Visualizing Early American Art Audiences: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Allston\u27s Dead Man Restored

abstract Scholarship on early American art focuses almost exclusively ontheproductionofartandontheideasthatartistsandtheirelitepatrons intended to inculcate by placing artworks on display. This essay explores art spectatorship in the early republic and examines how middle-class audiences influenced the content of art displays created by members of the elite. Using readings of works by Washington Allston, John Lewis Krimmel, and Charles Bird King and print accounts of art exhibitions,it argues that the audiences at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts stimulated a vigorous public discourse about its exhibitions that steered the Academy’s purchasing toward historical paintings. The Academy’s acquisition of Allston’s Dead Man Restored demonstrates that spectators played a more significant role than scholars have previously recognized in the development of the fine arts in the United States

Living, Breathing Data: Sharing and Interpreting Green Infrastructure Data to Promote Behavioral Change

Green infrastructure is a sustainable and climate resilient approach to urbanization that reduces the impact that we as humans have on our environment. Traditional impermeable infrastructure causes excessive stormwater runoff, which disrupts the nutrient balance and water properties of the surrounding watershed. Green infrastructure installments such as porous pavement, rain barrels, and green roofs provide various ecosystem services, and restore urban water quality. As communities shift to being more climate resilient, the responsibility to develop green infrastructure rests on individuals as well as institutions. The Rochester Museum & Science Center in Rochester, New York, has constructed a Green Infrastructure Showcase on their campus and is working with the Rochester Institute of Technology Environmental Science Program to collect data and assess the efficacy of their green infrastructure. The goal of this thesis is to communicate that data to the public by using Tableau, an online data visualization platform, and by prototyping an interactive software demo that could be installed within the museum. This thesis addresses the following research question: How can scientific data visualizations and dashboards be used to convey meaningful conclusions about green infrastructure to the public? This question is explored by examining engaging exhibition components and visualization design and by analyzing four case studies. The intended outcome of this project is threefold: to share data from the green infrastructure showcase; to visualize and interpret scientific data for visitors to the museum; and to show how data may promote behavioral change. The thesis offers a method for museums to share numerical data in a way that is more engaging than a static display of numbers. This thesis proposes that living, breathing data—quantitative information presented as a series of data visualizations that visitors can interact with—fosters visitor engagement and may motivate visitors to change their behavior in order to be responsible stewards of the environment. Ultimately, by creating data visualizations, interpreting the data, and sharing it with the museum’s public, museums have the capacity to encourage individuals and communities to make more informed decisions about how to implement green infrastructure in their cities and in their daily lives

Persuasive Technology for Learning in Business Context

"Persuasive Design is a relatively new concept which employs general principles of persuasion that can be implemented in persuasive technology. This concept has been introduced by BJ Fogg in 1998, who since then has further extended it to use computers for changing attitudes and behaviour. Such principles can be applied very well in learning and teaching: in traditional human-led learning, teachers always have employed persuasion as one of the elements of teaching. Persuasive technology moves these principles into the digital domain, by focusing on technology that inherently stimulates learners to learn more quickly and effectively. This is very relevant for the area of Business Management in several aspects: Consumer Behavior, Communications, Human Resource, Marketing & Advertising, Organisational Behavior & Leadership. The persuasive principles identified by BJ Fogg are: reduction, tunnelling, tailoring, suggestion, self-monitoring, surveillance, conditioning, simulation, social signals. Also relevant is the concept of KAIROS, which means the just-in-time, at the right place provision of information/stimulus. In the EuroPLOT project (2010-2013) we have developed persuasive learning objects and tools (PLOTs) in which we have applied persuasive designs and principles. In this context, we have developed a pedagogical framework for active engagement, based on persuasive design in which the principles of persuasive learning have been formalised in a 6-step guide for persuasive learning. These principles have been embedded in two tools – PLOTmaker and PLOTLearner – which have been developed for creating persuasive learning objects. The tools provide specific capability for implementing persuasive principles at the very beginning of the design of learning objects. The feasibility of employing persuasive learning concepts with these tools has been investigated in four different case studies with groups of teachers and learners from realms with distinctly different teaching and learning practices: Business Computing, language learning, museum learning, and chemical substance handling. These case studies have involved the following learner target groups: school children, university students, tertiary students, vocational learners and adult learners. With regards to the learning context, they address archive-based learning, industrial training, and academic teaching. Alltogether, these case studies include participants from Sweden, Africa (Madagascar), Denmark, Czech Republic, and UK. One of the outcomes of this investigation was that one cannot apply a common set of persuasive designs that would be valid for general use in all situations: on the contrary, the persuasive principles are very specific to learning contexts and therefore must be specifically tailored for each situation. Two of these case studies have a direct relevance to education in the realm of Business Management: Business Computing and language learning (for International Business). In this paper we will present the first results from the evaluation of persuasive technology driven learning in these two relevant areas.