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Virtual models have the potential to transform architectural design processes by introducing a novel form of participation of project stakeholders. With the concepts of material participation and digital materiality, this research shows how virtual models in meetings called ‘virtual safaris’ set up a space for participation by providing a tangible architectural demonstration. In virtual safaris, virtual models allow participants to imagine and co-design their experience in the future space instead of trying to interpret architectural plans, resulting in more detailed and concrete feedback. Based on observed virtual safaris and interviews, we categorised the participatory aspects of virtual models and safaris into technical features of the virtual models, experiential features of virtual safaris, and organising and arranging virtual safaris. We consider these categories as intertwined, specifying aspects of material participation. They highlight both the complexities of actual usage of virtual reality in co-design and the additional value of virtual safaris as a participatory setting. We conclude that ways of organising and arranging virtual safaris are central for achieving the transformation potential of virtual reality. We also highlight crucial aspects of meetings utilising virtual reality for practitioners and researchers in construction projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the contributions presented in the special issue "God's Influencers: How Social Media Users Shape Religion and Pious Self-Fashioning", this introduction explores resonances and dissonances between the six articles: First, I reconsider the online/offline connection in relation to the religious actors examined. Then, I articulate a post techno-utopian vision of religion online, identifying digital media as a social space where inequalities, prejudices and power structures offline can be both reinforced and challenged. Third, I shed light on the subjective turn in the way online religious actors understand and impart "authenticity", a heatedly debated concept in the context of both religion and social media. Fourth, I present some of the communicative strategies that the religious social media users examined in this special issue employ. And, finally, I conclude by sketching future research directions in the study of how social media users shape religion and pious self-fashioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology companies and their platforms are important digital intermediaries for news publishers. Platforms as technological infrastructures have digital materiality and how publishers organise their innovations have become entangled with the digital materiality of platforms. This six-year longitudinal study (2015–2021) examines this entanglement by analysing how and why a news publisher innovated its practices vis-à-vis the changing digital materiality of Facebook and Instagram. Employing practice theory and the platform configuration framework, this study assesses the publisher's configuration of its editorial activities in relation to shifts in the digital materiality of Meta's platforms and the reflexivity of newsroom staff. Using a mix of qualitative methods, this study finds that the publisher both embraced and resisted the platforms' algorithmic changes. While it enhanced video production and distribution to align with the platforms' preference for audio-visual content, the publisher also developed new practices to counterbalance its reliance on Facebook for news distribution and digital advertising revenue, especially after Meta's downranking of publishers' content on News Feeds and the introduction of restrictions for Instant Articles. This study concludes that while publishers are circumscribed by the changes in the platforms' digital materiality, they strategically innovate specific practices to both leverage platforms and reclaim or maintain independence from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the prevalence of bias in artificial intelligence text-to-image models utilized in the architecture and design disciplines. The rapid pace of advancements in machine learning technologies, particularly in text-to-image generators, has significantly increased over the past year, making these tools more accessible to the design community. Accordingly, this paper aims to critically document and analyze the collective, computational, and cognitive biases that designers may encounter when working with these tools at this time. The paper delves into three hierarchical levels of operation and investigates the possible biases present at each level. Starting with the training data for large language models (LLM), the paper explores how these models may create biases privileging English-language users and perspectives. The paper subsequently investigates the digital materiality of models and how their weights generate specific aesthetic results. Finally, the report concludes by examining user biases through their prompt and image selections and the potential for platforms to perpetuate these biases through the application of user data during training. Graphical Abstract [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the formidable challenges that the advent of big data brings to the digital humanities broadly and proposes some ways the Korean studies community can prepare to navigate these uncharted waters. Standard digital humanities training in data mining, text analysis, mapping, network science, and machine learning will be developed and refined over the coming years, as will research concerning the ephemeral nature of new media, web archives, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. Yet I contend that established responses to the digital transformation of the humanities, while timely and necessary, will prove inadequate for handling petabyte- and exabyte-scale born-digital sources. In the Zettabyte Era, more data is processed in real time than all of the records produced from early times to the 2010s. To make sense of the current information regime, we need critical reflections and comparisons to the classical internet age of the 1990s, the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, and early modern print cultures. This exercise will allow us to situate the humanities in an age of big data as an extension of traditional humanities research and at the same as something foreign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the notion of shared guardianship in the context of digital museum objects and blockchain technology, arguing that this technology can contribute to the production of value in digital museum objects that goes beyond the monetary. Shared guardianship is understood to be a process of prioritizing the experience of others and forming a diverse set of stakeholders that transforms understandings around ownership; meanwhile, a blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology which can be used to identify digital files and so make them feel ownable and authentic. As such, this paper argues that blockchain technology could create a new layer of materiality and value in digital museum objects which could support the formation of shared guardianship. This question will be analysed in relation to the theoretical underpinnings of digital materiality and a case study project at the National Museums Liverpool, UK, which investigated how to implement blockchain technology in the museum context in order to produce collective ownership and meaningful, connected digital objects.

The editorial provides a broad contextualization of recent and developing theoretical and empirical examinations of digital materiality in museums. This Special Issue includes seven papers, which cover a range of theorizations, issues and challenges that arise in the intersection of digital and materiality in museum and heritage contexts.

High-fidelity imaging methods such as laser scanning and digital photogrammetry have captured public and professional audiences in a flurry of optimistic discourse about their capacities as forms of preservation and of archaeological recording and interpretation. With technical finesse and mastery, endangered heritage can, it is argued, be captured, re-materialized, and recovered from the forces that threaten it. As the plot concerning our ‘digital futures’ thickens, we discuss here an experimental project that offers an oblique approach to the practice of 3D visualization, one that subverts the dominance of neutral, technical field engagements. We examine digital materiality by exploring digital heritage objects as both method and site of ethnographic encounter. Orbiting the ruins of Asinou, an abandoned village in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, with our ‘low-tech’ equipment, we sought to observe the conditions of the ‘in-between’ of two makeshift forms, each as ‘real’ as the other. We focus our thinking on the tensions of translation that play on the surface of our technically crude digital assemblages, as spaces of generative potential for speculations about encounters with emerging digital materialities, their affective capacities and status as future heritage objects.

While the use of digital media and technologies has impacted social work for several years, the Covid-19 pandemic and need for physical distancing dramatically accelerated the systematic use of video calls and other digital practices to interact with service users. This article draws from our research into child protection to show how digital social work was used during the pandemic, critically analyse the policy responses, and make new concepts drawn from digital and design anthropology available to the profession to help it make sense of these developments. While policy responses downgraded digital practices to at best a last resort, we argue that the digital is now an inevitable and necessary element of social work practice, which must be understood as a hybrid practice that integrates digital practices such as video calls and face-to-face interactions. Moving forward, hybrid digital social work should be a future-ready element of practice, designed to accommodate uncertainties as they arise and sensitive to the improvisatory practice of social workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction to the concept of ‘digital materiality’ goes beyond the custom of considering matters’ physical characteristics as the opposite of virtual, binary and digital ones. Bonsiepe, in 1995, had already integrated the material characteristics of objects and the semiotic value of the interface, acknowledging its ability to become a ‘non-verbal language’, ‘spatial system’ establishing new relationships between the human body and technology. Therefore, surfaces have the key role of ‘membranes’, creating and receiving stimuli from inside and outside, and from subject and object. From this framework, it emerges the need to experiment alternative solutions meeting circularity/sustainability and experience/enjoyment needs, for example, through material interfaces or experiments on new biofabricated materials, such as microbial nanocellulose.

This article explores digital material/ism by examining student teachers' experiences, processes and products with fully immersive virtual reality (VR) as part of visual art education. The students created and painted a virtual world, given the name Gretan puutarha ('Greta's Garden'), using the Google application Tilt Brush. They also applied photogrammetry techniques to scan 3D objects from the real world in order to create 3D models for their VR world. Additionally, they imported 2D photographs and drawings along with applied animated effects to construct their VR world digitally, thereby remixing elements from real life and fantasy. The students were asked open-ended questions to find out how they created art virtually and the results were analysed using Burdea's VR concepts of immersion, interaction and imagination. Digital material was created intersubjectively and intermedially while it was also remixed with real and imaginary. Various webs of meanings were created, both intertextual and rhizomatic in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Agathon: International Journal of Architecture, Art & Design is the property of DEMETRA CE.RI.MED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, we examine how the digital material value of emerging technologies is articulated in technology design contexts. We argue that here digital material value lies not in the monetisation of an artefact or product but in the opening up of possibilities for its use. Thus, to generate digital material value, a certain configuration of things and processes that enables its value to be relevant is required. We develop this through a processual theory of digital materiality, which attends to how the affordances of digital material things emerge in shifting circumstances, and a corresponding theory of value. To demonstrate how this happens in human experience and action, we draw on ethnographic research with drone developers in Australia. Studying digital materiality through emerging technologies goes beyond seeing technologies and data as finished commodities that are modified when consumed towards studying the incompleteness of the technology design process itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the notion of shared guardianship in the context of digital museum objects and blockchain technology and it argues that the technology can contribute to the production of value in digital museum objects that goes beyond the monetary. Shared guardianship is understood to be a process of prioritising the experience of others and forming a diverse set of stakeholders that transforms understandings around ownership, meanwhile, a blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology which can be used to identify digital files and so create digital files that feel ownable and authentic. As such, this paper argues that blockchain technology could create a new layer of materiality and value in digital museum objects which could support the formation of shared guardianship. This question will be analysed in relation to the theoretical underpinnings of digital materiality and a case study project at the National Museums Liverpool in Liverpool, UK, which investigated how to implement blockchain technology in the museum context in order to produce collective ownership and meaningful, connected digital objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-fidelity imaging methods such as laser scanning and digital photogrammetry have captured public and professional audiences in a flurry of optimistic discourse about their capacities as forms of preservation and of archaeological recording and interpretation. With technical finesse and mastery, endangered heritage can, it is argued, be captured, re-materialized, and recovered from the forces that threaten it. As the plot concerning our 'digital futures' thickens, we discuss here an experimental project that offers an oblique approach to the practice of 3D visualization, one that subverts the dominance of neutral, technical field engagements. We examine digital materiality by exploring digital heritage objects as both method and site of ethnographic encounter. Orbiting the ruins of Asinou, an abandoned village in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, with our 'low-tech' equipment, we sought to observe the conditions of the 'in-between' of two makeshift forms, each as 'real' as the other. We focus our thinking on the tensions of translation that play on the surface of our technically crude digital assemblages, as spaces of generative potential for speculations about encounters with emerging digital materialities, their affective capacities and status as future heritage objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the interdependency between digital matter and the representational or mimetic layer of the digital game object. The main aim is to foreground the mechanisms by which the representational elements of the game world emerge from the materiality of the process of play. These mechanisms are examined from the perspective of the ontology of the game object. The issue of digital materiality will be linked with the aesthetical explorations of Tadeusz Kantor, who emphasised the relation between the materiality of the theatre and its fictional elements. As the main example of this analysis, I will focus on Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015) as an example of a game that plays with the boundaries between the fictional world being presented and the elements of digital materiality that are usually hidden from the player's sight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2011 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association adjudicated the State of California's right to regulate the sale of "violent" video games and, in the process, effectively considered how video games should be apprehended as a cultural form under the law. The court's decision cited the mis-steps of judicial film censorship in protecting video games as a form of expression under the First Amendment, placing video games into a cultural time line of expressive forms. Some media scholars contest the court's approach for overvaluing the cultural aspects of video games and neglecting their distinct digital materiality. However, a close reading of the case and the circumstances that led the justices' opinions helps articulate a crucial critique of overly materialist approaches to video games associated with media archaeology. The case details reflect the inextricability of materiality and experience in considering video games as a form of expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We will study how, in his Spanish graphic novel Mensajes, published in 2009, the author Mariano Casas questions the materiality of contemporary creation, and its articulation with the digital environment. We will see how references to the operation of satellite geolocation software, computer drawing tools or printing techniques, put in tension with effects of mise en abyme, multiplication of screens, ink and color, induce a paradoxical representation of the materiality of creation, both based on and challenging the digital.

Copyright of Informacao & Sociedade: Estudos is the property of Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, Centro de Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Large sources of digital trace data (i.e. "Big Data") have become increasingly important in the study of material culture. However, akin to the offline material culture traditionally studied by archaeologists, digital trace data is rarely a passive reflection of human behavior – it is a complex palimpsest produced through a variety of erasure and accretion formation processes. To better understand how digital trace palimpsests are formed and how digital formation processes influence and inform our ability to interpret the offline material processes they index, we introduce a computational method – high-frequency archaeological survey – which allows us to observe digital formation processes at a high temporal resolution, as well as a large spatial scale. Using this method every hour for one month, we surveyed posts from across the United States in Craigslist's "Free Stuff" category (popularly called "Curb Alert"), a user-generated source of big digital trace data, indexing material things that have been placed on users' curbs for removal by scavengers or trash collectors. For each post, we observed its time-to-erasure and any edits that were made during the study period – finding that the posts that survive represent a biased sample of those that were posted over the course of the month, conditioned by how recently and on what day the post is posted, the material characteristics of things that are posted about, as well as regional variation. Far from only being evidence of biased end-of-month data, however, we show that further analysis of identified digital formation processes can be an important object of study in its own right – in this case, shedding new light on social scientific questions linking the exchange of "free stuff" with the process of social stratification and urban inequality in the United States. Overall, our findings suggest the importance of accounting for and explicitly analyzing digital formation processes in studies that utilize digital trace data. • Big Data sources enable large scale archaeological analysis of the material world. • Rapid digital formation processes produce palimpsests of additions, edits, erasures. • These processes can be rigorously studied with high-frequency computational methods. • Craigslist Free Stuff formation processes reveal unexpected use across social strata. • Biased end-of-month palimpsest: 74% of items erased, 50% of erasures within 18 h. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to the discourses that argue that digital culture leads images to dematerialisation, this article approaches the materiality of images, paying attention to the difference between things and objects, and to the concepts of presence and mobility. The materiality of contemporary images lies in how images and imaginaries assume imperatives characteristic of today's capitalism such as participation, connectivity, and performativity. New visual forms such as GIFs, cinemagraphs, and the Live-Photos function of the iPhone embrace those demands. The article distinguishes between an internal and external mobility of images in order to understand how contemporary visual culture generates new material, spatial, and temporal experiences that make it difficult to even maintain the distinction between still and moving images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of low-cost and do-it-yourself (DIY) digital sensors for monitoring air quality are now in circulation. DIY technologies attempt to democratize environmental practices such as air quality sensing that might ordinarily be the domain of expert scientists. But in the process of setting up and using DIY sensors, citizens encounter just as many challenges for ensuring the accuracy of their devices and the validity of their data. In this article, we look specifically at the infrastructures and practices of DIY digital sensing. Through an analysis of urban sensing in London as an environmental media practice, we consider the specific techniques and challenges of calibrating DIY digital sensors for measuring air pollution to ensure the relative accuracy and validity of data. We ask, “How are DIY calibration practices expressive of particular political subjects and environmental relations—and not others?” “How might we re-calibrate DIY as a digital practice and political commitment through engagements with multiple genealogies and counter-genealogies of citizen-led inquiry?” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If digital objects are abundant and ubiquitous, why should consumers pay for, much less collect them? The qualities of digital code present numerous challenges for collecting, yet digital collecting can and does occur. We explore the role of companies in constructing digital consumption objects that encourage and support collecting behaviours, identifying material configuration techniques that materialize these objects as elusive and authentic. Such techniques, we argue, may facilitate those pleasures of collecting otherwise absent in the digital realm. We extend theories of collecting by highlighting the role of objects and the companies that construct them in materializing digital collecting. More broadly, we extend theories of digital materiality by highlighting processes of digital material configuration that occur in the pre-objectification phase of materialization, acknowledging the role of marketing and design in shaping the qualities exhibited by digital consumption objects and, consequently, related consumption behaviours and experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is still the case that in many discussions about digital literature, the digital textwork is thought of as some sort of immaterial, disembodied, dematerialised object. In this paper, the author seeks to counter that view strongly by presenting a series of digital textworks which exemplify the performativity of form. They display the multiple ways in which the body (and by extension, subjectivity) is a necessary and vital element in the composition, distribution, reception and realisation of digital text. The question which arises from this is not so much is there a body present, but what are the myriad, embodied functions — technical and creative — which operate within the digital environment?

This article explores the material and digital culture of warfarin, one of the most commonly prescribed medications in the world. The author uses the drug’s 60-year history to describe its materiality and use, showing how and why it has become an informed material. Three ethnographic cases then show where warfarin has produced and is now reproduced by three types of information: NHS Trust guidelines, genetic codes and the INR (International Normalized Ratio). When a drug becomes so entangled with informational and digital technologies, it becomes reliant on them for its proper and safe use; it can no longer be just an informed material but is a digitally informed one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Angles: French Perspectives on the Anglophone World is the property of Societe des Anglicistes de l Enseignement Superieur and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Industrial film and television production (FTP) includes many elements of creative work on sounds and images that are best addressed as audiovisual design. Two paradigmatic understandings of design, "design-as-problem-solving" and "design-as-meaning-creation", have a bearing on these elements. The issues dealt with during FTP work processes, as well as the problems to be solved and the characteristics of the work processes used, resemble issues, problems, and process characteristics within design work. From the perspective of audiovisual communication, both the design and production aspects of a process are considered to make an important impact on a message. In FTP, these aspects are blurred. This paper discusses the benefits of approaching FTP as creation of audiovisual communication, in which design is an integrated part of that process. The benefits of considering FTP as audiovisual design are proposed from a design research perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]