Search

This article analyzes algorithm awareness as a process—a series of activities intended to reach a goal over time. It examines how a group of Costa Ricans understood, felt about, and related to TikTok and its algorithms as they began using the app for the first time. Data come from diary entries completed by 43 participants about their use of TikTok over a month and seven focus groups with these diarists. The article discusses five activities through which users expressed developing forms of awareness of TikToks' algorithms and enacted various rhythms in the experience of the app: managing expectations about what TikTok is and how it works; "training" the app; experiencing a sense of algorithmic personalization; dealing with oscillations in the pertinence of recommendations; and showing various forms of rejection of TikTok. The article then considers some implications of bringing time to the fore in the study of algorithm awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If our sociality is intertwined with the logics of social media, then the examination of the temporalities that are immanent in these technologies contributes to the understanding of our very conditions of existence. And even if algorithmic sorting is increasingly employed to deliver what is "relevant" at the "right-time," the notion of "real-time" still permeates these platforms' operations. Through a critical phenomenological approach, I examine the interplay of chronological and algorithmic ordering. To operationalize the idea of temporality as both subjectively experienced and always arranged by the platforms themselves, I use rhythm as an analytical device. Based on accounts of lived experience obtained through the conduction of the diary-interview method with London-based social media users, I foreground how "the algorithm" is used as a vehicle to make sense of platforms' temporalities, reflecting struggles and negotiations over social coordination and temporal control. I argue that realtimeness is also rhythmic, and can therefore be scrutinized as a "sensorial orchestration." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rhythm metrics can detect second language development of target-like speech rhythm but interpretation of the results from metrics in learners' speech is problematic because the mapping of metrics to underpinning phonological features is indirect. We investigate speech rhythm in first language (L1) Arabic / second language (L2) English, which differ in key properties contributing to the percept of rhythm: unstressed vowel reduction and syllable structure. Our production data are interpreted using additional measures, of stressed and unstressed vowels and of consonant cluster realization, alongside standard rhythm metrics; this combination facilitates disambiguation of competing interpretations of the metric results. The findings confirm the importance of using multiple rhythm metrics to study L2 speech rhythm and demonstrate how simple additional measures can guide interpretation of their results. In this study the metrics results showed that the speech produced by the L2 speakers, regardless of their length of residence in the UK, exhibited lower vocalic durational variability than the speech produced by the native Arabic and English speakers. However, closer inspection of the degree of vowel reduction by the native and nonnative groups confirms that no single metric captures the complex nature of the observed L2 rhythm patterns. Future L2 studies are advised not to draw firm conclusions about the degree of vowel reduction and consonant cluster realization in L2 speech based solely on the results of the rhythm metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tested the effects of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words on the pronunciation of these words by 7- to 8-year-old Catalan children. In a short training experiment with a pre- and posttest design, 28 children either repeated cognate words in French (e.g. French aspirateur, Catalan aspirador 'vacuum cleaner') while clapping to the rhythmic structure of those words or only repeated the words. Participants' oral productions before and after training were rated for accentedness by three French native speakers. Results showed that in both groups, participants' pronunciation improved after training, and crucially, children in the clapping group improved significantly more than those in the non-clapping group. Additionally, an acoustic analysis of the duration of word-final vowels indicated that only children in the clapping group significantly lengthened the final vowel after training, thus producing more target-like durational patterns. Our results suggest that a brief embodied intervention based on highlighting the rhythmic structure of words through hand-clapping has the potential to enhance pronunciation in a foreign language. The implications for second language teaching of pronunciation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amount of living space we have access to is one manifestation of the unequal distribution of housing resources within societies. The COVID-19 pandemic has required most households to spend more time at home, unmasking inequalities and reigniting longstanding debates about the functionality and experience of smaller homes. Drawing on interviews across three UK cities, this article attends to the changing household routines of individuals living in different types of small home, exploring daily life before and during 'lockdown'. Using the concept of urban rhythms, the data show that the lockdown has intensified existing pressures of living in a smaller home – lack of space for different functions and household members – whilst constraining coping strategies, like spending time outside the home. Lockdown restrictions governing mobility and contact acted as a mechanism of exception, disrupting habitual patterns of life and sociability, and forcing people to spend more time in smaller homes that struggled to accommodate different functions, affecting home atmospheres. For some, the loss of normal strategies was so significant that they sought to challenge the new rules governing daily life to protect their wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical schools are among the most important spaces for the history of the body. It is here that students come to know the anatomical bodies of their future patients and, through a process of cognitive and embodied practice, that the knowing bodies of future clinicians are also shaped. Practical and theoretical understandings of medicine are formed in these affective and historied buildings and in collaboration with a broad material culture of education. Medical schools are, however, both under-theorised and under-historicised. This article integrates 'materialist' considerations of the body with Henri Lefebvre's philosophy of space and rhythm in order to compare two markedly different spaces – the 19th-century Anatomy Department at Semmelweis University in Hungary and the mid-20th-century 'skills laboratory' at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. This comparison suggests that biomedical bodies are variously shaped by the agential and affective material histories present in the everyday experience of contemporary medical education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Chinese cities, informal street vendors often appear in a transient space intertwined with a large number of pedestrians and heterogeneity, in contrast with the dichotomous construction of static built environment and dynamic street activity examined in most studies on walkability. This paper explores the rhythm of everyday street spaces and the temporary experiences of pedestrians and street vendors in Yuncheng, China. The author argues that street vendors are particularly well suited for capturing city rhythms and can discern the tempo of social life and pedestrians in urban street spaces. Following Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis approach and drawing on 86 semi-structured interviews combined with on-site observation in three street spaces, this paper investigates how rhythms are linked to spatial form, time and the everyday street activity of walking and vending. It expands an analytical framework in both daily rhythms and long-standing rhythms, including arrhythmia, eurhythmia and polyrhythmia. The conclusions provide an alternative way of understanding why pedestrians emerge, through considering how street vendors temporarily meet the everyday needs of different pedestrians in specific, real and detailed ways. Such fine-grained narratives, in turn, demonstrate the need to advance theoretical and empirical understandings of multiple rhythms in relation to walkable space and walking forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]