Paper Submission

Jeff and or Marty

Where do you want the final paper submitted? There isn’t an assignment slot that I saw on oncourse. Thanks!

Final Paper Template

I noticed that the generic ACM template that was posted earlier on the blog is actually a little different than the official CHI format found here: http://chi2008.org/chi2008pubsformat.doc

I’m sure that both templates are acceptable and not much different in length. Basically the CHI format has larger body text but smaller section headings. However I do find the CHI template to be a little easier on the eye

My argument for final paper (YouTube and Goffman).

 BASIC THESIS:  Goffman’s theory of front stage and backstage is being blurred by technology, more specifically YouTube.  Behaviors that Goffman saw as backstage are being moved to the front stage because of the availability of this new technology.  People are posting videos of themselves on YouTube, behavior Goffman would consider backstage, to a very large audience.  I will use Goffman’s theory of self presentation to examine a selection of these videos and critique them in terms of his theory to articulate this “blurring” of front stage - backstage behavior.  This is useful because it provides a new interpretation of Goffman’s theory relating to YouTube technology and communication (posting) behavior.

I plan to start the paper by summarizing Goffman’s entire framework of self presentation.  Second, I will look at other academic use of Goffman’s front stage - backstage theory  and explain what they found (articles i have found include hospital setting, web pages, chat and bulletin board).  Third,  I will interpret a selection of videos (20 random videos) found by searching for “drinking and puking” utilizing Goffman’s front stage and backstage principles to describe what I see occurring in these videos.  Lastly, I will summarize what I’ve found and (hopefully) make the claim that because of this new technological medium, I believe that Goffman’s rigid boundary of front stage - backstage is being blurred.

I think this is a good plan and I have a basic pre-writing outline to do this.  I am wondering, though, if I should spend any time leading into Goffman by describing other theories???  I don’t think so for this paper, but I wanted your opinion.  Obviously if I write this up and have only six pages, I might be more inclined to throw in some other theories relating to symbolic interaction…  but I’d rather not.

Any comments on basic thesis and outline would be greatly appreciated.  I will be writing the paper all day today and tomorrow with hope of setting it aside for the morning on Sunday and proofing it again Sunday afternoon.  I had to start over because I was trying to be too scientific.  I don’t think I’ve written a critical essay before (if so, it was 10+ years ago and I have no recollection of this)… so this is very new to me.

Good luck everyone.

Structuring a Critical Essay

I meant to mention this in class, but I wanted to share a few thoughts on how to structure (or sequence, or arrange into a syntagm yayy!) a critical essay. A scientific paper in our field typically has the following structure (and you are welcome to use it in this class, if it makes sense to do so):

1. Intro
2. Lit Review
3. Methods
4. Results
5. Discussion
6. Conclusion

Critical essays don’t have a standardized structure like this. Typically, though, they have a structure that can be more or less described as a sequence of high-level ideas or concepts. Take a look at Manovich to see what I mean. Each of his sections develops a single concept. Each chapter covers several of these concepts. And the introduction and conclusion identify the relationships among each of those concepts. And actually, most of the readings I assigned this semester are like that.

So ask yourself what the main ideas you are exploring, and think a little bit about how they relate to each other. That should help you come up with a good outline and thesis.

Making Final Papers Available

Hi folks,

I think it would be fantastic to make the final papers available to each other. Not sure how we’d do it (i think i will be submitting mine to a conference later on, so i won’t be posting it on the web), but please add a comment here if you would assent to having your paper included in the collection (perhaps we could post them all to oncourse?)

Interaction Criticism

Here is an article that I meant to share with all of you sooner. It is a framework for critiquing interfaces, from Bertelsen & Pold. You may find it helpful as you work on your papers. From a philosophical standpoint, I have some issues with it. But from a practical standpoint, I’m really glad it’s available. If I had designers working for me, I would certainly encourage them to use this. 

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1028018

Abstract: In this paper we discuss the re-orientation of human-computer interaction as an aesthetic field. We argue that mainstream approaches lack of general openness and ability to assess experience aspects of interaction, but that this can indeed be remedied. We introduce the concept of interface criticism as a way to turn the conceptual re-orientation into handles for practical design, and we present and discuss an interface criticism guide.

Tagging as Identity Construction

For my paper, I’ve been looking at tagging on sites like Del.icio.us and Flickr.  Lots of interesting design opportunities here (e.g. vocabulary problems, identifying communities of practice, adapting to site navigation). One thing I found particularly interesting was how much you can learn about someone from their tag cloud (and how eager some people are to share their tag clouds). Yes, tags clouds are useful interfaces…but an individual’s tag cloud also says something about them; a community’s tag cloud says something about that community.  In this sense, they are similar to facebook and myspace: they are ever-changing interfaces of the self.

This echoes some ideas from Manovich: “…creating a work in new media can be understood as construction of an interface to a database. […] As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items.”  This cultural logic of the database manifested in new media has led to a database complex, “an irrational desire to preserve and store everything.” [e.g. lifelogging, lifecaching]

The other key form of new media that Manovich talks about is navigable space.  “The subject of the information society finds peace in the knowledge she can slide over endless fields of data, locating nay morsel of information with the click of a button, zooming through file systems and networks.”

How do we make sense of all this database information? This multiplying abundance of digital things?  How do we make sense of navigable space? Our spatial meanderings? Our digital memories?

Tagging is one way; a language for talking about experience in cyberspace…for constructing identity through an interface to a database of experience.

Tagging and tagging interfaces are wonderfully simple. The tagging interface reverses the search interface: you freely associate terms with resource you are tagging so that you can find it in the future.  The notion of a tag, as metadata, isn’t new.  But the idea of letting anyone assign any label they want to anything IS new.

So why tag clouds are a good construction of identity?  First off, we actively collect and manage them (as opposed to search histories or page view histories).  With a folksonomy (i.e. collaborative tagging), there are no predefined categories or hierarchy, no natural ordering.  Tag clouds are a good way to construct a (usable) interface to a database of yourself because you do not need to decide who you are ahead of time.  Tags can be simple and understandable, as well as rich and expressive.  The virtual flaneur may not have time to keep a narrative diary of her travels, but she is willing to tag up digital destinations she finds meaningful.   [is this authorship?]

Current applications that use tagging focus on the utilitarian aspects of tagging for the user and community (e.g. searching, navigating, and browsing content).  Many studies focus on the empirical, quantitative insights that can be drawn from analyzing tags.  This is all quite fascinating. However, there doesn’t seem to be much focus on the experiential, qualitative aspects of tagging…on tags as related to identity and ongoing construction of an interface to a database of the self.

 A few interesting design directions…

 Merging/alternating hierarchies and clusters.

 EX:  the ability to “bundle” tags on delicious gives people more (top-down) control over the management and display of their tags

 Merging/alternating database and narrative; making syntagms more explicit.

 EX: visualizing the evolution of “interesting” tags in Flickr with a river and waterfall metaphor.