Kent’s Best Man: Radical Chorographic Consciousness and the Identity Politics of Local History in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI

In this article, the character of Jack Cade in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI is reconsidered through an exploration of the local history and traditions of Kent. I argue that Shakespeare, through Cade and his followers, created a sense of local historical consciousness which directly challenged the structures of chronicle history and manifests itself in various acts of self-affirmation. Shakespeare departed from his sources by giving Cade a Kentish identity. I also challenge the modern critical consensus that Shakespeare made Cade more violent than he was in the play’s chronicle sources

Locating the 'big hole' in HCI research

In a recent Interactions article, “The Big Hole in HCI Research,” Vassilis Kostakos argued that HCI lacks persistent “motor themes,” based on a co-word analysis of keywords sections from the past 20 years of CHI papers. HCI as a discipline, it is argued, “simply roll[s] from topic to topic, year after year, without developing any of them substantially.” In this analysis, motor themes—based on clusters of recurring keywords over time—are described as a critical feature of healthy disciplines. Motor themes represent commonly addressed topics that constitute the research mainstream and therefore are essential to creating a disciplinary core. Summarizing his work from a recent CHI paper, Kostakos characterizes the absence of these themes from HCI as “a very worrying prospect for a scientific community.” These concerns seem to be echoed by events at recent CHI conferences, such as the appearance since 2011 of yearly panels or workshops on “replication” (RepliCHI), and the Interaction Science SIG of CHI 2014. While my view contrasts with the proponents of what one might label as the “scientific programme,” the emergence of increased debate about the very idea of HCI—what its work does, could, or should look like academically—feels like a valuable activity and is probably long overdue. Here, I want to talk about two matters that are core to the discussion: the relationship between science and HCI, and, more broadly, the disciplinarity of HCI

The code document's structure and analysis

The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly it presents a preliminary and ethnomethodologically-informed analysis of the way in which the growing structure of a particular program's code was ongoingly derived from its earliest stages. This was motivated by an interest in how the detailed structure of completed program `emerged from nothing' as a product of the concrete practices of the programmer within the framework afforded by the language. The analysis is broken down into three sections that discuss: the beginnings of the program's structure; the incremental development of structure; and finally the code productions that constitute the structure and the importance of the programmer's stock of knowledge. The discussion attempts to understand and describe the emerging structure of code rather than focus on generating `requirements' for supporting the production of that structure. Due to time and space constraints, however, only a relatively cursory examination of these features was possible. Secondly the paper presents some thoughts on the difficulties associated with the analytic---in particular ethnographic---study of code, drawing on general problems as well as issues arising from the difficulties and failings encountered as part of the analysis presented in the first section

Some conversational challenges of talking with machines

A surge of interest in the capabilities of so-called 'conversational' technologies—both from research and industrial contexts—furnishes CSCW and HCI with opportunities to enrich and leverage its historic connection to conversation analysis (and relatedly, ethnomethodology) in novel ways. This paper explores a number of preliminary interactional troubles one might encounter when 'talking to' conversational agents, and in doing so sketches out possible routes forward in the empirical study of agents as collaborative technologies, as well as touching on further conceptual challenges that face research in this area

Moral Concerns in Genomic Medicine Beyond GINA

Genomic medicine, including pharmacogenomics, represents a potential paradigm shift in the diagnosis of disease and delivery of healthcare. Beyond the promise to address and resolve pandemics affecting specific ethnic/racial communities is the potential to develop pharmacological therapies custom tailored to the individual patient¿s genomic profile. However, the delivery of such promise rests on the contribution of genomic samples from individuals in communities where the culpable polymorphisms are present in high volumes. With the potential for an ever-widening disparity in overall population health among the socio-economic tiers in which these communities are often found, a theory of justice is needed to address and resolve concerns of distributive justice. I submit Norman Daniels¿ application of Rawls¿ theory of justice as fairness can provide a framework to guide policymakers in navigating these matters and ensure that subject populations are not unjustly exploited for the sole medical benefit of those individuals that can afford such treatments, while those that contributed their specimens for the development of new therapies are left with only sub-standard treatments for the same maladies, if any at all

Othello: A guide to the text and the play in performance

Othello is one of Shakespeare's most theatrically striking plays. This Handbook focuses on Othello as a dramatic work which exploits the resources of the early modern stage and yet still challenges contemporary theatres. Exploring race and gender as performance issues throughout the study, Stuart Hampton-Reeves: • examines the play's earliest performances and the problem of staging darkness on Shakespeare's stage • analyses the play from a performance point of view scene by scene, line by line • surveys key productions and films, tracing the play's move away from mainstream theatres • draws together the latest criticism on Othello's treatment of identity and sexuality

Embeddedness and sequentiality in social media

Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of work around social media within CSCW. A range of perspectives have been applied to the use of social media, which we characterise as aggregate, actor-focussed or a combination. We outline the opportunities for a perspective informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA)—an orientation that has been influential within CSCW, yet has only rarely been applied to social media use. EMCA approaches can complement existing perspectives through articulating how social media is embedded in the everyday lives of its users and how sequentiality of social media use organises this embeddedness. We draw on a corpus of screen and ambient audio recordings of mobile device use to show how EMCA research is generative for understanding social media through concepts such as adjacency pairs, sequential context, turn allocation / speaker selection, and repair