3,196 research outputs found

    Mobile heritage practices. Implications for scholarly research, user experience design, and evaluation methods using mobile apps.

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    Mobile heritage apps have become one of the most popular means for audience engagement and curation of museum collections and heritage contexts. This raises practical and ethical questions for both researchers and practitioners, such as: what kind of audience engagement can be built using mobile apps? what are the current approaches? how can audience engagement with these experience be evaluated? how can those experiences be made more resilient, and in turn sustainable? In this thesis I explore experience design scholarships together with personal professional insights to analyse digital heritage practices with a view to accelerating thinking about and critique of mobile apps in particular. As a result, the chapters that follow here look at the evolution of digital heritage practices, examining the cultural, societal, and technological contexts in which mobile heritage apps are developed by the creative media industry, the academic institutions, and how these forces are shaping the user experience design methods. Drawing from studies in digital (critical) heritage, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and design thinking, this thesis provides a critical analysis of the development and use of mobile practices for the heritage. Furthermore, through an empirical and embedded approach to research, the thesis also presents auto-ethnographic case studies in order to show evidence that mobile experiences conceptualised by more organic design approaches, can result in more resilient and sustainable heritage practices. By doing so, this thesis encourages a renewed understanding of the pivotal role of these practices in the broader sociocultural, political and environmental changes.AHRC REAC

    Experience, evidence and what counts in UK music therapy – an arts-based autoethnographic study

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    The field of music therapy is not bland: therapists train because of deep belief in the dignity of people and the power of music; participants begin therapy because something significantly challenging is present in their lives; fundraisers share stories which are painful, life affirming, uncomfortable; receptionists juggle quiet spaces with loud spaces with stimulation without sensory triggers; carers listen, absorb, give and give some more, often beyond the limits of their energy. And pulse and meter and melody and dynamics and bodies and voices and wood and skin and metal are the raw materials.However, it might be argued that the search for evidence in music therapy has led to something akin to a parallel reality, - one in which measured, analytical reporting of certain aspects of the work is shared, often in official documents. The vital, sensory, embodied, relational experience which is music making, and which lies at the heart of the therapy is rendered in careful and dispassionate text. There are good reasons for this, and for the steady growth of ‘evidence-based practice’, which lie in the history of the profession and its search for validation. Yet the evidence which is shared in these texts has tended to become increasingly disconnected from many features of the musical therapeutic encounter that music therapists value.In this study, conceived from a critical realist perspective, I ask ‘what is experience in music therapy’, ‘what is evidence in music therapy’, ‘are evidence and experience in fact the same thing, or could they be’? I look at my own experiences, and evidencing of these experiences, gained across 24 years of working as a music therapist. In so doing, I find I cannot maintain a single role or persona. Unexpectedly, in the course of this reflexive exploration, four Roles arrive noisily and will not go away (Music Therapist, Researcher, Musician and Carer). They debate, argue and probe at the heart of what counts, and at the cultures of music therapy which systematise and perpetuate what counts. They consider the turn to evidence-based practice in music therapy and ask ‘what is the evidence of’, and ‘does this make sense to insiders, outsiders, either, both’?This multivocal, dialogical approach allows me to adopt the different positions taken by each of the four Roles as they ask ‘does this make sense to me’, and to advocate for culture change in both music therapy and academia. It resonates with the focus of this research – experience, evidence and what counts in music therapy, and invites various different methodological approaches - autoethnography, arts-based research, phenomenology, and Aesthetic Critical Realism which is introduced to the field of music therapy for the first time. A complex web of different kinds of experience and evidence emerges through poems, stories, vignettes, images and mobile making and results in a concept of four phases of experience, leads to defined categories of different kinds of experience, and to the proposition that in music therapy, experience is evidence of personhood.The thesis is relational: those engaging with it are part of the network of experiences in the field of music therapy, because I conceptualise this field as including all musical, logistical, contractual, academic, public and informal encounters of all stakeholders, from participants to next-door neighbours. Because you are engaging with this thesis, I regard you as a Collaborator, but it is not necessary for you to be familiar with the field. Thank you for your involvement

    Rights on news : expanding copyright on the internet

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    Defence date: 18 February 2020Examining Board: Prof. Giovanni Sartor, EUI (Supervisor); Prof. Pier Luigi Parcu, EUI; Prof. Lionel Bently, University of Cambridge; Prof. Christophe Geiger, University of StrasbourgThe internet and digital technologies have irreversibly changed the way we find and consume news. Legacy news organisations, publishers of newspapers, have moved to the internet. In the online news environment, however, they are no longer the exclusive suppliers of news. New digital intermediaries have emerged, search engines and news aggregators in particular. They select and display links and fragments of press publishers’ content as a part of their services, without seeking the news organisations’ prior consent. To shield themselves from exploitation by digital intermediaries, press publishers have begun to seek legal protection, and called for the introduction of a new right under the umbrella of copyright and related rights. Following these calls, the press publishers’ right was introduced into the EU copyright framework by the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market in 2019

    UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024

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    The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp

    Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept

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    In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to "cultural integrity" and "immigrant inassimilability," revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others - a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment

    UMSL Bulletin 2022-2023

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    The 2022-2023 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1087/thumbnail.jp

    A qualitative study exploring whether emotion work conducted by health visitors has an influence on their assessment and identification of children in need of care and protection?

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    There is an increased understanding that experiencing adversity in childhood can have a significantly negative impact on the long-term developmental wellbeing of children and young people, as well as their families and communities. Political and societal ambition is that such adverse experiences and their consequences are eradicated through preventative and early intervention measures taken by health, education, and social care practitioners on the identification of a child(ren) who requires support. Professionals working with children have become increasingly proficient in this type of work however no professional is infallible. As a result, many children and young people living with adverse circumstances can go unnoticed. For some this includes experiencing harm which often only comes to light when they have been significantly or fatally injured. Every child living in the United Kingdom is aligned with the universal health visiting service following birth to school entry. Health visitors play an essential role in “searching for health needs” through the “surveillance and assessment of the population’s health and wellbeing” (Nursing & Midwifery Council [NMC] 2004, page 11) . Such universal contact based on these core principles mean that health visitors are ideally positioned to identify children living in challenging situations but, like others, they can find this difficult on occasions. The purpose of this study is to explore whether health visitors view the emotion work they carry out as part of their role has an influence on their ability to assess, identify, and respond to children in need of care and protection. STUDY – METHOD: The study has been progressed qualitatively, using a reflexive ethnographic approach to interviews as the main data collection and analytic method with short periods of office-based observation. 16 health visitors who managed caseloads of between 100-450 pre-school children were observed and interviewed to understand their experiences, values, and beliefs. Gee’s (2014) toolkit was used to critically analyse the discourse shared during the interviews. FINDINGS: The emergent findings demonstrate that health visitors can be conceptualised as ‘applied clinical anthropologists’ in the way they develop relationships with families to gain access to their home environments. The approach taken is to gather information to the depth required for a social, bioecological assessment (Bronfenbrenner 2005) of a child in the context of their family and community system. Health visitors are welcomed by most families and are often successful in assessing and responding to child need. However, at times, the level of engagement necessary can be overwhelming for both the health visitor and parent/carer. This influences the level of child centred assessment obtained. The study has demonstrated that the influences on the work of the health visitor can be interpreted through a complex interplay of theoretical concepts. Firstly, Bourdieu’s “theory of practice” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992, page 4) provides the basis on which to understand why challenges and barriers arise during the relational work of the health visitor with the child and family. Secondly, Gross’ (2014) Emotion Regulation Framework and Hochschild’s (1983) theory of Emotional Labour, are utilised to consider how health visitors and families respond emotionally to these challenges. The study then goes on to demonstrate what impact these responses can have on the assessment of children. RECOMMENDATIONS: Implications for practice are that health visitors require increased rates of supervision. This should include an observational element. Educational programmes for health visitors, require a focus on promoting professional wellbeing with learning sessions on unconscious bias. Research and learning developments are suggested to influence assessment and decision-making practice. Research with other professional groups and children & families is recommended to build on the findings of this study in order to influence future safeguarding policy and practice to protect children

    A Taxonomy of Freehand Grasping Patterns in Virtual Reality

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    Grasping is the most natural and primary interaction paradigm people perform every day, which allows us to pick up and manipulate objects around us such as drinking a cup of coffee or writing with a pen. Grasping has been highly explored in real environments, to understand and structure the way people grasp and interact with objects by presenting categories, models and theories for grasping approach. Due to the complexity of the human hand, classifying grasping knowledge to provide meaningful insights is a challenging task, which led to researchers developing grasp taxonomies to provide guidelines for emerging grasping work (such as in anthropology, robotics and hand surgery) in a systematic way. While this body of work exists for real grasping, the nuances of grasping transfer in virtual environments is unexplored. The emerging development of robust hand tracking sensors for virtual devices now allow the development of grasp models that enable VR to simulate real grasping interactions. However, present work has not yet explored the differences and nuances that are present in virtual grasping compared to real object grasping, which means that virtual systems that create grasping models based on real grasping knowledge, might make assumptions which are yet to be proven true or untrue around the way users intuitively grasp and interact with virtual objects. To address this, this thesis presents the first user elicitation studies to explore grasping patterns directly in VR. The first study presents main similarities and differences between real and virtual object grasping, the second study furthers this by exploring how virtual object shape influences grasping patterns, the third study focuses on visual thermal cues and how this influences grasp metrics, and the fourth study focuses on understanding other object characteristics such as stability and complexity and how they influence grasps in VR. To provide structured insights on grasping interactions in VR, the results are synthesized in the first VR Taxonomy of Grasp Types, developed following current methods for developing grasping and HCI taxonomies and re-iterated to present an updated and more complete taxonomy. Results show that users appear to mimic real grasping behaviour in VR, however they also illustrate that users present issues around object size estimation and generally a lower variability in grasp types is used. The taxonomy shows that only five grasps account for the majority of grasp data in VR, which can be used for computer systems aiming to achieve natural and intuitive interactions at lower computational cost. Further, findings show that virtual object characteristics such as shape, stability and complexity as well as visual cues for temperature influence grasp metrics such as aperture, category, type, location and dimension. These changes in grasping patterns together with virtual object categorisation methods can be used to inform design decisions when developing intuitive interactions and virtual objects and environments and therefore taking a step forward in achieving natural grasping interaction in VR

    Frontiers of Humanity and Beyond: Towards new critical understandings of borders. Working Papers

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