Desire Lines: Open Educational Collections, Memory and the Social Machine

This paper delineates the initial ideas around the development of the Co-Curate North East project. The idea of computerised machines which have a social use and impact was central to the development of the project. The project was designed with and for schools and communities as a digital platform which would collect and aggregate ‘memory’ resources and collections around local area studies and social identity. It was a co-curation process supported by museums and curators which was about the ‘meshwork’ between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ archives and collections and the ways in which materials generated from within the schools and community groups could themselves be re-narrated and exhibited online as part of self-organised learning experiences. This paper looks at initial ideas of social machines and the ways in machines can be used in identity and memory studies. It examines ideas of navigation and visualisation of data and concludes with some initial findings from the early stages of the project about the potential for machines and educational work

Intelligent user support in graphical user interfaces

1. This paper presents a frontend to an intelligent help system based on plans called InCome (Interaction Control Manager). It visualizes user actions previously executed in a specific application as a graph structure and enables the user to navigate through this structure. A higher level of abstraction on performed user actions shows the dialog history, the interaction context and reachable goals. Finally, the user is able to act on the application via InCome by performing undo mechanisms as well as specifying user goals inferred already by the help system. 2. This paper describes the system PLUS, a plan-based help system for applications offering an object-oriented user interface. Our plan recognition process is based on a predefined static hierarchical plan base, that is modelled using a goal plan language. This language is designed to especially cope with the problems arising when plan recognition is performed in a graphical user interface environment whose interaction is based on a user-directed dialog by means of direct manipulation -- so-called Direct Manipulation User Interfaces. The plan hierarchy is entered using the interactive graphics-oriented plan editor PlanEdit+. The plan recognition module PlanRecognizer+ builds a dynamic plan base by mapping user actions to plans stored in the static plan base. The dynamic plan base contains hypotheses about tasks the user is pursuing at the moment. These plan hypotheses serve as a basis to offer various kinds of assistance to the user. A central component of our graphical help is the module InCome+. InCome+ visualizes user actions previously executed in an application as a graph structure and enables the user to navigate through this structure. A higher level of abstraction on performed actions shows the dialog history, the interaction context, and reachable goals. InCome+ offers special features like task-oriented undo und redo facilities and a context-sensitive tutor. As a substantial extension of the graphical user assistance, we integrate the presentation of animated help within PLUS. Animation sequences are generated in the context of the tasks the user is currently working on

A Pedagogy for Original Synners

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the UnexpectedThis essay begins by speculating about the learning environment of the class of 2020. It takes place entirely in a virtual world, populated by simulated avatars, managed through the pedagogy of gaming. Based on this projected version of a future-now-in-formation, the authors consider the implications of the current paradigm shift that is happening at the edges of institutions of higher education. From the development of programs in multimedia literacy to the focus on the creation of hybrid learning spaces (that combine the use of virtual worlds, social networking applications, and classroom activities), the scene of learning as well as the subjects of education are changing. The figure of the Original Synner is a projection of the student-of-the-future whose foundational literacy is grounded in their ability to synthesize information from multiple information streams

Incorrectness Logic for Graph Programs

Program logics typically reason about an over-approximation of program behaviour to prove the absence of bugs. Recently, program logics have been proposed that instead prove the presence of bugs by means of under-approximate reasoning, which has the promise of better scalability. In this paper, we present an under-approximate program logic for a nondeterministic graph programming language, and show how it can be used to reason deductively about program incorrectness, whether defined by the presence of forbidden graph structure or by finitely failing executions. We prove this incorrectness logic to be sound and complete, and speculate on some possible future applications of it.Comment: Accepted by the 14th International Conference on Graph Transformation (ICGT 2021

Interrogating Datafication

What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? The volume collects theoretical, empirical, and historiographical contributions from a range of international scholars to shed light on the current shift from media to data practices

Interrogating Datafication: Towards a Praxeology of Data

What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? The volume collects theoretical, empirical, and historiographical contributions from a range of international scholars to shed light on the current shift from media to data practices

Interrogating Datafication

What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? The volume collects theoretical, empirical, and historiographical contributions from a range of international scholars to shed light on the current shift from media to data practices

Toward a Transnational Information Ecology on the Right?:Hyperlink Networking among Right-Wing Digital News Sites in Europe and the United

The recent rise of a more transnationally networked political right across Europe and the United States has been accompanied by an emerging alternative digital news infrastructure through which information circulates and shared epistemologies are established. This paper examines the extent to which digital news sites on the right are interconnected within and across countries. It further explores which additional sites serve as transnationally shared reference points of such news ecology on a transnational scale. To do so, we investigate hyperlink networks between alternative right-wing online news sites (RNS) in six western democracies (Austria, Germany, United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden). Our analysis draws on hyperlink data harvested from 65 RNS for three months in 2018. The results show that RNS do establish interlinked alternative right-wing news ecologies, as they connect to likeminded RNS within and across borders. Furthermore, we see substantial variation across countries, where RNS from countries with less established alternative right-wing news infrastructure are more likely to link transnationally to RNS. The United States represents an outlier in that it features the largest and domestically most integrated network of RNS, while U.S. sites function as hubs for transnational connections from European RNS. Apart from connections between RNS, we find that legacy news media are crucial transnationally shared reference points. We conclude that rather than presenting an insulated, alternative sphere, the emerging digital news ecology on the right seeks to link up to the broader information environment across borders