with what you have, wherever you are.
See initial sketch from last year. Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC) |
"The person figured here is not an autonomous, rational actor but an unfolding, shifting biography of culturally and materially specific experiences, relations, and possibilities inflected by each next encounter (...) in uniquely particular ways." (Lucy Suchman, Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions, 2009, 281)
See initial sketch from last year. Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC) |
"(...) interdependent systems of 'immobile' material worlds, and especially exceptionally immobile platforms (transmitters, roads, garages, stations, aerials, airports, docks) structure mobility experiences. The complex character of such systems stems from their multiple fixities or moorings, often on a substantial physical scale. Thus 'mobile machines', such as mobile phones, cars, boats, aircraft, trains and computer connections, all presume overlapping and varied time-space immobilities. There is no linear increase in fluidity without extensive systems of immobility."Anthony Elliott & John Urry (2010). Mobile Lives. Routledge, p. 20.
October 16, 2009 Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC) |
"Technology is messy and complex. It is difficult to define and to understand. In its variety, it is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." Hughes, T. P. (2004). Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture. University Of Chicago Press.
Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC), November 17, 2009 |
onsite interactive map shows energy wasted in different sectors |
"By clicking through the chart, you can see exactly how much energy is used for every activity. (...) Almost 1% is used just to pump natural gas around pipelines; 2% goes to making cardboard and other paper products. Around 16% is used to grow, distribute, and cook food. Looking at the total picture helps make the point that some of the ways that we think about energy aren't quite right. Refining petroleum uses about 6% of total energy in the country, but isn't considered when we think about fuel economy in cars. (...) Mining oil and gas uses even more energy." (in link)
"These days, beyond spectacular weather events or spectacular failures like blackouts, electricity hides in plain sight, whether stored in batteries or flowing in the electrical wires that festoon our social landscapes. We conveniently ignore whole electroscapes until something goes awry."
"Technology non-use offers a fascinating sociotechnical phenomenon worthy of study per se. However, it also provides an opportunity to rethink how we approach, study, and conceptualize human relationships with, and through, technology."
"The findings show (i) the extensive information fragmentation in each individual PIM tool besides cross-tool fragmentation, (ii) the information overload preventing focusing on the subset of fragmented project related information and changing focus over time, and (iii) the importance of support information (information scraps) and its integration into project flow." [pdf]
«Ainda é possível vender mais papel na era do digital»: «Não deixa de ser curioso que uma empresa que vende papel esteja a crescer em paralelo com o avanço da digitalização. Ou seja, a Portucel está a vender mais folhas de papel mesmo com a desmaterialização de ficheiros e documentos. “No ano passado até na Europa conseguimos crescer”, nota Diogo da Silveira, “mas é óbvio para nós a grande importância que tem (e vai continuar a ter) o mercado asiático, com especial destaque para a China”» in http://expresso.sapo.pt/economia/2015-07-19-Portucel-quer-quinta-fabrica-em-Portugal
"Image as Method: Ethnography – Photography – Film – Sensation – Perception" is a two-day symposium presented by the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. The symposium is organized by Fellow Brian Goldstone, Lecturer in Anthropology.
Paper does not need an occasional reboot, however. (...) "He said, 'My copilot's iPad went black. Exactly 24 minutes after that, mine went black. We were informed it looks like a problem with all the iPads on 737s,' " Jacaruso, 54, recalled. (...) The crew explained that flight plans are transmitted on the iPads, which make them crucial to navigation, said McRell, 43. (...) The glitch came two weeks after the U.S. Government Accountability Office warned that i on-board wifi conceivably could be used to bring down a plane. "Modern aircraft are increasingly connected to the internet. This interconnectedness can potentially provide unauthorized remote access to aircraft avionics systems."Dezenas de voos da American Airlines em terra devido a falha nos iPad, in jornal Expresso:
Uma falha numa aplicação de iPad usada pelos pilotos da American Airlines levou a que cerca de duas dezenas de aviões da empresa não descolassem terça-feira à noite. (...) A responsável de comunicações da companhia, Andrea Huguely, indicou ao "USA Today" que, "em alguns casos, os aparelhos tiveram de regressar até à zona de entrada para acederem a uma rede de wi-fi e resolverem o incidente". "Nós pedimos desculpa aos nossos clientes pelos inconvenientes e nós conseguimos levá-los para os seus destinos passado pouco tempo", afirmou. (...) A American Airlines tornou-se em 2013 a primeira companhia a substituir os planos de voo em papel, de modo a evitar o peso extra que isso representava, passando a transmitir essa informação às tripulações através de iPad.
"Individuals, like organizations, need to manage information for work (and non-work) related activities, on a daily basis. In order to extend their communication and fulfill information needs, people use artifacts (man made objects), that became increasingly technological, and in turn, these very technological artifacts are increasingly more dependent upon other supporting technologies, widely referred as infrastructures. In order to design information systems that support workers’needs, what do we know about their use of artifacts? Across time? Inside and outside their organizations? And on the move?"
"The perception of an overabundance of books led to more books being used in a great variety ways. Alongside the well-established methods of thorough reading and note-taking, which engaged the personal judgment and effort of the reader, early modern scholars also relied on shortcuts to “process” books so as to retrieve items of use with less investment of time and self. (...) The proliferation of inventive methods of and aids to study, whether unique to individuals or spread more widely through official or unofficial teaching, can help us understand better not only the conditions of production of early modern scholarly and pedagogical works, but also the deep roots of the ways in which we, too, cope with what we now call information overload."
Registering in plain paper artefact, June 2011 |
"In summary, shared understanding and the flow of tacit knowledge are key elements of innovative collaboration; and trust, shared context, and frequent interactions (both formal and informal) are central to establishing these elements. Despite proclamations of the “death of distance” (Cairncross, 1997), physical presence and shared space are still important in today’s world, especially for people who are highly interdependent and faced with ambiguous situations. This study was designed to explore the potential and the limitations of distance collaboration in R&D, given the communication tools available. (...) For the researchers in this study, in-person meetings led to a higher level of comfort in collaboration. They trusted their counterparts more and moved the relationship from a purely professional level to a more personal level; they made fewer negative attributions in situations of uncertainty. An increase in spontaneity and a decrease in formality helped overcome some difficulties in distance communication."a) Note to self: see another post with same title, and follow tag «distance».
"In response to requests from authors and readers to purchase printed and bound hard copies of papers on SSRN, we provide a 'Purchase Bound Hard Copy' service for most free PDF files in SSRN's eLibrary." FAQ
"(...) the researchers found that observing people over time as they find, select, collect, organize, and manage information for a personal project provides an excellent context for studying the challenges of personal information management."
"The World Wide Web has enabled the creation of a global information space comprising linked documents. (...) Linked Data provides a publishing paradigm in which not only documents, but also data, can be a first class citizen of the Web, thereby enabling the extension of the Web with a global data space based on open standards - the Web of Data.""Just as hyperlinks in the classic Web connect documents into a single global information space, Linked Data enables links to be set between items in different data sources and therefore connect these sources into a single global data space."
from CEPI |
"Em 2009 a produção europeia de pastas para papel desceu 13,5%, sendo Portugal o 4º maior produtor europeu de pasta – com 7,1% do total – e o 3º maior produtor de pastas químicas – com 8,9% de produção. Relativamente à produção de papel, também a Europa viu a sua produção baixar 10,4%, sendo Portugal o 11º maior produtor europeu de papel e cartão – com 1,8% do total - e o 2º maior produtor de papel fino não revestido (UWF) – com 11,6% da produção total." (p.18)
"Neste contexto, em 2009 as empresas portuguesas produtoras de pasta e de papel conseguiram registar um aumento da produção de pastas virgens de 7,9%. (...) Apesar das quebras sentidas, com impacte directo na Rendibilidade das Vendas, que diminuiu de 10,2%, em 2008, para 7,0%, em 2009, o sector está a adaptar-se às mudanças dos mercados e acredita no seu potencial de crescimento a médio/longo prazo." (p.18-19)
"When you do anthropological fieldwork, your main tool is yourself. You participate, you observe and you ask incredible amounts of questions."
"The construction of scientific facts, in particular, is a process of generating texts whose fate (status, value, utility, facticity) depends on their subsequent interpretation."
Image from Kees Graaff post |
"The ways in which an item is manipulated will vary depending upon its form and the tools available for this form. The tools used for interaction with paper–based information items include, for example, paper clips, staplers, filing cabinets and the flat surfaces of a desktop. In interactions with digital information items, we depend upon the support of various computer–based tools and applications such as e–mail applications, file managers, Web browsers, and so on. (...) Knowledge as ‘no thing’ cannot be managed directly. If we think we have knowledge ‘at our fingertips’ we are most likely touching information in some form instead. This is not to say that knowledge management is not possible. But we do so through its expression in information. There is no management of knowledge except through the management of information."
Evers, Jeanine C. (2011). From the Past into the Future. How Technological Developments Change Our Ways of Data Collection, Transcription and Analysis [94 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1), Art. 38.
"The KWALON Experiment consisted of five developers of Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) software analysing a dataset regarding the financial crisis in the time period 2008-2009, provided by the conference organisers. Besides this experiment, researchers were invited to present their reflective papers on the use of QDA software. This introduction gives a description of the experiment, the "rules", research questions and reflective points, as well as a full description of the dataset and search rules used, and our reflection on the lessons learned."
"The report urges EU Member States to step up their efforts to put online the collections held in all their libraries, archives and museums. It stresses the benefits of making Europe's culture and knowledge more easily accessible. It also points to the potential economic benefits of digitisation (...) The report's recommendations will feed into the Commission's broader strategy, under the Digital Agenda for Europe, to help cultural institutions make the transition towards the digital age."
"Today europeana.eu already offers access to more than 15 million digitised books, maps, photographs, film clips, paintings and musical extracts, but this is only a fraction of works held by Europe's cultural institutions (see IP/10/1524). Most digitised materials are older works in the public domain, to avoid potential litigation for works covered by copyright."Elisabeth Niggemann, Jacques De Decker & Maurice Lévy (2011). The New Renaissance. Brussels: Report of the 'Comité des Sages’, Europe.[PDF]
"É extinto o Instituto Nacional de Engenharia, Tecnologia e Inovação (INETI), sendo os seus recursos científicos e tecnológicos, humanos e materiais reorganizados e integrados noutros laboratórios, centros tecnológicos, instituições de ensino superior e consórcios a criar. Em particular, as infra-estruturas do INETI transformam-se em parque de ciência e tecnologia com a participação e gestão de universidades, laboratórios associados e laboratórios do Estado e alargam-se a parcerias com empresas, no quadro de projectos definidos, organizando-se ainda como espaço de acolhimento de programas europeus de I&D."
"Although Yin’s case research method is considered to be positivist, his concept of analytical generalization has received attention and approval from a prominent interpretive IS researcher,Walsham (1995b). Walsham accepts Yin’s notion of generalizing to theory and extends it to four types of generalization. Walsham explains (pp. 70–80) that, beginning with the facts or the rich description of a case, the researcher can generalize to concepts, to a theory, to specific implications, or to rich insight. All four of Walsham’s examples involve generalizing from empirical statements (reflecting the observations made in a case study) to theoretical statements (concepts, theory ,specific implications,and rich insight).
Klein and Myers (1999) also recognize the process of generalizing from empirical statements to theoretical statements. Whereas they acknowledge that “interpretive research values the documentation of unique circumstances,” they also emphasize, “it is important that theoretical abstractions and generalizations should be carefully related to the case study details as they were experienced and/or collected by the researcher” They add: “The key point here is that theory plays a crucial role in interpretive research,and clearly distinguishes it from just anecdotes” (p. 75). For them,generalizing from idiographic details to theory is so important that they elevate it to one of their seven principles for assessing interpretive field work: The principle of abstraction and generalization." (p. 234)
"While the tools for writing, storing, disseminating and retrieving documents have undergone a revolution in the last few decades, reading is still a very slow process. For practical reasons, we are forced to determine a working set size, i.e., the number of documents that we can handle."
"By combining metadata and subject terms in a vector-based information space, visualization may give us the opportunity to handle larger document collections and to help the user to find the documents that are most likely to satisfy an information need defined on a pragmatic level."
"My excuse for not presenting any authors' credentials is that I am not saying, "X is true because Smith said so." I hoped I was merely letting the reader know where I sourced an interesting idea and implicitly where they might look if they want to read more on the topic. LATOUR (1987) suspects that most of you will not."
"Here I want to assert that knowledge, as well as expertise, is inherently transgressive. Nobody has anywhere succeeded for very long in containing knowledge. Knowledge seeps through institutions and structures like water through the pores of a membrane. Knowledge seeps in both directions, from science to society as well as from society to science. It seeps through institutions and from academia to and from the outside world. Transdisciplinarity is therefore about transgressing boundaries. Institutions still exist and have a function. Disciplines still exist and new ones arise continuously from interdisciplinary work."
Thinking, Doing and Publishing Visual Research: the state of the field? Bologna, Italy, July 20-22, 2010.
"When a photograph is situated in the present tense and is treated as a realist representation, a particular relationship between the text, the image and the ethnographic context is constructed. The specificity of the photographic moment, set in the past, is lost and instead the photograph is situated in a continuous present." Sarah Pink (2009). Doing Visual Ethnography. Sage, p.150. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)
"Although cell phones are usually considered mere instruments at their owners’ service, they are also social artifacts. As a communication channel, they support the relationship with others. But, more than this, cell phones communication patterns is influenced by the social context in which it is used, and, as it can be activated from anywhere, at any time, cell phones took up also an active social role. But who communicates with whom? What is the structure of social networks created by communication through cell phones? Is cell phones use connected to a borderline blur between social contexts and individual practices, as our daily roles intertwine?"
(...)
"The present study allowed evaluating the level of Portugal involvement in the Mobile Communication Society, highlighting the main differences between socio demographic groups within the area of several use contexts. On the other hand, it contributed to identify user profiles, enabling to foresee the development path on this sector, where everyday new possibilities emerge. Its major contribution will be perhaps the opening of a discussion about the need to analyze mobility role in general, and cell phones in particular, in today’s society."in LINI - Lisbon Internet and Networks Institute