Bakelite and other Shibboleths: eBay listings and the 'policing' of 'amateur' collecting knowledges within the space of an online old radio forum

eBay, the online auction site, is composed of thousands of item descriptions constructed by sellers themselves. Sellers may be collectors or antiques experts, but often they are amateurs selling off unwanted items. As such, eBay becomes an unprecedented public space for the performance of amateur collecting and consumption knowledges where experts are being disintermediated by non-expert knowledges. These knowledges have become a major source of discussion on an online old radio discussion forum and the case study presented here contends that amateur knowledges are strongly contested, often in separate online spaces, and as part of identity performance. While a ‘cult of the amateur’ may be occurring online, it is not happening without a fight over knowledge and its performance. eBay is shown as a relational space to the forum, allowing radio experts to perform their own group identity and related practices - distinguished from those seen on eBay. This paper examines these distinctions in detail - the identifying traits or 'Shibboleths' of eBay amateurs - such as the incorrect spelling of 'Bakelite'.

Teaching Health Impact and Behavior with Infographics

The use of Infographics can be a tool that not only allows for the communication of empirical health data in an understandable format, but encourages the health administration student to present evidence-based research in a creative manner. The purpose of this paper is to describe a learning exercise that implements Infographics to demonstrate an impact of a health issue and/or encourage a health behavior change. This learning exercise is developed to increase student knowledge and visual literacy skills with respect to presenting, in a concise format, a well-researched and referenced health issue and/or a health behavior change. Specifically, the exercise was designed to: (a) curate health statistics and reference information for the selected health issue; (b) identify media resources and apply copyright and fair use in a proper manner; (c) evaluate internet resources for credibility and accuracy; and (d) utilize Infographic tools to communicate one\u27s visual viewpoint. At the conclusion of the course, students reflected on the effective visual aspects of their Infographics and the points that were challenging to communicate using this medium. The benefits of this applied learning approach for students and the faculty instructor are discussed

Tracking Users’ Viewing Pattern

Empirical evidence suggests that users often exhibit a viewing pattern that favors the top and left sides of web pages (Nielsen, 2006). According to the model of visual hierarchy, viewing pattern is guided by two distinct cognitive processes: searching and scanning, both influenced by the attributes of the web components (Faraday, 2000). When used effectively, these attributes create a visual hierarchy that can guide users in viewing a page. In addition, a number of studies show that web users often exhibit a viewing pattern that is shaped like the letter “F” (Nielsen, 2006; Shrestha and Lenz, 2007). F-pattern is common to text-based pages, but can be diminished for an image-heavy page and can also be task-dependent (Shrestha and Lenz, 2007). Because images often serve as entry points to web pages (Faraday, 2000), these findings suggest that visual hierarchy manipulated by images may have an impact on users’ pattern of viewing. This study investigates two factors that may affect the F shaped viewing pattern: 1) visual hierarchy, and 2) task. Two prototypes of a homepage from a financialsrf company were designed to be different in only one section, which was named “Expert Insights”. The location of the section was below the fold of the page, a spot typically missed when users exhibit an F-shaped viewing pattern. One prototype was named Faces as its Expert Insights section included images of faces, while the other, the No Faces prototype, contained no images of faces. Because images tend to attract users’ attention, their inclusion affects the visual hierarchy of the homepage (Faraday, 2000). Two tasks were designed in this study: browsing and searching. In the searching task, participants were asked questions such as “You want to know more about a fall in Brazil\u27s stocks” and needed to retrieve information which lay in the Expert Insights section. 34 participants were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions in this two-task (browse or search) X two-prototype (Faces or No Faces prototype) design. Their viewing patterns and eye fixations were collected by the non-intrusive Tobii 1750 and analyzed using heat maps. Results of this study showed that 1) consistent with previous findings, the content above the fold received more fixations overall; 2) more fixations in the center of the page were shown in the browsing task, whereas long fixations on navigations and more scattered pattern were shown in the searching task; 3) Faces prototype received more fixations on the text in Expert Insights, but No Faces prototype showed fixations only on the titles. Compared with a previous study in F-pattern (Shrestha and Lenz, 2007), our homepage had a more complex visual hierarchy, which could guide users’ attention to areas outside of the pattern found on less visually complex pages. This study also shows that visual complexity may affect the effect of task on viewing pattern, and that task has an effect on viewing a page with a more complex visual hierarchy. Images of the faces have served as effective entry points, helping users to retrieve the information with fewer fixations. In addition, including images of faces on a homepage can help guide users in viewing and retrieving information adjacent to those images, even when the images are located below the fold of the webpage. Last, creating visual appeal in central area may be of great importance in creating a favorable aesthetic experience. These results not only have theoretical importance, but also have practical value

The Open Graph Archive: A Community-Driven Effort

In order to evaluate, compare, and tune graph algorithms, experiments on well designed benchmark sets have to be performed. Together with the goal of reproducibility of experimental results, this creates a demand for a public archive to gather and store graph instances. Such an archive would ideally allow annotation of instances or sets of graphs with additional information like graph properties and references to the respective experiments and results. Here we examine the requirements, and introduce a new community project with the aim of producing an easily accessible library of graphs. Through successful community involvement, it is expected that the archive will contain a representative selection of both real-world and generated graph instances, covering significant application areas as well as interesting classes of graphs.Comment: 10 page

Designing compelling interfaces: an exploration of the artist book and how its unique interactive experience can influence the graphical user interface.

Traditional art forms have contributed greatly to the interactive design industry and many designers still gain inspiration from painting, carving, weaving, photography, and other various arts. The artist book, which is a fairly new art form, is a mixture of old and new concepts but different from other art forms in that part of the viewer’s experience is made up by physically interacting with the book. To draw a modern day comparison, this interaction of the viewer to the book, is similar to the interaction of a user to a flash site. The goal of this interactive project is to compare two art forms, the artist book to the flash site, and from said comparison, gain insight and inspiration from the user’s experience of the two. By first interacting with the artists’ books that I have created, and then through exploration of the flash site that emulates them, users will have the chance to compare the two experiences and decide which is more compelling. Exploring an artist book will give users a glimpse of a unique type of communication. In an age where computers, television, and books are the main avenue of information, the online artist book is a refreshing and intimate way of connecting people to ideas and allowing them to also experience those ideas

Learning Visual Features from Snapshots for Web Search

When applying learning to rank algorithms to Web search, a large number of features are usually designed to capture the relevance signals. Most of these features are computed based on the extracted textual elements, link analysis, and user logs. However, Web pages are not solely linked texts, but have structured layout organizing a large variety of elements in different styles. Such layout itself can convey useful visual information, indicating the relevance of a Web page. For example, the query-independent layout (i.e., raw page layout) can help identify the page quality, while the query-dependent layout (i.e., page rendered with matched query words) can further tell rich structural information (e.g., size, position and proximity) of the matching signals. However, such visual information of layout has been seldom utilized in Web search in the past. In this work, we propose to learn rich visual features automatically from the layout of Web pages (i.e., Web page snapshots) for relevance ranking. Both query-independent and query-dependent snapshots are considered as the new inputs. We then propose a novel visual perception model inspired by human's visual search behaviors on page viewing to extract the visual features. This model can be learned end-to-end together with traditional human-crafted features. We also show that such visual features can be efficiently acquired in the online setting with an extended inverted indexing scheme. Experiments on benchmark collections demonstrate that learning visual features from Web page snapshots can significantly improve the performance of relevance ranking in ad-hoc Web retrieval tasks.Comment: CIKM 201

Integrating Flickr-based Images into Moodle to Increase Visual Appeal and Dynamism of Teaching Spaces

Images have long been shown to be an important tool for both learning and helping to develop community; in fact, there is at least one well-known English proverb that attests to this. One reason is that, used well, an image can remove the ambiguity that can be present in verbal and written communication. Research has also shown that imagery has a more direct route into our memory than the written word, which is perceived as an image and converted into meaning by the brain. This paper outlines the development of a tool (a ‘Block’ in Moodle terms) that allows the presentation of Flickr-stored photos within the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for setting general context of a module, describes the initial uses of the Block and suggests further uses for the future. The paper concludes with further work to be conducted