Product placement

The exhibition brought together a range of artists and product designers who share an interest in how objects are made, displayed / marketed and sold in contemporary culture. The exhibition questioned issues surrounding the production, technology and marketing of commodities, but on a wider scale, how (and by whom) participation in consumer activity is structured or framed. Each artist and product designer was ‘paired’ in order to produce a new object, multiple or edition for exhibition. Via this cross-disciplinary collaboration, new working processes were to be found and explored, as well as allowing a re-appraisal of the conceptual elements of their practices. The resulting polymorphic objects (often neither product or artwork) were placed in an installation developed for the exhibition. Through an architectural re-working of the gallery, the space becomes a parody of 'catalogue' stores - mimicking their structure of experience with catalogue kiosks, service point (with uniformed assistant) and market hall/storage space. Merging this structure into the space intended to amplify the functional similarities and behavioral prompts of gallery, retail and warehouse spaces

Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Knowledge Organization WissOrg'17 of theGerman Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO),30th November - 1st December 2017, Freie Universität Berlin

Wissensorganisation is the name of a series of biennial conferences / workshops with a long tradition, organized by the German chapter of the International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO). The 15th conference in this series, held at Freie Universität Berlin, focused on knowledge organization for the digital humanities. Structuring, and interacting with, large data collections has become a major issue in the digital humanities. In these proceedings, various aspects of knowledge organization in the digital humanities are discussed, and the authors of the papers show how projects in the digital humanities deal with knowledge organization.Wissensorganisation ist der Name einer Konferenzreihe mit einer langjährigen Tradition, die von der Deutschen Sektion der International Society of Knowledge Organization (ISKO) organisiert wird. Die 15. Konferenz dieser Reihe, die an der Freien Universität Berlin stattfand, hatte ihren Schwerpunkt im Bereich Wissensorganisation und Digital Humanities. Die Strukturierung von und die Interaktion mit großen Datenmengen ist ein zentrales Thema in den Digital Humanities. In diesem Konferenzband werden verschiedene Aspekte der Wissensorganisation in den Digital Humanities diskutiert, und die Autoren der einzelnen Beiträge zeigen, wie die Digital Humanities mit Wissensorganisation umgehen

HOMO SEMIOTICUS IN SCIENCE CLASSROOM: HOW FUTURE’S SCIENCE TEACHERS FACILITATE MEANING-MAKING OF SCIENCE CONCEPTS AS CITIZENS OF DIGITAL AGE?

Communication of scientific knowledge is ultimately multimodal. In science education, many researchers demonstrated that design of science texts has a great role in meaning-making of communicated scientific knowledge. In order to present message, representations are essential elements that need to be designed consciously by science educators. This study investigates meaning-making practices of pre-service science teachers during learning activities. In a social semiotic approach, multimodality principles were executed to reveal how participants think about meaning-making practices, how they design their learn materials, and how they orchestrate during teaching. 41 preservice science teachers participated to study. 33 of them responded multimodal literacy scale, all of them prepared a PowerPointTM presentation as ten groups to teach a certain general chemistry topic and classroom observations were done. It was seen that, in theory almost all pre-service science teachers have representational competence but the results stemming from real practices showed inverse. Results of this study demonstrated that there is a big gap between pedagogical concerns and meaning-making facilities in the practices of pre-service science teachers during a science instruction. It was implied that, designing learning materials that contain high meaning-making potentials and mastering to communicate it requires a theoretical and pedagogical knowledge.  Article visualizations

The role of language in engineering competence

The behaviour of engineered products is becoming less evident from their outward appearance. Thus many current engineered products have unseen properties that become evident only after protracted investigation, analysis or use. Nevertheless marketing staff, potential users, disposal experts, financiers and so on will wish to make informed decisions about products and commonly their choices will be based on more accessible descriptions, explanations, scenarios and accounts of a products use rather than their direct experience. Engineers usually work with others in enterprises that produce things or provide services. The engineer rarely provides the service or makes the goods but, as a professional, the engineer guides the rest of the enterprise and persuades others to take particular courses of action. It is clear that an engineer's central interest is the artefact. Interestingly the artefact may be in the process of design or the subject of a feasibility study and hence will have no material existence, but it will be circumscribed by a wide variety of texts including specifications, technical reports and standards. Using their specialist language and analytical techniques, the individual engineer will gain assurance about his or her view of the artefact through discussions with fellow engineers, but at some point they will have to convey that view to non-technical specialists. Within the enterprise the engineer will become either an advocate or an adversary of the artefact faced by other individuals or groups who because of their professional or cultural background will value things in different way. The role of the engineer is then as a protagonist or opponent of the artefact within, using Bruno Latour’s evocative phrase, a “Parliament of Things”. And competent engineers, as competent advocates of artifacts, need fluent linguistic and rhetorical skills as well as analytical proficiency and the knowledge that will give them the confidence to project their views. The paper examines the implications for engineering education

Book reviews online

As the number of new academic books published each year continues to rise, such that it becomes evermore difficult to keep abreast of them in one's discipline, the book‐review procedure takes on an increasing importance. This paper outlines the design and development of an automated system for handling book reviews. Descriptions are given of some prototypes that have been developed for use on an intranet server and/or the Internet. These systems, based on SGML and HTML, are briefly discussed and compared

Clui: A Platform for Handles to Rich Objects

On the desktop, users are accustomed to having visible handles to objects that they want to organize, share, or manipulate. Web applications today feature many classes of such objects, like flight itineraries, products for sale, people, recipes, and businesses, but there are no interoperable handles for high-level semantic objects that users can grab. This paper proposes Clui, a platform for exploring a new data type, called a Webit, that provides uniform handles to rich objects. Clui uses plugins to 1) create Webits on existing pages by extracting semantic data from those pages, and 2) augmenting existing sites with drag and drop targets that accept and interpret Webits. Users drag and drop Webits between sites to transfer data, auto-fill search forms, map associated locations, or share Webits with others. Clui enables experimentation with handles to semantic objects and the standards that underlie them

Biodigital publics: personal genomes as digital media artifacts

The recent proliferation of personal genomics and direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomics has attracted much attention and publicity. Concern around these developments has mainly focused on issues of biomedical regulation and hinged on questions of how people understand genomic information as biomedical and what meaning they make of it. However, this publicity amplifies genome sequences which are also made as internet texts and, as such, they generate new reading publics. The practices around the generation, circulation and reading of genome scans do not just raise questions about biomedical regulation, they also provide the focus for an exploration of how contemporary public participation in genomics works. These issues around the public features of DTC genomic testing can be pursued through a close examination of the modes of one of the best known providers—23andMe. In fact, genome sequences circulate as digital artefacts and, hence, people are addressed by them. They are read as texts, annotated and written about in browsers, blogs and wikis. This activity also yields content for media coverage which addresses an indefinite public in line with Michael Warner’s conceptualisation of publics. Digital genomic texts promise empowerment, personalisation and community, but this promise may obscure the compliance and proscription associated with these forms. The kinds of interaction here can be compared to those analysed by Andrew Barry. Direct-to-consumer genetics companies are part of a network providing an infrastructure for genomic reading publics and this network can be mapped and examined to demonstrate the ways in which this formation both exacerbates inequalities and offers possibilities for participation in biodigital culture