Digital Media @ CoLab » Research

Craig Watkins’ new book The Young and the Digital

sharon — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:16:35 +0000

Professor Craig Watkins’ new book on social media explores the digital world that children and youth inhabit. Using a mix of research methods, Dr. Watkins offers a nuanced picture of “digital natives.” The Chronicle of Higher Education recently interviewed Watkins on his research.

DM-CoLab Blog Supports Word 2007

mcchris — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:12:32 +0000

Many users have tried to post to the DM-CoLab blog using Microsoft Word. Generally, this is not recommended for formatting reasons, but it turns you can post to this blog using Word 2007. If you use this word processing package and would like to post directly to the blog with Word, you can follow these simple directions or get help from one of your friendly blog administrators.

Digital Media Research Projects Underway

sharon — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:45:26 +0000

Two Digital Media research projects have been funded by FCT for the coming two years, one dealing with the Portuguese population’s experiences with computers and the Internet and another directly developing new DM applications. Dr. Cristina Ponte (UNL) and Dr. Carlos Guedes (INESC-Porto) are Principal Investigators for the respective projects.

Kinetic controller driven adaptive and dynamic music composition systems is a joint research project led by INESC-Porto (Dr. Carlos Guedes, Dr. Fabien Gouyon) with partners UT Austin (Dr. Bruce Pennycook), Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Tomas Henriques), YDreams, and Casa da Música. The outcome of the project will be the creation of a modular toolbox for real-time dynamic music generation that will allow for easy creation of software applications for music, dance, theatre, installation artists, interactive kiosks, computer games, and internet/web information systems.

The applications to be developed are aimed both at highly specialized users striving for standard professional quality in digital media applications and non-specialized users including people with disabilities, children and the elderly for use in sound-based interactive games. The toolbox will be implemented in YDream’s YVision framework for developing interactive installations and it will be freely available through project Digitopia, a platform for the development of digital music communities at Casa da Música.

More information will be coming on Dr. Ponte’s research plans.

Millennials at work

carly — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 18:14:02 +0000

While much of the generation-based research seems more likely to produce buzzwords than to actually provide a meaningful framework for thinking about social or cultural trends, a new report from Accenture on the tech habits of Millennials (people born between 1977 and 1997) confirms a broad trend I’ve heard a number of faculty commenting on: Basically, college-aged folks just don’t like to use e-mail, and prefer to use social networking sites, instant messaging, and text messaging instead. These preferences mean that younger employees are often just making their own IT policies. As Frederic Lardinois summarizes on Read Write Web:

“…this difference between expectations and reality has led over a quarter of the employees surveyed by Accenture to use technology that is unsupported and unsanctioned by their corporate IT departments. Almost half of all Millennials who use social networks, blogs, vlogs, or Twitter do so without support from their IT departments (and often against the IT policies of their companies). Millennials also see no problem with using unsupported mobile phones or instant messaging services at work.”

While the report seems to make much of the fact that these Millennial workers often don’t even know their company’s IT policies, I wonder how many older (or even slightly older) employees are that well-versed in the regulations and guidelines enforced by individual corporations. Further, I’m not sure that the lag between employee preference and company policy is particularly novel. In any case, you can read a lengthier summary of the report here.

Outcomes from the Interface Design for Mobile Devices workshop

riddle — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:32:20 +0000

An outcomes document from the Interface Design for Mobile Devices workshop is now available [5.7 MB PDF].

Teams developed projects in user interface design and information structures for using mobile devices to explore a physical location, the Serralves Foundation in Porto. The workshop was held October 7-9 at Serralves as part of the Future Places festival.

Research call is out!

sharon — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:01:39 +0000

The research call for the Digital Media program (as well as other programs) was released last week, and we now have an English version. This is a great opportunity for UT researchers to team with our Portuguese colleagues on some of the research ideas in which they might share interests. I know some people are thinking about a media and science education project, and another team is coming up with something in the music arena. Still other researchers are thinking about a social science project examining how people use the Internet. The deadline is in September. Contact anyone on the team for more details.