Parsing Technology-entanglement for Thick-things: The Complication or Complexity of Media and Technologies

Can an interpretive framework untangle distributed forms of technology-enabled media? The thesis develops an interpretive framework to provide an antidote to reckless imaginations that privilege concealment and encourage explanations of technology-enablement as social or automagical. The framework is a response to Latour's call to modify explanations given simply as 'social' and Kittler's observation of software as an unrecognizable layering of linguistic extensions. The interpretive framework is developed from successive encounters with technology-enablement associated with a particular geospatial use of Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality that accesses photos embedded with geospatial information depends on multiple distributed technologies ranging from smartphones to satellites. This contemporary form of technology-enabled media is demonstrated by a Panoramio geospatial layer of tourist photos accessed using the software product Layar. The encounters are with an image collection, WIFI router, 3G cellular data network, iPhone, geospatial location service and Layar. These enabling technologies have been gathered and inspected for human and nonhuman agencies during project encounters that followed an ethnographic approach. A dialogue with technology practitioners informs the analytical engagement with Augmented Reality to provide an alternative vocabulary for theoretical access to those vastly distributed and indescribable technology-enablers. The framework is developed through successive propositions. The encounters pursue the trajectory of a digital image from a technology-enabled visual representation that can be created or consumed with ease to distributed image collections that operate as a contemporary site of interoperability. Photos are transformed in proposition 1 from a visual surface to a realm of specificity that is a stratified and expansive construction of exchangeable data. The second proposition establishes technologies as constructed from atomic building blocks that are combined in either complicated or complex formations. The second proposition asserts that it is necessary to distinguish between complication and complexity. Propositions 1 and 2 are extended by a debate between respective positions of an extremely flat ontology and an expansive materialism represented by Bryant, Barad, Latour and Bennett. The flat ontology is rejected and a thick account of things is asserted as a position that better accounts for the entanglement of humans and nonhumans interoperating amongst a synthetic ecology of media technologies. The third proposition is that the technology-enablement of media is a complicated or complex form of technology-entanglement. The thesis demonstrates this interpretive framework before concluding with a ‘how-to’ that guides researchers adapting this methodology for their own projects

Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design – FMCAD 2022

The Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD) is an annual conference on the theory and applications of formal methods in hardware and system verification. FMCAD provides a leading forum to researchers in academia and industry for presenting and discussing groundbreaking methods, technologies, theoretical results, and tools for reasoning formally about computing systems. FMCAD covers formal aspects of computer-aided system design including verification, specification, synthesis, and testing

Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design – FMCAD 2022

The Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD) is an annual conference on the theory and applications of formal methods in hardware and system verification. FMCAD provides a leading forum to researchers in academia and industry for presenting and discussing groundbreaking methods, technologies, theoretical results, and tools for reasoning formally about computing systems. FMCAD covers formal aspects of computer-aided system design including verification, specification, synthesis, and testing

Open semantic hyperwikis

Wikis are lightweight, community-editable, web-based hypertext systems, which can be described as a website that anybody can edit. From this collaborative base has grown significant efforts at large-scale knowledge management such as Wikipedia. Recently, ‘semantic’ wiki systems have been developed with typed links, such that the structure of nodes and links is analogous to an RDF graph of resources and arcs: a machineprocessable representation of the relations between articles which can form part of the web of linked data. Despite this, the hypermedia side of wiki systems has so far largely been constrained to the web model of simple embedded, unidirectional links. This research considers the hypertext origins of wiki systems, asks, and answers how the technologies developed during decades of hypertext research may be applied to better manage their document, and thus knowledge, structure. We present experimental evidence supporting the hypothesis that additional hypermedia features would be useful to wiki editors on both macro- and micro-scales. Quantitative analysis of editing logs from a large-scale wiki shows that hyperstructure changes form a substantial proportion of editing effort. Conversely, qualitative user studies show that individual user editing can be better supported by classical but since overlooked hypertext features such as first-class links and transclusion. We then specify an extensive model for a ‘open semantic hyperwiki’ system which draws from these fields, based around first-class links with support for transclusion and advanced functional link types, with defined semantics for the role of versioning and parametric nodes in the linked data world, while mindful to preserve the core simplicity that allows non-expert users to contribute. This is followed by a practical approach to its implementation in terms of an existing experimental modular wiki foundation, and the actual prototype implementation, which has been made available as open source software. Finally, we work through applying the system to a set of real-world use cases which are currently employing classic, non-semantic wiki software, and evaluate the implementation in comparison to a conventional semantic wiki in a user study.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo