The power of writing hands : logical memory performance after handwriting and typing tasks with Wechsler Memory Scale revised edition

Information and communications technologies have generated a multilevel metamorphose not only of the educational field, but also of the usage of hands. The shift from handwriting to typing is bringing about a change in the ways people learn to recognize and recollect letters and words, read and write. This study investigates how different writing methods affect memory retrieval. The aim is to understand how the memory performances compare after handwriting and typing tasks, and how the factor of time or age affects recollection. The Wechsler Memory Scale Revised Edition (WMS-R) was used with experimental within-subjects research design to measure memory functions of 31 University of Lapland students in 2016. Participants wrote down a dictated story with a pencil, computer keyboard, and a touch screen keyboard. Consequently, the degree of recollection of each writing task was measured and analysed with repeated measures analysis of variance. Additionally, this thesis deliberates the embodied cognition theory, as learning and memorizing are not simply information processing in nothingness. Experiences, actions and senses all play part in learning, as well as in writing process with the harmonious co-operation of brain, mind and body. The results of this study indicate that writing modalities have statistically significant effect on recollection, handwriting receiving the highest scores. These results are of interest due to the constant increase of digitalization of learning environments. Moreover, these results can be reflected upon when evaluating the impending changes in the Finnish curriculum, from which cursive handwriting is removed in autumn 2016

Graphic Design Students’ Perceptions Of Using Apple iPads To Create Sketches And Promote Idea Generation

Artists and designers typically utilize sketching during the early stages of the design process because it provides them with an opportunity to transfer ideas from their head onto paper, computer, or mobile device. Sketching is regarded by researchers in the field of design to be an essential part of the design process. The existing research in this field is focused on comparing paper and pencil sketches with sketches completed on computers. There is a void in the literature examining sketching completed on mobile devices like the Apple iPad. Therefore, this study aimed to fill that void. The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of graphic design students’ use of iPads for sketching activities. The experiences and perceptions of 10 graphic design students who completed a sketching activity using iPads, were examined during the spring and fall semesters of 2016 at a university in the Upper-Midwest. Qualitative phenomenological research methods were used in the study. Data was gathered from interviews and from analysis of the participants’ iPad sketches. The general categories for the participants’ perspectives included background information, design workflow, attitudes on sketching, experience using the iPads, and quality of the iPad sketches. Three themes emerged from an analysis of the data. The first theme addressed the reasons why students preferred sketching with paper and pencil. The second theme explained the benefits students found when sketching on iPads. Finally, theme three expounded on alternative idea generation techniques that could be accomplished on iPads

Rise of the Modern Mediatrix: The Feminization of Media and Mediating Labor, 1865-1945

This dissertation uncovers a vast archive of fictional female telegraph, telephone, and typewriter girls, combining rigorous historical research with feminist, psychoanalytic readings of mass cultural texts to show how the global gendering of low-level communication work shaped modern media. It begins in the United States, where women first performed this work, and explores three further national contexts (France, Germany, and Britain) where female operators and typists circulated as media icons of techno-social connection in an increasingly atomized age. The title “modern mediatrix” describes the essential mediating role white-collar woman workers have played in modern media infrastructure, from switchboard to editing bench. This role has been promoted by corporations, nations, and mass media as feminine for over a century. Across four chapters that engage ad campaigns, plays, novels, and films, I reveal the modern mediatrix to be a uniquely flexible character, capable of creating continuity across industrial ruptures and activating new narrative forms. To trace this character’s construction, I tie her unique semiotic tools and social skills to evolving Christian notions of sanctified feminine transmission, weaving as women’s work, and Hollywood’s reliance on an invisible feminized clerical proletariat. Media scholars who point out telegraphs and typewriters still rarely note the girl behind the machine. For too long, my field has clung to the male factory worker as an all-purpose archetype for cinematic labor and depicted female tech users at home, alone, in the thrall of the apparatus. Instead, my project proposes the rise of the modern mediatrix as an essential theoretical and material foundation for film and media studies. Each of my chapters explores a different facet of the modern mediatrix. I begin in the 1860s, when Western Union began recruiting lady telegraphers and the Catholic Church premiered its Blessing of the Telegraph, with Mary cast as a pure channel for man’s natural use of electricity. Framed by this techno-romantic mother-figure, Chapter 1 examines three teenage girls enshrined in US popular history as the first users of the telegraph, telephone, and typewriter. I show how inventors and companies used virginal foremothers to claim paternity over communications technologies and their feminized workforces. Chapter 2 argues Bell’s speech-weaver ad campaigns coded onscreen operators as vernacular translators of transitional cinematic syntax. Highlighting telephone girls’ enlistment as temp techno-pedagogues during US film’s introduction of cross-cutting and European film’s polyglot transition to sound, it offers women’s film-weaving labor as an alternative to the surgical rhetoric (suture) and patriarchal authorship model typically used to historicize film editing conventions. Chapter 3 traces the secretary’s construction as an automatic audience member in interwar European modernist media. Suggesting that the hypnotic effects of taking dictation stoked Weimar-era anxieties about women workers’ receptivity to media-savvy fascist dictators, it catalogs secretarial symptoms that trouble Frankfurt school divisions of worker-spectators into shocked factory workers and absorbed little shopgirls. Chapter 4 uses the metallic echoes of taps to read Astaire-Rogers musicals as anxious allegories for the Production Code’s reliance on typists, and as encrypted channels to two fleetingly feminized languages, Morse and binary code. A postwar coda draws out the clerical conduit’s transgressive potential, hinted at by her narrative flexibility and explicitly reclaimed in the 1970s and 80s by feminist filmmakers and techno-scientists. With access to the codes of information capitalism, virginal electric muses and hysterical film fans became canny decipherers of mystified techno-cultural matrilineages

Pretty in punk: female bodies and identity performance in the pit

Along with style, habitus, and visual self-representation, dancing in the mosh pit at punk shows is a way of performing one’s punk identity. While the visual aspect or “punk look” can be aimed at both members of the punk community and society at large, bodily performance in the mosh pit at punk shows is a more intimate way of presenting oneself as punk within the scene. In this presentation I will argue that the mosh pit is a contested and highly gendered space, in which women and girls are not always welcome. Thus, my primary aim is to point out the ways in which punk communities tend to slip into reproducing sexist modes of behavior, and give insight into the ways in which these tendencies can be negotiated and minimized. Furthermore, I will give an ethnographic account of a number of different situations in which gender was an issue in the mosh pit, and map out different strategies used by women and girls in order to fight this specific form of gendered social exclusion. The presentation is based on participant observation conduced at punk concerts primarily in Serbia, but in other European countries as well

An aesthetic for sustainable interactions in product-service systems?

Copyright @ 2012 Greenleaf PublishingEco-efficient Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability. However the application of this concept is still very limited because its implementation and diffusion is hindered by several barriers (cultural, corporate and regulative ones). The paper investigates the barriers that affect the attractiveness and acceptation of eco-efficient PSS alternatives, and opens the debate on the aesthetic of eco-efficient PSS, and the way in which aesthetic could enhance some specific inner qualities of this kinds of innovations. Integrating insights from semiotics, the paper outlines some first research hypothesis on how the aesthetic elements of an eco-efficient PSS could facilitate user attraction, acceptation and satisfaction

Professional translation between academic theory, best practice and market realities: a data-led investigation into practitioners’ experiences of their current working conditions

Translation is, as Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked, “a difficult business”. With a growing global annual sales volume that currently exceeds US$ 46bn, it is also an extremely lucrative one. This PhD project is primarily an investigation into the “internal knowledge” of professional practitioners who make their living at the intersection between these two aspects of translation; who operate simultaneously in the “mnemonic time” of translation and the “instantaneous time” of globalisation, and on a daily basis negotiate between their own experience of translation as a process that takes as long as it takes – and, according to Translation Studies scholars, in a sense always remains provisional and unfinished – and their clients’ reliance on receiving complete and accurate translations by or before a pre-agreed deadline. Quantitative and qualitative data obtained from a survey completed by 292 respondents from 33 different countries shows that, although almost 60 per cent of respondents define themselves as service providers, many perceive their work as translators – described as “the work itself”, “the actual work” or “the work as such” in a number of responses – as separate from, and less stressful than, their work as providers of translation services. This distinction, which is expressed most concisely in one respondent’s wish for “[l]ess paperwork, emails, negotiations – I would just like to translate” (emphasis added), appears to point beyond the simple difference between billable and non-billable work. While a number of respondents explicitly talk about their love or passion for “translating itself”, many are considerably less enamoured with the market environment that enables them to turn that passion into a livelihood. Time pressure emerges as a constant and near-ubiquitous issue that dominates many respondents’ experience of their professional practice and is inextricably linked to concerns about remuneration, work/life balance, mental and physical wellbeing and the standard of quality respondents feel able to deliver under these conditions. To compensate for growing pressure on rates, a substantial number report working longer hours and/or at greater speed than they would like to. As responses to survey questions about stress factors and enjoyment confirm, these concerns are frequently exacerbated by the feeling that clients who commission translations fail to appreciate the full of complexity of what translators actually do. Specifically, responses to survey questions about definitions of professional identity show that respondents were consistently more likely to ascribe reductive views of translators as service providers, suppliers or resources to their clients, and more likely to ascribe empowering and/or creative roles as language experts, knowledge workers, word artists or intercultural mediators to themselves. It may also be the case that this is a mutual failure: that some professional translators themselves have a reductive view of their clients’ constraints and expectations unless there is sufficient opportunity, time, inclination and trust on both sides for meaningful dialogue beyond negotiating rates and deadlines. This can be difficult in a market dominated by profit-driven corporate language service providers (LSPs) whose business model relies on marginalising professional translators as service providers, vendors and translation resources. My secondary research objective is to examine what can be done, and/or is already being done, by HE institutions, professional associations and other stakeholders to equip new and aspiring translators with the skills and resilience required to confront the working conditions described by survey respondents, and to offer proposals for new and existing models of best practice in translator education, e.g. situated learning under conditions that are as authentic as possible, mentorship schemes and other forms of collaboration between new and experienced professionals. The thesis concludes with a speculative chapter that explores potential scenarios for the future of human translation in a market environment that is progressively geared towards eliminating the human element from translation workflows altogether

Digital China: creativity and community in the sinocybersphere

Over the past decade, digital technologies have profoundly reshaped the Chinese cultural landscape. With a focus on the creative agency of new media and online communities, this volume examines this development through the notion of the Sinocybersphere - the networked spaces across the globe that not only operate on the Chinese script, but also imaginatively negotiate the meanings of Chinese culture in the digital age. Instead of asking what makes the internet or new media “Chinese,” the chapters situate contemporary entanglements of cultural and digital practices within specific historical, social, and discursive contexts. Covering topics as diverse as live-streaming, AI poetry, online literature, poetry memes, cyberpunk fiction, virtual art exhibitions, cooking videos, censorship, and viral translations, the collection as a whole not only engages with a wide range of Chinese new media phenomena, but also demonstrates their relevance to our understanding of contemporary digital culture

Rethinking Digital Inequalities: The Experience of the Marginalized in Community Technology Centers

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Informatics and Computing, 2015Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have emerged as symbols of modernity in the developing world, and currently policy makers and popular press perceived them as bridges to promote social and digital equalities. However, scholars have regularly demonstrated that digital inclusion projects have often failed to meet expectations related to human development objectives. Some postulate that the problem may not be entirely one of project failure, but rather of our limited understanding of the value that technology provides. Hence, this dissertation emphasizes the socio-cultural aspects of digital inclusion projects aimed at favela residents and attempts to understand ICTs aspects and practices from their perspective. Favelas, urban slums in Brazil, are considered marginalized areas due to the absence of State social and physical investments. As a consequence of this, such areas lack proper infrastructure, sanitation and road systems and provide their residents, the marginalized, with a low quality of life. Favela residents are deprived not only of proper services for their basic needs, such as health and education, but also of access to technology and Internet. Most of them rely on community technology centers (CTCs) to access ICTs. Based on an over eight-month ethnography in the favelas of Vitória, Brazil, this dissertation focuses on the motivations, engagements, and adoption of ICTs by favela residents in CTCs. It asks the following questions: (1) What is their experience using CTCs? (2) How does their experience inform the ways we should think about what constitutes empowerment and disempowerment vis-à-vis ICTs? It argues that theoretical positions stemming from technology utilitarianism need expanding, because mundane and non-instrumental practices observed in the favelas shed light on the importance of technology in a variety of dimensions within people’s lives. Encompassing such practices contributes to a broader comprehension of the engagements and strategies that help shape the daily use of technology by people who suffer the consequences of being poor and marginalized