Managed Forgetting to Support Information Management and Knowledge Work

Trends like digital transformation even intensify the already overwhelming mass of information knowledge workers face in their daily life. To counter this, we have been investigating knowledge work and information management support measures inspired by human forgetting. In this paper, we give an overview of solutions we have found during the last five years as well as challenges that still need to be tackled. Additionally, we share experiences gained with the prototype of a first forgetful information system used 24/7 in our daily work for the last three years. We also address the untapped potential of more explicated user context as well as features inspired by Memory Inhibition, which is our current focus of research.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, preprint, final version to appear in KI - K\"unstliche Intelligenz, Special Issue: Intentional Forgettin

Emerging technologies for learning (volume 1)

Collection of 5 articles on emerging technologies and trend

Mapping the travel blog : a study of the online travel narrative

This thesis examines the discursive tension between travel and tourism and analyses how narrative techniques negotiate this in travel blogs. This discursive analysis uses various theories of narrative and self-presentation, particularly Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, polyphony, and speech genres, Goffman’s theories of self-presentation, and Graham Dann’s framework for tourist discourse. It finds that the underlying discursive tensions in travel blogs indicate a need for a more flexible approach to defining and analysing this form of communication

Racialising assemblages and affective events: A feminist new materialism and posthuman study of Muslim schoolgirls in London

Recent years have seen rising trends in terrorism, hate crime and Islamophobia in the UK. Enforced Prevent and counter-terrorism strategies have re-located all Muslims as threatening and having potentiality to radicalisation. This PhD thesis is concerned with how a Muslim schoolgirl feels, lives and experiences everyday life in this era. I follow fifteen Muslim schoolgirls across time and space by mapping relational materialities between things that matter for them in their ordinary everyday practices and experiences. This thesis takes up the feminist new materialist and post- humanist call for anticipating potentialities of the virtual, material and affective to find a different capacity for the analysis of events, practices, assemblages, feelings, and the backgrounds of everyday experiences against which relations unfold in their myriad potentials. I argue that the affective atmospheres around Muslims provide the conditions for the emergence of racialising encounters. Multi-sensory methods of walking intra-view, creating photo-diary and face-to- face interview were developed to explore relations between bodies, spaces, times, virtual and actual. Stories, places, objects, thoughts and feelings that emerge as data and in-between relational materialities were mapped and read diffractively through one another. Thinking through relationality, materiality and affect enabled this thesis to actualise the plurality of Muslim schoolgirls' relations-in-the-world and their subjectivity as part of the becoming-assemblages with human and more-than- human bodies. This thesis mapped and challenged some of the racialised, gendered and hegemonic views of Muslim schoolgirls as risky, threatening and with a potential to radicalisation. Mattering with what those Muslim schoolgirls mattered with, their fear of racial harassment in the course of their everyday lives, of what to say, do and wear, their desire to live in safe houses and blossom in safe schools, all showed that safeguarding educational policies need to shift their focus towards threats of racial harassment, of living in overcrowded housing and being silenced rather than seeking to prevent the threat of radicalisation

A quantified past : fieldwork and design for remembering a data-driven life

PhD ThesisA ‘data-driven life’ has become an established feature of present and future technological visions. Smart homes, smart cities, an Internet of Things, and particularly the Quantified Self movement are all premised on the pervasive datafication of many aspects of everyday life. This thesis interrogates the human experience of such a data-driven life, by conceptualising, investigating, and speculating about these personal informatics tools as new technologies of memory. With respect to existing discourses in Human-Computer Interaction, Memory Studies and Critical Data Studies, I argue that the prevalence of quantified data and metrics is creating fundamentally new and distinct records of everyday life: a quantified past. To address this, I first conduct qualitative, and idiographic fieldwork – with long-term self-trackers, and subsequently with users of ‘smart journals’ – to investigate how this data-driven record mediates the experience of remembering. Further, I undertake a speculative and design-led inquiry to explore context of a ’quantified wedding’. Adopting a context where remembering is centrally valued, this Research through Design project demonstrates opportunities and develops considerations for the design of data-driven tools for remembering. Crucially, while speculative, this project maintains a central focus on individual experience, and introduces an innovative methodological approach ‘Speculative Enactments’ for engaging participants meaningfully in speculative inquiry. The outcomes of this conceptual, empirical and speculative inquiry are multiple. I present, and interpret, a variety of rich descriptions of existing and anticipated practices of remembering with data. Introducing six experiential qualities of data, and reflecting on how data requires selectivity and construction to meaningfully account for one’s life, I argue for the design of ‘Documentary Informatics’. This perspective fundamentally reimagines the roles and possibilities for personal informatics tools; it looks beyond the current present-focused and goal-oriented paradigm of a data-driven life, to propose a more poetic orientation to recording one’s life with quantified data

Photo Realism

Photo Realism is the principal term used throughout this paper. I use this specific terminology, Photo Realism, so as not to confuse it with Super Realism, Sharp Focus Realism or Hard Edge Realism. True, many of these Realisms all mean the impecable clarity of subject matter, but, for my purpose, I am continually using Photo Realism to make it evident that a photograph was rendered to achieve an end result. Using predominantly contemporary Photo Realists\u27 beliefs and opinions as my main resource material, comparisons were made of their unique styles so as to present the various uses of the photograph through the medium of oil. To combine painting with photography is a technique incorporating a mechanical device with an old medium, retaining the integrity of both. In this increasingly technical society, the artist can use technology sensitively. The use of the photograph through painting shows constructive growth toward the development of contemporary art. The material presented here is to show that the use of the camera does not duplicate productions, but only makes the productions more dynamic. The use of photographic images inspired the Photo Realists as did traditional realistic painting. The desire to struggle with photography, which reveals true reality in just moments, not only influenced many artists\u27 compositions, but provided immediate source material for many paintings. The Photo Realist is concerned with reevaluating common things, thus emphasizing this force by size. The emphasis of an image heightens the ability to see, to take note of what is really being viewed. What usually goes unnoticed is now emphasized to achieve its aesthetic beauty, thus informing us of a beauty which is usually ignored. This enables the viewer to inspect the painterly quality of a production. Ordinarily, the piece would engulf the viewer with emotions, ---- now investigating the production as a sole work of art is of most importance

Photo Realism

Photo Realism is the principal term used throughout this paper. I use this specific terminology, Photo Realism, so as not to confuse it with Super Realism, Sharp Focus Realism or Hard Edge Realism. True, many of these Realisms all mean the impecable clarity of subject matter, but, for my purpose, I am continually using Photo Realism to make it evident that a photograph was rendered to achieve an end result. Using predominantly contemporary Photo Realists\u27 beliefs and opinions as my main resource material, comparisons were made of their unique styles so as to present the various uses of the photograph through the medium of oil. To combine painting with photography is a technique incorporating a mechanical device with an old medium, retaining the integrity of both. In this increasingly technical society, the artist can use technology sensitively. The use of the photograph through painting shows constructive growth toward the development of contemporary art. The material presented here is to show that the use of the camera does not duplicate productions, but only makes the productions more dynamic. The use of photographic images inspired the Photo Realists as did traditional realistic painting. The desire to struggle with photography, which reveals true reality in just moments, not only influenced many artists\u27 compositions, but provided immediate source material for many paintings. The Photo Realist is concerned with reevaluating common things, thus emphasizing this force by size. The emphasis of an image heightens the ability to see, to take note of what is really being viewed. What usually goes unnoticed is now emphasized to achieve its aesthetic beauty, thus informing us of a beauty which is usually ignored. This enables the viewer to inspect the painterly quality of a production. Ordinarily, the piece would engulf the viewer with emotions, ---- now investigating the production as a sole work of art is of most importance