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We use data science methods to examine Colonial Spanish records to analyze the extent of the presence of Afro-descendants in early California. This has been difficult to examine because most Californians of African descent elided their origins in sacramental church records referring to themselves as "gente de razón" or people of reason.

This paper presents systems to extract measures for legislators' engagement and absence during committee meetings and the stance and affiliation of non-lawmakers making public comments. We propose a system to track the affiliation of organizations in public comments and whether the organizational representative supports or opposes the bill.

Despite some recent advances, automatic text summarization remains unreliable, elusive, and of limited practical use in applications. Two main problems with current summarization methods are well known: evaluation and factual consistency. To address these issues, we propose a new automatic reference-less text summarization evaluation system that can measure the quality of any text summarization model with a set of generated facts based on factual consistency, comprehensiveness, and compression rate. As far as we know, our evaluation system is the first system that measures the overarching quality of the text summarization models based on factuality, information coverage, and compression rate.

In US State government legislatures, most of the activity occurs in committees made up of lawmakers discussing bills. When analyzing, classifying or summarizing these committee proceedings, some important features become broadly interesting. In this paper, we engineer four useful features, two applying to lawmakers (engagement and absence), and two to non-lawmakers (stance and affiliation). We propose a system to automatically track the affiliation of organizations in public comments and whether the organizational representative supports or opposes the bill. The model tracking affiliation achieves an F1 of 0.872 while the support determination has an F1 of 0.979. Additionally, a metric to compute legislator engagement and absenteeism is also proposed and as proof-of-concept, a list of the most and least engaged legislators over one full California legislative session is presented., 6 pages, 1 figure, 5 equations, 7 tables

As interactive narratives, by definition, change according to the user's choices (dynamic story), so do the dialogue utterances by the characters. Writing all possible utterances manually faces scaling problems. This motivates the use of natural language generation techniques. We present ExpReal, a surface realizer and templating language that allows authors of interactive narratives to write flexible and enriched templates while maintaining control over their use. Templates are automatically selected based on author-specified conditions relating to the world state (e.g. characters' emotions) or the current task at hand. ExpReal has been developed to support at least three languages (English, French and Dutch).

In this paper, we study the effect of time pressure on player behaviour during a dilemma-based crisis management game. We employ in-game action tracking, physiological sensor data and self-reporting in order to create multi-modal predictive models of player stress responses during a crisis management scenario. We were able to predict the experimental condition (time pressure vs. no time pressure) with 84.5% accuracy, using a game-only feature set. However, lower accuracy was observed when physiological sensor data was used for the same task. The method presented in this paper can be employed in crisis management training, aiming at assessing players' responses to stressful conditions and manipulating player stress levels to provide personalised training scenarios.

Performance of newly-formed project teams is often limited, or at least delayed, when team members refrain from sharing their ideas due to unfamiliarity with their peers. A variety of ice-breaking methods can help overcome this cold start, but mostly they need to be deployed and moderated by experienced facilitators. This setup is rarely an option for most undergrad project courses at university level, typically carried out in small teams. In order to help breaking the ice in this context, we developed Maze Maestro, a collaborative tabletop game in which the board is made up by attaching the displays of the team members' mobile phones to form a large maze. Each member controls a character in the maze, and the whole team has the common goal of leaving the maze together; however, this is only possible with timely communication and much cooperation. While playing, team members are encouraged to confer possible plans and share their ideas, which is the fertile ground for breaking the ice. Play testing has shown that Maze Maestro was perceived as a fun and original collaborative game. So far, results of a preliminary user study are optimistic about the ability of Maze Maestro to break the ice within newly-formed teams, without requiring any facilitator.

Descriptive metadata and full-text transcripts have long been valued for their roles in powering search engines and faceted browsing. But as the morganpapers.org web application demonstrates, such textual data (both structured and unstructured) can be leveraged to build a variety of tools which provide deeper and broader insight than simple searching and browsing. The Robert E. Kennedy Library at Cal Poly recently completed digitization of a unique body of correspondence between architect Julia Morgan and William Randolph Hearst, carried out during the construction of what is now known as Hearst Castle. The structure is a masterpiece and the crown jewel of Morgan’s illustrious career throughout California, where she worked as the state’s first female licensed architect. The collection consists of over 2,500 letters, telegrams, notes, and other documents (totalling over 3,200 pages), spanning the years 1919-1941. The pieces were written in several places across the United States and overseas. As each piece of correspondence was digitized, it was ingested in the library's archival repository along with its MODS-based metadata, and full-text transcripts (for both typescripts and manuscripts).

Detective stories in games have long been a heavily used inspiration source and setting for games, and it is indeed a fitting genre at first glance with its clearly defined set of expectations, rules, and type of storytelling relying on uncovering the past. It is curious then, that until recently, most detective games have followed a more traditional adventure game structure, with little emphasis on actual investigation in the player’s actions, but where the player more acts as a proxy for the plot to follow its course. However, in recent years, a number of games have shown a tendency to shift this balance, and push the bulk of the detective work onto the players themselves, to leave them with an inscrutable mystery to slowly uncover over the course of the game, to decipher the story of the crime in their mind. This paper will investigate a few of these games as well as compare with literature on traditional detective stories to understand how detective games have typically been a different type of detective story all together, which is crucial to understanding how we can make the player the detective instead of an observer of a detective.

Boardgames exist that explicitly address Computational Thinking (CT for short) concepts and practices. Some are actual games, while others are more akin to gamified learning activities. And since CT has been formalized only recently, many existing boardgames unknowingly might support aspects of CT. To help educators and game practitioners navigate this complex landscape, we analyze a selected sample of analog games, and propose to categorize their features with respect to CT concepts and practices. The main contribution of this paper is a novel way to identify potential CT-relevant games, that leverages on the authors' experience with digital and analog games, playful and game-based learning. Although limited, this approach appears promising and practical for CT teachers and game designers interested in adapting existing games to the classroom or developing better CT-supporting boardgames.

With the advent of the retro-gaming movement there is an increasing interest in rediscovering games once played. Tip of my Joystick' is a Reddit community dedicated to the re-finding of forgotten games. In this subreddit, users describe games they wish to re-find so that other users may help them identify the game's title. This community thus offers a unique opportunity for studying how players recall and describe games and play experiences of the past. This paper presents the results of an analysis of a random sample of 250 posts from this subreddit. The posts were analyzed in terms of what aspects of games they describe For the purpose of this analysis we developed a coding scheme consisting of 38 individual codes belonging to 9 different main categories. Our findings may contribute to research on game archiving and collection as they may help inform the design of better game search engines.

Behavioral profiling of players in digital games is a key challenge in game analytics, representing a particular challenge in Open-World Games. These games are characterized by large virtual worlds and few restrictions on player affordances. In these games, incorporating the spatial and temporal dimensions of player behavior is necessary when profiling behavior, as these dimensions are important to the playing experience. We present analyses that apply cluster analysis and the DEDICOM decompositional model to profile the behavior of more than 5,000 players of the major commercial title Just Cause 2 integrating both spatio-temporal trails and behavioral metrics. The application of DEDICOM to profile the spatio-temporal behavior of players is demonstrated for the purpose of analysing the entire play history of Just Cause 2 players, but also for the more detailed analysis of a single mission. This showcases the applicability of spatio-temporal profiling to condense player behavior across large sample sizes, across different scales of investigation. The method presented here provides a means to build profiles of player activity in game environments with high degrees of freedom across different scales of analysis - from a small segment to the entire game.

This paper identifies 7 key social features which appear in the marketing and promotional material of hybrid board games. The features are identified by exploring sources such as game websites and game boxes of 13 hybrid board game products. The material is analyzed in order to determine how social features related to hybrid game features are presented. As a result of the analysis, it became apparent that there are certain key social features which are presented as being important to players. The knowledge generated in this work acts as a view to how the industry sees hybridity in games as a tool for supporting social interaction, and how the industry wants to message it to consumers when they explore promotional material. The identified key social features can also be used as design knowledge for developing new games, as they give insight into popular social features in hybrid board games. acceptedVersion

Climate change poses a real and present threat to cultural heritage. Responses to climate change have focussed on strategies for prevention and physical protection. Developments in technology have made possible a new type of virtual museum that actively supports the work of museums and enables the creation of immersive digital exhibits. This paper proposes that it is important to address the role that community museums play in the digital preservation of natural and cultural heritage. It focusses on the contribution of virtual museums and proposes a distributed virtual museum architecture to support digital preservation.The architecture addresses both the need for high quality local interactions that enables preservation and the need for a global infrastructure that makes the results accessible and enables the development of links between communities. Publisher PDF

This paper describes the concept of the virtual field trip and presents a taxonomy of virtual field trip approaches. Building on the Virtual Skiddaw project between Daden Limited and The Open University, UK, the Innovate UK-funded 'Virtual Field trips as a Service project' is described. The resulting Fieldscapes system is then presented, along with how it addresses the technical, pedagogical and commercial challenges of creating a virtual field trip system. This is followed by an initial evaluation of the system, and areas for future development and research are identified.

Physical heritage objects and assets are related to a vast amount of digital information of different kinds, which are challenging to be communicated to visitors in understandable and engaging ways. Yet recent technological advances promise new opportunities to more tightly merge the digital with the physical world. This paper therefore introduces the concept of “phygital heritage”, the integration of digital technology ‘into’ physical reality, as a potential medium for more enriched and playful communication of heritage values and qualities. We propose that phygital heritage should enable the exploitation of typical advantages of both digital and physical reality, and that distinct categories of phygital can be recognized based on: 1) the level of physical affordance; and 2) in how far the technology is integrated into the physical reality. The paper also opens the discussion about the potential challenges and concerns which future explorations, scientific research and real-world applications of phygital heritage probably will encounter. ispartof: pages:220-229 ispartof: Immersive Learning Research Network Conference pages:220-229 ispartof: iLRN 2017 location:Coimbra, Portugal date:26 Jun - 29 Jun 2017 status: published

This work discusses the methodology for the design, development and deployment of a virtual 19th-century Fish Curing Yard as an immersive museum installation. The museum building now occupies the same space where the curing yard was over 100 years prior, hence the deployment of a virtual reconstruction of the curing yard in a game engine enables the museum visitors to explore the virtual world from equivalent vantage points in the real world. The project methodology achieves the goal of maximising user experience for visitors while minimising cost for the museum, and focus group evaluations of the system revealed the success of the interaction-free design with snackable content. A major implication of the ndings is that museums can provide compelling and informative experiences that enable visitors to travel back in time with minimal interaction and relatively low cost systems. Postprint

Augmented Reality and Wearables are the recent media and computing technologies, similar, but different from established technologies, even mobile computing and virtual reality. Numerous proposals for measuring technology acceptance exist, but have not been applied, nor fine-tuned to such new technology so far. Within this contribution, we enhance these existing instruments with the special needs required for measuring technology acceptance of Augmented Reality and Wearable Technologies and we validate the new instrument with participants from three pilot areas in industry, namely aviation, medicine, and space. Findings of such baseline indicate that respondents in these pilot areas generally enjoy and look forward to using these technologies, for being intuitive and easy to learn to use. The respondents currently do not receive much support, but like working with them without feeling addicted. The technologies are still seen as forerunner tools, with some fear of problems of integration with existing systems or vendor-lock. Privacy and security aspects surprisingly seem not to matter, possibly overshadowed by expected productivity increase, increase in precision, and better feedback on task completion. More participants have experience with AR than not, but only few on a regular basis.