A participatory approach for digital documentation of Egyptian Bedouins intangible cultural heritage

The Bedouins of Egypt hold a unique intangible cultural heritage (ICH), with distinct cultural values and social practices that are rapidly changing as a consequence of having settled after having been nomadic for centuries. We present our attempt to develop a bottom-up approach to document Bedouin ICH. Grounded in participatory design practices, the project purpose was two-fold: engaging Egyptian Engineering undergraduates with culturally-distant technology users and introducing digital self-documentation of ICH to the Bedouin community. We report the design of a didactic model that deployed the students as research partners to co-design four prototypes of ICH documentation mobile applications with the community. The prototypes reflected an advanced understanding for the values to the Bedouins brought by digital documentation practices. Drawing from our experience, three recommendations were elicited for similar ICH projects. Namely, focusing on the community benefits; promoting motivation ownership, and authenticity; and pursuing a shared identity between designers and community members. These guidelines hold a strong value as they have been tested against local challenges that could have been detrimental to the project

Integrity protection for code-on-demand mobile agents in e-commerce

The mobile agent paradigm has been proposed as a promising solution to facilitate distributed computing over open and heterogeneous networks. Mobility, autonomy, and intelligence are identified as key features of mobile agent systems and enabling characteristics for the next-generation smart electronic commerce on the Internet. However, security-related issues, especially integrity protection in mobile agent technology, still hinder the widespread use of software agents: from the agent’s perspective, mobile agent integrity should be protected against attacks from malicious hosts and other agents. In this paper, we present Code-on-Demand(CoD) mobile agents and a corresponding agent integrity protection scheme. Compared to the traditional assumption that mobile agents consist of invariant code parts, we propose the use of dynamically upgradeable agent code, in which new agent function modules can be added and redundant ones can be deleted at runtime. This approach will reduce the weight of agent programs, equip mobile agents with more flexibility, enhance code privacy and help the recoverability of agents after attack. In order to meet the security challenges for agent integrity protection, we propose agent code change authorization protocols and a double integrity verification scheme. Finally, we discuss the Java implementation of CoD mobile agents and integrity protection

Mediators of Inequity: Online Literate Activity in Two Eighth Grade English Language Arts Classes

This comparative case study, framed by Cultural Historical Activity Theory and sociocultural understandings of literacy, investigated students’ online literate activity in two eighth grade English Language Arts classes taught by the same teacher - one with a scripted literacy curriculum and the other without. During a year-long research project, we used ethnographic methods to explore the nature of middle school students’ literate activity in each of these classes, with particular attention to the mediators evident as students engaged in online literate activity. Specifically, this article addresses the following research question: What mediators were evident within and across each of the classes and how did these mediators influence students’ online literate activity? In addressing this question, we illustrate how particular configurations of mediators – even those operating within the context of the same school and same teacher – significantly influenced the nature of students’ online literate activity and the literate identities available to students. This study reinforces the importance of attending to the influence of offline mediators in school settings. Without such attention, students’ formal education is likely to be transferred online rather than transformed online

Producing place atmospheres digitally: Architecture, digital visualisations practices and the experience economy

Computer generated images have become the common means for architects and developers to visualise and market future urban developments. This article examines within the context of the experience economy how these digital images aim to evoke and manipulate specific place atmospheres to emphasize the experiential qualities of new buildings and urban environments. In particular, we argue that CGIs are far from ‘just’ glossy representations but are a new form of visualising the urban that captures and markets particular embodied sensations. Drawing on a two year qualitative study of architects’ practices that worked on the Msheireb project, a large scale redevelopment project in Doha (Qatar), we examine how digital visualisation technology enables the virtual engineering of sensory experiences using a wide range of graphic effects. We show how these CGIs are laboriously materialised in order to depict and present specific sensory, embodied regimes and affective experiences to appeal to clients and consumers. Such development has two key implications. Firstly, we demonstrate the importance of digital technologies in framing the ‘expressive infrastructure’ (Thrift 2012) of the experience economy. Secondly, we argue that although the Msheireb CGIs open up a field of negotiation between producers and the Qatari client, and work quite hard at being culturally specific, they ultimately draw “on a Westnocentric literary and sensory palette” (Tolia-Kelly 2006) that highlights the continuing influence of colonial sensibilities in supposedly postcolonial urban processes.This research was funded by the ESRC (RES-062-23-0223)

Measuring internet activity: a (selective) review of methods and metrics

Two Decades after the birth of the World Wide Web, more than two billion people around the world are Internet users. The digital landscape is littered with hints that the affordances of digital communications are being leveraged to transform life in profound and important ways. The reach and influence of digitally mediated activity grow by the day and touch upon all aspects of life, from health, education, and commerce to religion and governance. This trend demands that we seek answers to the biggest questions about how digitally mediated communication changes society and the role of different policies in helping or hindering the beneficial aspects of these changes. Yet despite the profusion of data the digital age has brought upon us—we now have access to a flood of information about the movements, relationships, purchasing decisions, interests, and intimate thoughts of people around the world—the distance between the great questions of the digital age and our understanding of the impact of digital communications on society remains large. A number of ongoing policy questions have emerged that beg for better empirical data and analyses upon which to base wider and more insightful perspectives on the mechanics of social, economic, and political life online. This paper seeks to describe the conceptual and practical impediments to measuring and understanding digital activity and highlights a sample of the many efforts to fill the gap between our incomplete understanding of digital life and the formidable policy questions related to developing a vibrant and healthy Internet that serves the public interest and contributes to human wellbeing. Our primary focus is on efforts to measure Internet activity, as we believe obtaining robust, accurate data is a necessary and valuable first step that will lead us closer to answering the vitally important questions of the digital realm. Even this step is challenging: the Internet is difficult to measure and monitor, and there is no simple aggregate measure of Internet activity—no GDP, no HDI. In the following section we present a framework for assessing efforts to document digital activity. The next three sections offer a summary and description of many of the ongoing projects that document digital activity, with two final sections devoted to discussion and conclusions

Viewing, listening and reading along: Linguistic and multimodal constructions of viewer participation in the net series SKAM

This paper investigates how SKAM viewers are positioned as participants through semiotic resources in the net series, i.e. the filmic means for making meaning, including representations of the characters’ embodied and digitally mediated communication. For this purpose, we combine perspectives from linguistic-multimodality studies of modes for communication and studies building on Goff man’s (1981) work on participation frameworks, i.e. the various ways of participating in co-present and/or mediated communication. The article aims to complement existing media studies of immediacy in SKAM and viewers’ sense of co-presence with characters in the net series (Jerslev 2017, Sundet 2017). It does so by showing how participant frameworks are multimodally constructed at a fictional level and a communicational level. Within each of these frameworks, the viewer is positioned in distinct ways. We describe how the viewer is placed, i.e. physically positioned, in the interactional space of the depicted characters, and how the characters’ communicative means are interactionally organised, accomplished and made available for interpretation by the viewer. Furthermore, we show how characters monitor each other in the shared space of a schoolyard, how embodied and digitally mediated communicative features are foregrounded, and how the viewer is provided access to these resources in ways that reflect and create specific viewing positions in the communicative frames of the characters. We argue that these integrations of semiotic modes exploit affordances related to speech, writing and embodiment, that the positionings mainly work to create a sense of presence and identification for the viewer, and that representations of digitally mediated communication (writing) on the viewer’s screen specifically expose how the digitally mediated communication space of one of the characters is integrated with the digitally mediated viewing space

An examination of the physical and temporal parameters of post-physical printmaking practice: exploring new modes of collaboration, distribution and consumption resulting from digital processes and networked participation.

This research was initiated by questions raised from the researchers professional activities in fine art printmaking and examines, through contextualised artistic practice and critical enquiry, redefinitions in the physical and temporal parameters of digitally mediated fine art printmaking caused by developments in digital media; specifically the impact of digital culture, Web2.0, social networking, augmented and virtual reality. Grounded on critical contextual review the research explores, through contextualised research probes, the notion of post-physical practice and the impact of new modes of collaboration, distribution and consumption on contemporary printmaking. It includes the findings of an international, digitally mediated, participatory and collaborative exchange survey of contemporary digital print, developed through direct enquiry using social media as a research tool. Philosophical questions about the impact of eculture, post-physical working and new modes of print-based artistic practice were examined, as well as the indexicality of the print itself in augmented and virtual contexts. The research employs dynamic triangulation between critical contextual review and direct qualitative and practice-based research; to develop a taxonomy framing the contextual precedents of digital printmaking, pinpointing key markers of transition between traditional and new printmaking. It uses post-studio methods and explores the conception, production, editioning, collection and ownership of print in an increasingly networked digital age, providing proof of concept and exploring virtual immersive surfaces in printmaking. These lead to the development of new models for a second generation of printmaking practice or Printmaking2.0 expressly founded in post-physical practice in a poststudio context and embracing the lingua franca of contemporary digital practice in the production of born digital virtually imprinted forms. In both, the technical practice of post-physical printmaking and the significant artistic implications resulting from the cultural shifts following digital participation and post-physical embodiment

Photobombing: Mobility, Humour and Culture

The photobomb, in name and practice, is a phenomenon of Web2.0 – in the sense of being a participatory and read/write Web. This paper contributes to the academic discourse concerning the anthropology of the Internet. Photobombing exploits the ready availability of channels for individual expression created with writability, the importance of user-generated humour for the Web and theubiquity of digital photography devices. The issues of the visual and of humour\ud are both problematic territory for academic research and, despite their significance\ud within the context of digital culture, have received little focused attention in this\ud context (Gillispie, 2003). By drawing upon an observational methodology we\ud construct a typology of photobombs drawn from a variety of sources to understand\ud the simplicity and subtlety of humour being employed as well as the way in which\ud the photobomb – as a discrete artefact - is embedded and interlinked with other\ud (digital) cultural practices. The approach employed here for photobombs offers insight into the potential for the wider application of typological methods in the search and retrieval of (digital) visual object

Bridging cultural heritage and communities through digital technologies: Understanding perspectives and challenges

We present and discuss the results of a qualitative study aimed at identifying what role interactive digital technologies could play in facilitating the participation of communities at risk of exclusion (particularly migrants and refugees) in cultural and heritage-related activities. Culture and heritage are known to be key factors in fostering social inclusion, and this has the potential for contributing to both the wellbeing of these communities and to cultural institutions themselves. Through surveys and interviews with two cohorts of participants (cultural heritage professionals and community facilitators), we gathered insights about their perspectives on how ICT tools could support their work with and for communities, as well as the challenges they face. This work sheds light on the opportunities and barriers surrounding the use of digital technologies for participation in the cultural heritage sector, which is timely due to the increasing focus on grassroots and community-led heritage initiatives and to the growing body of work on participatory ICT in disciplines such as human-computer interaction and community informatics