161 research outputs found
Transgressive Positivity in Four Online Multiplayer Games
Online games have a reputation for toxicity. Forms of play that have been theorized as transgressive from the perspective of idealized play have become highly normalized within the toxic space of online gaming. In this context, positivity in online gaming takes on a transgressive quality that challenges the common behaviours, the norms of communication, and their underlying ideologies found within online gaming communities. Through an ethnography of four massively multiplayer online game spaces - DOTA 2, Lost Ark, Destiny 2, and World of Warcraft - this project examines the effects of positivity in play on others who share these game worlds to consider ways that positivity might be leveraged to impact gaming’s toxic culture. Positivity is approached through different scales, from smaller individual actions like friendly greetings and helpful gestures not often seen in these particular games, to larger community formations that promote positivity and inclusivity within these gaming communities.
This study finds that positivity across these scales produces substantial and proportional resistance to positive deviations from the toxic norms within these games and their linked community sites. Players actively trying to resist toxicity through positivity add varying levels of labor to their leisure and are frequent targets for harassment, leading to burnout or self-exclusion from these online games. Transgressive positivity in online play can produce alternatives to self-exclusion from gaming by producing ephemeral connections and networks of support between players. Enclaves built on positivity can form, but they are always under threat when they intersect with the mainstream culture across each of these four games. Ultimately, there are severe systemic issues within these communities - reinforced by trends within the games industry and in online game design - that undercut player-led positivity initiatives. While positivity can be a useful strategy for some to connect with others and to persist in spite of these toxic environments, positivity’s transgressive quality in online play produces substantial vulnerability for those who actively pursue it as a strategy of resistance or cultural intervention
Digital writing technologies in higher education : theory, research, and practice
This open access book serves as a comprehensive guide to digital writing technology, featuring contributions from over 20 renowned researchers from various disciplines around the world. The book is designed to provide a state-of-the-art synthesis of the developments in digital writing in higher education, making it an essential resource for anyone interested in this rapidly evolving field.
In the first part of the book, the authors offer an overview of the impact that digitalization has had on writing, covering more than 25 key technological innovations and their implications for writing practices and pedagogical uses. Drawing on these chapters, the second part of the book explores the theoretical underpinnings of digital writing technology such as writing and learning, writing quality, formulation support, writing and thinking, and writing processes. The authors provide insightful analysis on the impact of these developments and offer valuable insights into the future of writing. Overall, this book provides a cohesive and consistent theoretical view of the new realities of digital writing, complementing existing literature on the digitalization of writing. It is an essential resource for scholars, educators, and practitioners interested in the intersection of technology and writing
The Benefits of Extended Reality for Technical Communication : Utilizing XR for Maintenance Documentation Creation and Delivery
The main goal of this dissertation is to explore the benefits of extended reality for technical communication. Both of these fields offer opportunities and also pose challenges to each other, and this dissertation provides insight into this relationship. The research was initiated by the author’s personal interest in both fields and also human-technology interaction and user needs in general. Even though this is an academic dissertation, it is first and foremost a practitioner’s view of these evolving technologies and their potential uses in industry and, specifically, in industrial maintenance and technical communication.
Under the umbrella of extended reality and technical communication, this dissertation focuses on two main themes. The first part studies virtual reality as a technology to facilitate collaboration and digital content creation for technical documentation in industrial companies, and the second part explores the possibilities of augmented reality and smart glasses as a delivery channel for maintenance instructions. The developed concepts were tested by domain experts in user tests. The overall results of testing were positive, and domain experts expressed enthusiasm toward the concepts and technologies in general.
The technical documentation process is an inherently collaborative process involving stakeholders from different teams and organizations, and virtual reality was evaluated to have a positive effect on that process, especially in the case of globally scattered teams. The developed tools were also rated positively for digital content creation. Therefore, virtual reality offers many benefits for technical documentation creation, an area where it has not been utilized until now. On the augmented reality side, domain experts were generally enthusiastic about the use of smart glasses even though the technologies are not yet mature enough for field use in industrial maintenance. Furthermore, the results show that content created in the technical communications industry standard, DITA XML, works well when delivered to smart glasses, and the same content can be single sourced to other delivery channels. The use of DITA XML, therefore, eliminates the need to tailor content for each delivery channel separately, and offers an effective way to create and update content for AR applications in industrial companies. This, in turn, can advance the use of AR technologies and related devices in field operations in industrial companies.
In conclusion, the findings of this dissertation show that the fields of technical communication and extended reality have a significant amount of synergy. In this dissertation I establish use cases and guidelines for these areas
“Everywhere You Go It’s Morning”: Photo-Topographies in Bernadette Mayer’s Memory
This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of the use of Kodachrome snapshots in Bernadette Mayer’s Memory (1971), focusing on their topographic nature as a means to address two major threads of the project: Mayer’s explicit attention to spatial politics within the landscapes she traverses and her interest in the role of images in her mnemonic mapping experiments
Bindings, boundaries and cuts: relating agency and ontology in photobook encounters
PhD ThesisThe artwork and commodity known as a “photobook” is gaining visibility as an object of creative
practice and cultural economy. It has generally been studied within photographic histories. This
thesis builds alternative ontologies of the photobook as an experiential, social artefact using a
unique methodological assemblage that responds to the object’s hybrid nature.
The enquiry posits that encounters with photobooks are “material-discursive configurations” of
matter, materiality, meaning and context, in which the photobook-object is actualised in relation
to its surroundings and the reader’s sensations and interpretations. The study foregrounds
situated moments of “encounter” between humans and photobooks, which are simultaneously
texts, images, actants and phenomena, to question what roles photobooks perform in different
circumstances – what they do. The research identifies photobook agencies including: affecting
aesthetic art experiences, mediating social and economic relations, and pushing back against
established epistemic regimes.
The study of this messy, boundary object employs counter-hegemonic techniques such as
autoethnography alongside ethnographic data to uncover relational insight into photobook
encounters, analysed through a combined lens of Actor-Network Theory, New Materialism and
Phenomenology. The iterative methodology reveals the research process’ own agency, advancing
the thesis’ argument that more-than-human entities co-produce diverse knowledges. This original
theoretical position produces a multi-faceted analysis of an under-researched artistic medium,
form and genre, which is novel for studies of photographic history and culture, as well as
interdisciplinary object studies.
Through exploring the complexities of a seemingly quotidian book-shaped thing in wide-ranging
personal and institutional encounters, the study fosters a profound, felt awareness of
relationalities between humans and non-humans. This alternative approach shows how
encounters with art objects present new, pluralistic ways of knowing that disrupt habitual
schematic modes of cutting or limiting our experiences of phenomena and things, with
meaningful consequences for rethinking our modes of acting, consuming, feeling and being in
the world.Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnershi
Style Blink: Exploring Digital Inking of Structured Information via Handcrafted Styling as a First-Class Object
Structured note-taking forms such as sketchnoting, self-tracking journals, and bullet journaling go beyond immediate capture of information scraps. Instead, hand-drawn pride-in-craftmanship increases perceived value for sharing and display. But hand-crafting lists, tables, and calendars is tedious and repetitive. To support these practices digitally, Style Blink ("Style-Blocks+Ink") explores handcrafted styling as a first-class object. Style-blocks encapsulate digital ink, enabling people to craft, modify, and reuse embellishments and decorations for larger structures, and apply custom layouts. For example, we provide interaction instruments that style ink for personal expression, inking palettes that afford creative experimentation, fillable pens that can be "loaded"with commands and actions to replace menu selections, techniques to customize inked structures post-creation by modifying the underlying handcrafted style-blocks and to re-layout the overall structure to match users' preferred template. In effect, any ink stroke, notation, or sketch can be encapsulated as a style-object and re-purposed as a tool. Feedback from 13 users show the potential of style adaptation and re-use in individual sketching practices
EG-ICE 2021 Workshop on Intelligent Computing in Engineering
The 28th EG-ICE International Workshop 2021 brings together international experts working at the interface between advanced computing and modern engineering challenges. Many engineering tasks require open-world resolutions to support multi-actor collaboration, coping with approximate models, providing effective engineer-computer interaction, search in multi-dimensional solution spaces, accommodating uncertainty, including specialist domain knowledge, performing sensor-data interpretation and dealing with incomplete knowledge. While results from computer science provide much initial support for resolution, adaptation is unavoidable and most importantly, feedback from addressing engineering challenges drives fundamental computer-science research. Competence and knowledge transfer goes both ways
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