Horizon Report 2009

El informe anual Horizon investiga, identifica y clasifica las tecnologías emergentes que los expertos que lo elaboran prevén tendrán un impacto en la enseñanza aprendizaje, la investigación y la producción creativa en el contexto educativo de la enseñanza superior. También estudia las tendencias clave que permiten prever el uso que se hará de las mismas y los retos que ellos suponen para las aulas. Cada edición identifica seis tecnologías o prácticas. Dos cuyo uso se prevé emergerá en un futuro inmediato (un año o menos) dos que emergerán a medio plazo (en dos o tres años) y dos previstas a más largo plazo (5 años)

Casual Information Visualization on Exploring Spatiotemporal Data

The goal of this thesis is to study how the diverse data on the Web which are familiar to everyone can be visualized, and with a special consideration on their spatial and temporal information. We introduce novel approaches and visualization techniques dealing with different types of data contents: interactively browsing large amount of tags linking with geospace and time, navigating and locating spatiotemporal photos or videos in collections, and especially, providing visual supports for the exploration of diverse Web contents on arbitrary webpages in terms of augmented Web browsing

Exegesis : photographs and place

Photographs are used to reinforce arguments about our history, our culture, and our identity. With billions of photographs now available online, growing numbers of cameras capturing every moment, and people sharing the resulting images in an instant across the globe, what is the connection between even a single photograph and the basic truth of the reality it purports to represent? Focusing on geographic location, my research interest for my creative practice is in how photographs document and represent place. Place helps to define who we are. Place informs us about our past and about the foundations of our community and our culture. Photographs help to define place because they provide evidence for what is there, what was there, and what happened there. In my studio practice I explore the use of rephotography to highlight the differences in material form of place over time. The exhibition explores the place of the photograph in the modern world by comparing photographs taken in the past with those taken in the same places almost forty years later with a series of photographs taken in 1973 in and around Cronulla Street, south of Sydney, and rephotographs of the same scenes in 2011. They show sometimes subtle, sometimes clear, changes in our environment and behaviour that go unnoticed without photographic evidence. To better understand what the photographs in my exhibition are actually saying to us, and to explore what photographs from the past actually tell us, for my dissertation I examined a number of photographs from a more distant, nineteenth or early twentieth century past that proved to be ambiguous. On the basis of my research, I argue that the model of the nineteenth century photograph as an indexical truth, modulated by cultural interpretation, is more complex than is generally thought. Online access to substantially expanded resources through more sophisticated digital tools today shows clearly that the staged photographs should not be considered as 'false' simply because they are not documents of true events. They give us access to the way people then constructed their reality. This offers us useful information about the way they thought about themselves and their society. I also argue that online digital tools, the resources they allow us to access easily, and the opportunities provided by the internet to interact with each other change the rules significantly for Australian institutions of photographic history - galleries, libraries, archives and museums. These institutions are yet to realise the implications of these changed rules, and to embrace the opportunities provided by them to engage actively with individual researchers

Porto Maphazardly - Representation of Place in Graphic Design

This project, Porto Maphazardly, examines the role of a graphic designer in exploring alternate means of mapping a location. A square in the Portuguese city of Porto was mapped through five sensory approaches: sound, smell, taste, activity, and color perception. The data that was gathered was translated into visuals to create a generated, but totally unique, graphic portrait of a place. The portmanteau maphazardly in the title combines the word ‘map’ with the adverb, ‘haphazardly,’ which means to do something determined by accident rather than design, without a clear plan or at the mercy of chance. The coining of the word is meant to evoke the extent to which the illustrations developed in response to observations, encounters and circumstance, rather than a client brief or a designer’s pre-decided aesthetic. In this report, the project is contextualized between the theory of critical cartography in the field of sociology, and the mapping works which already exist in the graphic design field, including the works of Paula Scher, Pedro Pina, Jeremy Wood, Alison Barnes and Kate McLean. The report presents a synthesized definition of ‘map’ for use in a visual, graphic analysis. A limited survey of the principles of information design is discussed, in its relation to traditional cartography, infographics, and our cognitive interpretations of maps. Finally, a brief analysis of changes in the nature of maps (smart-maps) is included, focusing on how user-centered maps have changed how one interacts with a city. The project endeavors to work in the realm of ‘designer as researcher,’ and is influenced by the writing of Russell Bestley and Ian Noble on visual research, in which the experiential nature of the data collection influences the design process. The methodology was developed through a series of test projects and by the application of ‘walking as method,’ and the report introduces the generative systems which were used to transform data— notes, photographs, and recordings—into illustrations. The final mappings are presented along with an analysis of successes and failures

Understanding Tourism Experiences and Behaviour in Cities: An Australian Case Study

This study aims to enhance the understanding of tourist experiences and behaviour in urban destinations by analysing the spatial movements of tourists, identifying the key attributes they are seeking in urban destinations, determining how important these attributes are to their experiences, evaluating how two urban destinations performed in relation to these attributes, and assessing whether there are key differences between different types of visitors to urban destinations. The ultimate aim of this project is to inform and guide the future governance and improved functioning of urban tourism destinations by developing a better understanding of the tourist in such settings

THE SOCIAL MEDIA IMAGE: MODES OF VISUAL ORDERING ON SOCIAL MEDIA

My dissertation considers the organization of large sets of user-generated photographs across social media platforms, and delineates the ways in which time and place are mediated through their presentation and analyses. Addressing the unprecedented scale of social media visual expressions, together with their implementation, structure and presentation within specific media platforms, I examine how visual social media data is processed, structured, and presented, and theorize the consequences of these forms for the ways we culturally understand and experience contemporary visual information. Taking an integrated approach, this work offers a qualitative and quantitative analysis, and draws on methodologies from media theory, information science, software studies, art history, cultural studies, and computer science. I combine distant critical reading of larger organizational patterns and their cultural meanings (studying visual arrangement in exiting platforms, experimental computational research, and artistic works) with a close analytical reading of groups of photos, using computational and visualization tools. This twin process allows me to develop my theoretical understanding based on particular results, but also illustrates the problem that is the focus of this dissertation: how to understand new visual production scales, their organizations, and their interpretation

Welcome to my world: researching the role of personal narrative and affective presence at Graceland

This study explores the visitor experience at one of the world's most\ud famous historic houses, Graceland, Elvis Presley's home. The research\ud methodology prioritises the visitor's voice, examining the impact of the Graceland\ud experience on visitor perception. Particular attention is paid to theories of\ud personal narrative and affective presence as interpretive devices. Personal\ud Meaning Maps from 170 visitors form the core data and provide evidence of the\ud profound conceptual changes that occur in visitors' perceptions of Elvis. Visitors\ud consistently describe Elvis as a 'real' person, with personal characteristics such\ud as humility and generosity proving more memorable than his fame or career.\ud The Graceland tour is designed for visitors to connect with Elvis in an\ud affective manner, evoking emotions and relying on narratives of family and\ud nostalgic discourses. This succeeds in providing visitors with an experience that\ud challenges and extends their pre-visit views of Elvis as the 'King of Rock and\ud Roll.' The ability to change visitor perception is linked to the quality of the\ud experience, as Adams et al. (2003) suggests, 'the better the experience, the\ud greater the change' (p. 22). The transformations documented at Graceland\ud prompted investigation, searching for indicators of quality interpretation through\ud analysis of the audio tour content and visitor photographs. This examination\ud reveals a set of interpretive practices potentially useful for other historic\ud properties, including the contextualising of space through personal accounts, the\ud introduction of emotive media, and a reliance on a narrative that is personal\ud rather than objective. This set of practices is framed within the context of the\ud `Experience Economy,' which proves to be a useful tool for examining the\ud successes of the Graceland tour and visitor impact. While historic sites struggle to find new audiences and compel current audiences to return, this experience\ud framework yields new insights into concepts of effective historic house\ud interpretation

Mutually reinforcing systems

Human computation can be described as outsourcing part of a computational process to humans. This technique might be used when a problem can be solved better by humans than computers or it may require a level of adaptation that computers are not yet capable of handling. This can be particularly important in changeable settings which require a greater level of adaptation to the surrounding environment. In most cases, human computation has been used to gather data that computers struggle to create. Games with by-products can provide an incentive for people to carry out such tasks by rewarding them with entertainment. These are games which are designed to create a by-product during the course of regular play. However, such games have traditionally been unable to deal with requests for specific data, relying instead on a broad capture of data in the hope that it will cover specific needs. A new method is needed to focus the efforts of human computation and produce specifically requested results. This would make human computation a more valuable and versatile technique. Mutually reinforcing systems are a new approach to human computation that tries to attain this focus. Ordinary human computation systems tend to work in isolation and do not work directly with each other. Mutually reinforcing systems are an attempt to allow multiple human computation systems to work together so that each can benefit from the other's strengths. For example, a non-game system can request specific data from a game. The game can then tailor its game-play to deliver the required by-products from the players. This is also beneficial to the game because the requests become game content, creating variety in the game-play which helps to prevent players getting bored of the game. Mobile systems provide a particularly good test of human computation because they allow users to react to their environment. Real world environments are changeable and require higher levels of adaptation from the users. This means that, in addition to the human computation required by other systems, mobile systems can also take advantage of a user's ability to apply environmental context to the computational task. This research explores the effects of mutually reinforcing systems on mobile games with by-products. These effects will be explored by building and testing mutually reinforcing systems, including mobile games. A review of existing literature, human computation systems and games with by-products will set out problems which exist in outsourcing parts of a computational process to humans. Mutually reinforcing systems are presented as one approach of addressing some of these problems. Example systems have been created to demonstrate the successes and failures of this approach and their evolving designs have been documented. The evaluation of these systems will be presented along with a discussion of the outcomes and possible future work. A conclusion will summarize the findings of the work carried out. This dissertation shows that extending human computation techniques to allow the collection and classification of useful contextual information in mobile environments is possible and can be extended to allow the by-products to match the specific needs of another system