3,036 research outputs found

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

    Get PDF
    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

    Measuring the Impact of China’s Digital Heritage: Developing Multidimensional Impact Indicators for Digital Museum Resources

    Get PDF
    This research investigates how to best assess the impact of China’s digital heritage and focuses on digital museum resources. It is motivated by the need for tools to help governing bodies and heritage organisations assess the impact of digital heritage resources. The research sits at the intersection of Chinese cultural heritage, digital heritage, and impact assessment (IA) studies, which forms the theoretical framework of the thesis. Informed by the Balanced Value Impact (BVI) Model, this thesis addresses the following questions: 1. How do Western heritage discourses and Chinese culture shape ‘cultural heritage’ and the museum digital ecosystem in modern China? 2. Which indicators demonstrate the multidimensional impacts of digital museum resources in China? How should the BVI Model be adapted to fit the Chinese cultural landscape? 3. How do different stakeholders perceive these impact indicators? What are the implications for impact indicator development and application? This research applies a mixed-method approach, combining desk research, survey, and interview with both public audiences and museum professionals. The research findings identify 18 impact indicators, covering economic, social, innovation and operational dimensions. Notably, the perceived usefulness and importance of different impact indicators vary among and between public participants and museum professionals. The study finds the BVI Model helpful in guiding the indicator development process, particularly in laying a solid foundation to inform decision-making. The Strategic Perspectives and Value Lenses provide a structure to organise various indicators and keep them focused on the impact objectives. However, the findings also suggest that the Value Lenses are merely signifiers; their signified meanings change with cultural contexts and should be examined when the Model is applied in a different cultural setting. This research addresses the absence of digital resource IA in China’s heritage sector. It contributes to the field of IA for digital heritage within and beyond the Chinese context by challenging the current target-setting culture in performance evaluation. Moreover, the research ratifies the utility of the BVI Model while modifying it to fit China’s unique cultural setting. This thesis as a whole demonstrates the value of using multidimensional impact indicators for evidence-based decision-making and better museum practices in the digital domain

    Communicating a Pandemic

    Get PDF
    This edited volume compares experiences of how the Covid-19 pandemic was communicated in the Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The Nordic countries are often discussed in terms of similarities concerning an extensive welfare system, economic policies, media systems, and high levels of trust in societal actors. However, in the wake of a global pandemic, the countries’ coping strategies varied, creating certain question marks on the existence of a “Nordic model”. The chapters give a broad overview of crisis communication in the Nordic countries during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic by combining organisational and societal theoretical perspectives and encompassing crisis response from governments, public health authorities, lobbyists, corporations, news media, and citizens. The results show several similarities, such as political and governmental responses highlighting solidarity and the need for exceptional measures, as expressed in press conferences, social media posts, information campaigns, and speeches. The media coverage relied on experts and was mainly informative, with few critical investigations during the initial phases. Moreover, surveys and interviews show the importance of news media for citizens’ coping strategies, but also that citizens mostly trusted both politicians and health authorities during the crisis. This book is of interest to all who are looking to understand societal crisis management on a comprehensive level. The volume contains chapters from leading experts from all the Nordic countries and is edited by a team with complementary expertise on crisis communication, political communication, and journalism, consisting of Bengt Johansson, Øyvind Ihlen, Jenny Lindholm, and Mark Blach-Ørsten. Publishe

    Plant Ontology, The Amazonian Yachag and the Artist in Trance

    Get PDF
    The commonalities that plants, shamans and artists share may not be evident at first glance, nevertheless, if we search for uncomfortable entanglements and difficult questions, we may find that for centuries the voice with which plants speak has been the Amazonian yachag and the chamana or healer. Furthermore, who has invariably accompanied different plateaus along humanity’s convoluted becomings, has been what I have called the artist in trance. This artist is a concoction born from Walter Benjamin’s notion of ecstatic trance and Nietzche’s tragic artist. In this research I have investigated the being of plants or plant ontology and how they may be others who we may learn from in order to relate to Earth in a better way. The artist-yachag or artist philosopher as we may call her, is the one who bridges disparate conocimientos or knowledge, those of plants and those of shamans and translates them into our own words and worlds. What for? To learn to inhabit this planet in a softermood, in a weak mood as Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala would say, stemming from other visions and other perspectives. The interconnectivity that plants generate, as well as the idea of them being a world in themselves allied with the yachag or shaman and the artist, may lead humanity towards the understanding of a world to come. Applyingand expanding the notion first posited by Levi-Strauss and then contested by Viveiros de Castro that the relation between nature and culture is one of“metonymic contiguity rather than metaphoric resemblance”, I argue that the same kind of contiguity exists between plants,the Amazonian yachag and the artist in trance. The trope ofmetonymic contiguity serves to connect in a continuum these three entities one after the other in a nature-culture effervescent symbiosis. ‍https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1047/thumbnail.jp

    If I Can\u27t Predict My Future, Why Can AI? Exploring Human Interaction with Predictive Analytics

    Get PDF
    This research study seeks to understand how AI-based chatbots can potentially be leveraged as a tool in a PSYOP. This study is methodologically driven as it employs validated scales concerning suggestibility and human-computer interaction to assess how participants interact with a specific AI chatbot, Replika. Recent studies demonstrate the capability of GPT-based analytics to influence user’s moral judgements, and this paper is interested in exploring why. Results will help draw conclusions regarding human interaction with predictive analytics (in this case a free GPT-based chatbot, Replika) to understand if suggestibility (how easily influenced someone generally is) impacts the overall usability of AI chatbots. This project will help assess how much of a concern predictive AI chatbots should be considered as virtual AI influencers and other bot-based propaganda modalities emerge in the contemporary media environment. This study uses the CASA paradigm, medium theory, and Boyd’s theory of conflict to explore how factors that often drive human computer interaction— like anthropomorphic autonomy and suspension of disbelief— potentially relate to suggestibility or chatbot usability. Overall, this study is interested in specifically exploring if suggestion can predict usability in AI chatbots

    Second-Person Surveillance: Politics of User Implication in Digital Documentaries

    Get PDF
    This dissertation analyzes digital documentaries that utilize second-person address and roleplay to make users feel implicated in contemporary refugee crises, mass incarceration in the U.S., and state and corporate surveillances. Digital documentaries are seemingly more interactive and participatory than linear film and video documentary as they are comprised of a variety of auditory, visual, and written media, utilize networked technologies, and turn the documentary audience into a documentary user. I draw on scholarship from documentary, game, new media, and surveillance studies to analyze how second-person address in digital documentaries is configured through user positioning and direct address within the works themselves, in how organizations and creators frame their productions, and in how users and players respond in reviews, discussion forums, and Let’s Plays. I build on Michael Rothberg’s theorization of the implicated subject to explore how these digital documentaries bring the user into complicated relationality with national and international crises. Visually and experientially implying that users bear responsibility to the subjects and subject matter, these works can, on the one hand, replicate modes of liberal empathy for suffering, distant “others” and, on the other, simulate one’s own surveillant modes of observation or behavior to mirror it back to users and open up one’s offline thoughts and actions as a site of critique. This dissertation charts how second-person address shapes and limits the political potentialities of documentary projects and connects them to a lineage of direct address from educational and propaganda films, museum exhibits, and serious games. By centralizing the user’s individual experience, the interventions that second-person digital documentaries can make into social discourse change from public, institution-based education to more privatized forms of sentimental education geared toward personal edification and self-realization. Unless tied to larger initiatives or movements, I argue that digital documentaries reaffirm a neoliberal politics of individual self-regulation and governance instead of public education or collective, social intervention. Chapter one focuses on 360-degree virtual reality (VR) documentaries that utilize the feeling of presence to position users as if among refugees and as witnesses to refugee experiences in camps outside of Europe and various dwellings in European cities. My analysis of Clouds Over Sidra (Gabo Arora and Chris Milk 2015) and The Displaced (Imraan Ismail and Ben C. Solomon 2015) shows how these VR documentaries utilize observational realism to make believable and immersive their representations of already empathetic refugees. The empathetic refugee is often young, vulnerable, depoliticized and dehistoricized and is a well-known trope in other forms of humanitarian media that continues into VR documentaries. Forced to Flee (Zahra Rasool 2017), I am Rohingya (Zahra Rasool 2017), So Leben Flüchtlinge in Berlin (Berliner Morgenpost 2017), and Limbo: A Virtual Experience of Waiting for Asylum (Shehani Fernando 2017) disrupt easy immersions into realistic-looking VR experiences of stereotyped representations and user identifications and, instead, can reflect back the user’s political inaction and surveillant modes of looking. Chapter two analyzes web- and social media messenger-based documentaries that position users as outsiders to U.S. mass incarceration. Users are noir-style co-investigators into the crime of the prison-industrial complex in Fremont County, Colorado in Prison Valley: The Prison Industry (David Dufresne and Philippe Brault 2009) and co-riders on a bus transporting prison inmates’ loved ones for visitations to correctional facilities in Upstate New York in A Temporary Contact (Nirit Peled and Sara Kolster 2017). Both projects construct an experience of carceral constraint for users to reinscribe seeming “outside” places, people, and experiences as within the continuation of the racialized and classed politics of state control through mass incarceration. These projects utilize interfaces that create a tension between replicating an exploitative hierarchy between non-incarcerated users and those subject to mass incarceration while also de-immersing users in these experiences to mirror back the user’s supposed distance from this mode of state regulation. Chapter three investigates a type of digital game I term dataveillance simulation games, which position users as surveillance agents in ambiguously dystopian nation-states and force users to use their own critical thinking and judgment to construct the criminality of state-sanctioned surveillance targets. Project Perfect Citizen (Bad Cop Studios 2016), Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You (Osmotic Studios 2016), and Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) all create a dual empathy: players empathize with bureaucratic surveillance agents while empathizing with surveillance targets whose emails, text messages, documents, and social media profiles reveal them to be “normal” people. I argue that while these games show criminality to be a construct, they also utilize a racialized fear of the loss of one’s individual privacy to make players feel like they too could be surveillance targets. Chapter four examines personalized digital documentaries that turn users and their data into the subject matter. Do Not Track (Brett Gaylor 2015), A Week with Wanda (Joe Derry Hall 2019), Stealing Ur Feelings (Noah Levenson 2019), Alfred Premium (Joël Ronez, Pierre Corbinais, and Émilie F. Grenier 2019), How They Watch You (Nick Briz 2021), and Fairly Intelligent™ (A.M. Darke 2021) track, monitor, and confront users with their own online behavior to reflect back a corporate surveillance that collects, analyzes, and exploits user data for profit. These digital documentaries utilize emotional fear- and humor-based appeals to persuade users that these technologies are controlling them, shaping their desires and needs, and dehumanizing them through algorithmic surveillance

    Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined

    Get PDF
    Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders

    Informationsströme in digitalen Kulturen

    Get PDF
    Wir sind umgeben von einer Vielzahl an Informationsströmen, die uns selbstverständlich erscheinen. Um diese digitalen Kulturen zu beschreiben, entwickeln medienwissenschaftliche Arbeiten Theorien einer Welt im Fluss. Dabei erliegen ihre Diagnosen oftmals einem Technikfetisch und vernachlässigen gesellschaftliche Strukturen. Mathias Denecke legt eine systematische Kritik dieser Theoriebildung vor. Dazu zeichnet er die Geschichte der Rede von strömenden Informationen in der Entwicklung digitaler Computer nach und diskutiert, wie der Begriff für Gegenwartsbeschreibungen produktiv gemacht werden kann

    Hybrid human-AI driven open personalized education

    Get PDF
    Attaining those skills that match labor market demand is getting increasingly complicated as prerequisite knowledge, skills, and abilities are evolving dynamically through an uncontrollable and seemingly unpredictable process. Furthermore, people's interests in gaining knowledge pertaining to their personal life (e.g., hobbies and life-hacks) are also increasing dramatically in recent decades. In this situation, anticipating and addressing the learning needs are fundamental challenges to twenty-first century education. The need for such technologies has escalated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, where online education became a key player in all types of training programs. The burgeoning availability of data, not only on the demand side but also on the supply side (in the form of open/free educational resources) coupled with smart technologies, may provide a fertile ground for addressing this challenge. Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to the literature about the utilization of (open and free-online) educational resources toward goal-driven personalized informal learning, by developing a novel Human-AI based system, called eDoer. In this thesis, we discuss all the new knowledge that was created in order to complete the system development, which includes 1) prototype development and qualitative user validation, 2) decomposing the preliminary requirements into meaningful components, 3) implementation and validation of each component, and 4) a final requirement analysis followed by combining the implemented components in order develop and validate the planned system (eDoer). All in all, our proposed system 1) derives the skill requirements for a wide range of occupations (as skills and jobs are typical goals in informal learning) through an analysis of online job vacancy announcements, 2) decomposes skills into learning topics, 3) collects a variety of open/free online educational resources that address those topics, 4) checks the quality of those resources and topic relevance using our developed intelligent prediction models, 5) helps learners to set their learning goals, 6) recommends personalized learning pathways and learning content based on individual learning goals, and 7) provides assessment services for learners to monitor their progress towards their desired learning objectives. Accordingly, we created a learning dashboard focusing on three Data Science related jobs and conducted an initial validation of eDoer through a randomized experiment. Controlling for the effects of prior knowledge as assessed by the pretest, the randomized experiment provided tentative support for the hypothesis that learners who engaged with personal eDoer recommendations attain higher scores on the posttest than those who did not. The hypothesis that learners who received personalized content in terms of format, length, level of detail, and content type, would achieve higher scores than those receiving non-personalized content was not supported as a statistically significant result

    Summer/Fall 2023

    Get PDF
    corecore