Dominic Price

A conversation between trees: what data feels like in the forest

A study of an interactive artwork shows how artists engaged the public with scientific climate change data. The artwork visualised live environmental data collected from remote trees, alongside both historical and forecast global CO2 data. Visitors also took part in a mobile sensing experience in a nearby forest. Our study draws on the perspectives of the artists, visitors and a climate scientist to reveal how the work was designed and experienced. We show that the artists adopted a distinct approach that fostered an emotional engagement with data rather than an informative or persuasive one. We chart the performative strategies they used to achieve this including sensory engagement with data, a temporal structure that balanced liveness with slowness, and the juxtaposition of different treatments of the data to enable interpretation and dialogue.

Run Spot Run: Capturing and Tagging Footage of a Race by Crowds of Spectators

There has been a massive growth in the number of people who film and upload amateur footage of events to services such as Facebook and Youtube, or even stream live to services such as LiveStream. We present an exploratory study that investigates the potential of these spectators in creating footage en masse; in this case, during a live trial at a local marathon. We deployed a prototype app, RunSpotRun, as a technology probe to see what kinds of footage spectators would produce. We present an analysis of this footage in terms of its coverage, quality, and contents, and also discuss the implications for a) spectators enjoying the race, and b) extracting the stories of individual runners throughout the race. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges that remain for deploying such technology at a larger scale.

Understanding mass participatory pervasive computing systems for environmental campaigns

Abstract Participate was a 3-year collaboration between industry and academia to explore how mobile, Web and broadcast technologies could combine to deliver environmental campaigns. In a series of pilot projects, schools used mobile sensors to enhance science learning; visitors to an ecological attraction employed mobile phones to access and generate locative media; and the public played a mobile phone game that challenged their environmental behaviours. Key elements of these were carried forward into an integrated trial in which participants were assigned a series of environmental missions as part of an overarching narrative that was delivered across mobile, broadcast and Web platforms. These experiences use a three-layered structure for campaigns that draw on experts, local groups and the general public, who engage through a combination of playful characterisation and social networking.

Inter-Social-Networking: Accounting for Multiple Identities

We argue that the current approaches to online social networking give rise to numerous challenges regarding the management of the multiple facets of people’s digital identities within and around social networking sites (SNS). We propose an architecture for enabling people to better manage their SNS identities that is informed by the way the core Internet protocols developed to support interoperation of proprietary network protocols, and based on the idea of Separation of Concerns [1]. This does not require modification of existing services but is predicated on providing a connecting layer over them, both as a mechanism to address problems of privacy and identity, and to create opportunities to open up online social networking to a much richer set of possible interactions and applications.

Digital archiving as information production: Using experts and learners in the design of subject access

Purpose – This article aims to develop a framework that considers digital archiving as a form of networked information production, in which the different stages of producing a digital archive are modularized and distributed across different actors. The framework is applied and developed within the context of designing a digital archive for the electronic artwork Rider Spoke. More specifically the framework is applied and developed within the context of designing a subject scheme that provides its users with consistent yet relevant access to the content of the archive. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 74 postgraduate students from the Information School at the University of Sheffield were invited to tag four videos from the Riders Have Spoken archive as a voluntary exercise. Students were evenly distributed across the four videos and each participant was invited to generate up to ten tags; with each tag or annotation representing a point of interest in the content of the video for viewer. The time ...

Participate: Pervasive Computing for Environmental Campaigns

Participate was a three year collaboration between industry and academia to explore how mobile, Web and broadcast technologies could combine to deliver environmental campaigns. In a series of pilot projects, schools used mobile sensors to enhance science learning; visitors to an ecological attraction employed mobile phones to access and generate locative-media; and the public played a mobile phone game that challenged their environmental behaviours. Key elements of these were carried forward into an integrated trial in which participants were assigned a series of environmental missions as part of an overarching narrative that was delivered across mobile, broadcast and Web platforms. These experiences use a three-layered structure for campaigns that draw on experts, local groups and the general public, who engage through a combination of playful characterisation and social networking.

Managing privacy, rights, and security in a digital economy

We focus on the issues of managing Big Data within a Digital Economy, and address the asymmetrical distribution of power between the originators of data and the organizations that make use of that ...

ArtMaps: A Technology for Looking at Tate’s Collection

ABSTRACT This article presents ArtMaps, a crowdsourcing web-based app for desktop and mobile use that allows users to locate, move and annotate artworks in the Tate collection in relation to one or more sets of locations. Here the authors show that ArtMaps extends the “space” of the museum and facilitates a new pluriperspectival way of looking at art.

Art mapping in Paris

In this work, we describe a proposed technology demonstrator for Art Maps, a collaborative research project exploring the relation between artworks and the location that they depict, through the support of a cloud-based crowdsourcing platform with web and mobile interfaces. The Art Maps demonstration entails two types of hands-on experiences for the conference attendees: an in-CHI-experience and an optional bespoke outdoor activity to experience Paris through Art Maps.

Documenting mixed reality performance: the case of CloudPad

This article introduces an original documentation and archiving tool, CloudPad, that integrates ‘cloud computing’ into the annotation and synchronisation of mixed media resources. Through CloudPad users are able to view a documentation, edit a version of it, and record their own comments in response to it. Whether users may have created and/or experienced a particular work, or whether they may simply wish to consult a works documentation, their journey through these records and annotations are subsumed into the works documentation, thus augmenting the ‘original’ artworks field of social engagement. Before discussing CloudPad in detail, we proceed to explain how recent debates in performance documentation influenced our methodology and development, and the general challenges of mixed reality documentation that CloudPad aims to address.