http://chi2010-cskach.blogspot.com/2011/01/paper-reading-3-recognizing-shapes-and.html
"Grassroots Heritage in the Crisis Context: A Social Media Probes Approach to Studying Heritage in a Participatory Age"
Sophia B. Liu
Presented at the CHI 2010 Doctoral Consortium in Atlanta, 10-15 April 2010.
Summary
The author discusses her methods of researching the structures of grassroots heritage in the context of how it handles and disseminates knowledge about crises and catastrophes (the example used being the New York and Pentagon attacks of 2001). Some techniques of doing so are listed, followed by explaining that the primary one used was a "social media probe" and citing a paper which I presume explains exactly what that might be.
She summarizes (two paragraphs) what she has done so far. Her project had 33 participants at the time of writing, and expected to add another 10 or so. The example probe given asked the participants to choose 7 events from a 9/11 timeline and create the story they would tell about that event 50 years from now. She finishes by describing her "grassroots heritage framework" (pictured below) and a note on the contributions she expects her work to make.
Discussion
This was easily my least favorite of the three papers I have read to date for this class. Realize I am attempting to be analytical and not insulting when I say this, but she used a lot of words to say next to nothing. There seemed to be a set of quotation marks on every other line, which is a sign of both heavy usage of terms she was defining as she went and of using portions of cited works to explain concepts in her own. Neither is inherently bad, but they made this paper very difficult to read. Another item I noted along the same lines is that, while constantly telling us that "I conducted..research", "my interdisciplinary research informs studies in...", etc she never told us how she was conducting the research, aside from the one example dealing with 9/11. I think you can understand how this was frustrating to my attempts to write about her research,
I also noted that she said he research should "“open up new design spaces” by provoking “the users to consider their environment in a new way "" (Yes, I did have to quote her quotation marks). If she is researching how people handle information, why is she actively attempting to change the way they do so?
I almost feel that I must be completely misunderstanding something.
I'm not trying to say that her work isn't valuable, useful, or interesting in any way. The way people organize historical is an interesting subject. I just can't say anything about how I think her research would help or not in this area, because I can't seem to divine what it is from her paper.
Source: The paper in question.
When i read this I was also confused at first but then just went with it. I'm not really sure how they were creating a new space to develop the information but I think many social networking site are not really the place to express a crisis situation so that other can see. This would cause some users to not write their full thought
ReplyDeleteI'll have to agree that this sounds like an annoying paper to read, given what you've told me about her presentation style :) I identify with what she's trying to do, though: she's trying to create a purpose-driven social interaction in order to get more salient results. Example: most people use Facebook for the sake of Facebook; there's some collaboration that goes on in the form of events, tagging people in notes, liking pages, etc., but I don't feel that it's purpose is specific enough to drive the kind of creative process this author is trying to describe. Another example: Twitter can be used to a higher degree of purpose-driven tasks because there's nothing extraneous outside of the status update, but what if someone created a system that was purpose-built for submitting, disseminating, and responding to prayer requests? You could use Twitter for this, and follow other people who do, to simulate a "prayer group" of sorts, but the purpose-driven approach would garner more success, I think.
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