Mobile Magic: Demystifying Ubiquitous Computing by Deconstructing Mobile Affordances through the Lens of Technology

This item includes a video recording of a Mānoa Faculty Lecture Series presentation that took place in the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Library and also a flyer for that presentation.The ubiquitous computing age is upon us, and a mobile device in every hand means unprecedented networked humanity. The ways in which we live are changing, often dramatically, as communication systems, businesses and organizations, and families adjust to the abilities of smartphones, tablet computers, watches, eyeglasses, etc., to track and transmit data. Dr. Oppegaard will illuminate significant changes in the media ecosystem created by networked mobile devices and examine technological advances that have led to these changes. In turn, mobile development can be viewed in many ways as a technological progression, helping us to project the future of communication technologies and plan for how they will shape the next generation of learners, leaders, and lifestyles

Media Accessibility Policy in Theory and Reality: Empirical Outreach to Audio Description Users in the United States

Audio description, a form of trans-modal media translation, allows people who are blind or visually impaired access to visually-oriented, socio-cultural, or historical public discourse alike. Although audio description has gained more prominence in media policy and research lately, it rarely has been studied empirically. Yet this paper presents quantitative and qualitative survey data on its challenges and opportunities, through the analysis of responses from 483 participants in a national sample, with 334 of these respondents being blind. Our results give insight into audio description use in broadcast TV, streaming services, for physical media, such as DVDs, and in movie theaters. We further discover a multiplicity of barriers and hindrances which prevent a better adoption and larger proliferation of audio description. In our discussion, we present a possible answer to these problems - the UniDescription Project - a media ecosystem for the creation, curation, and dissemination of audio description for multiple media platforms

Towards Cultural Inclusion: Using Mobile Technologies to Increase Access to Audio Description

This paper describes a National Park Service (NPS) and University of Hawaii research project that is developing a mobile application for audio describing NPS print brochures for blind and visually impaired park users. The project has the potential to expand access to cultural and aesthetic material for blind and visually impaired people

Invisible Locative Media: Key Considerations at the Nexus of Place and Digital Journalism

Mobility and location-awareness are pervasive and foundational elements of contemporary communication systems, and a descriptive term to synthesize them, “locative media”, has gained widespread use throughout mobile media and communication research. That label of “locative media”, though, usually gets defined ad hoc and used in many different ways to express a variety of related ideas. Locative features of digital media increasingly have changed from visible location-driven aspects of user interfaces, such as check-in features and location badges, toward more inconspicuous ways of relating to location through automated backend processes. In turn, locative features—whether in journalism or other formats and content types—are now increasingly algorithmic and hidden “under the hood”, so to speak. Part of the problem with existing classifications or typologies in this field is that they do not take into account this practical shift and the rapid development of locative media in many new directions, intertwining ubiquitous digital integration with heterogeneous content distinctions and divergences. Existing definitions and typologies tend to be based on dated practices of use and initial versions of applications that have changed significantly since inception. To illustrate, this article identifies three emerging areas within digital journalism and mobile media practice that call for further research into the locative dimensions of journalism: the situational turn in news consumption research, platform-specific vis-a-vis platform-agnostic mobile news production, and personalised news

Center on Disability Studies eNewsletter, December 2023

As the year draws to a close and the holiday season is upon us, I want to extend my gratitude to our partners, collaborators, participants, students, and stakeholders on behalf of CDS. We genuinely appreciate the collective efforts that continually contribute to the success of our projects and initiatives. Looking ahead, we're gearing up for our Pac Rim Conference in February 2024, centered around the theme "Beyond Access: Building a Culture of Belonging," a concept we're deeply passionate about. This ethos guides our efforts within our unit and throughout our projects. Additionally, I encourage you to read about Dr. Steve Brown and his impactful legacy on CDS, within the AUCD network, and on Disability Culture. We celebrate his life and honor his memory

Center on Disability Studies eNewsletter, June 2023

Welcome to our summer newsletter. In this issue we highlight many events and happenings sponsored by CDS during June and July that you don’t want to miss out on. Disability Pride Month is also celebrated each year in July. Disability Pride initially started as a day of celebration in 1990, the year that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law. It is also an opportunity to raise awareness about improving access and inclusion. The first official Disability Pride celebration occurred in 2015 to commemorate the ADA’s 25th anniversary and the Disability Pride Flag was originally designed in 2019 by Ann Magill, who with feedback within the disabled community, refined its visual elements in 2021 to be more accessible. You can read more about how the disability pride flag helps increase the community’s visibility at https://go.hawaii.edu/qEX

Journalism Foundations

Poster presented at the Assessment for Curricular Improvement Poster Exhibit 2024.This poster is about an effort to make better Journalism through better curriculum assessment as well as through collective curriculum mapping for students, classes, and the program. Journalism has roughly tripled its majors in the past three years. Because of that change, we have outgrown our current assessment systems. So for this work, we will, 1. Document what we do now, 2. Gather stakeholders for discussions about assessment, and 3. Create new tools for assessment

Mobilizing the past for the present and the future: Design-based research of a model for interactive, informal history lessons

Informal history education, including many popular museum learning studies, have shown that mobile media objects, such as apps, quickly could become critical parts of the predominate learning technologies of the future. In the process, this could lessen the overall pedagogical focus for history education on aural transmission, such as lecturing, as well as traditional media delivery systems, such as printed books. Having “an app for that,” though, is just the start of the process of developing effective, efficient, and evocative learning systems. This case study describes a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded mobile app designed in situ and deployed at a National Historic Site with the intention of creating a mobile learning model for the National Park Service. After the app module was created and released to the public, an independent evaluator was enlisted to perform a LORI Analysis on the project, to assess the efforts as they related to informal history learning objectives. This evaluation identified potential best practices for the design of these types of mobile apps, such as interactive activities enabled by the mobile technology, as well as opportunities for improvement in the design of such learning systems

Grand Emporium of the West Tablet App

The Grand Emporium of the West project created and investigated new forms of m-Learning, based on matters of historical significance, delivered through mobile technologies, and focused on the emerging affordances of the medium. Development of this project began in March 2012 -- with planning, initial user tests, and early prototypes –triggered by this NEH “We the People Grant” investment. The grant supported the research team’s work in this area, but it also led to the development of new material, tools, and approaches for secondary schools to teach and learn about history, through apps (available for both Apple and Android tablet computers). The grant not only generated a significant burst of new multimedia material – integrated into the tablet apps but also repurposed into related smartphone apps, with the media, when appropriate, geolocated at the primary research site, the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Vancouver, WA, but it also served as a major catalyst for additional funding, larger collaborations with the National Park Service, educational advancements, more app development, and nationally and internationally distributed scholarship. Through this NEH grant, and the earlier Digital Start-Up Grant (HD 51330-11), WSUV and Fort Vancouver have become an epicenter of internationally significant research and innovation related to mobile media and mobile learning, generating free and accessible mobile apps, for the general public, while also advancing the digital humanities field in several demonstrable ways, which will be outlined in this report

As Seen through Smartphones: An Evolution of Historic Information Embedment

People who want to learn about history also want to learn about it in theways and through the media that they prefer. Sometimes it happens by reading abook, with the learner at home in a comfy chair in front of a fire. But sometimes–especially now, in the smartphone era–meaningful history-learning moments canoccur just about anywhere. So, historians need to adapt. This chapter outlines howhistory-seeking audiences have always followed advances in communication tech-nologies and how mobile technologies today simply offer opportunities for the nextperiod of field expansion. The desirable affordances of smartphones can be tracedconceptually back to the earliest people who read about historical events on papy-rus scrolls (much more mobile than stone monuments), through volumes of boundpapers cranked out on the printing press (prompting the need for mass literacy),and in complicated multimedia contexts (like with text and graphics overlayingvideo on television screens). As a confluence of the media that have come before itbut also as a bridge to emerging forms of new media, mobile media are only nowstarting to be understood as viable media for history. This piece puts the intellectualfoundations in place for such an exploration and also presents some reflections onwork like this from a pioneer in the field, who has been designing locative historicalexperiences for more than a decade