1,720,984 research outputs found
Participation in urban interaction design for civic engagement
No full textThe future of civic engagement is characterised by both technological innovation as well as new technological user practices that are fuelled by trends towards mobile, personal devices; broadband connectivity; open data; urban interfaces; and cloud computing. These technology trends are progressing at a rapid pace, and have led global technology vendors to package and sell the <i>“Smart City”</i> as a centralised service delivery platform predicted to optimise and enhance cities’ key performance indicators – and generate a profitable market. The top-down deployment of these large and proprietary technology platforms have helped sectors such as energy, transport, and healthcare to increase efficiencies. However, an increasing number of scholars and commentators warn of another <i>“IT bubble”</i> emerging. Along with some city leaders, they argue that the top-down approach does not fit the governance dynamics and values of a liberal democracy when applied across sectors. A thorough understanding is required, of the socio-cultural nuances of how people work, live, play across different environments, and how they employ social media and mobile devices to interact with, engage in, and constitute public realms.\ud
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Although the term <i>“slacktivism”</i> is sometimes used to denote a watered down version of civic engagement and activism that is reduced to clicking a “Like” button and signing online petitions, we believe that we are far from witnessing another Biedermeier period that saw people focus on the domestic and the non-political. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, such as post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, the Occupy movements in New York, Hong Kong and elsewhere, the Arab Spring, Stuttgart 21, Fukushima, the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul, and the Vinegar Movement in Brazil in 2013. These examples of civic action shape the dynamics of governments, and in turn, call for new processes to be incorporated into governance structures. Participatory research into these new processes across the triad of people, place and technology is a significant and timely investment to foster productive, sustainable, and liveable human habitats. With this article, we want to reframe the current debates in academia and priorities in industry and government to allow citizens and civic actors to take their rightful centrepiece place in civic movements. This calls for new participatory approaches for co-inquiry and co-design. It is an evolving process with an explicit agenda to facilitate change, and we propose <i>participatory action research (PAR)</i> as an indispensable component in the journey to develop new governance infrastructures and practices for civic engagement.\ud
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We do not limit our definition of civic technologies to tools specifically designed to simply enhance government and governance, such as renewing your car registration online or casting your vote electronically on election day. Rather, we are interested in civic media and technologies that foster citizen engagement in the widest sense, and particularly the participatory design of such civic technologies that strive to involve citizens in political debate and action as well as question conventional approaches to political issues. \ud
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The rationale for this approach is an alternative to smart cities in a <i>“perpetual tomorrow,”</i> based on many weak and strong signals of civic actions revolving around technology seen today. It seeks to emphasise and direct attention to active citizenry over passive consumerism, human actors over human factors, culture over infrastructure, and prosperity over efficiency.\ud
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First, we will have a look at some fundamental issues arising from applying simplistic smart city visions to the kind of a problem a city poses. We focus on the touch points between “the city” and its civic body, the citizens. In order to provide for meaningful civic engagement, the city must provide appropriate interfaces
Practicing, Materializing and Contesting Environmental Data
No full textThis special theme investigates the proliferation of environmental data content and practices. Big Data analyses often focus on data sources culled from online activities such as social media use, yet environmental data is now being generated from a range of sources, from citizen sensing to environmental agency monitoring, and from arboretum archives to air quality modelling, as well as social media postings. The special theme attends to the multiple practices, materialisations and contestations that emerge in relation to environmental data, and asks how these specific modes of data—as environmental—challenge or rework approaches to Big Data
Reclamar el aire
No full textEl aire que nos rodea está tan contaminado que afecta a nuestros cuerpos, produciendo la muerte incipiente de humanos, animales
y plantas, en una proporción que se agrava cada año. Por ello, es urgente que empecemos a tratarlo como lo que es, como un bien común que necesitamos para respirar. Y también necesitamos reclamarlo para recuperar el espacio público, ya que no es de recibo admitir que la única forma de sobrevivir en un entorno con mala calidad del aire sea refugiarnos dentro de casa.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Colored Data Clouds Ubiquitous Ambient Technologies as Public Urban Infrastructures
No full textWith the project In the Air,1 Spanish architect Nerea Calvillo wants to make the citizens of Madrid more aware of the city’s official monitoring systems for measuring air pollution and get them involved. Through the development of interfaces, collective action can be initiated that is aimed at exchanging experiences and raising community consciousness
Inviting atmospheres to the architecture table
Get PDFIn order to test this shift to the processual as well as architectural practice’s ability to design socialities, in this chapter I propose to think and work with a dynamic and seemingly intangible material: air. Although ignored throughout architectural history (Banham,1969) during the 1960’s and 1970’s there was a proliferation of inflatable structures that used air to explore the lightness, ephemerality, transparency and transportability of new plastics to propose new ways of living closer to the everyday, popular culture and political resistance (Dessauce, 1999; Topham, 2002). The project I discuss here, although sharing certain aesthetic qualities, was conceived differently. On the one hand, the Polivagina was not conceived as addressing air through its structural capacity, but on how its invisibility and dynamism destabilise architectural practice, requiring a transformation of methods, techniques, materials and social organizations. On the other hand, it acknowledges that the social is not the result of the inhabitation of inflatable structures; the air is already social. German philosoper and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk in his work on social foams (2005) proposes that sociality is not only about human exchanges of information (Wakeford, 2011), but is a foam that includes humans, structures, and the air and climate that brings them together. Then, taking the air into account in architecture shifts the attention beyond boundaries, such as walls and roofs, to what is in between them, working with humidity, pressure, smell, toxicity, and breath
Slowing
No full textThe production of environmental visualisations is a form of knowledge making and transmission. Through a retrospective account of my participation in a collaborative visualisation production workshop I argue that making visualisations with non-experts slows down data visualisation and in general a research process. And yet, slowing down enables the co-articulation of environmental research with other realms and redistributes the spaces where environmental research can be done, who can contribute to environmental research or the role of expertise in collaborative production. Visualisations can be prototypes for making kin with ourselves and more than humans, as prototypes of other forms of governance
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