992 research outputs found
Digital exclusion: implications for human services practitioners
Issues around digital exclusion may be in their infancy but
they are developing fast. The Internet has the potential to offer equity of digital access for enabling individual independence and empowerment in an increasingly digital society. However, for many users of assistive technologies, this remains a problematic scenario. Citizens, who already experience disablement through social failure to recognize difference and diversity of need, may be doubly disabled by exclusive digital policy and practice. There is an urgent need to research the implications of this exclusion for human service educators and practitioners
Milestones and Impact Factors
Environmental Health has just received its first Impact Factor by Thomson ISI. At a level of 2.48, this achievement is quite satisfactory and places Environmental Health in the top 25% of environmental science journals. When the journal was launched in 2002, it was still unclear whether the Open Access publishing model could be made into a viable commercial enterprise within the biomedical field. During the past eight years, Open Access journals have become widely available, although still covering only about 15% of journal titles. Major funding agencies and institutions, including prominent US universities, now require that researchers publish in Open Access journals. Because of the profound role of scientific journals for the sharing of results and communication between researchers, the advent of Open Access may be of as much significance as the transition from handwriting to printing via moveable type. As Environmental Health is an electronic Open Access journal, the numbers of downloads at the journal website can be retrieved. The top-20 list of articles most frequently accessed shows that all of them have been downloaded over 10,000 times. Back in 2002, the first article published was accessed only 49 times during the following month. A year later, the server had over 1,000 downloads per month, and now the total number of monthly downloads approaches 50,000. These statistics complement the Impact Factor and confirm the viability of Open Access in our field of research. The advent of digital media and its decentralized mode of distribution - the internet - have dramatically changed the control and financing of scientific information dissemination, while facilitating peer review, accelerating editorial handling, and supporting much needed transparency. Both the meaning and means of "having an impact" are therefore changing, as will the degree and way in which scientific journals remain "factors" in that impact
Prosumer and Product Design Through Digital Tools
Currently, the growing interest of users and consumers in the participation of the creative process has led to the typical âmaker cultureâ practices. Consequently, there is an increasing number of prosumers - users who produce what they consume - who want to be part of the design and transformation process of the products. In order to achieve it, prosumers have begun to use digital tools that greatly facilitate this task. These tools could vary depending on the number of users involved in the process and the freedom of participation that they have on the product. It has been presented a number of qualitative classification of cases involving the end user, individually or collectively, that has influenced as a prosumer in the product design process. The objective is to study the use of digital tools in the creative phase within the design process according to their different levels of participation with respect to the final product. The cases are shown in four tables according to the number of users involved in the process and their level of participation. In these tables, other important aspects related to the study of digital tools such as the type of contribution of the prosumer to the product or the design phase in which he participates will be identified. In conclusion, this work will show if there is a pattern in the use of digital tools according to the number of users involved in the process and the freedom of participation that they have and which are the reasons for their use
Breaking Open the Black Boxes: media archaeology, anarchaeology and media materiality
An essay on the emergent methodology of media archaeology, in relation to the material turn in approaches to digital media. In particular, this article advocates taking up Siegfried Zielinski's concept of 'anarchaeology', but in a different sense to the way it was originally proposed, in order to emphasise the political potentials of a media (an)archaeological methodological approach
Telepresence and the Role of the Senses
The telepresence experience can be evoked in a number of ways. A well-known example is a player of videogames who reports about a telepresence experience, a subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when physically situated in another place. In this paper we set the phenomenon of telepresence into a theoretical framework. As people react subjectively to stimuli from telepresence, empirical studies can give more evidence about the phenomenon. Thus, our contribution is to bridge the theoretical with the empirical. We discuss theories of perception with an emphasis on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, the role of the senses and the Spinozian belief procedure. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon. A telepresence-study that included the affordance concept is used to empirically study how players report sense-reactions to virtual sightseeing in two cities. We investigate and explore the interplay of the philosophical and the empirical. The findings indicate that it is not only the visual sense that plays a role in this experience, but all senses
Speaking with things: Encoded researchers, social data, and other posthuman concoctions
We apply our heuristics for ‘interviewing’ nonhuman research participants (Adams and Thompson 2011) to the digital things of qualitative research itself: recording devices, data analysis software, and other sociomaterial concoctions recruited at different stages of contemporary research projects. We suggest that these ‘inorganic organized’ entities participate as co-researchers that inevitably extend but also disrupt research practice and knowledge construction, introducing new tensions and contradictions. Counterpointing phenomenology and Actor Network Theory, we usher some of the hidden and coded materialities of research practice into view, and glimpse unexpected realities co-enacted. Such immersive entanglements raise ethical questions about the posthumanist fluencies now demanded in social science research practice and we outline several considerations
The materiality of digital media: The hard disk drive, phonograph, magnetic tape and optical media in technical close-up
Popular discourses surrounding contemporary digital media often misrepresent it as immaterial and ephemeral, overlooking the material devices that store and generate our media objects. This article materially âdescendsâ into a selection of prior media forms that make up the genealogy of the hard disk drive (HDD) to challenge our reliance on conceptual misrepresentations. This material analysis is used to situate digital media in a genealogy of prior media forms, to enrich our understanding of how mediaâs affordances arise from the interplay of both formal and forensic materiality and to demonstrate the value of reintegrating materiality back into the study of media
"Meaning" as a sociological concept: A review of the modeling, mapping, and simulation of the communication of knowledge and meaning
The development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning
as analytically different from the communication of information. Knowledge can
then be considered as a meaning which makes a difference. Whereas the
communication of information is studied in the information sciences and
scientometrics, the communication of meaning has been central to Luhmann's
attempts to make the theory of autopoiesis relevant for sociology. Analytical
techniques such as semantic maps and the simulation of anticipatory systems
enable us to operationalize the distinctions which Luhmann proposed as relevant
to the elaboration of Husserl's "horizons of meaning" in empirical research:
interactions among communications, the organization of meaning in
instantiations, and the self-organization of interhuman communication in terms
of symbolically generalized media such as truth, love, and power. Horizons of
meaning, however, remain uncertain orders of expectations, and one should
caution against reification from the meta-biological perspective of systems
theory
Is there an app for that? A case study of the potentials and limitations of the participatory turn and networked publics for classical music audience engagement
The participatory turn, fuelled by discourses and rhetoric regarding social media, and in the
aftermath of the dot.com crash of the early 2000s, enrols to some extent an idea of being
able to deploy networks to achieve institutional aims. The arts and cultural sector in the UK,
in the face of funding cuts, has been keen to engage with such ideas in order to demonstrate
value for money; by improving the efficiency of their operations, improving their respective
audience experience and ultimately increasing audience size and engagement. Drawing on a
case study compiled via a collaborative research project with a UK-based symphony
orchestra (UKSO) we interrogate the potentials of social media engagement for audience
development work through participatory media and networked publics. We argue that the
literature related to mobile phones and applications (âappsâ) has focused primarily on
marketing for engagement where institutional contexts are concerned. In contrast, our
analysis elucidates the broader potentials and limitations of social-media-enabled apps for
audience development and engagement beyond a marketing paradigm. In the case of UKSO,
it appears that the technologically deterministic discourses often associated with institutional
enrolment of participatory media and networked publics may not necessarily apply due to
classical music culture. More generally, this work raises the contradictory nature of
networked publics and argues for increased critical engagement with the concept
On the Usefulness of Modern Animism: Co-Creating Architecture with Soils as Ontopolitical Practice
In opposition to the general understanding of animism as an irrational religious set of beliefs, theâsecularâmodern animism embodied in this practice of built and grown architecture is operative. It conceives of placesâecosystemsâas beings with agency that we garden with to nurture and express their resilience. It is a useful ontology for ecological practice; this architectural animism is ontopolitical; it co-creates a common world. At a recent symposium, a number of projects were presented as architectural soils and to give a voice to these earthly beings, the method was to write a letter from them to me. This first letter with the response in this article forms the beginning of an animistic correspondence. The medium places the reader in a pluriverse, in between the multiple voices of various âactants.â The text is isomorphic to the embodied dialogue of this earthy practice. It is useful both to nurture societal awarenessâempathy and careâtowards these fragmentary ecosystemic beings, and as research method to conceive them, and our relationship
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