Design directions for media-supported collocated remembering practices

Since the widespread adoption of digital photography, people create many digital photos, often with the intention to use them for shared remembering. Practices around digital photography have changed along with advances in media sharing technologies such as smartphones, social media, and mobile connectivity. Although much research was done at the start of digital photography, commercially available tools for media-supported shared remembering still have many limitations. The objective of our research is to explore spatial and material design directions to better support the use of personal photos for collocated shared remembering. In this paper, we present seven design requirements that resulted from a redesign workshop with fifteen participants, and four design concepts (two spatial, two material) that we developed based on those requirements. By reflecting on the requirements and designs we conclude with challenges for interaction designers to support collocated remembering practices

Has Instagram Fundamentally Altered the 'Family Snapshot'?

This paper considers how parents use the social media platform Instagram to facilitate the capture, curation and sharing of ‘family snapshots’. Our work draws upon established cross-disciplinary literature relating to film photography and the composition of family albums in order to establish whether social media has changed the way parents visually present their families. We conducted a qualitative visual analysis of a sample of 4,000 photographs collected from Instagram using hashtags relating to children and parenting. We show that the style and composition of snapshots featuring children remains fundamentally unchanged and continues to be dominated by rather bland and idealised images of the happy family and the cute child. In addition, we find that the frequent taking and sharing of photographs via Instagram has inevitably resulted in a more mundane visual catalogue of daily life. We note a tension in the desire to use social media as a means to evidence good parenting, while trying to effectively manage the social identity of the child and finally, we note the reluctance of parents to use their own snapshots to portray family tension or disharmony, but their willingness to use externally generated content for this purpose

From PhotoWork to PhotoUse: exploring personal digital photo activities

© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. People accumulate large collections of digital photos, which they use for individual, social, and utilitarian purposes. In order to provide suitable technologies for enjoying our expanding photo collections, it is essential to understand how and to what purpose these collections are used. Contextual interviews with 12 participants in their homes explored the use of digital photos, incorporating new photo activities that are offered by new technologies. Based on the qualitative analysis of the collected data, we give an overview of current photo activities, which we term PhotoUse. We introduce a model of PhotoUse, which emphasises the purpose of photo activities rather than the tools to support them. We argue for the use of our model to design tools to support the user’s individual and social goals pertaining to PhotoUse

Mobile Historical

The Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (CPHDH) seeks NEH Level II Start-Up support for work leading toward the release of Mobile Historical, an open-source (and, optionally, hosted) software application (app) that allows cultural institutions, K-16 teachers, and university-based humanists to publish humanities information to mobile devices. The proposed project builds and extends (dramatically so) an existing mobile app development project aimed at curating the city, Cleveland Historical. We seek funding to scale up, revise, and extend our previous work toward the creation of the open-source tool Mobile Historical. Thus, the principal activities of this proposal are focused on creating a new vehicle for interpretive humanities publishing in mobile environments via innovative technologies and guidance on how to curate humanities content, including especially developing approaches to state-of-the-art interactive humanistic learning for broad public audiences and users

Smart radio and audio apps: the politics and paradoxes of listening to (anti-) social media

The recent crop of vocal social media applications tends to appeal to users in terms of getting their voices heard loud and clear. Indeed, it is striking how often verbs like ‘shout’ and ‘boast’ and ‘brag’ are associated with microcasting platforms with such noisy names as Shoutcast, Audioboom, Hubbub, Yappie, Boast and ShoutOmatic. In other words, these audio social media are often promoted in rather unsociable terms, appealing less to the promise of a new communicative exchange than to the fantasy that we will each can be at the centre of attention of an infinite audience. Meanwhile, many of the new forms of online radio sell their services to listeners as offering ‘bespoke’ or ‘responsive’ programming (or ‘audiofeeds’), building up a personal listening experience that meets their individual needs and predilictions. The role of listening in this new media ecology is characterised, then, by similarly contradictory trends. Listening is increasingly personalised, privatised, masterable and measurable, but also newly shareable, networked and, potentially, public. The promotional framing of these new media suggests a key contradiction at play in these new forms of radio and audio, speaking to a neo-liberal desire for a decentralization of broadcasting to the point where every individual has a voice, but where the idea of the audience is invoked as a mass network of anonymous and yet thoroughly privatised listeners. Focusing on the promotion and affordances of these various new radio- and radio-like applications for sharing speech online, this article seeks to interrogate what is at stake in these contradictions in terms of the ongoing politics, experience and ethics of listening in a mediated world

Proxemics mobile collocated interactions

Recent research on mobile collocated interactions has been looking at situations in which collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their mobile devices. However, existing practices fail to fully account for the culturally-dependent spatial relationships between people and their digital devices (i.e. the proxemic relationships). Building on the ideas of proxemic interactions, this workshop is motivated by the concept of 'proxemic mobile collocated interactions', to harness new or existing technologies to create engaging and interactionally relevant experiences. Such approaches would allow devices to not only react to presence and interaction, but also other indicators, such as the interpersonal distance people naturally use in everyday life. The aim of this one-day workshop is to bring together a community of researchers, designers and practitioners who are interested in exploring proxemics and mobile collocated interactions

Making Personal and Professional Learning Mobile: Blending Mobile Devices, Social Media, Social Networks, and Mobile Apps To Support PLEs, PLNs, & ProLNs

Mobile technologies have become an integrated, or inseparable, part of individuals’ daily lives for work, play, and learning. While social networking has been important and in practice in our society even before human civilization and certainly prior to the advent of computers, nowadays, the opportunities and venues of building a network are unprecedented. Currently, the opportunities and tools to build a network to support personal and professional learning are enabled by mobile technologies (e.g., mobile apps, devices, and services), web-based applications (e.g., Diigo and RSS readers), and social-networking applications and services (e.g., Facebook, Google+, and Twitter). The purpose of this chapter is to describe and propose how individuals use personal learning environments (PLEs), personal learning networks (PLNs), and professional learning networks (ProLNs) with mobile technologies and social networking tools to meet their daily learning needs. In our chapter, we consider categories of learning relevant to personal learning and professional learning, then we define and examine PLEs, PLNs, and ProLNs, suggesting how mobile devices and social software can be used within these. The specific strategies learners use within PLEs, PLNs, and ProLNs are then presented followed by cases that depict and exemplify these strategies within the categories of learning. Finally, implications for using mobile devices to support personal and professional learning are discussed

A holistic design perspective on media capturing and reliving

Copyright © 2016 ACM. People capture far more media than they are able to relive. In this paper we identify the discrepancy between media capturing and media reliving from a design perspective. We propose a holistic perspective, that invites designers of media experiences to considering all three interdependent aspects of the media process: media capturing interaction, specific media, and media reliving interaction. By adopting this view, we aim to ensure that the media that is captured will be both necessary and appropriate for the intended reliving experience. We illustrate our perspective with three design concepts. Finally, in the discussion we present several topics related to media capturing and reliving

Data Curation Workshop: Tips and Tools for Today

The current state of research data is like a disorganized photo collection: a mix of formats scattered across different media without a lot of authority control. That is changing as the need to make data available to researchers across the world is becoming recognized. Researchers know that their data needs to be maintained and made accessible, but often they do not have the time or the inclination to get involved in all of the details. This provides an excellent opportunity for librarians. Data curation is the process of preparing data to be made available in a repository with the goal of making it FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. This workshop walks attendees through the steps in the process and gives them hands-on experience in data curation activities