Posts tagged academic papers

Aca-articles: Unlike Us – Understanding Social Media Monopolies

This issue of online open-access journal First Monday is dedicated to setting out a research platform that overcomes both the dominant quantitative analyses and the privacy paradigm in current social media research.

INTRO – The ubiquitous presence of social media in everyday life has not been met by equally pervasive research efforts for their critical understanding, due mostly to the increasing specialization and fragmentation of academic research. Unlike Us: Understanding Social Media Monopolies attempts to set out a research platform that overcomes both the dominant quantitative analyses and the privacy paradigm in current social media research.

Table of contents: http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/380/showToc

Aca-article: Getting into the Game – Doing Multi-Disciplinary Game Studies

This article focuses on interdisciplinary dialogue and multi-methodology research as an inherent characteristic of game studies. It was originally published in Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf (eds.) The Video Game Theory Reader 2, New York: Routledge.

Author: Frans Mäyrä

INTRO – This essay will focus on interdisciplinary dialogue and multi-methodology research as an inherent characteristic of game studies. Drawing from the author’s experience as the leader or partner in numerous research projects in games and digital culture, it is pieced together as a travelogue of an ongoing trip into conducting game studies within the contemporary, highly competitive and often project-based academic environment. In practical terms, it aims to provide some advice on how to avoid the pitfalls waiting for those venturing into interdisciplinary games research, as well as to point out some of the benefits that can be obtained from such approaches. The essay will conclude by providing some recent examples from interdisciplinary game studies, highlighting the associated methodological challenges and their solutions, followed by summaries of the key findings.

Read the full paper: http://people.uta.fi/~frans.mayra/Mayra_Multidisciplinary_Game_Studies_2009.pdf

Paper: Doing Research on Value of Visual Practice

In this paper, Heidi Forbes Öste define the visual practice as real-time graphics generation used to help people communicate, collaborate and make decisions”.

Forbes Öste continues:

To visualize or “see what you mean” through imagery and metaphors is the base approach. We can see from prehistoric cave paintings that this is not a new form of communication for humans. The formal application and refining of this practice, nevertheless is relatively new. It is rapidly evolving beyond communicating hunting and war strategies to events, meetings, classrooms and coaching.

Read the full paper: http://forbesoste.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/ForbesOste-721R-ResearchVisualPractice.pdf

Aca-articles: designing with companies, DIY production, and Locative social media

Design Research Society recently published a massive collection of open-access papers that were presented at the DRS 2012 Bangkok conference. It stretches over more than 2000 pages…

… but here are a few articles that cought my attention (with direct links to the paper on Scribd):

Co-creating with Companies: A design led process of learning, by Alessandro Deserti and Francesca Rizzo, Politecnico Di Milano.

Sustainability by Do-It-Yourself Product Design: User design opposing mass consumption, by Janwillem Hoftijzer, University of Twente.

Designing Experimental Urban Mapping with Locative Social Media, by Andrew Morrison, Institute of Design, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, et al.

Bonus: Medea’s Anna Seravallis Bangkok paper Building Fabriken: Design for Socially Shaped Innovation.

Aca-article: How Music Takes Place – Excerpts From “The Post-digital Manifesto”

This essay in online journal E-flux is an edited selection from Rasmus Fleischer’s book “Det postdigitala manifestet”, published in Swedish in 2009:

How to decide what music to listen to? Presented with boundless access, this is the perpetual question today. The standard response is to propose the use of automated systems of recommendation. Instead of spending all that time choosing music ourselves, we could just let software identify patterns in the statistical data we have left in our trail. Next, this software goes on to offer us radio stations specially tailored to our individual preferences, stations which often prove themselves shockingly adept at opening our ears to music we didn’t even knew we liked. In spite of this, the underlying principles of these recommendation systems remain quite primitive. “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought …” is the basic functionality, familiar from online bookstores. At the center of it all we find the individual, whose preferences are to be compressed and reduced into a statistical profile.

Read it in full on e-flux.com.

Encyclopedia: A Visual History of Mobile Computing

The open-access encyclopedia over at interaction-design.org has added a new chapter on the history of Mobile Computing.

Author Jesper Kjeldskov writes:

The uptake of mobile technology in our work and private spheres has had a huge impact on the way we perceive and use these technologies. They are no longer just computers on batteries. They have become functional design objects, the look, feel and experience of which we care deeply about, and that we juggle in multitude in our everyday lives.

This chapter includes sections on e.g. connectivity, convergence/divergence, digital ecosystems, and interaction design for mobile computers.

Read it for free here: http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/mobile_computing.html

Aca-articles: Design, change and politics – Design Philosophy Papers

Latest issue of open access publication Design Philosophy Papers have just been published.

CONTENTS

• Editorial: Design, Change and Politics
• Mahmoud Keshavarz & Ramia Maze: ‘Design and Dissensus: framing & staging participation in design research’
• Matthew Kiem: ‘If political design changed anything they’d make it illegal’ (review of Carl DiSalvo’s Adversarial Design)
• Guilherme C. Meyer & Alice T. Cybis Pereira: ‘Design and ethnography on a post-tragedy scenario’
• Filipe Campello Xavier da Costa & Celso Carnos Scaletsky: ‘Road running as a designed experience’
• Fernando Secomandi: ‘Thinking through the service interface: Philips DirectLife’

Access here: http://desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/journal.html

Aca-articles: Exploring affect in interaction design, interaction-based art and digital art.

The aim of this special issue of the Fibreculture Journal is to address some of the contemporary challenges involved in working with affect across disciplines and practices that centre on the use of interactive- or digital technologies.

Access here: http://twentyone.fibreculturejournal.org/

MORE – The issue has a special focus on interaction design, interaction-based art and digital art. The pivotal question, as we see it, might be framed roughly like this: How do we explore the “field of questioning” that arises when we approach the affective in relation to interaction design, interaction-based art and digital art? What is the use of disciplinary goals when the affective has been proven most valuable in trans-disciplinary theory? Where do we go from here, that is, how can we continue working with the notion of affect, develop it in new theoretical, analytical and practical domains? What key concepts would emerge from this continued trajectory and how would they feed back onto the theoretical propositions? How would they resonate within and with-out existing disciplines, creating novel links and assemblages?

Aca-article: Formatting Culture – The Mpeg group and the technoscientific innovation by digital formats

The Italian open access journal Tecnoscienza recently published an article that

“reconstructs the process of technoscientific innovation of digital formats pursued in the ‘80s by the MPEG group led by Leonardo Chiariglione. Through a historical and cultural frame provided by Paolo Magaudda and the very words of the main character of this technoscientific story, Leonardo Chiariglione, the contribution gives fresh insights into the relationship between sociotechnical standards and the digitization of media culture.”

Read it in full: http://www.tecnoscienza.net/index.php/tsj/article/view/116

Aca-articles: Comic book and music audiences

A new issue of online journal Participations is out, focusing on “audiences” from multiple perspectives, e.g. comic book and music audiences. All articles are open access.

Access here: http://www.participations.org/Volume%209/Issue%202/contents.htm

Article examples:

• Avdeeff, Melissa:‘Technological Engagement and Musical Eclecticism: An Examination of Contemporary Listening Practices’
• Baym, Nancy K.: ‘Fans or Friends? Seeing Social Media As Musicians Do’
• Potts, Liza: ‘Amanda Palmer and the #LOFNOTC: How Online Fan Participation is Rewriting Music Labels’