Tag Archives: digital culture

Busy September – talks, tutorials and an ultra-marathon

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September has been a full month!

During the last two weeks things have started to kick back into action, with the normal rounds of meetings and induction week for new students.  For the latter I’d pre-recorded a video welcome, so my involvement during the week was negligible.  However, in addition I delivered a “Statistics for HCI” day course organised by the BCS Interaction Group with PhD students from across the globe and also a talk “Designing User Interactions with AI: Servant, Master or Symbiosis” at the AI Summit London.  I was also very pleased to be part of the “60 faces of IFIP” campaign by the International Federation for Information Processing.

It was the first two weeks that stood out though, as I was back on Tiree for two whole weeks.  Not 100% holiday as during the stay I gave two virtual keynotes: “Qualitative–Quantitative Reasoning: thinking informally about formal things” at the International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing (ICTAC) in Kazakhstan and “Acting out of the Box” at the University of Wales Trinity St David (UWTSD) Postgraduate Summer School.  I also gave a couple of lectures on “Modelling interactions: digital and physical” at the ICTAC School which ran just before the conference and presented a paper on “Interface Engineering for UX Professionals” in the Workshop on HCI Engineering Education (HCI-E2) at INTERACT 2021 in Bari.  Amazing how easy it is to tour the world from a little glamping pod on a remote Scottish Island.

Of course the high point was not the talks and meetings, but the annual Tiree Ultra-marathon.  I’d missed last year, so especially wonderful to be back: thirty five miles of coastline, fourteen beaches, not to mention so many friendly faces, old friends and new.  Odd of course with Covid zero-contact and social distancing – the usual excited press of bodies at the pre-race briefing in An Talla, the Tiree community hall, replaced with a video webinar and all a little more widely spaced for the start on the beach too.

The course was slightly different too, anti-clockwise and starting half way along Gott Bay, the longest beach.  Gott Bay is usually towards the end of the race, about 28 miles in, so the long run, often into the wind is one of the challenges of the race.  I recall in 2017 running the beach with 40 mile an hour head wind and stinging rain – I knew I’d be faster walking, but was determined to run every yard of beach..  Another runner came up behind me and walked in my shelter.  However, this year had its own sting in the tail with Ben Hynish, the highest point, at 26 miles in.

The first person was across the line in about four-and-a-quarter hours, the fastest time yet.  I was about five hours later!

This was my fifth time doing the ultra, but the hardest yet, maybe in part due to lockdown couch-potato-ness!  My normal training pattern is that about a month before the ultra I think, “yikes, I’ve not run for a year” and then rapidly build up the miles – not the recommended training regime!  This year I knew I wasn’t as fit as usual, so I did start in May … but then got a knee injury, then had to self-isolate … and then it was into the second-half of July; so about a month again.

Next year it will be different, I will keep running through the winter … hmm … well, time will tell!

The different September things all sound very disparate – and they are, but there are some threads and connections.

The first thread is largely motivational.

The UWTSD keynote was about the way we are not defined by the “kind of people” we think of ourselves as being, but by the things we do.  The talk used my walk around Wales in 2013 as the central example, but the ultra would have been just as pertinent.  Someone with my waistline is not who one would naturally think as being an ultramarathon runner – not that kind of person, but I did it.

However, I was not alone.  The ‘winners’ of the ultra are typically the rangy build one would expect of a long-distance runner, but beyond the front runners, there is something about the long distance that attracts a vast range of people of all ages, and all body shapes imaginable.  For many there are physical or mental health stories: relationship breakdowns, illnesses, that led them to running and through it they have found ways to believe in themselves again.  Post Covid this was even more marked: Will, who organises the ultra, said that many people burst into tears as they crossed the finish line, something he’d never seen before.

The other thread is about the mental tools we need to be a 21st century citizen.

The ICTAC keynote was about “Qualitative–Quantitative Reasoning”, which is my term for the largely informal understanding of numbers that is so important for both day-to-day and professional life, but is not part of formal education.  The big issues of our lives from Covid to Brexit to climate change need us to make sense of large-scale numerical or data-rich phenomena.  These often seem too complex to make sense of, yet are ones where we need to make appropriate choices in both our individual lives and political voices.  It is essential that we find ways to aid understanding in the public, press and politicians – including both educational resources and support tools.

The statistics course and my “Statistics for HCI” book are about precisely this issue – offering ways to make sense of often complex results of statistical analysis and obtain some of the ‘gut’ understanding that professional statisticians develop over many years.

My 60 faces of IFIP statement also follows this broad thread:

“Digital techology is now essential to being a citizen. The future of information processing is the future of everyone; so needs to be understood and shaped by all. Often ICT simply reinforces existing patterns, but technology is only useful if we can use it to radically reimagine a better world.”

More information on different events

Tiree Ultra

Tiree Ultramarathon web page and Facebook Group

Paper: Interface Engineering for UX Professionals

HCI-E2: Workshop on HCI Engineering Education – for developers, designers and more, INTERACT 2021, Bari, Italy – August 31st, 2021. See more – paper and links

Summer School Lecturea: Modelling interactions: digital and physical

Lecture at ICTAC School 2021: 18th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, 1st September 2021. See more – abstract and links

Talk: Designing User Interactions with AI: Servant, Master or Symbiosis

The AI Summit London, 22nd Sept. 2021. See more – abstract and links

Day Course: Statistics for HCI

BCS Interaction Group One Day Course for PhD Students, 21st Sept. 2021.
See my Statistics for HCI Micro-site.

Keynote: Acting out of the Box

Rhaglen Ysgol Haf 2021 PCYDDS / UWTSD Postgraduate Summer School 2021, 10th Sept. 2021. See more – abstract and links

Keynote: Qualitative–Quantitative Reasoning: thinking informally about formal things

18th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, 10th Sept. 2021. See more – full paper and links

Induction week greeting

 

The big stories buried beneath the headlines

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In news stories this morning about pet abduction and sustainable fashion, the most critical parts are buried deep in the article: a chance remark that gives away the bigger story.

During the lockdown there has been a steep rise in the cost of dogs and other pets, and this has led to an increase in pet abductions. The most high profile example was when Lady Gaga’s dog walker was shot during the theft of her bulldogs in Los Angeles, but the BBC reports that there are over 2000 pet thefts in the UK alone last year.

Stock image of a person stealing a dog

Pet abduction to be made new criminal offence in thefts crackdown – BBC News

In principle pet theft is a crime covered by the UK Theft Act, but the use of this evidently does not reflect the emotional harms of pet abductions, hence the need for the new law. Reading further the article says:

Although offences under the Theft Act 1968 carry a maximum term of seven years, ministers say there is little evidence of that being used, because the severity of the sentence is partly determined by the monetary value of the item taken.

It was this that caught my eye.  The most severe penalties under the Theft Act are for the most valuable items.  If the second-hand car of a pensioner near the poverty line is stolen, it will attract a less severe sentence than the trophy Porsche from the millionaire’s collection.  This sounds like a law made in the 17th century, but is in fact from 1968 and applies today.

The lesson is clear, if you are poor then even the criminal law does nothing for you.

The second story is about Molly-Mae, ex-Love Island contestant and social media influencer, who has just been recruited as creative director of Pretty Little Things with a particular focus on sustainable fashion.

 

Molly Mae

Molly-Mae: “I’m not just an influencer anymore”

Reading further there is a section entitled “Wearing the same dress twice”, that has the following quote from Molly-Mae:

“I even captioned one of my Instagram pictures the other day saying ‘PSA it’s ok to wear the same dress twice’ – it’s a bad habit us girls have got into, like if you put it on Instagram it means you can’t wear it again.”

Although I did know some of the figures for this before, it still shocked me to hear that “wearing the same dress twice” is regarded as a significant message.

Sadly, this does reflect the previous figures I’ve seen suggesting that the median number of times a garment is worn is indeed one, with something like 20% of clothes never worn at all once bought.  This all has to be added to around 1/3 of fashion clothing that is shredded or otherwise disposed of without ever being sold, due to end of season, returns, or other reasons.

The fashion industry is estimated to contribute 10% of all global carbon emissions, not to mention plastic micro-fibres, chemical, water and other environmental impacts, as well as being built upon near slave-labour conditions across the world.

Given this, even wearing clothes twice could be a major benefit.

However, just imagine how the statement sounds to someone who lived through the second world war, or even anyone over 50.  This is reflected in figures for environmental action by age group: awareness is greatest in the younger age groups, but in nearly all areas life-style action is greatest in the older ones.  Perhaps influencers such as Molly-Mae can help turn this round.

So as you read the news, do look beyond the headlines, the most hard-hitting parts are often buried deep.

dog digging

Image: jimbomack66, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Software for 2050

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New Year’s resolutions are for a year ahead, but with the start of a new decade it is worth looking a bit further.
How many of the software systems we use today will be around in 2050 — or even 2030?
Story 1.  This morning the BBC reported that NHS staff need up to 15 different logins to manage ‘outdated’ IT systems and I have seen exactly this in a video produced by a local hospital consultant. Another major health organisation I talked to mentioned that their key systems are written in FoxBase Pro, which has not been supported by Microsoft for 10 years.
Story 2.  Nearly all worldwide ATM transactions are routed through systems that include COBOL code (‘natural language’ programming of the 1960s) … happily IBM still do support CICS, but there is concern that COBOL expertise is literally dying out.
Story 3.  Good millennial tech typically involves an assemblage of cloud-based services: why try to deal with images when you have Flickr … except Flickr is struggling to survive financially; why have your own version control system when you can use Google Code, except Google Code shut down in 2016 after 10 years.
Story 3a.  Google have a particularly bad history of starting or buying services and then dropping them: Freebase (sigh), Revolv Hub home automation, too many to list. They are doing their best with AngularJS, which has a massive uptake in hi-tech, and is being put into long-term maintenance mode — however, ‘long-term’ here will not mean COBOL long-term, just a few years of critical security updates.
Story 4.  Success at last. Berners-Lee did NOT build the web on cutting edge technology (an edge of sadness here as hypertext research, including external linkage, pretty much died in 1994), and because of this it has survived and probably will still be functioning in 2050.
Story 5.  I’m working with David Frohlich and others who have been developing slow, meaningful social media for the elderly and their families. This could potentially contribute to very long term domestic memories, which may help as people suffer dementia and families grieve after death. However, alongside the design issues for such long-term interaction, what technical infrastructure will survive a current person’s lifetime?
You can see the challenge here.  Start-ups are about creating something that will grow rapidly in 2–5 years, but then be sold, thrown away or re-engineered from scratch.  Government and health systems need to run for 30 years or more … as do our personal lives.
What practical advice do we give to people designing now for systems that are likely to still be in use in 2050?

Students love digital … don’t they?

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In the ever accelerating rush to digital delivery, is this actually what students want or need?

Last week I was at Talis Insight conference. As with previous years, this is a mix of sessions focused on those using or thinking of using Talis products, with lots of rich experience talks. However, also about half of the time is dedicated to plenaries about the current state and future prospects for technology in higher education; so well worth attending (it is free!) whether or not you are a Talis user.

Speakers this year included Bill Rammell, now Vice-Chancellor at the University of Bedfordshire, but who was also Minister of State for Higher Education during the second Blair government, and during that time responsible for introducing the National Student Survey.

Another high profile speaker was Rosie Jones, who is Director of Library Services at the Open University … which operates somewhat differently from the standard university library!

However, among the VCs, CEOs and directors of this and that, it was the two most junior speakers who stood out for me. Eva Brittin-Snell and Alex Davie are to SAGE student scholars from Sussex. As SAGE scholars they have engaged in research on student experience amongst their peers, speak at events like this and maintain a student blog, which includes, amongst other things the story of how Eva came to buy her first textbook.

Eva and Alex’s talk was entitled “Digital through a student’s eyes” (video). Many of the talks had been about the rise of digital services and especially the eTextbook. Eva and Alex were the ‘digital natives’, so surely this was joy to their ears. Surprisingly not.

Alex, in her first year at university, started by alluding to the previous speakers, the push for book-less libraries, and general digital spiritus mundi, but offered an alternative view. Students were annoyed at being asked to buy books for a course where only a chapter or two would be relevant; they appreciated the convenience of an eBook, when core textbooks were permanently out on and, and instantly recalled once one got hold of them. However, she said they still preferred physical books, as they are far more usable (even if heavy!) than eBooks.

Eva, a fourth year student, offered a different view. “I started like Aly”, she said, and then went on to describe her change of heart. However, it was not a revelation of the pedagogical potential of digital, more that she had learnt to live through the pain. There were clear practical and logistic advantages to eBooks, there when and where you wanted, but she described a life of constant headaches from reading on-screen.

Possibly some of this is due to the current poor state of eBooks that are still mostly simply electronic versions of texts designed for paper. Also, one of their student surveys showed that very few students had eBook readers such as Kindle (evidently now definitely not cool), and used phones primarily for messaging and WhatsApp. The centre of the student’s academic life was definitely the laptop, so eBooks meant hours staring at a laptop screen.

However, it also reflects a growing body of work showing the pedagogic advantages of physical note taking, potential developmental damage of early tablet and smartphone use, and industry figures showing that across all areas eBook sales are dropping and physical book sales increasing. In addition there is evidence that children and teenagers people prefer physical books, and public library use by young people is growing.

It was also interesting that both Alex and Eva complained that eTextbooks were not ‘snappy’ enough. In the age of Tweet-stream presidents and 5-minute attention spans, ‘snappy’ was clearly the students’ term of choice to describe their expectation of digital media. Yet this did not represent a loss of their attention per se, as this was clearly not perceived as a problem with physical books.

… and I am still trying to imagine what a critical study of Aristotle’s Poetics would look like in ‘snappy’ form.

There are two lessons from this for me. First what would a ‘digital first’ textbook look like. Does it have to be ‘snappy’, or are there ways to maintain attention and depth of reading in digital texts?

The second picks up on issues in the co-authored paper I presented at NordiChi last year, “From intertextuality to transphysicality: The changing nature of the book, reader and writer“, which, amongst other things, asked how we might use digital means to augment the physical reading process, offering some of the strengths of eBooks such as the ability to share annotations, but retaining a physical reading experience.  Also maybe some of the physical limitations of availability could be relieved, for example, if university libraries work with bookshops to have student buy and return schemes alongside borrowing?

It would certainly be good if students did not have to learn to live with pain.

We have a challenge.

the internet laws of the jungle

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firefox-copyright-1Where are the boundaries between freedom, license and exploitation, between fair use and theft?

I found myself getting increasingly angry today as Mozilla Foundation stepped firmly beyond those limits, and moreover with Trump-esque rhetoric attempts to dupe others into following them.

It all started with a small text add below the Firefox default screen search box:

firefox-copyright-2

Partly because of my ignorance of web-speak ‘TFW‘ (I know showing my age!), I clicked through to a petition page on Mozilla Foundation (PDF archive copy here).

It starts off fine, with stories of some of the silliness of current copyright law across Europe (can’t share photos of the Eiffel tower at night) and problems for use in education (which does in fact have quite a lot of copyright exemptions in many countries).  It offers a petition to sign.

This sounds all good, partly due to rapid change, partly due to knee jerk reactions, internet law does seem to be a bit of a mess.

If you blink you might miss one or two odd parts:

“This means that if you live in or visit a country like Italy or France, you’re not permitted to take pictures of certain buildings, cityscapes, graffiti, and art, and share them online through Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.”

Read this carefully, a tourist forbidden from photographing cityscapes – silly!  But a few words on “… and art” …  So if I visit an exhibition of an artist or maybe even photographer, and share a high definition (Nokia Lumia 1020 has 40 Mega pixel camera) is that OK? Perhaps a thumbnail in the background of a selfie, but does Mozilla object to any rules to prevent copying of artworks?

mozilla-dont-break-the-internet

However, it is at the end, in a section labelled “don’t break the internet”, the cyber fundamentalism really starts.

“A key part of what makes the internet awesome is the principle of innovation without permission — that anyone, anywhere, can create and reach an audience without anyone standing in the way.”

Again at first this sounds like a cry for self expression, except if you happen to be an artist or writer and would like to make a living from that self-expression?

Again, it is clear that current laws have not kept up with change and in areas are unreasonably restrictive.  We need to be ale to distinguish between a fair reference to something and seriously infringing its IP.  Likewise, we could distinguish the aspects of social media that are more like looking at holiday snaps over a coffee, compared to pirate copies for commercial profit.

However, in so many areas it is the other way round, our laws are struggling to restrict the excesses of the internet.

Just a few weeks ago a 14 year old girl was given permission to sue Facebook.  Multiple times over a 2 year period nude pictures of her were posted and reposted.  Facebook hides behind the argument that it is user content, it takes down the images when they are pointed out, and yet a massive technology company, which is able to recognise faces is not able to identify the same photo being repeatedly posted. Back to Mozilla: “anyone, anywhere, can create and reach an audience without anyone standing in the way” – really?

Of course this vision of the internet without boundaries is not just about self expression, but freedom of speech:

“We need to defend the principle of innovation without permission in copyright law. Abandoning it by holding platforms liable for everything that happens online would have an immense chilling effect on speech, and would take away one of the best parts of the internet — the ability to innovate and breathe new meaning into old content.”

Of course, the petition is signalling out EU law, which inconveniently includes various provisions to protect the privacy and rights of individuals, not dictatorships or centrally controlled countries.

So, who benefits from such an open and unlicensed world?  Clearly not the small artist or the victim of cyber-bullying.

Laissez-faire has always been an aim for big business, but without constraint it is the law of the jungle and always ends up benefiting the powerful.

In the 19th century it was child labour in the mills only curtailed after long battles.

In the age of the internet, it is the vast US social media giants who hold sway, and of course the search engines, who just happen to account for $300 million of revenue for Mozilla Foundation annually, 90% of its income.

 

Of academic communication: overload, homeostatsis and nostalgia

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open-mailbox-silhouetteRevisiting on an old paper on early email use and reflecting on scholarly communication now.

About 30 years ago, I was at a meeting in London and heard a presentation about a study of early email use in Xerox and the Open University. At Xerox the use of email was already part of their normal culture, but it was still new at OU. I’d thought they had done a before and after study of one of the departments, but remembered clearly their conclusions: email acted in addition to other forms of communication (face to face, phone, paper), but did not substitute.

Gilbert-Cockton-from-IDFIt was one of those pieces of work that I could recall, but didn’t have a reference too. Facebook to the rescue! I posted about it and in no time had a series of helpful suggestions including Gilbert Cockton who nailed it, finding the meeting, the “IEE Colloquium on Human Factors in Electronic Mail and Conferencing Systems” (3 Feb 1989) and the precise paper:

Fung , T. O’Shea , S. Bly. Electronic mail viewed as a communications catalyst. IEE Colloquium on Human Factors in Electronic Mail and Conferencing Systems, , pp.1/1–1/3. INSPEC: 3381096 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=197821

In some extraordinary investigative journalism, Gilbert also noted that the first author, Pat Fung, went on to fresh territory after retirement, qualifying as a scuba-diving instructor at the age of 75.

The details of the paper were not exactly as I remembered. Rather than a before and after study, it was a comparison of computing departments at Xerox (mature use of email) and OU’s (email less ingrained, but already well used). Maybe I had simply embroidered the memory over the years, or maybe they presented newer work at the colloquium, than was in the 3 page extended abstract.   In those days this was common as researchers did not feel they needed to milk every last result in a formal ‘publication’. However, the conclusions were just as I remembered:

“An exciting finding is its indication that the use of sophisticated electronic communications media is not seen by users as replacing existing methods of communicating. On the contrary, the use of such media is seen as a way of establishing new interactions and collaboration whilst catalysing the role of more traditional methods of communication.”

As part of this process following various leads by other Facebook friends, I spent some time looking at early CSCW conference proceedings, some at Saul Greenburg’s early CSCW bibliography [1] and Ducheneaut and Watts (15 years on) review of email research [2] in the 2005 HCI special issue on ‘reinventing email’ [3] (both notably missing the Fung et al. paper). I downloaded and skimmed several early papers including Wendy McKay’s lovely early (1988) study [4] that exposed the wide variety of ways in which people used email over and above simple ‘communication’. So much to learn from this work when the field was still fresh,

This all led me to reflect both on the Fung et al. paper, the process of finding it, and the lessons for email and other ‘communication’ media today.

Communication for new purposes

A key finding was that “the use of such media is seen as a way of establishing new interactions and collaboration“. Of course, the authors and their subjects could not have envisaged current social media, but the finding if this paper was exactly an example of this. In 1989 if I had been trying to find a paper, I would have scoured my own filing cabinet and bookshelves, those of my colleagues, and perhaps asked people when I met them. Nowadays I pop the question into Facebook and within minutes the advice starts to appear, and not long after I have a scanned copy of the paper I was after.

Communication as a good thing

In the paper abstract, the authors say that an “exciting finding” of the paper is that “the use of sophisticated electronic communications media is not seen by users as replacing existing methods of communicating.” Within paper, this is phrased even more strongly:

“The majority of subjects (nineteen) also saw no likelihood of a decrease in personal interactions due to an increase in sophisticated technological communications support and many felt that such a shift in communication patterns would be undesirable.”

Effectively, email was seen as potentially damaging if it replaced other more human means of communication, and the good outcome of this report was that this did not appear to be happening (or strictly subjects believed it was not happening).

However, by the mid-1990s, papers discussing ’email overload’ started to appear [5].

I recall a morning radio discussion of email overload about ten years ago. The presenter asked someone else in the studio if they thought this was a problem. Quite un-ironically, they answered, “no, I only spend a couple of hours a day”. I have found my own pattern of email change when I switched from highly structured Eudora (with over 2000 email folders), to Gmail (mail is like a Facebook feed, if it isn’t on the first page it doesn’t exist). I was recently talking to another academic who explained that two years ago he had deliberately taken “email as stream” as a policy to control unmanageable volumes.

If only they had known …

Communication as substitute

While Fung et al.’s respondents reported that they did not foresee a reduction in other forms of non-electronic communication, in fact even in the paper the signs of this shift to digital are evident.

Here are the graphs of communication frequency for the Open University (30 people, more recent use of email) and Xerox (36 people, more established use) respectively.

( from Fung et al., 1989)

( from Fung et al., 1989)

( from Fung et al., 1989)

( from Fung et al., 1989)

It is hard to draw exact comparisons as it appears there may have been a higher overall volume of communication at Xerox (because of email?).  Certainly, at that point, face-to-face communication remains strong at Xerox, but it appears that not only the proportion, but total volume of non-digital non-face-to-face communications is lower than at OU.  That is sub substitution has already happened.

Again, this is obvious nowadays, although the volume of electronic communications would have been untenable in paper (I’ve sometimes imagined printing out a day’s email and trying to cram it in a pigeon-hole), the volume of paper communications has diminished markedly. A report in 2013 for Royal Mail recorded 3-6% pa reduction in letters over recent years and projected a further 4% pa for the foreseeable future [6].

academic communication and national meetungs

However, this also made me think about the IEE Colloquium itself. Back in the late 1980s and 1990s it was common to attend small national or local meetings to meet with others and present work, often early stage, for discussion. In other fields this still happens, but in HCI it has all but disappeared. Maybe I have is a little nostalgia, but this does seem a real loss as it was a great way for new PhD students to present their work and meet with the leaders in their field. Of course, this can happen if you get your CHI paper accepted, but the barriers are higher, particularly for those in smaller and less well-resourced departments.

Some of this is because international travel is cheaper and faster, and so national meetings have reduced in importance – everyone goes to the big global (largely US) conferences. Many years ago research on day-to-day time use suggested that we have a travel ‘time budget’ reactively constant across counties and across different kinds of areas within the same country [7]. The same is clearly true of academic travel time; we have a certain budget and if we travel more internationally then we do correspondingly less nationally.

(from Zahavi, 1979)

(from Zahavi, 1979)

However, I wonder if digital communication also had a part to play. I knew about the Fung et al. paper, even though it was not in the large reviews of CSCW and email, because I had been there. Indeed, the reason that the Fung et al.paper was not cited in relevant reviews would have been because it was in a small venue and only available as paper copy, and only if you know it existed. Indeed, it was presumably also below the digital radar until it was, I assume, scanned by IEE archivists and deposited in IEEE digital library.

However, despite the advantages of this easy access to one another and scholarly communication, I wonder if we have also lost something.

In the 1980s, physical presence and co-presence at an event was crucial for academic communication. Proceedings were paper and precious, I would at least skim read all of the proceedings of any event I had been to, even those of large conferences, because they were rare and because they were available. Reference lists at the end of my papers were shorter than now, but possibly more diverse and more in-depth, as compared to more directed ‘search for the relevant terms’ literature reviews of the digital age.

And looking back at some of those early papers, in days when publish-or-perish was not so extreme, when cardiac failure was not an occupational hazard for academics (except maybe due to the Cambridge sherry allowance), at the way this crucial piece of early research was not dressed up with an extra 6000 words of window dressing to make a ‘high impact’ publication, but simply shared. Were things more fun?

 

[1] Saul Greenberg (1991) “An annotated bibliography of computer supported cooperative work.” ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 23(3), pp. 29-62. July. Reprinted in Greenberg, S. ed. (1991) “Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware”, pp. 359-413, Academic Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/126505.126508
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/52b4/d0bb76fcd628c00c71e0dfbf511505ae8a30.pdf

[2] Nicolas Ducheneaut and Leon A. Watts (2005). In search of coherence: a review of e-mail research. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 20, 1 (June 2005), 11-48. DOI= 10.1080/07370024.2005.9667360
http://www2.parc.com/csl/members/nicolas/documents/HCIJ-Coherence.pdf

[3] Steve Whittaker, Victoria Bellotti, and Paul Moody (2005). Introduction to this special issue on revisiting and reinventing e-mail. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 20, 1 (June 2005), 1-9.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07370024.2005.9667359

[4] Wendy E. Mackay. 1988. More than just a communication system: diversity in the use of electronic mail. In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW ’88). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 344-353. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/62266.62293
https://www.lri.fr/~mackay/pdffiles/TOIS88.Diversity.pdf

[5] Steve Whittaker and Candace Sidner (1996). Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’96), Michael J. Tauber (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 276-283. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/238386.238530
https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~i385q/readings/Whittaker_Sidner-1996-Email.pdf

[6] The outlook for UK mail volumes to 2023. PwC prepared for Royal Mail Group, 15 July 2013
http://www.royalmailgroup.com/sites/default/files/ The%20outlook%20for%20UK%20mail%20volumes%20to%202023.pdf

[7] Yacov Zahavi (1979). The ‘UMOT’ Project. Prepared For U.S. Department Of Transportation Ministry Of Transport and Fed. Rep. Of Germany.
http://www.surveyarchive.org/Zahavi/UMOT_79.pdf

running and talking

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September saw two events on Tiree; both exciting but each very different: at the beginning of the month the first Tiree Ultramarathon organised by Will Wright our very own Tiree superhero and towards the end ‘Re-Thinking Architecturally‘, a workshop of the European Network of Excellence on Internet Science organised by Clare Hooper from Southampton University.    I was lucky enough to take part in both.

In addition, in a few weeks time (23-27 Oct) there will be the eighth Tiree Tech Wave, which will include participants from Canada, Scotland, Wales and England (but no-one from Ireland yet).  As well as the usual unstructured serendipity, we will have some tutorial workshops of 3D scanning, 3D printing and laser cutting … but more about that in another post.

The Tiree Ultra

photo Rhoda Meek

I should first emphasise that I did not run all of the 35 mile ultra-marathon course around the coast of Tiree, but did about 50:50, walk/run.  I’d never done anything remotely like this before.  The longest I’d run was the Tiree half marathon back in May and the longest I’d walked during the Wales walk was a 29 mile day (although I did that over more than 12 hours).  I had as a schoolboy once done a 34 mile day hike up into the coal valleys above Cardiff, and one of the spurs to sign up for the Ultra was to beat my 17 year old self!

With my usual level of preparation it came to the beginning of August and I realised I’d not run at all, nor even taken a walk longer than to the beach and back, since the half-marathon in May.  Just before the event I found a couple of sites with training schedules for marathons, all of them were several months long and the ‘beginner’ level was “runs 15-25 miles  a week regularly” … what about zero miles a week?  Anyway my lengthy one month training schedule consisted mainly of short (2.5 mile) beach runs with the occasional 7.5 mile run to Hynish and towards the end a run of 8.5 miles along part of the route of the Ultra round the base of Ben Hynish.  I was aware I’d not done any really substantial runs and so, rather foolishly, on the Wednesday 4 days before the event I ran (and walked!) 21 miles around part of the route on the east end of the island and down to Hynish and back.  A good last run before the event, but one I should have done a week earlier.

Somehow or other, despite my foolish training schedule, I managed to get round without any serious injury.  My main problem was eating, or rather failing to eat. I found I could only mange food during walking stages, and then just a small amount of Kendal Mint Cake and few bananas, I guess overall I managed to burn around 4000 calories, but ate less than 1000, which really made the legs start to tire as I got to the latter parts of the course.  I’ve already entered for the 2015 Tiree Ultra next September (half the places are already gone and entries have only been open a week), but I will have to work out how to eat better before then.  Crucially I got round the course … and not even last.  The serious contenders managed times not much more than 4 1/2 hours whilst I got round in just over 8:20, but I was simply happy to get to the end.

Although it was further and faster than any day walking last year, it was in many ways a lot easier than the Wales walk.  About 2/3 of the way round the Tiree course my right ankle and calf started to stiffen, which was where I’d had Achilles ankle problems a couple of years ago.  Although I did try to ease a little I was not terribly worried; the worst would be that I’d be hobbling for a month or so after the run.  In contrast, last year I knew that I would be walking again the next day, and the next,and the one after that; with each ache I worried whether it would be the injury that did not get better, and stopped the walk. And, despite the worry of this, I had also learnt quite how resilient the body is, that most pains and strains did get better, albeit slowly, despite unrelenting exercise.

I was also reminded very much of the walk when I finished.  I took off my running shoes and socks, the latter sodden from beach and bog, and filled with fine layer of sand.  The soles of my feet, which had been subjected to 35 miles of damp sandpaper, felt like I was walking on coals and I hobbled about between van and Ceadhar where they laid on a post-walk pizza and party.  It was just like that so many days last year, I would get to where I was staying, ease off my boots, put on sandals, and then hobble out in search of food, wondering if I would get as far as the closest pub or cafe, let alone walk again the next day.

Re-thinking Architecturally

The Internet Science workshop was equally enjoyable, but a little less physically challenging!  It brought together economists, architects, lawyers, policy advisors, and some with more technical background from as far afield as Umea in northern Sweden. It was lovely being able to attend a technology workshop on Tiree that I hadn’t organised 🙂

Clare had been to one of the Tiree Tech Waves, and then, when she was organising a workshop for the European Network of Excellence on Internet Science, she thought of Tiree.  The logistics were not without problems, but after the event I’ve been getting together with the Tiree Trust to make an information pack for future organisers to make the process easier.  So if if you would like to organise an event on Tiree, get in touch!

The participants all seemed utterly taken with the venue, several brave souls even swimming in the mornings off the Hynish pier, in the words of one of the participants on the way back after the event “I’d rather be in Tiree!”.  Another said:

“one great consequence of the week in Tiree was a kind of intellectual regeneration that let me set aside the stresses of the coming academic year and…think openly a bit.”
Alison Powell (London School of Economics)

In fact this is precisely the feedback I get from many who have been to Tiree Tech Wave.  It is hard to capture in words the way the open horizon and being at the wild-edge opens up the mind, especially when meeting with others equally committed to exploring new ideas freely and openly.

One of the memorable moments from the week was a debate of internet freedom and regulation.  We started off half on one side half the other and then part way through we all had to swop sides.  I can’t believe how passionate I got about both sides of the argument … and I managed to wheel in my school English teacher as authority on benevolent dictatorship1.

photo Parag Deshpande

photo Rory at Balevullin

People

While two very different events, a common story was the wonderful welcome of the people of Tiree.  During the Ulta-marathon, at every way-station there was a glorious array of tray bakes, chocolates, pre-sliced fruit, and above all smiling faces.  This was great for me seeing faces I knew, but clearly very special for the participants who came from afar being greeted as if they too were friends.  For the Re-thinking Architecturally workshop many people made it a success: the wonderful team at the Hynish Centre, especially Lesley who kept on smiling despite a seven hour wait for participants whose travel was disrupted, everyone at Ceadhar, Ring n Ride, and at the airport re-arranging travel across Europe when the Thursday plane was cancelled.

  1. I wrote what I thought to be a masterful mock O’level essay that asserted that Macbeth was actually a good king taking a ‘he made the trains run on time’ argument — my English teacher, Miss Griffiths, was not impressed.[back]

First version of Tiree Mobile Archive app goes live at Wave Classic

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The first release version of the Tiree Mobile Archive app (see “Tiree Going Mobile“) is seeing real use this coming week at the Tiree Wave Classic. As well as historical information, and parts customised for the wind-surfers, it already embodies some interesting design features including the use of a local map  There’s a lot of work to do before the full launch next March, but it is an important step.

The mini-site for this Wave Classic version has a simulator, so you can see what it is like online, or download to your mobile … although GPS tracking only works when you are on Tiree 😉

Currently it still has only a small proportion of the archive material from An Iodhlann so still to come are some of the issues of volume that will surely emerge as more of the data comes into the app.

Of course those coming for the Wave Classic will be more interested in the sea than local history, so we have deliberately included features relevant to them, Twitter and news feeds from the Wave Classic site and also pertinent tourist info (beaches, campsites and places to eat … and drink!).  This will still be true for the final version of the app when it is released in the sprint — visitors come for a variety of reasons, so we need to offer a broad experience, without overlapping too much with a more tourism focused app that is due to be created for the island in another project.

One crucial feature of the app is the use of local maps.  The booklet for the wave classic (below left) uses the Discover Tiree tourist map, designed by Colin Woodcock and used on the island community website and various island information leaflets.  The online map (below right) uses the same base layer.  The map deliberately uses this rather than the OS or Google maps (although final version will swop to OS for most detailed views) as this wll be familiar as they move between paper leaflets and the interactive map.

   

In “from place to PLACE“, a collection developed as part of Common Ground‘s ‘Parish Maps‘ project in the 1990s, Barbara Bender writes about the way:

“Post-Renaissance maps cover the surface of the world with an homogeneous Cartesian grip”

Local maps have their own logic not driven by satellite imagery, or military cartography1; they emphasise certain features, de-emphasise others, and are driven spatially less by the compass and ruler and more by the way things feel ‘on the ground’.  These issues of space and mapping have been an interest for many years2, so both here and in my walk around Wales next year I will be aiming to ‘reclaim the local map within technological space’.

In fact, the Discover Tiree map, while stylised and deliberately not including roads that are not suitable for tourists, is very close to a ‘standard map’ in shape, albeit at a slightly different angle to OS maps as it is oriented3 to true North whereas OS maps are oriented to ‘Grid North’ (the problems of representing a round earth on flat sheets!).  In the future I’d like us to be able to deal with more interpretative maps, such as the mural map found on the outside of MacLeod’s shop. Or even the map of Cardigan knitted onto a Cardigan knitted as part of the 900 year anniversary of the town.

     

Technically this is put together as an HTML5 site to be cross-platform,, but … well let’s say some tweaks needed4.  Later on we’ll look to wrapping this in PhoneGap or one of the other HTML5-to-native frameworks, but for the time being once you have bookmarked to the home page on iOS looks pretty much like an app – on Android a little less so, but still easy access … and crucially works off-line — Tiree not known for high availability of mobile signal!

  1. The ‘ordnance‘ in ‘Ordnance Survey‘ was originally about things that go bang![back]
  2. For example, see “Welsh Mathematician walks in Cyberspace” and  “Paths and Patches – patterns of geognosy and gnosis”.[back]
  3. A lovely word, originally means to face East as early Mappa Mundi were all arranged with the East at the top.[back]
  4. There’s a story, going cross browser on mobile platform reminds me so much of desktop web design 10 years ago, on the whole iOS Safari behave pretty much like desktop ones, but Android is a law unto itself!.[back]

Death by design

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Wonderful image and set of slides describing some of the reasons multitasking is a myth and how the interfaces we design may be literally killing people (during a mobile outage in Dubai cat accidents dropped by 20%).

Thanks to Ian Sommervile for sharing this on twitter.

“lost in hyperspace” – do we care?

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I have rarely heard the phrase “lost in hyperspace” in the last 10 years, although it used to be a recurrent theme in hypertext and HCI literature.  For some time this has bothered me.  We don’t seem less lost, so maybe we are just more laid back about control, or maybe we are simply relinquishing it?

Recently Lisa Tweedie posted a Pintrest link on Facebook to Angela Morelli‘s dynamic infographic on water.  This is a lovely vertically scrolling page showing how the majority of the water we use is indirectly consumed via the food we eat … especially if you are a meat eater (1 kilo beef = 15,400 litres of water!).  The graphic was great, except it took me ages to actually get to it.  In fact the first time I found a single large graphic produced by Angela as a download, it was only when I returned to it that I found the full dynamic info graphic.

Every time I go to Pintrest I feel like I’ve been dropped into a random part of Hampton Court Maze, so hard to find the actual source … this is why a lot of artists get annoyed at Pintrest!  Now for Pintrest this is probably part of their design philosophy … after all they want people to stay on their site.  What is amazing is that this kind of design is so acceptable to users … Facebook is slightly less random, but still it takes me ages to find pages I’ve liked, each time I start the search through my profile afresh.

In the early days of hypertext everyone used to talk about the “lost in hyperspace” problem … now we are more lost … but don’t care anymore.  In the Mediaeval world you put your trust in your ‘betters’ lords, kings, and priests and assumed they knew best … now we put our trust in Pintrest and Facebook.