P. Dourish. Re-space-ing place: “place” and “space” ten years on. In Proceedings of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW06), Banff, Alberta, Canada, November 4-8 2006. Association for Computing Machinery. [pdf]

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This paper elaborate further Harrison and Dourish’s paper on how place is the social product of space. The author stress out how, due to recent technological development, this idea needs to be reconsidered and adjusted.

First of all, the initial paper seems to suggest that space is perceived before place emerges. This is called the layer-cake model. His current view would see exacly the contrary, being space a social product just as much as place: the conceptual resources that we have at hand when we talk about space are the products of particular kinds of social practice.

The second point contained in the article follows from the first point: space and place are the products of emboided social practice. Therefore the question is not what feature of the space are conductive to the creation or emergence of place but what are the relationship between spatiality and practices and how multiple spatialities might intersect.

This second point is suggested by the power geometry: “… the production of space is conditioned by one’s access to and legitimacy within that space. Encounters with space occur within specific contexts, and the spatialities that result reflect those contexts.

Tags: geography, human communication, human computer interaction, power geometry, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, ubiquitous computing

I am recycling here this nice post of Temu on this subject. He made a nice table analyzing collaboration by looking for what are the objects (some people call them artifacts) worked out, how are the scripts (processes) handled and what is the density of communication in the systems.

I think this summary is neat and simple but yet useful to distinguish and see the ordering of the different levels. One thing missing though is a link back to the theoretical framework for each level.

Tags: connectivism, constructivism, education, learning technology

Philip Wagner sent me a couple movies that he edited to help people with reading difficulties to learn from movies. Basically he colorized the actor that speaks and put the caption as a comic balloon close to him/her. Then he uses a karaoke-style highlight to match the pronounced word with the text in the caption.

In his words:

I have more things which in total are about eight hours long.  I have two Robin Hood movies on Dvd discs that  are together about 50 minutes long They are partly slide show and partly movies.  When there is talking it is a slide show with the subtitles and when there is little talking and lots of action it is a movie without subtitles. I use “The Adventures of Robin Hood” Volumes 1 and 2 DVDs that can be purchased from Amazon.com economically. There are 4 episodes on the Volume 1 and 4 Episodes on Volume 2. The episodes are from the tv series begun in 1955 starring Richard Greene as Robin Hood produced in England.  Before I burn them onto DVDs I colorize the actor who is speaking and the faces and hands of the other actors in the scene.  My burn program enhances the scenes by brightening and focusing them better. I burn them into HDTV format which allows more space on the left and right of each frame so I am able to put more captioning on the pictures. I have made textreading programs with no pictures for

“Treasure Island”, “Moby Dick” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” of which I used my own voice for dubbing the sound which can be used immediately as I have not applied for a copyright for them.

Philip is willing to teach anybody the process that he used to produce these movies. You can reach him at the address philip5147 [@] yahoo.com.

[more on this …]

Tags: education, hack, human computer interaction, linguistics, new technology

Three years have passed since I finished my Master’s thesis and I have been able to track a couple of commercial product that emerged in the market that my work could have been anticipated. One of them was the Domestic Greenhouse designed by Renzo Piano, which costed around 1000 euros.

This one is from Matsushita and it seems to add the ability of controlling the climate via Internet or SMS (cost around 3000 USD):

On October 11, Matsushita Electric Works, Ltd. announced plans to begin selling an indoor gardening system whose lighting, temperature and water supply can be remotely monitored and controlled via the Internet. The system, called Aiterrarium, is slated for release on December 20 and will initially target research facilities for universities and businesses.

The system consists of a growing chamber that is 50 centimeters wide and 1.2 meters tall. The chamber is outfitted with 190 watts of fluorescent lighting on the walls and ceiling, and sensors measure 15 different growing conditions, including soil temperature and moisture level. If a heater and automatic watering system are added, users can connect to a Matsushita server over the Internet to set ideal temperatures and perform watering. A webcam allows users to monitor growing conditions from anywhere in the world via cellphone or computer.

This is the link to my master’s thesis on the Biosphera project. Our prototype was around 5000 euros but it could easily drop in a serial production.

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Tags: ecology, education, environment, interaction design, pedagogy, plants

A new initiative by Israel’s parliament will soon allow every Israeli citizen to share his or her proposal for new legislation by cellular phone text messaging. This seems to me an excellent idea to raise the citizenry involvement in the politics life of the country.

A couple of question arise:

1. Who is going to waive each proposals?

2. What is going to be the decision process to select the proposition that will take a broader audience?

3. What about conflicting propositions?

I think the basic question hinges in our definition of democracy. What do we mean by that?

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.

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Tags: collaboration tools, education, eGov, politics, Short Message Service

B. Galantucci. An experimental study of the emergence of human communication systems. Cognitive Science, (29):737–767, 2005. [pdf]

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The emergence of human communication systems is typically investigated via 2 approaches with complementary strengths and weaknesses: naturalistic studies and computer simulations. This study was conducted with a method that combines these approaches. Pairs of participants playedvideogames requiring communication. Members of a pair were physically separated but exchanged graphic signals through a medium that prevented the use of standard symbols (e.g., letters). Communication systems emerged and developed rapidly during the games, integrating the use of explicit signs with information implicitly available to players and silent behavior-coordinating procedures. The systems that emerged suggest 3 conclusions: (a)signs originate from different mappings;(b)sign systems developp arsimoniously; (c) sign forms are perceptually distinct, easy to produce, and tolerant to variations.

Tags: human communication, situated cognition, universal cognitive distance

One of the latest articles in Make Magazine inspired me a logging technique to be used for Ubiquitous computing research. One of the big problem related to recording people interaction is that is very difficult to understand where they are facing and what they are looking at. Some sophisticated solutions include cameras that can be mounted on a person’s glasses.

Recording the scene does not help, especially if the participants are moving around or worse they move across the city!

John Maushammer, in his article, propose an hack to a disposable camcorder so to fit in a rocket. Using the same hack it could be possible to have a cheap video recording unit that could be easily incorporated in the clothes of  the participants, a la SenseCam.

 

On the left hand-side the CVS Camcorder used in the Make Article. On the right hand-side Microsoft’s SenseCam.

Patrick pointed me to this great collection of SMS (Short Message Service) messages collected for research at the Department of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. As of April 2004, the corpus consists of about 10,000 SMS messages collected by students. The messages largely originate from Singaporeans and mostly from students attending the University. These messages were collected from volunteers who were made aware that their contributions were going to be made publicly available.

Using this collection it might be possible for me to verify some initial intuition on the relation of linguistic identifiers pertaining spatial information and the content disambiguation. It will be cool to parse these messages looking for keywords like “there”, “here”, “over”, “crossing”, etc. and comparing the relative frequencies of these words with the frequencies of the same words within a collection of geographical messages like that of UrbanTapestries.

This will tell whether the strategies of messaging are different in the two settings. However before doing this I’ll be looking for a taxonomy of these semantic markers.

P.S.: a Corpus of 30.000 SMS messages in French was recently made available at the cost of  ~300 euros.

Tags: data mining, ethnography, linguistics, Short Message Service, statistics, tagging, text data mining

It was about time to give this blog a fresh and sparkling engine!

One of the most quoted paper on this subject is Cohen, below. Not without controversy though. This page contains a nice review of the pros and cons of the method.

Cohen J. Weighted kappa: Nominal scale agreement with provision for scaled disagreement or partial credit. Psychological Bulletin. 70:213-20, 1968.

Tags: research methodology