Cultural Heritage on line

The 2nd International Conference "Cultural Heritage online – Empowering users: an active role for user communities" was held in Florence on 15-16 December 2009. It was organised by the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and the Library of Congress, through the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program - NDIIP partners. The conference topics were related to digital libraries, digital preservation and the changing paradigms, focussing on user needs and expectations, analysing how to involve users and the cultural heritage community in creating and sharing digital resources. The sessions investigated also new organisational issues and roles, and cultural and economic limits from an international perspective

Facilitating immersion, engagement and flow in multi-user virtual environments

Virtual worlds are providing myriad opportunities for the development of innovative curricula for tertiary educators. They provide a virtual meeting space for those students and lecturers who are geographically remote from one another, rendering distance irrelevant and facilitating the formation of community. This paper will look at those factors - physical, social, virtual and those related to pedagogy - which facilitate immersion in virtual worlds; that suspension of disbelief which generates the feeling of presence or 'being there', crucial to promoting student engagement and ultimately, flow

Exploring bystanders’ privacy concerns with smart homes in Jordan

The proliferation of smart home devices has raised many privacy concerns among smart home inhabitants. Previous research has mostly focused on family members and device owners in Western contexts (i.e., Europe and North America). In contrast, this research study examines the Muslim Arab Middle Eastern (MAME) context of Jordan to investigate how different cultural, social, and religious norms affect privacy concerns and practices in smart homes in Jordan. Our research starts with a literature review of the privacy concerns of bystanders in smart homes -- individuals who are subjected to the smart device use of others -- identifying several gaps in this area. Our studies seek to understand the privacy concerns and expectations of smart home bystanders and households in Jordan, with a particular focus on domestic workers. We explore legal and regulatory perspectives on privacy protection and how these relate to the tensions that may arise between households and their domestic workers. We also examine the complex power dynamics between domestic workers and households, particularly in spaces that function as both a residence and a workplace. This dual-use of smart homes has created gaps in workplace protections that favor households. Finally, we explore smart device design challenges for privacy protection, and we assess how a co-designed mobile application can be used as an auxiliary tool to support privacy protection of bystanders in Jordanian smart homes. Ultimately, the outcomes of this thesis contribute to addressing the complex and intricate issues that arise from the use of smart technology in households that employ domestic workers. We anticipate that our findings will not only inform future research and offer recommendations for social interventions but also facilitate the improvement of privacy protection measures by informing smart device design and influencing the development of policies and regulations that offer better support for the privacy protection in smart homes. It is crucial to stress that collaborative interventions are essential from all stakeholders

CURATION AND MANAGEMENT OF CULTURAL HERITAGE THROUGH LIBRARIES

Libraries, museums and archives hold valuable collections in a variety of media, presenting a vast body of knowledge rooted in the history of human civilisation. These form the repository of the wisdom of great works by thinkers of past and the present. The holdings of these institutions are priceless heritage of the mankind as they preserve documents, ideas, and the oral and written records. To value the cultural heritage and to care for it as a treasure bequeathed to us by our ancestors is the major responsibility of libraries. The past records constitute a natural resource and are indispensable to the present generation as well as to the generations to come. Libraries preserve the documentary heritage resources for which they are primarily responsible. Any loss of such materials is simply irreplaceable. Therefore, preserving this intellectual, cultural heritage becomes not only the academic commitment but also the moral responsibility of the librarians/information scientists, who are in charge of these repositories. The high quality of the papers and the discussion represent the thinking and experience of experts in their particular fields. The contributed papers also relate to the methodology used in libraries in Asia to provide access to manuscripts and cultural heritage. The volume discusses best practices in Knowledge preservation and how to collaborate and preserve the culture. The book also deals with manuscript and archives issues in the digital era. The approach of this book is concise, comprehensively, covering all major aspects of preservation and conservation through libraries. The readership of the book is not just limited to library and information science professionals, but also for those involved in conservation, preservation, restoration or other related disciplines. The book will be useful for librarians, archivists and conservators. We thank the Sunan Kalijaga University, Special Libraries Association- Asian Chapter for their trust and their constant support, all the contributors for their submissions, the members of the Local and International Committee for their reviewing effort for making this publication possible

Dramatistic User Experience Design: The Usability Testing of an e-Government System in A Non-Western Setting

This dissertation investigates rhetorical situatedness as a factor that culturally designates users’ motives in adopting a new technology. The application of Kenneth Burke’s dramatism extends the discussion about the situation where an interaction takes place to include acting and meaning-making in Non-Western settings as contextual and situated. This expansion is essential to reinforce the understanding of how cultural contexts impact users’ motives, specifically users from Non-Western settings, to adopt a technology. The traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research stresses mechanical and technical aspects between a user (agent) and a technology device (agency) in order to reduce user errors. This approach isolates the rhetorical situation of interaction in a computer interface, thus eliding the cultural situatedness by regarding the situation as something fixed, such as in a laboratory. Adding a cultural context provides a fuller picture of this interaction. Using a civic records online system called e-Lampid, which is administered by Surabaya City Government in Indonesia as a case study, I discover five elements of situatedness that contribute significantly to weave acting and meaning-making into a culturally informed interaction. User motives are shaped by internal and external situations that are collective, local, and both onsite and off. Dramatism is a tool for analysis and production that prioritizes cultural awareness. Dramatistic User Experience (UX) design offers analytical, comprehensive, and systematic perspectives on the design process. Dramatistic UX integrates three different approaches: usability testing, rhetorical awareness of situations, and needs analysis. The synergy of dramatism, user experience, and design thinking provides a holistic approach to construct a rhetorically grounded and culturally contingent user experience design

The UX of things: exploring UX principles to inform security and privacy design in the smart home

Smart homes are under attack. Threats can harm both the security of these homes and the privacy of their inhabitants. As a result, in addition to delivering pleasant and aesthetic experiences, smart devices need to protect households from vulnerabilities and attacks. Further, the need for user-centered security and privacy design is particularly important for such an environment, given that inhabitants are demographically-diverse (e.g., age, gender, educational level) and have different skills and (dis)abilities. Prior work has explored different usable security and privacy solutions for smart homes; however, the applicability of user eXperience (UX) principles to security and privacy design is under-explored. This research project aims to address the on-going challenge of security and privacy in the smart home through the lens of UX design. The objective of this thesis is two-fold. First, to investigate how UX factors and principles affect the security and privacy of smart home users. Secondly, to inform product design through the development of an empirically-tested framework for UX design of security and privacy in smart home products. In the first step, we explored the relationship between UX, security, and privacy in smart homes from user and designer perspectives: through (i) conducting a qualitative interview study with smart home users (n=13) and (ii) analyzing an ethnomethodologically informed study of six UK households living in smart homes (n=6); and, we then explored the role of UX in the design of security, privacy and data protection in smart homes through qualitative semi-structured interviews with smart home users, designers and business leaders through two rounds of interviews (n=20, n=20). In the second step, using conceptual framework analysis, we systematically analyzed our previously collected data and the literature to construct a framework of design heuristics for consent and permission in smart homes. We applied these heuristics in four participatory co-design workshops and reported on their use. We further analyzed the use of the heuristics through thematic analysis highlighting how the heuristics were used, their purpose, and their effectiveness. By bringing UX design to the smart home security and privacy table, we believe that this research project will have a significant impact on academia, industry, and government organizations. Our thesis will improve design practices for security and privacy in domestic smart devices while addressing wider challenges, opportunities, and future work

Teaching-Learning-Research: Design and Environments

This is Manchester: We do things differently here Manchester, once the ‘Industrial Capital’ of the world, has long been a test bed for architectural and urban experimentation. From the early settlements that challenged the resilience of the Romans, and then the Vikings, through the massive boom of the industrial period, when such was the frenzy in the city that it earned the sobriquet Cottonopolis, beyond the economic melancholia of the late 20th century, to the unbridled optimism of the 21st. As a progressive city, Manchester has continually reinvented itself. The present reincarnation was led through cultural regeneration facilitated by the adaptive reuse of those great redundant industrial structures, it is a city that encourages smart technologies and embraces a community of 24 Hour Party People. Where better then to hold a conference that explores progressive architectural pedagogy – especially a virtual one! The architectural, landscape, and design studio is a laboratory for experimentation where students are encouraged and expected to question and disrupt the status quo, to explore possible different futures, and to propose radical solutions to unsolvable problems. The need to fuel this move away from more traditional tabular rasa education is the responsibility of academics, and this conference was a wonderful vehicle to explore, expound, discuss, and debate the future of architectural education. During the pandemic we have had to learn to do things differently, not to be down heartened by the difficulty of interacting solely through the computer, but to embrace the nearness that digital communication provides. We have adapted methods of teaching and learning to accommodate this extraordinary situation, we have creatively responded to the pandemic and developed strategies that encourage endeavour, promote wellbeing, and support scholarship. Extraordinary strategies are needed for an extraordinary situation. It was a great pleasure to be able to host the AMPS Teaching – Learning – Research: Design and Environments conference at the Manchester School of Architecture. It was lovely to welcome so many virtual guests to the city. The great success of the online event was the demonstrated by the enthusiasm with which speakers engaged with the conference, the quality of the post-session debate combined with the international dialogue and collaboration, (especially in this time of uncertainty) created by such global citizens. It is an honour to introduce the conference proceedings, presented here as collection of well argued, forward thinking, deliberately controversial, and valuable papers

The role of television and social media news videos in raising the socio-political awareness of Jordanian University students

This thesis investigates the use and perceived awareness of Jordanian university students towards the socio-political news presented by Television “National Jordanian and Satellite TV” in comparison to Social Media “Facebook and YouTube”. The thesis employs the use of qualitative and quantitative data through surveys and interviews with stratified simple sampling from 1000 students enrolled at the University of Jordan. The survey had been designed after a careful view of the demographics and behavioural perceptions and subsequently examined the viewing habits of the university students with 66% of the sample aged between 18 and 25 years old. The survey questions allow the participants to explore, identify and state their perceptions of online news videos, their credibility weighed against traditional media television, more specifically, JRTV with a focus on how each of the two mediums influenced and manipulated their socio-political awareness. The research further identifies the motivations and perceptions that each of these factors had to play in allowing the sample survey to identify their preferences through the application of uses and gratifications theory. This study reveals that traditional media such as television contribute to raising socio-political awareness of domestic and global events. JRTV has taken the role of domestic news provider to all age groups in Jordan, despite university students relying on satellite television for international news. Interestingly, a significant number of students spend more than an hour on social media for news updates. The findings of the study indicate that 86% of the sample survey to be more inclined towards using social media than watching JRTV. The research further concludes that the traditional media platforms including JRTV need to enhance their content and to include various programs and talk shows that capture the interest of students and allow them to rely on national television rather than satellite or online news for local socio-political news, since only 3.4% of the total sample size placed reliance on traditional media. Therefore, the research identifies the need to provide importance to content improvement by national authorities, to result in having representative platform to all voices in the country and also, reducing the possible influence by other foreign media providers