Daniel Carter

Always somewhere, never there: using critical design to understand database interactions

Structured databases achieve effective searching and sorting by enacting sharply delineated category boundaries around their contents. While this enables precise retrieval, it also distorts identities that exist between category lines. A choice between Single and Married, for example, blurs distinctions within the Single group: single, perhaps, merely because same-sex marriage is not legal in ones locality. Sociologists Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker describe such residual states as inevitable byproducts of information systems. To minimize residuality, traditional practice for descriptive metadata seeks to demarcate clear and objective classes. In this study, we use critical design to question this position by creating information collections that foreground the residual, instead of diminishing it. We then interrogate our design experiments with solicited critical responses from invited experts and student designers. Inspired by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, we argue that our experiments illuminate a form of interacting with databases characterized by notions of wayfaring, or inhabiting a space, as opposed to notions of transport, or reaching a known destination. We suggest that the form of coherence that shapes a wayfaring database is enacted through its flow, or fluid integration between structure and content.

Infrastructure and the experience of documents

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to understandings of how documents are experienced by looking to work in reception studies for methodological examples. Based on a review of research from literary studies, communication studies and museum studies, it identifies existing approaches and challenges. Specifically, it draws attention to problems cited in relation to small-scale user studies and suggests an alternative approach that focusses on how infrastructures influence experience. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents data collected from over a year of ethnographic work at a cultural archive and exhibition space and analyses the implications of infrastructural features such as institutional organization, database structures and the organization of physical space for making available certain modes of reception. Findings – This research suggests that infrastructure provides a useful perspective on how experiences of documents are influenced by larger systems. Research limitati...

Hustle and Brand: The Sociotechnical Shaping of Influence

While social media platforms are often assumed to be sites of speaking, they are also important sites of knowing, where businesses use content produced by individuals in order to understand markets and make predictions and where individuals understand their own position and importance. This article considers social knowledge production in the context of influencer marketing, a growing industry in which social media users are ranked according to measures of influence and compensated for promoting products online. Working from industry press, technical documentation and interviews with tool developers, marketing professionals, and social media users, it traces the sociotechnical shaping of influence, moving from computer scientists’ optimal solutions through technical constraints and business needs to the practices of marketing professionals and individual users. In doing so, it identifies two conceptions of influence. The first is connected to celebrities and practices of branding, while the second, more novel conception is associated with less prominent social media users who make themselves and their willingness to work visible to marketers through practices I describe as hustling. While social influence is conventionally conceptualized in relation to extensive, naturally occurring networks of individuals, in this context it is evaluated in relation to much simpler networks that bring together users who may never interact directly. In this context, users understand and manipulate their influence by positioning their followers (branding) and by explicitly affiliating themselves with non-human entities such as brands and topical hashtags (hustling).

Connecting theory and practice in digital humanities information work

The omnipresence and escalating efficiency of digital, networked information systems alongside the resulting deluge of digital corpora, apps, software, and data has coincided with increased concerns in the humanities with new topics and methods of inquiry. In particular, digital humanities (DH), the subfield that has emerged as the site of most of this work, has received growing attention in higher education in recent years. This study seeks to facilitate a better understanding of digital humanities by studying the motivations and practices of digital humanists as information workers in the humanities. To this end, we observe information work through interviews with DH scholars about their work practices and through a survey of DH programs such as graduate degrees, certificates, minors, and training institutes. In this study we focus on how the goals behind methodology (a link between theories and method) surface in everyday DH work practices and in DH curricula in order to investigate if the critiques that have appeared in relation to DH information work are well founded and to suggest alternative narratives about information work in DH that will help advance the impact of the field in the humanities and beyond.

Encouraging ambiguous experience: guides for personal meaning making

I discuss a project in which an interactive edition of a poetry text was introduced in a classroom as a way to learn about designing for ambiguity. As several HCI researchers have noted, ambiguity can be a valuable attribute of designed objects, allowing users to create personal meaning. However, ambiguity can also lead to anxiety or frustration that precludes this kind of engagement. Based on observations, interviews and analysis of work produced by students, I suggest that while an interface designed with guides-features that orient users to an unfamiliar environment-can support and encourage personal meaning making, questions remain about the users autonomy and the role of the designer in guiding ambiguous experiences.

Translating Texture: Design as Integration

This conceptual essay uses the notion of texture to articulate the relationship between data infrastructure (the attributes and value parameters that give data its shape) and data environment (the mode of implementation in which data is stored and manipulated). We take experimental datasets that we authored with unorthodox, weird data infrastructure and translate those datasets from one data evironment to another. In performing these translations, we surface integration as a design activity. Integration work is often tedious, mundane, and technical--but it is nonetheless design. We show how texture arises from the integration of material components, demonstrating the effects of integration work upon user experience.