Reflections on a Collection: Revisiting the UWM Icons Fifty Years Later

The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Art Collection is home to a sizable donation of Byzantine and post-medieval icons and liturgical objects. Central to this thesis exhibition catalogue are the thirty-two Greek and Russian icons from this collection and their history with collector Charles Bolles Bolles-Rogers. Reflections on a Collection: Revisiting the UWM Icons Collection Fifty Years Later contextualizes the history of icon collecting in the United States and examines the collecting history of these icons. By first focusing on icon collecting and scholarship in Greece and Russia towards the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, this catalogue traces the growth of interest in Byzantine and post-medieval Greek and Russian liturgical objects in the West, particularly the United States. Icons and liturgical objects became increasingly desirable for large institutions and museums along with private collectors in the twentieth century. Bolles-Rogers was one such collector. This catalogue sheds new light on the history and acquisition of the Rogers Family Collection of icons and liturgical objects to the UWM Art Collection and shows that the Rogers Family Collection is not only a collection of icons but also a collection that reflects the time period in the art world in which it was assembled

Reflections on developing a tool for creating visual representations of learning designs: towards a visual language for learning designs

Over the past four years we have been developing CompendiumLD, a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface. It has been developed as a tool to support lecturers, teachers and others involved in education to help them articulate their ideas and map out a design or learning sequence. CompendiumLD is a specialised version of Compendium, a tool for managing connections between information and ideas, which has been applied in many domains including the mapping of discussions and arguments. As most of the core knowledge mapping facilities provided by Compendium are included within CompendiumLD, it can be used for learning design, and applied it to other information mapping and modelling problems. Evidence gathered since CompendiumLD’s first release has shown the many conditions in which it is likely to be applied and appreciated by users, and that the need for visualising learning designs as a solution to understanding how all components of planned learning and teaching fit together may continue to grow. Furthermore, the use of technology is making the process of creating courses more complex. We explore these challenges and conclude with some reflections on the developments in visual representation needed to further facilitate the modelling of today and tomorrow’s complex learning situations

Visualisations with semantic icons: Assessing engagement with distracting elements

As visualisations reach a broad range of audiences, designing visualisations that attract and engage becomes more critical. Prior work suggests that semantic icons entice and immerse the reader; however, little is known about their impact with informational tasks and when the viewer’s attention is divided because of a distracting element. To address this gap, we first explored a variety of semantic icons with various visualisation attributes. The findings of this exploration shaped the design of our primary comparative online user studies, whereparticipants saw a target visualisation with a distracting visualisation on a web page and were asked to extract insights. Their engagement was measured through three dependent variables: (1) visual attention, (2) effort to write insights, and (3) self-reported engagement. In Study 1, we discovered that visualisations with semantic icons were consistently perceived to be more engaging than the plain version. However, we found no differences in visual attention and effort between the two versions. Thus, we ran Study 2 using visualisations with more salient semantic icons to achieve maximum contrast. The results were consistent with our first Study. Furthermore, we found that semantic icons elevated engagement with visualisations depicting less interestingand engaging topics from the participant’s perspective. We extended prior work by demonstrating the semantic value after performing an informational task (extracting insights) and reflecting on the visualisation, besides its value to the first impression. Our findings may be helpful to visualisation designers and storytellers keen on designing engaging visualisations with limited resources. We also contribute reflections on engagement measurements with visualisations and provide future directions

Closure: A response to Miroslav Holub

A response to Miroslav Holub's essay on "Wisdom as a metaphor" related to the professional domain of engineering which concludes that experience and action are needed to transform metaphorical expressions of wisdom into literal tenets

A method and tool to support the analysis and enhance the understanding of peer-­to-­peer learning experiences

In this paper we look at how a web-based social software can be used to make qualitative data analysis of online peer-to-peer learning experiences. Specifically, we propose to use Cohere, a web-based social sense-making tool, to observe, track, annotate and visualize discussion group activities in online courses. We define a specific methodology for data observation and structuring, and present results of the analysis of peer interactions conducted in discussion forum in a real case study of a P2PU course. Finally we discuss how network visualization and analysis can be used to gather a better understanding of the peer-to-peer learning experience. To do so, we provide preliminary insights on the social, dialogical and conceptual connections that have been generated within one online discussion group

Historical spaces as narrative: mapping collective memory onto cinematic space

The following article proposes and develops a single theory: that unlike written history which tends to privilege chronology, teleology and consequentiality, historical films have increasingly abandoned overt means of narration and instead inscribe historical meanings onto cinematic spaces in historical films. The reason for this shift, I argue, is that recent advances in historiography have begun to encourage scepticism towards the human element in reconstructing narratives. In a world bombarded with media rhetoric from all directions, persuasion from traditionally “authoritative” sources such as voiceovers, prologues, marketing material proclaiming the use of historical experts and research, individual viewpoints, eyewitness accounts, etc, all become open to criticism. In the absence of authorial authenticity, and the gradual erosion of trust in both grand narratives and individual insights, the historical film nevertheless still requires some means by which the viewer can be persuaded of its veracity through shared or collective memory, history proper and lived social experience. It is to answer this need, then, that history and historical narratives have begun to place an emphasis on historical spaces as a means to retell history by creating a “cognitive map”, which offers recourse to an intertextual “representational legacy”