Cosima Rughinis

A Lucky Answer to a Fair Question: Conceptual, Methodological, and Moral Implications of Including Items on Human Evolution in Scientific Literacy Surveys

The article discusses acceptance of evolution and its relevance for measuring scientific literacy. The author analyzes the National Science Foundation knowledge quiz in relation to theoretical, methodological, and moral arguments, proposing a distinction between quiet and animated scientific constructs. When a public learns of evolution as an animated construct, its acceptance is a poor indicator in a reflective model of scientific literacy. Acceptance of evolution may constitute a valuable indicator in reflective models of science knowledge for publics that engage with it disinterestedly, as well as in formative models of scientifically shaped worldviews, and it may also be studied in itself.

‘In My Shoes’ Interaction Sandbox for a Quest of Accessible Design: Teaching Sighted Students Accessible Design for Blind People

This paper examines current practices in motivating students to design accessible technologies, and proposes an additional method to promote a long-term, steadfast commitment to accessibility. We examine recent reports of teaching accessibility for blind users to sighted students, and we find three types of motivational devices: 1) a ‘web of arguments’ as to morality, legality, and usefulness, 2) empathy, and 3) framing accessibility through mainstreaming. We observe that the challenge of interactional malaise between sighted and blind people is often neglected, and we propose an ‘Interaction Sandbox’ to overcome it. We also put forward an additional way of framing accessible design, in order to position it as a work of autonomy, mastery, and purpose: the ‘Quest’ metaphor. Accessible design is thus introduced as the pursuit of a daring goal against widespread adversity, through mastery, in the company of powerful characters. The Quest is set in motion by bringing students to appreciate the technical wizardry of accessible design, its aesthetics, and the heroism of blind people as skilled navigators of a dangerous world.

Big Data, Old Users, Personal Worlds: A Survey of Challenges and Resistance to Big Data Analytics in the EU

Organizations make extensive use of Big Data to classify and profile users, in order to effectively personalize their online messages. Big Data is also increasingly relied on as a photograph of society, creating expectations of an increasingly more accurate predictive science. Yet, there are systemic challenges in using Big Data as a comprehensive source of information, and there is also public resistance. We analyze Eurobarometer survey data from April 2016 to identify actual socio-demographical limitations of online traces, charting public awareness and attitudes towards the use of online information for content personalization across the European Union.

Computer-supported collaborative accounts of major depression: Digital rhetoric on Quora and Wikipedia

We analyze digital rhetoric in two computer-supported collaborative settings of writing and learning, focusing on major depression: Wikipedia and Quora. We examine the procedural rhetoric of access to and interaction with information, and the textual rhetoric of individual and aggregated entries. Through their different organization of authorship, publication and reading, the two settings create divergent accounts of depression. Key points of difference include: focus on symptoms and causes vs. experiences and advice, use of lists vs. metaphors and narratives, a/temporal structure, and personal and relational knowledge.

Reading with a Touch of Gameplay: Gamified E-Books’ Convergence with Classical Literary Worlds

Gamified e-books extend invitations for young and adult readers to revisit classical literary worlds. We examine ten e-books to discover distinctive rhetorical resources used to enhance the reading experience and achieve convergence with the original literary world. We distinguish between attempts to focus attention on the material world, to create empathy with characters through perception, choice and emotions and, last but not least, to shape the reader’s journey through the medium of text. Our proposed inventory may guide designers in creating gamified e-books that bring literary worlds and characters to life even more vividly.

The digital rhetoric of Prezi. Visual re-presentations of depression and other psychological conditions

We analyze the presentation software Prezi as an evocative object and a talkative technology that engages users in diverse web-based learning situations. Prezi claims to offer an alternative to a much ridiculed PowerPoint, and Prezi’s rhetorical options indeed privilege storytelling and metaphors through spatial organization, movement, and visuals. Still, we argue that many educational prezis in psychology fall short of such aims, relying on bullet points in a decorated, quasi slide-based document. The Prezi company, together with dedicated commercial and professional users, create a talkative and plurivocal technology, with a flow of tutorials and showcased presentations. Nonetheless, we propose that these voices leave important aspects uncovered for educational users, and we argue that the Prezi team should redefine its author guidance strategy. The paper is structured as follows: we first discuss the significance of presentation tools for learning. We then go on to investigate what is Prezi and how we encounter it. We analyze several types of messages from and about Prezi, and we discuss how it is currently used. We conclude the paper by highlighting the main findings and reflecting on implications for research on digital rhetoric. Prezi is designed as an evocative technology: it explicitly aims to encourage certain ways of dealing with knowledge, organizing information in space, through movement and storylines. Its templates bring to the fore metaphors as a persuasive device; the most acclaimed prezis, highlighted through contests and various informal rankings, illustrate the presentation principle of a journey through a visual landscape, using movement to create surprise and perplexity by zooming in, and to achieve clarification by zooming out to the bird’s-eye view. Prezi is also a verbose and multivocal tool: commercial and technical interests fuel a flow of messages and conversations about how to design prezis, aiming for ‘stunning’ presentations, for clarity and creativity. Prezi users have much to learn from ‘tips and tricks’ presentations and from illustrations in showcased prezis. Nonetheless, many prezis composed for classroom use, among those published on the Prezi platform, do not make full use of the tool’s capabilities and do not really follow its invitations to storytelling, metaphorical argumentation and spatial reasoning. We have observed this shortcoming in the case of prezis about psychological conditions such as depression, bipolar disorders, and delusions: although such conditions can be greatly clarified through analogies and storytelling, the bullet list of symptoms and causes remains a dominant rhetorical device in prezi frames. Visuals are used mostly for decoration, and movements do not have other rhetorical use besides the creation of attention-grabbing transitions. We propose that part of this limitation derives from the business focus of Prezi, including its clarifying-and-encouraging voices. There are relatively few showcased prezis that deal with the clarification of scientific concepts, and there is no special focus on science throughout the corpus of prezi tutorials. Users could also benefit from comments on specific prezis, explaining how they do what they do: teachers and students may well appreciate the persuasive power of a stunning prezi without having the vocabulary to describe and then reflect on its rhetorical choices. This requires redefining the Prezi tutorial approach through an intersection between the currently disparate endeavors of ‘tips and tricks’ advice versus showcasing prominent, creative prezis.

A touching app voice thinking about ethics of persuasive technology through an analysis of mobile smoking-cessation apps

We study smoking-cessation apps in order to formulate a framework for ethical evaluation, analyzing apps as ‘medium’, ‘market’, and ‘genre’. We center on the value of user autonomy through truthfulness and self-understanding. Smoking-cessation apps usually communicate in an anonymous ‘app voice’, with little presence of professional or other identified voices. Because of the fast-and-frugal communication, truthfulness is problematic. Messages in the ‘quantification’ modules may be read as deceitfully accurate. The app voice frames smoking as a useless, damaging habit indicative of weakness of will, in a ‘cold-turkey’ frame of individual mind-over-body heroism. Thus apps contribute to a stigmatization of smokers and culpabilization of relapses. The potential to support user autonomy through diverse meaningful voices and personalized communication remains yet unused.

Digital Rhetoric in Collaborative Knowledge-Making

We examine the ways in which answers formulated in the Q&A community Quora are aggregated in a collaborative, computer-mediated body of knowledge. Readers’ experiences are shaped by the answer ranking algorithm, a central rhetorical device on Quora. Answer visibility on page is strongly dependent on the number of upvotes, but also on recency and author popularity. Upvotes depend to some extent on wordcount, followers, and use of visual representations, but not on answer’s age. This indicates that readers engage with Quora as a body of stratified information, rather than pursuing unlimited diversity of perspectives: engagement seems to be limited to the top answers, which represent, for practical purposes, Quora’s persuasive statements.

Refreshing Quantification and other Ploys to Give Up the Habit

In this paper we analyze 26 smoking cessation applications on Android OS focusing on how they address their implied users. We identify ‘refreshing quantification’ as a main method, which endorses a portrait of the users as myopic in risk perception, but heroic in their individual pursuit to reach the non-smoker identity. App-created relationships and identities give rise to a temporal order based on contemplating the past and anticipating the future. Users are guided towards an autonomy-centered identity project, which renders them accountable for success or failure in smoking cessation. Users’ experience of smoking cessation is co-constructed in their interaction with the app-coach and with peers. Apps and peers offer diagnoses, advice, labels that populate the world in which the would-be ex-smokers pursue their project.

źSmoking Does Not Make You Happyź

We analyze in-depth five smoking cessation apps on Android OS, examining how they teach users to quit smoking and what they learn from users. Apps advise would-be ex-smokers how to perceive the world, how to deal with their emotions, and how to act on their bodies and environment. Still, they learn little from their users, and even less from the scientific literature on smoking cessation. We discuss the potential for improved customization of advice to users’ profiles and we propose a simple inventory of online scientific resources as a starting point for developers looking to create better apps.