Image-Enabled Discourse: Investigating the Creation of Visual Information as Communicative Practice

Anyone who has clarified a thought or prompted a response during a conversation by drawing a picture has exploited the potential of image making as an interactive tool for conveying information. Images are increasingly ubiquitous in daily communication, in large part due to advances in visually enabled information and communication technologies (ICT), such as information visualization applications, image retrieval systems and visually enabled collaborative work tools. Human abilities to use images to communicate are however far more sophisticated and nuanced than these technologies currently support. In order to learn more about the practice of image making as a specialized form of information and communication behavior, this study examined face-to-face conversations involving the creation of ad hoc visualizations (i.e., napkin drawings ). A model of image-enabled discourse is introduced, which positions image making as a specialized form of communicative practice. Multimodal analysis of video-recorded conversations focused on identifying image-enabled communicative activities in terms of interactional sociolinguistic concepts of conversational involvement and coordination, specifically framing, footing and stance. The study shows that when drawing occurs in the context of an ongoing dialogue, the activity of visual representation performs key communicative tasks. Visualization is a form of social interaction that contributes to the maintenance of conversational involvement in ways that are not often evident in the image artifact. For example, drawing enables us to coordinate with each other, to introduce alternative perspectives into a conversation and even to temporarily suspend the primary thread of a discussion in order to explore a tangential thought. The study compares attributes of the image artifact with those of the activity of image making, described as a series of contrasting affordances. Visual information in complex systems is generally represented and managed based on the affordances of the artifact, neglecting to account for all that is communicated through the situated action of creating. These finding have heuristic and best-practice implications for a range of areas related to the design and evaluation of virtual collaboration environments, visual information extraction and retrieval systems, and data visualization tools

Tracking the Temporal-Evolution of Supernova Bubbles in Numerical Simulations

The study of low-dimensional, noisy manifolds embedded in a higher dimensional space has been extremely useful in many applications, from the chemical analysis of multi-phase flows to simulations of galactic mergers. Building a probabilistic model of the manifolds has helped in describing their essential properties and how they vary in space. However, when the manifold is evolving through time, a joint spatio-temporal modelling is needed, in order to fully comprehend its nature. We propose a first-order Markovian process that propagates the spatial probabilistic model of a manifold at fixed time, to its adjacent temporal stages. The proposed methodology is demonstrated using a particle simulation of an interacting dwarf galaxy to describe the evolution of a cavity generated by a Supernov

Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media’s adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come

Tech Giants, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism

This book examines the impact of the "Big Five" technology companies – Apple, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft – on journalism and the media industries. It looks at the current role of algorithms and artificial intelligence in curating how we consume media and their increasing influence on the production of the news. Exploring the changes that the technology industry and automation have made in the past decade to the production, distribution and consumption of news globally, the book considers what happens to journalism once it is produced and enters the media ecosystems of the internet tech giants – and the impact of social media and AI on such things as fake news in the post-truth age

Newman v. Google

3rd amended complain

Educational technology: assessing instructional use in the elementary classroom

The purpose of this study is to understand the process by which teachers integrate educational technology into their instructional practices in elementary classrooms in Newfoundland and Labrador. In Canada, several provinces have invested millions of dollars towards innovative teaching practices (Coles, 2018; Council of Ontario Directors of Education, 2017; Murgatroyd & Couture, 2010; Renić, 2020). Considering the local context, the Newfoundland and Labrador Government announced $20 million for the purchase of laptops for all teachers and Chromebooks for students across the K-12 education system (Education and Early Childhood Development, 2020). An important supplement to the introduction of educational technology into classrooms is the professional development activities for teachers through which technology utilization can be facilitated. I analyzed how professional development and policy relate to the adoption and utilization of educational technology in elementary classrooms across Newfoundland and Labrador. My study was situated in a qualitative constructivist paradigm and applied a single case study design. The critical theory of technology, proposed by Feenberg (1991), served as the philosophical lens for this research. The data collection process included an online teacher questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and documentation review. An interpretive analysis was applied for gaining an in-depth understanding of educational technology use in classrooms. The main question focused on how educational technology is integrated into instructional practices in elementary classrooms. Findings revealed that educational technology was integrated into instructions to help facilitate the learning process. Two broad categories emerged from the data that reflected educational technology’s use with instructions: (i) differentiating by offering choices and (ii) teaching with Google Workspace. Teachers also identified several factors that affected the process of educational technology integration. Moreover, three professional development characteristics: collaboration, selfdirection, and relevance motivated teachers towards using educational technology. This study also provides useful insights for policy and suggests a framework for the context of Newfoundland and Labrador in relation to educational technology integration in classrooms

Academic Ableism

Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center. For too long, argues Jay Timothy Dolmage, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation. Examining everything from campus accommodation processes, to architecture, to popular films about college life, Dolmage argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all

I am a knitter: hand-knitting in a digitally-mediated society

Hand-knitting continues to be a popular past-time for many people. It underwent a resurgence in the latter part of the 1990s, which was around the same time as the development of the World Wide Web. Knitting went on to become more widespread around 2007, alongside the time social media and smartphones combined to ensure digital technology came to dominate interpersonal communications. By 2017, hand-knitting continued to be popular, but the media and public focus waned. Also, by this date, concerns began to increase about the psycho-social effects of high levels of social media, internet, and smartphone use. This research seeks to address the position of hand-knitting in a society that has become increasingly mediated through digital communication technology. It establishes the concept of the knitter self, an identity that develops through practicing knitting, that encapsulates the effects of knitting on an individual and sits in contrast to identities developed online. Key to this contrast are two themes: firstly, the control the knitter has over their knitting; secondly, the importance of the objects they make in being useful and conferring this usefulness on the maker due to the embodiment of time and feelings through the making process. The research method developed combines hand-knitting practice, contextual investigation, and personal testimony, creating a mixed methodology drawing on concepts from practice as research, oral history, modified grounded theory and autoethnography. There are several contributions to knowledge emerging from this research. It establishes hand-knitting as an interpretative research tool that exploits the slow, embodied nature of knitting to examine the craft itself, within a broad methodological framework. Secondly, it positions hand-knitting as a way of developing skills to negotiate a digitally-mediated society and articulates the importance of sustaining knitting culture in contemporary society through the emerging concept of the knitter self

Chasing Mythical Beasts

Classical Antiquity is strongly present in youth culture globally. It accompanies children during their initiation into adulthood and thereby deepens their knowledge of the cultural code based on the Greek and Roman heritage. It enables intergenerational communication, with the reception of the Classics being able to serve as a marker of transformations underway in societies the world over. The team of contributors from Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand focuses on the reception of mythical creatures as the key to these transformations, including the changes in human mentality. The volume gathers the results of a stage of the programme ‘Our Mythical Childhood’, supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Alumni Award for Innovative Networking Initiatives and an ERC Consolidator Grant. Thanks to the multidisciplinary character of its research (Classics, Modern Philologies, Animal Studies) and to the universal importance of the theme of childhood, the volume offers stimulating reading for scholars, students, and educators, as well as for a wider audience