT) have become popular in various industries to solve complex problems. A true DT allows for bidirectional real-time data flows between the physical and virtual worlds. The term DT was often overused, leading to confusion about its capabilities therefore this paper provides a review of the current state of DT and its applications in the minerals industry. Existing literature shows a slow adoption of DTs in the minerals industry, which is largely due to challenges associated with geological unpredictability, legacy system integration, cost, skill gaps, cybersecurity, and lack of standards. Combining immersive visualisation with real-time spatial computer graphics could improve the usability and acceptance of DTs in the minerals industry which has been used successfully in training while underexplored for operational scenarios. The study concludes by highlighting the need for further research to understand the effectiveness of such an approach in mineral operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will investigate the emergence of a digitalising state in the global south through a focus on new techniques of governance initiated by the information age. It will discuss the mechanisms of the digitalising state across two realms – the governance of information infrastructures evident in the transition from paper to digital data, and the governance of informational peripheries emerging across digital and territorial exclusions. The paper argues that through these dynamics, the digitalising state is engaged in a politics of digitalisation-as-urbanisation where digitalisation becomes both a product and producer of regional urbanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines diverse infrastructural interventions in the making of Ardhisasa, the Kenyan state’s digital land information management platform, as a space of contestation, negotiation, and experimentation. We analyse the platformisation of governance through theories on liminality to explain the agency of various actors in shaping the digital state. We particularly zoom into the influence of two actors: the private actors in the land sector and the civil society organisations representing informalised residents, and how they exercise agency in the development of Ardhisasa. Drawing on interviews with state and non-state actors, secondary literature, and extensive experience within Kenya’s land administration system, we trace the overt and covert exercise of power in the platformisation of land administration of Nairobi. Our central thesis is that, despite its progressive development, Ardhisasa follows the tradition of a long line of large-scale infrastructural or developmental projects that rarely deliver on their promise for improvement but rather further entrench marginalised groups due to its exclusion of the already existing, albeit informalised, land administration and transaction practices that meet the needs of the urban poor. We argue that Ardhisasa’s perpetual state of becoming leads to the spatialisation of liminality itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a deep-seated realization that the uptake of digitization in newsrooms has necessitated the need for an ethical reformation. This article examines ethical issues confronting operations of selected Namibian hybrid media organizations. Using the Namibia Media Holdings and The Namibian as case studies, this article argues that the platformization of news work, ever-changing technological landscape, the immediacy of internet, media sustainability concerns, and the changing nature of public interest have reconfigured ethical decision-making in hybrid media organizations in Namibia. It demonstrates that although traditional journalism ethics are still relevant, there are new ethical issues confronting hybrid media organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a literature approach and a sociology of religion perspective, this research discusses the concept and phenomenon of digital religion in modern society. It is concluded that digital religion is not just the phenomenon of online religious practice for spiritual purposes but rather the extension of traditional religion into a new culture due to the digitalisation of society. The networked nature of modern society has a significant impact on the way people shape their experience of religiosity. Dialogue about God takes place in new forms as a form of cyber-theology. The results of this study challenge further research to see the extent to which people build their faith when spiritual experiences change into digital forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain technology, best known as the decentralised transactional ledger of Internet currencies such as Bitcoin, could provide possibilities for tracking the origin of timber products. As such, it could ease the complex job of timber procurement officers in companies that seek to purchase timber products from trustworthy origins. This study explores how trust among purchasers in suppliers of sustainable timber can be increased and the roles that blockchain technology could play as a factor influencing purchasing decisions. The study examines the attributes influencing purchaser trust in timber products, revealing that the country of origin is the strongest predictor of purchaser trust, followed by the price level for the timber product, the presence of a certification scheme, and the duration of the relationship with the supplier. Blockchain technology also had a significant effect on purchaser trust and could become an important factor for generating trust in timber products during international trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to capture the digital imaginaries of Hungarian schools through the lens of digital utopianism as a theoretical framework. Employing a qualitative research approach and semi-structured interviews, this study contributes to the body of literature concerning organizational and policy-level educational management. It investigates utopian and dystopian visions of digitalized schools within the Hungarian education system, featuring participants comprising school leaders, teachers, and administrative staff drawn from five institutions, offering either general or vocational education, representing diverse ownership structures, including state and religious ownership. The study highlights prominent themes of the imaginaries, such as funding and infrastructure, equity, misuse, and social and pedagogical relations and suggests further research directions and methodologies applicable in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital capitalism produces knowledge as a commodity. Machines and algorithms manage the value chain and concrete human labour is less and less necessary – allegedly. According to the predictions of Karl Marx, the system should be by now on the brink of collapse. Is that correct? Why or why not? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits materialist second-wave feminist debates about domestic labour in the context of digitalisation. Using a differentiated typology of labour, it looks at how the tasks involved in housework have undergone dramatic changes through commodification, decommodification and recommodification without fundamentally altering the gender division of labour in social reproduction, drawing on recent research on the use of online platforms to deliver social reproductive labour via the market in a context in which reproductive labour sits at the centre of an intense time squeeze. It reflects on the implications of the commodification of domestic labour for feminist strategy. The author points to the inadequacy in this context of traditional feminist strategies—for the socialisation of domestic labour through public services, wages for housework or labour-saving through technological solutions—concluding that new strategies are needed that address the underlying social relations that perpetuate unequal divisions of labour in contemporary capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital media and digital data processing have substantially influenced public institutions in recent years and changed their efficiency, effectiveness and organisational set-up (nature of organisations). Based on Fountain's Technology Enactment Framework (TEF), this paper argues that, firstly, in a circular process, digital requirements transform the bureaucratic features of school organisation, and that the effects of digital technologies on the performance and efficiency of schools as bureaucratic organisations are ambivalent. We use interview data from a sample of 51% of the head teachers of vocational school centres in the jurisdiction of Bavaria in order to substantiate these assumptions by means of structured qualitative analysis. Email technology seems particularly significant from a quantitative perspective. Indications for the transformative nature of objective digital technologies with regard to the school bureaucracies can be found for all bureaucratic categories under consideration in this analysis, particularly for the feature 'standardisation'. The examples presented here seem to highlight that gains in efficiency or reductions of losses in efficiency caused by digitalisation are mostly caused by the concrete use of digital technology within the respective school organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]