20 research outputs found
Applying seamful design in location-based mobile museum applications
The application of mobile computing is currently altering patterns of our behavior to a greater degree than perhaps any other invention. In combination with the introduction of power-efficient wireless communication technologies, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), designers are today increasingly empowered to shape the way we interact with our physical surroundings and thus build entirely new experiences. However, our evaluations of BLE and its abilities to facilitate mobile location-based experiences in public environments revealed a number of potential problems. Most notably, the position and orientation of the user in combination with various environmental factors, such as crowds of people traversing the space, were found to cause major fluctuations of the received BLE signal strength. These issues are rendering a seamless functioning of any location-based application practically impossible. Instead of achieving seamlessness by eliminating these technical issues, we thus choose to advocate the use of a seamful approach, that is, to reveal and exploit these problems and turn them into a part of the actual experience. In order to demonstrate the viability of this approach, we designed, implemented, and evaluated the
Ghost Detector
—an educational location-based museum game for children. By presenting a qualitative evaluation of this game and by motivating our design decisions, this article provides insight into some of the challenges and possible solutions connected to the process of developing location-based BLE-enabled experiences for public cultural spaces.
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Association for Computing Machinery via https://doi.org/10.1145/296272
Digital transformations and the archival nature of surrogates
Large-scale digitization is generating extraordinary collections of visual
and textual surrogates, potentially endowed with transcendent long-term cultural
and research values. Understanding the nature of digital surrogacy is a substantial
intellectual opportunity for archival science and the digital humanities, because of
the increasing independence of surrogate collections from their archival sources.
The paper presents an argument that one of the most significant requirements for the
long-term access to collections of digital surrogates is to treat digital surrogates as
archival records that embody traces of their fluid lifecycles and therefore are worthy
of management and preservation as archives. It advances a theory of the archival
nature of surrogacy founded on longstanding notions of archival quality, the traces
of their source and the conditions of their creation, and the functional ‘‘work of the
archive.’’ The paper presents evidence supporting a ‘‘secondary provenance’’
derived from re-digitization, re-ingestion of multiple versions, and de facto
replacement of the original sources. The design of the underlying research that
motivates the paper and summary findings are reported separately. The research has
been supported generously by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services.Institute for Museum and Library ServicesPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111825/1/J26 Conway Digital Transformations 2014-pers.pdfDescription of J26 Conway Digital Transformations 2014-pers.pdf : Main articl
Conceptualising spirituality for medical research and health service provision
The need to take account of spirituality in research and health services provision is assuming ever greater importance. However the field has long been hampered by a lack of conceptual clarity about the nature of spirituality itself. We do not agree with the sceptical claim that it is impossible to conceptualise spirituality within a scientific paradigm. Our aims are to 1) provide a brief over-view of critical thinking that might form the basis for a useful definition of spirituality for research and clinical work and 2) demystify the language of spirituality for clinical practice and research
Contextualizing Band Directing in a Singapore Primary School: Questioning Function and Significance
Impact of Beaver Dams on Abundance and Distribution of Anadromous Salmonids in Two Lowland Streams in Lithuania
European beaver dams impeded movements of anadromous salmonids as it was established by fishing survey, fish tagging and redd counts in two lowland streams in Lithuania. Significant differences in abundancies of other litophilic fish species and evenness of representation by species in the community were detected upstream and downstream of the beaver dams. Sea trout parr marked with RFID tags passed through several successive beaver dams in upstream direction, but no tagged fish were detected above the uppermost dam. Increase in abundances of salmonid parr in the stream between the beaver dams and decrease below the dams were recorded in November, at the time of spawning of Atlantic salmon and sea trout, but no significant changes were detected in the sections upstream of the dams. After construction of several additional beaver dams in the downstream sections of the studied streams, abundance of Atlantic salmon parr downstream of the dams decreased considerably in comparison with that estimated before construction