The Playful Potential of Digital Commensality: Learning from Spontaneous Playful Remote Dining Practices

With one-person households being increasingly common and Covid-19 lockdown policies forcing people to stay home, remote dining has become common practice for many, who take it as an opportunity to connect with others in times of loneliness. Sharing meals online, also known as digital commensality, is a rich form of interaction, where people leverage technology to achieve a sense of connectedness and belonging while eating. In this paper, we look at digital commensality and we explore its inherent playful potential with the aim to inspire the design of engaging technologies that can support, enhance and augment this form of interaction. For this, we used a situated play design approach to document and analyze the behavior of 36 people (including pairs of friends and strangers) sharing meals online. Our analysis surfaced a set of play potentials of remote dining -- i.e., playful things people already do and enjoy spontaneously while sharing meals online. We present those play potentials as inspirational material: they can motivate and enrich the design of future digital commensality technologies by responding to people's desire for playful and social interaction with, through, and around food

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationIn my dissertation, By Now It Should Sound Like Music, I explore connections between inheritance and writing, and how we experience different kinds of inheritance in our bodies, families, and spiritual lives. Although my primary genre for this project is the essay, many of these pieces have a story to tell. My look at inheritance is as personal as my immediate family, especially my father's adoption, and the turbulence following my grandmother's spiral into Alzheimer's. But I also follow stories and figures far outside of my own experience, such as composer Olivier Messiaen and Mother Teresa. The self is unpredictable, exciting quarry to track. And the self, by itself, is rarely enough. I investigate my Evangelical upbringing, especially the stories, songs, and cultural products like the sinner's prayer and the altar call that were part of my early spiritual formation and embedded in family relationships. In part two of the manuscript, I reach beyond the Evangelical culture of my youth to Catholic and Orthodox expressions of Christianity. In search of wisdom, transcendence, or healing, I look to spiritual places like the rocks of southern Utah, the painted monasteries of Romania, and the dehydrated carnival of Burning Man. By Now It Should Sound Like Music includes many different types of writing, from the protein scripts of our DNA to the lakes and canyons inscribed by glaciers. In these essays, the material shape and heft of words as objects, and not just meanings, are items for study in their own right. Music is one of the most important kinds of "writing" in the collection. Musical notation aims at precision but, like writing, allows room for interpretation in the birdseye of a fermata, or the suggestiveness of a metaphor. Music's other side, silence, is the backdrop of this project. Many of the essays are a reaction to silence: a silence imposed because of illness, death, physical distance, or a severed relationship. A priest I like once explained that the Bible is not the revelation but is a record of the revelation. This manuscript is no Bible, but these essays record. They function like afterimages of things seen and unseen. They function like echoes

Kaleidoscope : fictional genres and probable worlds

If fictional narratives do indeed create alternate possible worlds, and these alternate possible worlds are both enacted by and embody generic differences, as possible worlds narratology suggests, what happens when the genre of a novel changes as the text unfolds? Does a change of genre equate to a change of fictional narrative world, or a change within the fictional narrative world? If worldlikeness is recognised as a prerequisite for immersion, do genre shifts necessarily entail a disruption of immersion, and is such a potential disruption temporary or lasting? From a creative practice perspective, how and why would a writer steer their novel from one generic orientation to another? And from a possible-worlds theoretical perspective, what does the analysis of such genre changes reveal about the process of identifying genre, the role of genre in the creation of fictional narrative worlds, and the effectiveness of the concept of possibility in accounting for generic differences? This project investigates these questions through creative experimentation and critical examination with the aim of uncovering new insights into the fundamental nature of both genre and fictional narrative worlds. The novel Kaleidoscope attempts to unravel the strategies involved in implementing changes of genre within texts, testing the relationship between genre and immersion within a many-worlds ontological structure and finding significant gaps in existing understandings of what genre is and does. Informed by the findings of this creative process, the critical exegesis applies a possible-worlds informed analysis of genre to the genre-shifting works of César Aira, uncovering not only a greater understanding of the functions and functioning of genre but also important limitations in current narratological approaches to generic analysis. By attempting to apply Marie-Laure Ryan’s seminal semantic typology of fiction to the analysis of Aira’s genre-shifting works, possibility alone is found to provide an insufficient basis for generic differentiation, while the concept of probability – largely overlooked within contemporary narratology – emerges as a vital conceptual tool. The identification of probability emphasis, the generically probable and improbable, and probable accessibility relations in the analysis of genre-shifting texts reveals the importance of probability, not only to analysis, but in the development of fictional worlds. Through the interaction of creative practice and critical examination, these worlds are found to depend as much on the probable as the possible, complicating current conceptualisations of fiction in terms of possible worlds and suggesting that much remains to be discovered about the role and relevance of genre, the relationship between worldlikeness and immersion, and the probability, fictionality, and worldness of fictional narrative worlds

As the owl discreet: Essay towards a conversation and Carly\u27s Dance a novel

This thesis comprises a novel entitled Carly\u27s Dance and an essay entitled As the Owl Discreet. Although separate works, a line runs through them that might be described as an urge to connect; each work, although self-contained, is concerned with the co-existence of opposites, or more precisely, apparent opposites. The essay\u27s title is ironic, borrowed from Hillaire Belloc\u27s perverse verses collected as Cautionary Tales. Discretion is exactly what the thesis tests the bounds of, as do the characters in my novel. And so do I, in using family history to motivate my research

‘IMPLICIT CREATION’ – NON-PROGRAMMER CONCEPTUAL MODELS FOR AUTHORING IN INTERACTIVE DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) constitutes a research field that emerged from several areas of art, creation and computer science. It inquires technologies and possible artefacts that allow ‘highly-interactive’ experiences of digital worlds with compelling stories. However, the situation for story creators approaching ‘highly-interactive’ storytelling is complex. There is a gap between the available technology, which requires programming and prior knowledge in Artificial Intelligence, and established models of storytelling, which are too linear to have the potential to be highly interactive. This thesis reports on research that lays the ground for bridging this gap, leading to novel creation philosophies in future work. A design research process has been pursued, which centred on the suggestion of conceptual models, explaining a) process structures of interdisciplinary development, b) interactive story structures including the user of the interactive story system, and c) the positioning of human authors within semi-automated creative processes. By means of ‘implicit creation’, storytelling and modelling of simulated worlds are reconciled. The conceptual models are informed by exhaustive literature review in established neighbouring disciplines. These are a) creative principles in different storytelling domains, such as screenwriting, video game writing, role playing and improvisational theatre, b) narratological studies of story grammars and structures, and c) principles of designing interactive systems, in the areas of basic HCI design and models, discourse analysis in conversational systems, as well as game- and simulation design. In a case study of artefact building, the initial models have been put into practice, evaluated and extended. These artefacts are a) a conceived authoring tool (‘Scenejo’) for the creation of digital conversational stories, and b) the development of a serious game (‘The Killer Phrase Game’) as an application development. The study demonstrates how starting out from linear storytelling, iterative steps of ‘implicit creation’ can lead to more variability and interactivity in the designed interactive story. In the concrete case, the steps included abstraction of dialogues into conditional actions, and creating a dynamic world model of the conversation. This process and artefact can be used as a model illustrating non-programmer approaches to ‘implicit creation’ in a learning process. Research demonstrates that the field of Interactive Digital Storytelling still has to be further advanced until general creative principles can be fully established, which is a long-term endeavour, dependent upon environmental factors. It also requires further technological developments. The gap is not yet closed, but it can be better explained. The research results build groundwork for education of prospective authors. Concluding the thesis, IDS-specific creative principles have been proposed for evaluation in future work

Ресторанный бизнес

This textbook "Restaurant business" is the most complete specialized textbook for training specialists in English in the restaurant business. It is based on the latest data on the main directions of the restaurant industry development. In this we see the value and timeliness of this tutorial that will help on the one hand – to improve their English language skills, and on the other hand – to make better their knowledge in the professional field. The structure of this tutorial is – seven chapters: the history of the restaurant business, restaurant service, food and meals, business and culinary, diets, cookery art, European cuisine (Russian, Ukrainian, English), the American food industry (culinary business in North America and Canada, Latin America), African and Asian cuisine. In the book there is a large number of authentic texts in English, designed exercises, dialogues, charts, coloured inserts. This tutorial allows you to learn the professional vocabulary and improve their English language skills quickly and easily.Данный учебник «Ресторанный бизнес» представляет собой самое полное специализированное учебное пособие по профессиональной подготовке специалистов по английскому языку в сфере ресторанного бизнеса. Он построен на основе самых современных данных по основным направлениям развития ресторанной отрасли. Структура данного учебника такова – семь глав: история ресторанного дела, ресторанная служба, продукты и приемы пищи, кулинарное дело и диеты, поваренное искусство, европейская кухня (русская, украинская, английская), американская индустрия питания (кулинарное дело Северной Америки и Канады, Латинской Америки), Африканская и Азиатская кухня. В учебнике большое количество аутентичных текстов на английском языке, разработанные упражнения, диалоги, схемы, цветные вкладыши. Данный учебник позволяет быстро и легко усвоить профессиональную лексику и повысить свой уровень знания английского языка

The Bright Continent: African Art History (Second Edition)

Significant original research is included in this textbook. Through nearly 1000 images, it explores both traditional and contemporary African art through general discussion and specifics. The first chapter discusses materials, gender, training, and patronage. Chapter Two covers the elements and principles of design, as well as stylistic and contextual analysis. Chapter Three takes a thematic approach to African art, including numerous case studies. Chapter Four explores how religions—traditional, Christian, and Muslim—impact art and how different types of societies—nomadic, small-scale, and kingdom-based—favor varied arts. Appendices on note-taking and research are included. Maps; index. 668 pages.https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/msl_ae_ebooks/1023/thumbnail.jp

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Cultivating the world: English country house gardens, 'exotic' plants and elite women collectors, c.1690-1800

Global goods were central to the material culture of eighteenth-century country houses. Across Europe, mahogany furniture, Chinese wallpapers and Indian textiles formed the backdrop to genteel practices of drinking sweetened coffee, tea and chocolate from Chinese porcelain. They tied these houses and their wealthy owners into global systems of supply and the processes of colonialism and empire. Global Goods and the Country House builds on these narratives, and then challenges them by decentring our perspective. It offers a comparative framework that explores the definition, ownership and meaning of global goods outside the usual context of European imperial powers. What were global goods and what did they mean for wealthy landowners in places at the ‘periphery’ of Europe (Sweden and Wallachia), in the British colonies of North America and the Caribbean, or in the extra-colonial context (Japan or Rajasthan)? By addressing these questions, this volume offers fresh insights into the multi-directional flow of goods and cultures that enmeshed the eighteenth-century world. And by placing these goods in their specific material context - from the English country house to the princely palaces of Rajasthan - we gain a better understanding of their use and meaning, and of their role in linking the global and the local