P.S. I love you : understanding the impact of posthumous digital messages

A number of digital platforms and services have recently emerged that allow users to create posthumous forms of communication, effectively arranging for the delivery of messages from ‘beyond the grave’. Despite some evidence of interest and popularity of these services, little is known about how posthumous messages may impact the people who receive them. We present a qualitative study that explores the type of experiences potentially triggered upon receiving such messages. Our findings firstly suggest that posthumous messaging services have the potential to alter the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased, and secondly provide insight into how users make sense of this altered relationship. Through the inference of a set of design considerations for posthumous communication services, we reveal a number of conflicts that are not easily solvable through technological means alone, and which may serve as starting points for further research. Our work extends the growing body of research that is concerned with digital interactions related to death and dying

Embedding Academic Literacies through Growing Student and Staff Communities

In the UK, HE practical writing support has not kept pace with advances in our understanding of how students learn to write in their disciplines or greater comprehension of the nature of these discourses they are acquiring. Current institutional provision can be still be characterized as fragmented offering generic, deficit focused, skills-based instruction, despite such approaches being theoretically discredited. One alternative means to develop academic literacies in more inclusive and nuanced ways is to embed this work at a disciplinary level; while long recommended this model is unusual in the UK. This paper reviews approaches to embedding academic literacies work and reports on our attempts to embed writing development work within a social science department through an extended action research project which aimed to increase student mastery of academic literacies within one department. We focused on building opportunities for engagement using Writing Exemplars, Retreats and Writing Circles. Key features of our work are identified that appear transferable and may further facilitate successful interdisciplinary collaborations

Who am I? : Representing the self offline and in different online contexts

The present paper examines the extent to which self-presentation may be affected by the context in which is it undertaken. Individuals were asked to complete the Twenty Statements Test both privately and publicly, but were given an opportunity to withhold any of their personal information before it was made public. Four contexts were examined: an offline context (face-to-face), an un-contextualized general online context, or two specific online contexts (dating or job-seeking). The results suggested that participants were willing to disclose substantially less personal information online than offline. Moreover, disclosure decreased as the online context became more specific, and those in the job-seeking context disclosed the least amount of information. Surprisingly, individual differences in personality did not predict disclosure behavior. Instead, the results are set in the context of audience visibility and social norms, and implications for self-presentation in digital contexts are discussed

Relationships between Password Choices‚ Perceptions of Risk and Security Expertise

Despite technological advances, humans remain the weakest link in Internet security’ [1], this weakness is typically characterised in one of two domains. First, systems may not enable humans to interface securely, or the security mechanisms themselves are unusable or difficult to use effectively. Second, there may be something fundamental about the behaviour of some people which leads them to become vulnerable. This paper examines the links between perceptions of risk associated with online tasks and password choice. We also explore the degrees to which the said perceptions of risk differ according to whether the password user is a security expert or not, and whether they have experienced some form of attack

Understanding in-situ social media use at music festivals

Participation at large music festivals is changing, with many attendees using social media platforms to mediate and shape their experiences of attending such events. We used a combination of Twitter and Foursquare to collect social media posts from attendees at the Glastonbury 2013 music festival and performed a thematic analysis in order to better understand the in-situ use of such media. Our findings reflect the wide range of users' purposes in such settings and provides a basis for further exploration of this area

Relationships between password choices, perceptions of risk and security expertise

Despite technological advances, humans remain the weakest link in Internet security’ [1], this weakness is typically characterised in one of two domains. First, systems may not enable humans to interface securely, or the security mechanisms themselves are unusable or difficult to use effectively. Second, there may be something fundamental about the behaviour of some people which leads them to become vulnerable. This paper examines the links between perceptions of risk associated with online tasks and password choice. We also explore the degrees to which the said perceptions of risk differ according to whether the password user is a security expert or not, and whether they have experienced some form of attack

I can't get no sleep : discussing #insomnia on twitter

Emerging research has shown that social media services are being used as tools to disclose a range of personal health information. To explore the role of social media in the discussion of mental health issues, and with particular reference to insomnia and sleep disorders, a corpus of 18,901 messages - or Tweets - posted to the microblogging social media service Twitter were analysed using a mixed methods approach. We present a content analysis which revealed that Tweets that contained the word “insomnia” contained significantly more negative health information than a random sample, strongly suggesting that individuals were making disclosures about their sleep disorder. A subsequent thematic analysis then revealed two themes:coping with insomnia, and describing the experience of insomnia. We discuss these themes as well as the implications of our research for those in the interaction design community interested in integrating online social media systems in health interventions

Validating a Mobile Phone Application for the Everyday, Unobtrusive, Objective Measurement of Sleep

There is an identified need for objective, reliable, and scalable methods of measuring and recording sleep. Such methods must be designed for easy integration into people's lives in order to support both sleep therapy and everyday personal informatics. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a mobile phone application to record sleep, the design of which has substantive foundation in clinical sleep research. Two user studies were carried out which demonstrate that the application produces valid measurements of sleep quality and high levels of usability, whilst not seriously disturbing sleep or the sleep environment. These findings suggest that the app is suitable for both everyday sleep monitoring in a personal informatics context, and for integration into sleep interventions