From cutting out to cutting with: A materialist reframing of action and multimodality in children’s play and making

Using examples of early childhood play from our independent research studies, we take a closer look to ask what did we miss? In initial multimodal analysis of these events, how did an implicit human-centered insistence on semiotic affordances and strategic design tame the mobile jumble of children’s play and making? The shift from multimodality to materiality in this retrospective analysis builds on and transitions from Kress’ (1997) ground-breaking work on multimodality in children’s play and making, where he noted that a child cuts around a drawing to bring its image into the world of action. “Cutting out” turns a two-dimensional drawing of a car into a three-dimensional paper toy that can be animated for play. In this chapter, we take a new materialist lens (Lenz Taguchi, 2014) to children’s making that considers the intra-action among all the actants in the toy/player/action assemblage that co-produce a flow of play moves and pretend meanings. When we look for materiality, emergence, and mobility, we can better appreciate play’s haphazard trajectories and recognize the embodied “muchness” (Thiel, 201X) of children’s play, we can see how assemblages of bodies, meanings, and actions create knowledge flows from the most ordinary of school supplies: paper

Making Spatial Information Accessible on Touchscreens for Users who are Blind and Visually Impaired

Touchscreens have become a de facto standard of input for mobile devices as they most optimally use the limited input and output space that is imposed by their form factor. In recent years, people who are blind and visually impaired have been increasing their usage of smartphones and touchscreens. Although basic access is available, there are still many accessibility issues left to deal with in order to bring full inclusion to this population. One of the important challenges lies in accessing and creating of spatial information on touchscreens. The work presented here provides three new techniques, using three different modalities, for accessing spatial information on touchscreens. The first system makes geometry and diagram creation accessible on a touchscreen through the use of text-to-speech and gestural input. This first study is informed by a qualitative study of how people who are blind and visually impaired currently access and create graphs and diagrams. The second system makes directions through maps accessible using multiple vibration sensors without any sound or visual output. The third system investigates the use of binaural sound on a touchscreen to make various types of applications accessible such as physics simulations, astronomy, and video games

Discussion of the selection and use of teaching aids and standard materials in the lower school at Perkins School for the Blind

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Gojin: The Five Gods, A Location Based Mobile Game for Tourism

Gojin is a mobile location-based game for English-speaking tourists visiting Kyoto, Japan. The goal of the game is to provide assistance in traveling between famous cultural landmarks and educate players about the location and culture. This is done while still maintaining the enjoyment of game content itself. In this paper, we discuss the design process we followed, from the inspirations for the designs and art, to the technical implementation of each section

Republican Monsters: The Cultural Construction of American Positivist Criminology, 1767-1920

This dissertation examines the history of and cultural influences on positivist criminology in the United States. From Benjamin Rush to the present day, the U.S. has produced an extensive corpus of empirical and theoretical studies that seeks to discern an objective, scientifically-grounded basis for criminal behavior. American positivist criminology has drawn on numerous subfields and theories, including rational choice / economic theory, biology, and psychology, but in all cases, maintains that a purely scientific explanation of offending is possible. This study proceeds from the perspective that divisions between scientific and non-scientific thought are untenable. Drawing on scholarship in literary criticism and sociology, I argue that positivist criminology confronts an inherent contradiction in purporting to develop a purely scientific account of phenomena that are defined by the moral and cultural sentiments of a society. I thus hypothesize that positivist criminology is in fact reliant on the irrational and fictive cultural tropes and images of crime that it claims to exorcize. The dissertation proceeds by reviewing the literature on the history of criminology, developing a set of functional types or tropes for character analysis, and then examining four separate periods in the development of scientific criminology: eighteenth century studies of rational action, nineteenth century studies of defective reasoning, early twentieth century studies of race and crime, and the development of scientifically informed criminalistics programs. Each of these cases captures a different period and focus in the development of scientific criminology. In threading continuity between these cases, I show how criminological positivism is consistently reliant on culturally informed tropes and characters to render itself sensible and coherent

How does handwriting of letters affect mirror-image discrimination?

We explored whether training motor actions that match letter motor representations, supposedly supported by the dorsal visual stream, would contribute to mirror-image discrimination in tasks supported by the ventral visual stream, especially of letters for which orientation is the only feature that can assist discrimination, i.e., reversible letters. Two groups of preliterate children trained motor actions during 20, 20-min daily sessions, in tablet games developed specifically for this study following human-computer interaction principles. Six children played the draw game, tracing and copying letters, and five children played the contact game (the control game) by moving the letters from an initial to a target point. Two reversible letters (d; p), two non-reversible (e; k), and two symmetrical letters (o; x) were used in both games. To evaluate the impact of motor training on orientation processing, children performed independent tasks before and after the training: a four-alternative forced-choice task with letters, and same-different matching tasks with letters and geometric shapes. Children’s performance in the games suggests that letter motor representations have emerged but only when the trained motor actions matched the letter shape (i.e., in the draw game) and they were more important for reversible than for non-reversible or symmetrical letters. The difficulty in mirror-image discrimination found in the four-alternative forced-choice task provide an original contribution showing that this difficulty is not specifically due to the working memory demands of the tasks in which it occurs. The results in the same-different tasks suggest that children became more sensitive to plane-rotation contrasts because in both games they had contact with letters differing by that contrast (i.e., d-p). Finally, when we compared both groups’ performance in the independent tasks before and after the training, no significant differences were found. Therefore we could not confirm, or refute, the importance of training motor actions that match letter motor representations on mirror-image discrimination.Investigámos se o treino de acções motoras correspondentes à representação motora de letras, supostamente suportado pela via visual dorsal, contribui para a discriminação de imagens em espelho em tarefas suportadas pela via visual ventral, em particular de letras cuja orientação é a única característica que permite a sua discriminação, i.e., letras reversíveis. Dois grupos de crianças pré-letradas treinaram acções motoras com letras durante 20 sessões diárias de 20 min cada, em jogos de tablete desenvolvidos especificamente para este estudo segundo princípios da interacção humano-computador. Seis crianças treinaram no jogo draw, traçando e copiando as letras, e cinco crianças no jogo contact (jogo de controle) movimentado as letras de um ponto para outro. Utilizaram-se duas letras reversíveis (d; p), duas não-reversíveis (e; k) e duas simétricas (o; x). Para avaliar o impacto do treino no processamento da orientação, as crianças realizaram, antes e depois do treino, tarefas independentes dos jogos: uma tarefa de escolha forçada com letras, e tarefas de julgamento igual-diferente com letras e figuras geométricas. A evolução do desempenho das crianças no treino sugere que só o treino de acções motoras correspondentes à forma da letra, no jogo draw, conduziu à emergência de representações motoras das letras, que foram mais importantes para o desempenho com letras reversíveis do que com letras não-reversíveis e simétricas. Os resultados na tarefa de escolha forçada deram um contributo original para o estudo da discriminação de imagens em espelho, ao mostrar que esta dificuldade não é devida em particular às exigências de memória de trabalho da tarefa em que ocorre. Os resultados nas tarefas igual-diferente sugerem que as crianças após o treino aumentaram a sensibilidade aos contrastes de orientação rotação-plana devido ao contacto nos dois jogos com esse contraste (i.e., contacto com as letras d e p). Finalmente, a comparação do desempenho dos dois grupos nas tarefas independentes antes e após o treino, não revelou diferenças significativas. Não foi assim possível confirmar, ou rejeitar, a importância do treino motor que corresponde à representação motora das letras na discriminação imagens em espelho

“Three Ordinary, Normal Old Women”: Agatha Christie’s Uses of Shakespeare

This article draws on recent scholarship on Shakespearean allusions and crime fiction to develop an in-depth exploration of Agatha Christie's quotations from the playwright. These quotations do not tend to point to the murderer or give clues to the plot, but fall into three major categories. In some novels she uses them to interpolate the reader within the layers of intertextuality within crime fiction, aligning them with the author and with the detective rather than other characters. In other novels she uses discussions of Shakespeare to position her characters in the midcentury " feminine middlebrow " mode of novels identified by Nicola Humble. In a trio of late novels, her characters use reflections on how Macbeth should be staged to gain insights about the dangerous worlds they inhabit. The article examines how the novels engage with the Shakespearean text, but also with the shifting conceptions of Shakespeare which developed during the twentieth century. It reveals a sophisticated set of textual strategies within Christie's novels, which debate the meaning of Shakespeare's plays, and stage controversies over the ways in which those meanings should be accessed and reproduced