Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research

Schema Languages & Internationalization Issues: A survey

Many XML-related activities (e.g. the creation of a new schema) already address issues with different languages, scripts, and cultures. Nevertheless, a need exists for additional mechanisms and guidelines for more effective internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) in XML-related contents and processes. The W3C Internationalization Tag Set Working Group (W3C ITS WG) addresses this need and works on data categories, representation mechanisms and guidelines related to i18n and l10n support in the XML realm. This paper describes initial findings from the (W3C ITS WG). Furthermore, the paper discusses how these findings relate to specific schema languages, and complementary technologies like namespace sectioning, schema annotation and the description of processing chains. The paper exemplifies why certain requirements only can be met by a combination of technologies, and discusses these technologies

Software architectural support for tangible user interfaces in distributed, heterogeneous computing environments

This research focuses on tools that support the development of tangible interaction-based applications for distributed computing environments. Applications built with these tools are capable of utilizing heterogeneous resources for tangible interaction and can be reconfigured for different contexts with minimal code changes. Current trends in computing, especially in areas such as computational science, scientific visualization and computer supported collaborative work, foreshadow increasing complexity, distribution and remoteness of computation and data. These trends imply that tangible interface developers must address concerns of both tangible interaction design and networked distributed computing. In this dissertation, we present a software architecture that supports separation of these concerns. Additionally, a tangibles-based software development toolkit based on this architecture is presented that enables the logic of elements within a tangible user interface to be mapped to configurations that vary in the number, type and location of resources within a given tangibles-based system

Semantic Domains in Akkadian Text

The article examines the possibilities offered by language technology for analyzing semantic fields in Akkadian. The corpus of data for our research group is the existing electronic corpora, Open richly annotated cuneiform corpus (ORACC). In addition to more traditional Assyriological methods, the article explores two language technological methods: Pointwise mutual information (PMI) and Word2vec.Peer reviewe

CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean

CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Neighboring Regions provides case studies on archaeology, objects, cuneiform texts, and online publishing, digital archiving, and preservation. Eleven chapters present a rich array of material, spanning the fifth through the first millennium BCE, from Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Iran. Customized cyber- and general glossaries support readers who lack either a technical background or familiarity with the ancient cultures. Edited by Vanessa Bigot Juloux, Amy Rebecca Gansell, and Alessandro Di Ludovico, this volume is dedicated to broadening the understanding and accessibility of digital humanities tools, methodologies, and results to Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Ultimately, this book provides a model for introducing cyber-studies to the mainstream of humanities research

A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation

`Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, `named entity' identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. While there are several ongoing efforts to provide formats and tools for such annotations and to publish annotated linguistic databases, the lack of widely accepted standards is becoming a critical problem. Proposed standards, to the extent they exist, have focussed on file formats. This paper focuses instead on the logical structure of linguistic annotations. We survey a wide variety of existing annotation formats and demonstrate a common conceptual core, the annotation graph. This provides a formal framework for constructing, maintaining and searching linguistic annotations, while remaining consistent with many alternative data structures and file formats.Comment: 49 page

PhiloLogic4: An Abstract TEI Query System

A common problem for TEI software development is that projects develop their own custom software stack to address the semantic intricacies present in a deeply-encoded TEI corpus. This article describes the design of version 4 of the PhiloLogic corpus query engine, which is designed to handle heterogeneous TEI encoding through its redesigned abstract data model. We show that such an architecture has substantial benefits for software reuse, allowing for powerful TEI applications to be adapted to new corpora with a minimum of custom programming, and we discuss the more general and theoretical implications of abstraction as a TEI processing technique

Beyond South Seas: Making History in Networked Digital Technologies

In this paper, I discuss some of the more salient intellectual and technological dimensions of work over the past year, focused on developing an open source knowledge creation, management and publication system. In key respects, our work seeks to anticipate developments in national collaborative e-research infrastructure over the next five or so years. Especially in view of recent statements on innovation policy by the Australian government, we can expect the next five or so years will see significant advances in the development of online knowledge repositories for not only more complex kinds of quantitative research data, but also for qualitative data in rich and diverse media forms that will offer new possibilities for humanities research. We will also see improved or new middleware, allowing Australian research communities in the humanities collaboratively to create, share and interrogate new knowledge of cultural and social phenomena. However, if humanities researchers are to exploit these and other possible advances in digital research infrastructure, then what they will also need are ‘tools’ enabling the creation, reception and use of knowledge that these infrastructural advances can put into intellectual circulation. They will need the means of using networked digital technologies as primary media for research, and to publish their findings as complex multimedia artifacts