Eric Baumer

Exploring the role of the reader in the activity of blogging

Within the last decade, blogs have become an important element of popular culture, mass media, and the daily lives of countless Internet users. Despite the mediums interactive nature, most research on blogs focuses on either the blog itself or the blogger, rarely if at all focusing on the readers impact. In order to gain a better understanding of the social practice of blogging, we must take into account the role, contributions, and significance of the reader. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study of blog readers, including common blog reading practices, some of the dimensions along which reading practices vary, relationships between identity presentation and perception, the interpretation of temporality, and the ways in which readers feel that they are a part of the blogs they read. It also describes similarities to, and discrepancies with, previous work, and suggests a number of directions and implications for future work on blogging.

Synergizing in Cyberinfrastructure Development

This paper investigates the work of creating infrastructure, using as a case study the development of cyberinfrastructure for metagenomics research. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the role of embeddedness in infrastructure development. We expand on the notion of human infrastructure to develop the concepts of synergizing, leveraging, and aligning, which denote the active processes of creating and managing relationships among people, organizations, and technologies in the creation of cyberinfrastructure. This conceptual lens highlights how embeddedness is not only an important result of infrastructure development, but is also a precursor that can act as both a constraint and a resource for development activities.

America is like Metamucil: fostering critical and creative thinking about metaphor in political blogs

Blogs are becoming an increasingly important medium -- socially, academically, and politically. Much research has involved analyzing blogs, but less work has considered how such analytic techniques might be incorporated into tools for blog readers. A new tool, metaViz, analyzes political blogs for potential conceptual metaphors and presents them to blog readers. This paper presents a study exploring the types of critical and creative thinking fostered by metaViz as evidenced by user comments and discussion on the system. These results indicate the effectiveness of various system features at fostering critical thinking and creativity, specifically in terms of deep, structural reasoning about metaphors and creatively extending existing metaphors. Furthermore, the results carry broader implications beyond blogs and politics about exploring alternate configurations between computation and human thought.

Embodied mobile agents

The move in many societies toward individuals having multiple networked computational devices -- workstations, notebooks computers, mobile phones, PDAs - radically changes the ways in which people engage those devices. However, we lack interaction paradigms that enable a coherent experience across these technologies. One possible approach to this problem involves the use of embodied mobile agents (EMAs), that is, graphically animated, autonomous or semi-autonomous software systems that can migrate seamlessly from one computational device to another. This paper describes an interactive museum exhibit that was implemented with EMAs, discusses the opportunities and challenges presented by this new form of agent, and consider other potential applications for EMAs. While not a universal solution to challenges of interacting with heterogeneous networks of devices, embodied mobile agents can help to provide a coherent user experience across multiple computational devices.

Dreaming of adaptive interface agents

This interactive project uses the metaphor of human sleep and dreaming to present a novel paradigm that helps address problems in adaptive user interface design. Two significant problems in adaptive interfaces are: interfaces that adapt when a user does not want them to do so, and interfaces where it is hard to understand how it changed during the process of adaptation. In the project described here, the system only adapts when the user allows it to go to sleep long enough to have a dream. In addition, the dream itself is a visualization of the transformation of the interface, so that a person may see what changes have occurred. This project presents an interim stage of this system, in which an autonomous agent collects knowledge about its environment, falls asleep, has dreams, and reconfigures its internal representation of the world while it dreams. People may alter the agents environment, may prevent it from sleeping by making noise into a microphone, and may observe the dream process that ensues when it is allowed to fall asleep. By drawing on the universal human experience of sleep and dreaming, this project seeks to make adaptive interfaces more effective and comprehensible.

The EcoRaft project: a multi-device interactive graphical exhibit for learning about restoration ecology

The EcoRaft Project, an interactive installation designed to help children learn about restoration ecology, allows participants to engage physically with animated agents via a natural and intuitive interface. This physical engagement occurs when the agents transfer seamlessly from stationary computers to mobile devices, on which the agents are realized as quasi-physical manifestations. Utilizing tablet PCs to act simultaneously as objects in the physical world and as mobile virtual spaces, the system incorporates embodied mobile agents that increase levels of engagement. The project has been publicly shown at several venues, where over 2000 participants interacted with the system. This paper presents initial evaluation results based on interviews with participants indicating that the embodied, physical interaction in this installation leads to participant engagement and collaboration, and enhanced educational effectiveness.

Using social agents to visualize software scenarios

Enabling nonexperts to understand a software system and the scenarios of usage of that system can be challenging. Visually modeling a collection of scenarios as social interactions can provide quicker and more intuitive understanding of the system described by those scenarios. This project combines a scenario language with formal structure and automated tool support (ScenarioML) and an interactive graphical game engine featuring social automomous characters and text-to-speech capabilities. We map scenarios to social interactions by assigning a character to each actor and entity in the scenarios, and animate the interactions among these as social interactions among the corresponding characters. The social interactions can help bring out these important aspects: interactions of multiple agents, pattern and timing of interactions, non-local inconsistencies within and among scenarios, and gaps and missing information in the scenario collection. An exploratory study of this modelings effectiveness is presented.

Richly connected systems and multi-device worlds

Many human activities now take place in settings that include several computational devicessuch as desktop computers, laptops, and mobile phonesin the same physical space. However, we lack interaction paradigms that support a coherent experience across these collocated technologies and enable them to work effectively as systems. This article presents a conceptual framework for building richly connected systems of collocated devices, and offers two implemented examples of interactive virtual worlds built on this framework. Aspects of this framework include multiple channels of real and apparent connectivity among devices: for example, multiple kinds of data networking, cross-device graphics and sound, and embodied mobile agents that inhabit the multi-device system. In addition, integration of the system with the physical world helps bridge the gap between devices. We evaluate the framework in terms of the types of user experiences afforded and enabled by the implemented systems. We also present a number of lessons learned from this evaluation regarding how to develop richly connected systems using heterogeneous devices, as well as the expectations that users bring to this kind of system. The core contribution of this paper is a novel framework for collocated multi-device systems; by presenting this framework, this paper lays the groundwork for a wide range of potential applications.

metaViz: Visualizing Computationally Identified Metaphors in Political Blogs

This paper presents metaViz, an online application that uses computational metaphor identification to find conceptual metaphors in political blogs. The application presents those metaphors to users in an interactive, visual fashion, with the goal of fostering critical thinking and creativity. This paper describes the computational techniques and interface design of metaViz, and presents an evaluation of the tool based on a controlled experiment showing that metaViz is more effective at fostering critical thinking than blog reading alone. This research draws attention to the need for tools that facilitate blog reading while encouraging critical engagement with the text, helping to lay the groundwork for enabling new ways of reading and interacting with blogs.

Institutionalization through reciprocal habitualization and typification

When constructing multiagent systems, the designer may approach the system as a collection of individuals or may view the entire system as a whole. In addition to these approaches, it may be beneficial to consider the interactions between the individuals and the whole. Borrowing ideas from the notion of social construction and building on previous work in synthetic social construction, this paper presents a framework wherein autonomous agents engage in a dialectic relationship with the society of agents around them. In this framework, agents recognize patterns of social activity in their societies, group such patterns into institutions, and form computational representations of those institutions. The paper presents a design framework describing this method of institutionalization, some implementation suggestions, and a discussion of possible applications.