Bowdoin College Course Guide (2016-2017)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/course-catalogues/1299/thumbnail.jp

WEHST: Wearable Engine for Human-Mediated Telepresence

This dissertation reports on the industrial design of a wearable computational device created to enable better emergency medical intervention for situations where electronic remote assistance is necessary. The design created for this doctoral project, which assists practices by paramedics with mandates for search-and-rescue (SAR) in hazardous environments, contributes to the field of human-mediated teleparamedicine (HMTPM). Ethnographic and industrial design aspects of this research considered the intricate relationships at play in search-and-rescue operations, which lead to the design of the system created for this project known as WEHST: Wearable Engine for Human-Mediated Telepresence. Three case studies of different teams were carried out, each focusing on making improvements to the practices of teams of paramedics and search-and-rescue technicians who use combinations of ambulance, airplane, and helicopter transport in specific chemical, biological, radioactive, nuclear and explosive (CBRNE) scenarios. The three paramedicine groups included are the Canadian Air Force 442 Rescue Squadron, Nelson Search and Rescue, and the British Columbia Ambulance Service Infant Transport Team. Data was gathered over a seven-year period through a variety of methods including observation, interviews, examination of documents, and industrial design. The data collected included physiological, social, technical, and ecological information about the rescuers. Actor-network theory guided the research design, data analysis, and design synthesis. All of this leads to the creation of the WEHST system. As identified, the WEHST design created in this dissertation project addresses the difficulty case-study participants found in using their radios in hazardous settings. As the research identified, a means of controlling these radios without depending on hands, voice, or speech would greatly improve communication, as would wearing sensors and other computing resources better linking operators, radios, and environments. WEHST responds to this need. WEHST is an instance of industrial design for a wearable “engine” for human-situated telepresence that includes eight interoperable families of wearable electronic modules and accompanying textiles. These make up a platform technology for modular, scalable and adaptable toolsets for field practice, pedagogy, or research. This document details the considerations that went into the creation of the WEHST design

The power of storytelling in social media

Tourists are increasingly connecting in online social networks (OSN) where they share content and coconstruct narratives of tourist destinations through their shared tourism experiences. The destinations give tourists a stage to act on where they perform a desirable self. Thus, their performances and performative acts reflect on how destinations are represented. This poses a challenge for destination management organisations (DMOs). They have to find ways to join the conversations of OSN users to influence perception of their destination. It is believed that DMOs ought to build alliances with tourists by empowering them to co-construct brand narratives and aligning their storytelling with DMOs’ preferred narratives. This research aims to assess the role of storytelling in mediating tourism experiences in order to identify ways for DMOs to build alliances to strengthen destination narratives. It examines a range of different storytellers and how they reinforce and undermine preferred narratives of DMOs, and how they might write different stories across different types of OSN due to their performativity. The practices and strategies DMOs adopt to strengthen storytelling in OSN are also examined

Transnationalizing Radio Research: New Approaches to an Old Medium

Transnationalizing Radio Research presents a theoretical and methodological guide for exploring radio's multiple »global ages«, from its earliest years through its recent digital transformations. It offers radio scholars theoretical tools and concrete case studies for moving beyond national research frames. It gives radio practitioners inspiration for production and archiving, and offers scholars from many disciplines new ways to incorporate radio's vital voices into work on transnational institutions, communities, histories and identities

Gaywaves: Transcending Boundaries - the Rise and Demise of Britain's First Gay Radio Program

At the beginning of 1982 an array of conflicting forces were working to shape the landscape of Europe's metropolitan radio services, and to alternatively control, commodify or liberate its gay communities. This paper examines the drivers, which inspired Gaywaves, a nascent weekly gay community radio programme broadcasting to an inner London audience on pirate station Our Radio from May 1982 until March 1983

Divine and Diabolic Radio: Electromagnetic Spectrum, Aesthetics and Latin America

This work investigates the idea of wireless communication and the construction of the electromagnetic spectrum from a perspective of the Latin American cultural studies and Radio studies. Demonstrating that the wireless forms of expression have had socio-historical particularities and different socio-political manifestations through time, I identify diverse forms, functions and qualities that were given to the spectrum in order to understand what sort of political influence is exerted by the rational organization of radio waves. The hypothesis presented here is that the current control over the wireless infrastructure should be characterised in terms of an aesthetic domination of colonial sort. As the “birth” of the spectrum is found in the “baroque” sciences of the sixteenth century, I also note the radical shift that the notion took with the emergence of industrial capitalism, its technical instrumentality and political economy, arguing that the modern uses and interpretations of wireless media is grounded in colonial conflicts over aesthetic sovereignty and natural resources beyond the disputes over standard regulations, democratic allocation, freedom of expression, access to technology and technical management. Through the study of three experiences of radio in Latin America, I highlight the aspects of interference, illegality, colonial discipline and the control of the territory as manners by which the coloniality of power is expressed within the radio universe. The contribution that this work intends to offer to the areas of media studies, politics and cultural studies is to establish a relationship between the history of the idea (in this case, the construction of order, function and quality) of the electromagnetic spectrum and its impact on the solidification of a domination of modern and colonial kind based on the study of the phenomenon of radio waves and their uses applied for communication and expression in determined Latin American social realities

Bowdoin College Catalogue and Academic Handbook (2020-2021)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/course-catalogues/1318/thumbnail.jp

Bowdoin College Catalogue and Academic Handbook (2021-2022)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/course-catalogues/1319/thumbnail.jp

Ethnography and experimental non-fiction storytelling: relating the experiences of Maltese Fishermen

In this practice-based exploration I look at the dynamics of long-term ethnographic research to address the tensions between lived experience and conventional narrative constructs of Mediterranean identities. This research also fills a void in the anthropology of fishermen in Malta which as an area of academic investigation has remained understudied. Speculating on relational meaning making processes and multidimensional and experimental qualities inherent to ethnographic research, I produced non-linear multimodal documentary works as environments with the capacity to engender tangible, immersive and tacit knowledge about situated identities. Using my seven-year engagement with a family of fishermen from Marsaxlokk, a small fishing port in the south eastern part of Malta, I reflect on how situated learning experiences can inform experimental non-fiction audio-visual storytelling. In my research I draw on theories of affect and notions of the archivalto reflect on the ways Mediterranean identities are constructed. Examining the ecology of relations that binds together the people and the environment that they inhabit I engage with current discourses on multisensory ethnography, documentary making and narrative power to explore my practice (including two photographic essays, a sound installation, two gallery video projections and a web-based documentary prototype) as a process of creative mediation between the fishermen’s world and the public. Using select examples from my fieldwork recordings I show how embodied audio-visual practices enable nonfiction storytellers to re-propose the conditions of the ethnographic encounter. I look at how, responding to the very particular environmental and socio-cultural conditions of my field of study, I took my practice beyond the canons of traditional documentary photography towards an expanded multimedia form of storytelling. More specifically, I refer to my experiences with people working on and around the Joan of Arc(the family boat), as well as my apprenticeship as a deckhand/fisherman, to examine notions of emplaced learning, collaborative meaning making processes and affective strategies for the development of creative sensory-rich immersive storytelling strategies that provide amore nuanced understanding of Mediterranean identities