Search

As part of an on-going project for a London based Archaeological Information System, work on the automatic generation of stratigraphic adjacency matrices has been jointly undertaken by the Department of Urban Archaeology (MOL) and the Department of Photogrammetry and Survey (UCL). Such a program has been developed on an Apple Macintosh using SQL treewalking techniques (under Oracle RDBMS) and a Hypertext interface which handles graphic presentation and manages rule based drawing conventions (using Supercard object-oriented hypertext). The ultimate goal of this research is the creation of an interactive reporting structure which allows access to many levels of recorded and interpretive site information.

This dissertation explores how both past and modern practices respond to the introduction of new technology, such as the uptake, use and transmission of the potter’s wheel in the Late Bronze Age Aegean, and the nature of the adoption and application of new (digital 3D) technology in a distinct visualisation tradition in archaeology. A newly developed methodology that draws from reflexive and praxeological approaches enables to critically analyse current archaeological practice and to assess to what extent it has changed or has adapted to meet digital 3D visualisation standards.

Caught in a prolonged post-revolutionary crisis and bereft of a future to look up to, growing groups of middle-class Egyptians adopt Facebook to mobilize vintage images of what they frame as “al-zaman al-gamīl” or the “good old days”. This dissertation examines these nostalgic online communities that, under the extreme depoliticization of the Egyptian public sphere, decided to fashion themselves as “apolitical” spaces, refraining from defining their nostalgia with any historical periodisation or political regime. Instead, they define their nostalgia as directed towards a bygone moral and social order that once provided Egypt with stability and an authentic identity. I argue that this nostalgic discourse is not only a means of resisting or escaping a harsh political reality and difficult economic conditions. By sharing images of the “good old days” online, users give form to a distinct social imaginary of the ideal citizen and the ideal nation. They also point towards the possibility of a different future by the way of a detour to the past. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how this online nostalgic discourse is co-produced through the interplay of three main constituents: (1) the users with their ideologies, (2) the vintage images of the past that are redefined online, and (3) the platform with its neoliberal logic and complex affordances that shape how users and images interact. I offer an online ethnography exploring the digital lives and imaginaries of the members, and especially the initiators of these Facebook communities.

Current discourses on computational media display a fascination with the linguistic, numeric, algorithmic, and material aspects of technology, from which several new domains of study have emerged in the past several years, including Software Studies, Digital Humanities, and Media Archeology, to name but a few. One can argue that these by now well-established programmatic ventures are symptomatic of a profound transformation taking place within the core epistemological apparatus of the Humanities: the fact that technology, rather than being a mere surrogate for the human body or the human mind, displaces and neutralises the sensible and the thinkable as it confronts age-old ways of sense making. This dissertation addresses this problematic by looking at the various epistemological ruptures and sutures that have transformed how we conceive of sense making from the late 19th century onwards. The dissertation’s main object is computation and its diverse historical moments, conceptual articulations, and artefacts. It directly addresses questions of language (logos) and its sense-effects in relation to mathematics, logic, proof theory, software execution and debugging, as well as works of modern literature. These questions are read and problematised through three types of idioms: onto-logic—asking the question “what is”—, logo-logic—asking the question “according to which rules”—, and finally deonto-logic—asking the question “what ought to be.” In turn, the question of sense is approached through a constructivist logic of action whose aim is to attend to the event and force of execution which necessarily exceeds any of its ensuing results.

A Chance for Change? New Media in the Transforming Museum is an original study into the role of new media in visitor meaning making processes in the museum. This dissertation maps visitor meanings in two museum contexts; the ‘Crossroads’ exhibition at the Allard Pierson in Amsterdam and the Riverside Museum in Glasgow. Using an innovative combination of different quantitative and qualitative methods, visitor meanings are studied from multiple perspectives. Particularly creative is the use of two ethnographically-inspired techniques; the accompanied visit and photography-led exit interviews. From these two methods twelve types of meaning making are distilled which then serve as the main analytical tool in this study. This dissertation aims to question an existing and popular rhetoric which attributes transformative power to new media. Can digital technologies be used to propel the old-fashioned museum into the future? This research concludes that new media, in itself, does not contain any transformative power. When used in a context which still adheres to modernist, traditional, museum values, the digital’s potentially useful affordances are not employed. In such a context, which may be found at the ‘Crossroads’ exhibition, new media is not able to contribute to a transformation. Yet, this study ends on a hopeful note. The Riverside Museum works from a strongly visitor-centred perspective and does not adhere to a technologically determinist rhetoric. Their use of digital technology allows its affordances to contribute to a more visitor-centred environment. In other words, new media may still offer a chance for change.

This thesis examines the forms of instruction designed for communicating interactivity with touch-screen installations that are physically embedded into the museum context of an exhibition space, exploring the design and development of such instruction and its impact on the museum visitor interaction experience. A framework is proposed for defining and discussing various forms of instruction that may be associated with in-gallery interactive installations (classifying instructional forms by their direct or indirect, static or dynamic characteristics), which is applied in the evaluation of two case study installations: The Gibraltar Touch Table, a large touch table within Amsterdam’s het Scheepvaartmuseum, and The Painting Lens, a touch-screen kiosk from the Gallery One exhibition space within the Cleveland Museum of Art. Members of the teams responsible for the development of the two case study installations were interviewed to better understand their approach to designing and implementing instructions associated with the two interactives. The impact of identified instructional forms on the user interaction experience is explored through visitor observation and post-interaction questionnaires. Comparing results from the team member interviews with the evaluation results reflecting actual user experiences reveals the limitations of assumptions made by development teams about user interaction behaviours and preferences for instructional forms. To avoid relying on unproven assumptions, this thesis contends that museums must invest time, money, and personnel into identifying and understanding their target audiences or users to ensure any provided instructions for interaction with in-gallery interactive installations are being communicated effectively.

Less than a decade old, Learning Analytics is a new field in which research and practice are fragmented, new data sources are becoming widely available, whose value to education has yet to be thoroughly researched, and there is much duplication and fragmentation of the fields effort. To provide a safe path for implementing scaled LA services based on novel data sources, I defined a lifecycle with validated stepping stones. The lifecycle is split into three interconnected parts: i) strengthening and monitoring the current infrastructure, ii) understanding the context of new services, and iii) inclusive community practices. I highlighted the need for inclusive practices, and showed that there are many future research directions possible, and argued for an emphasis on community practice with the inclusion of all stakeholders. Through these means, we decrease the risks associated with deploying comprehensive services. The outcomes included an international discussion on curation processes around capturing digital traces and associated software artefacts to support standardisation. An experimental open Synthetic Data Generator that has tested the stability of national experimental LA infrastructure and discovered bugs and performance issues. Validation of a novel data source, 3 million job advertisements for their predictive value in explaining longitudinal gender segregation. The application of job adverts as a source of recommendations within Eportfolios to improve the usability for lifelong learners and their teachers/mentors. The peer review and publication of design patterns that enable the large-scale deployment of LA services that support the lifelong learner. The organisation of many International hackathon events.

Post-doctoral fellowship from the Scoial Sciences and Humanitites Reseach Council of Canada