[Space and Place] Social meaning of space

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Andy Crabtree (2000) Journal of Mundane Behavior. Remarks on the social organisation of space and place

Human conduct is always situated in a particular space or place yet little is understood about the social organisational relationship between space, place and conduct. In pursuing a sociological line of thought, ordinary conceptions of space have been elaborated such that spaces and places are seen as constructions expressly designed to constrain and shape our lives. While there is much to such notions, the embodied practices and interactional competences in and through which space is socially organised in real-time pass by 'unnoticed'. Drawing on an ethnographic perspective in general, and an ethnomethodological perspective in particular, this paper outlines an approach to the study of the social organisation of space and place from the largely unnoticed point of view of social action.

[Research] About the Can You See Me Now? evaluation

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Crabtree, A. (2003) Informing the Evaluation of Can You See Me Now? in Rotterdam: Runners' and Control Room Work. (.pdf) Technical Report Equator-03-004, Equator.

Can You See Me Now? (Flintham et al. 2003) is a mixed reality mobile game where online players are chased and captured by runners located on the physical streets of a city, in this case, in Rotterdam.Interaction between players and runners is supported behind-thescenes by control room staff, who are responsible for managing the technology and (wherever possible) any troubles that occur. The purpose of this study is to inform a broad evaluation of the game’s deployment in the wild, in contrast to in a controlled environment such as the laboratory, for example. (...) Various strategies are employed to evaluate Can You See Me Now? ranging from statistical analysis of computer logs to ethnographic observation of the game’s production, which is the particular focus of this report.

[MyResearch] Virtual Environment to study social psychology

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Blascovich, J., Loomis, J., Beall, A., Swinth, K., Hoyt, C., & Bailenson, J.N. (in press). Immersive virtual environment technology as a methodological tool for social psychology

Historically, at least three methodological problems have dogged experimental social psychology: the experimental control/mundane realism tradeoff, lack of replication, and unrepresentative sampling. We argue that immersive virtual environment technology (IVET) can help ameliorate if not solve these methodological problems and, thus, holds promise as a new social psychological research tool.

[Prospective] Near-Future Ubiquitous Networking Devices

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Geek stuff for the future: Resonantware: Near-Future Ubiquitous Networking Devices Visualized by Designers. The design is really nice.

NEC designers have created design possibilities with near future paradigms in mind: the world where humans and machines resonate with one another. We propose devices that judge situations to meet user’s needs, and interfaces that let users access unlimited information as naturally as breathing. - Soft-shell mobile phone "tag" is a new, malleable, casual communicator. - flacon: Virtual storage bottle. - gumi: Ubiquitous media chip. - wacca: visual Memory in a Bracelet. - P-ISM : A Pen-style Personal Networking Gadget Package - nave:360-Degree Visual Communication Device.

[Research] Workshop on Video Games and Social Interaction

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The workshop on video games and social interaction in Leeds seems pretty interesting. The position papers are available here. I am eager to meet these people.

- Liselott Brunnberg & Oskar Juhlin, Mobility Studio, The Interactive Institute, The Road Rager – Making use of traffic encounters to enhance a mobile gaming experience - Matthew Chalmers and Paul Tennent, University of Glasgow, Recording and Reusing Mobile Game Play - Mary Flanagan and Daniel C. Howe, hunter college/ central saint martins and new york university, :: designing.other :: - Nony Kamm, City University, Socially inclusive online gaming environments - Nicolas Nova and Fabien Girardin, CRAFT/EPFL, Analysis of a Location-Based Multi-Player Game Position paper - Darren J. Reed, Department of Computer Science, University of York, The Flow-test: a method for understanding the good conversation - Richard Sandford and Ben Williamson, NESTA, Racing Academy - Eben Upton, Intel Research Cambridge, Realtime Multiplayer Games over Mobile Networks - Greg Wadley, Martin Gibbs, Connor Graham, Kevin Hew, University of Melbourne and Iron Monkey Studios, Virtual game spaces as 'third places': a metaphor for understanding and designing for the voice channel

[Research] Paper accepted: rss4you for FOAF

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The paper I wrote with Roberto for the FOAF Workshop has been accepted: rss4you: Web-Based Syndication Enhanced with Social Navigation

Abstract: this paper describes rss4you a web-based news aggregator that provides users with a social navigation feature. It aims at augmenting current syndication by using an alternative information navigation model: relying on others' activities. The cornerstone of rss4you consists of a voting system that allow you to rate the RSS feeds you syndicate. All users hence have a list of their favorite RSS feeds he/she can share with others (in an OPML format). Based on this favorite list, the system retrieves users with close interests (based on the similarity of their feeds weighted with the ratings) and hence recommends you RSS feeds syndicated by users with close interests. A list of the most popular RSS feeds is also provided. The system, though in beta version is used to test various concepts of social navigation.

[Culture] O'reilly magazine: MAKE

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It should worth it: MAKE... coming in 2005...

Make brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. Make is loaded with exciting projects that help you make the most of your technology at home and away from home. This is a magazine that celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.

[VideoGames] Video Games as political space?

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Via Gamasutra, "The Potential of America's Army as Civilian Public Sphere" by Zhan Li.

This thesis, researched during 2002-03, examines the political life of the America's Army fan community, comparing the activities and identities of three exceptional gamer groups (real life soldiers and veterans; Evangelical Christians; and hackers) to the official understanding of the game's purpose.(...) The thesis argues that the exceptional America's Army gamer groups' grassroots activities demonstrate how objections about the presumed triviality and irrelevance of gamespaces as political spaces may be refuted.

[TheWorld] Amazing list of skateboarding tricks

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I have always been amazed by the name of skateboarding tricks. My favorite is the "stale fish".

ollie/switch ollie/kickflip/heelflip/varialflip/180 kickflip/180 heelflip/pop shuv-it/360 shuv-it/outward varial heelflip/inward varial heelflip/hard flip/360 flip/180/big spin/grind-slides/50-50/5-0/board slide/lipslide/noseslide/tailslide/crooked grind/feeble grind/nose grind/salad grind/smith grind/stances/dropping in/ollieing off kicker/ollieing stairs

[Research] Using experimental setting to study collaboration

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One of the weakness of my research lays in the fact that we are using non-realistic situations. Though CatchBob is a game in a virtual environment, the collaborative hunt players are engaged in is not a realistic situation. It is just a firefighter-like task. This issue (the use of field study or experimental setting) has been tackled by B. Cahour in "Cooperative interaction analysis: the use of post-verbalisations ":

Since the objective was to compare the communication with extended shared context and with restricted shared context, we needed to build comparable situations of cooperation, the subjects being in a comparable situation of co- operation except for the media.

A similar situation applied for a study we are developing about the memory of cooperative interactions: to test first the methodology which would be needed to study the representation of past cooperative interactions, and to check the variability of the descriptions given just after an interaction and again a year later, we asked nine pairs of subjects to perform a similar collaborative design task. We were then able to observe if there are a large number of individual differences or if there are similarities in what the subjects remembered of a cooperative interaction.

It is in both cases the scientific issue of looking at the differences between situations or between subjects which led us to build experimental settings for co-operative interaction. The results obtained from these studies need of course to be confirmed in real work situations.

[Research] Cooperation and communication in Ape and Humans

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Since CatchBob is a collaborative hunt, I tried to type this set of keywords in Google and I got this paper:Co-operation and Communication in Apes and Humans by Ingar Brinck and Peter Gärdenfors

We trace the difference between the ways in which apes and humans co-operate to differences in communicative abilities, claiming that the pressure for future-directed co-operation was a major force behind the evolution of language. Competitive co-operation concerns goals that are present in the environment and have stable values. It relies on either signalling or joint attention. Future-directed co-operation concerns new goals that lack fixed values. It requires symbolic communication and context-independent representations of means and goals. We analyse these ways of co-operating in game-theoretic terms and submit that the co-operative strategy of games that involve shared representations of future goals may provide new equilibrium solutions

[VideoGame] MMORPG and discourse analysis

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I already mentioned her but I've read an interesting paper by Constance A. Steinkuehler :Videogaming as Participation in a Discourse:

The analysis presented here is an initial attempt to explicate the kinds of social and material activities that MMORPGamers routinely participate in and, more specifically, how language functions within such activities. I will first briefly review the context of my research and the data collection and analysis methods I use to get at meaning-making (thus, cognition) in such settings. The remainder of this paper then focuses on the meaning and function of one utterance that occurred on an MMORPG called Lineage, demonstrating how this instance of language-in-use is situated in its particular (virtual) social and material context, tied to the Discourse community of MMORPGamers, and consequential for marking membership in that community.