Isabel Pedersen | University of Ontario Institute of Technology (original) (raw)

Books by Isabel Pedersen

This book enables readers to interrogate the technical, rhetorical, theoretical, and socio-ethic... more This book enables readers to interrogate the technical, rhetorical, theoretical,
and socio-ethical challenges and opportunities involved in the development and adoption of augmentation technologies and artificial intelligence.
The core of our human experience and identity is forever affected by the rise
of augmentation technologies that enhance human capability or productivity.
These technologies can add cognitive, physical, sensory, and emotional enhancements
to the body or environment. This book demonstrates the benefits, risks, and relevance of emerging augmentation technologies such as brain-computer interaction devices for cognitive enhancement; robots marketed to improve human social interaction; wearables that extend human senses, augment creative abilities, or overcome physical limitations; implantables that amplify intelligence or memory; and devices, AI generators or algorithms for emotional augmentation. It allows scholars and professionals to understand the impact of these technologies, improve digital and AI literacy, and practice new methods for their design and adoption.
This book will be vital reading for students, scholars, and professionals in fields including technical communication, UX design, computer science, human factors, information technology, sociology of technology, and ethics. Artifacts and supplemental resources for research and teaching can be found at
https://fabricofdigitallife.com/ and www.routledge.com/9781032263755.

Writing Futures: Collaborative, Algorithmic, Autonomous, 2021

This book is useful to understand and write alongside non-human agents, examine the impact of alg... more This book is useful to understand and write alongside non-human agents, examine the impact of algorithms and AI on writing, and accommodate relationships with autonomous agents. This ground-breaking future-driven framework prepares scholars and practitioners to investigate and plan for the social, digital literacy, and civic implications arising from emerging technologies. This book prepares researchers, students, practitioners, and citizens to work with AI writers, virtual humans, and social robots. This book explores prompts to envision how fields and professions will change. The book's unique integration with Fabric of Digital Life, a database and structured content repository for conducting social and cultural analysis of emerging technologies, provides concrete examples throughout. Readers gain imperative direction for collaborative, algorithmic, and autonomous writing futures.

Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles, 2020

MIT Press, 2020 Body-centered computing now goes beyond the "wearable" to encompass implants, ... more MIT Press, 2020

Body-centered computing now goes beyond the "wearable" to encompass implants, bionic technology, and ingestible sensors--technologies that point to hybrid bodies and blurred boundaries between human, computer, and artificial intelligence platforms. Such technologies promise to reconfigure the relationship between bodies and their environment, enabling new kinds of physiological interfacing, embodiment, and productivity. Using the term embodied computing to describe these devices, this book offers essays by practitioners and scholars from a variety of disciplines that explore the accompanying ethical, social, and conceptual issues.

The contributors examine technologies that range from fitness monitors to neural implants to a toe-controlled mouse. They discuss topics that include the policy implications of ingestibles; the invasive potential of body area networks, which transmit data from bodily devices to the internet; cyborg experiments, linking a human brain directly to a computer; the evolution of the ankle monitor and other intrusive electronic monitoring devices; fashiontech, which offers users an aura of "cool" in exchange for their data; and the "final frontier" of technosupremacism: technologies that seek to read our minds. Taken together, the essays show the importance of considering embodied technologies in their social and political contexts rather than in isolated subjectivity or in purely quantitative terms.

Contributors
Roba Abbas, Andrew Iliadis, Gary Genosko, Suneel Jethani, Deborah Lupton, Katina Michael, M. G. Michael, Marcel O'Gorman, Maggie Orth, Isabel Pedersen, Christine Perakslis, Kevin Warwick, Elizabeth Wissinger

https://books.google.ca/books?id=oSHdDwAAQBAJ

Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality- Shifting Media, 2013

Origin stories for wearable computers stress motives, beliefs, assumptions transgressions, and go... more Origin stories for wearable computers stress motives, beliefs, assumptions transgressions, and goals amid the technological and economic conditions that alter them. One facet of this book is to challenge rhetorical motives embedded in technical terms, like augmented reality, and make salient their social and political assumptions as well as the kinds of rhetoric that lingers in their evocations. “Reality shifting” – deliberately a gerund rather than a noun – is a catch-all term to describe immersive computing phenomenon; but, it is also a term that suggests ongoing scrutiny of the meanings it instigates. Affective computing, brain-computer interaction, and emotion augmentation drive toward convergence with everyday computing practices. This book focuses on the communicative aspects of wearable devices and reality-shifting interfaces in their conceptual, social, cultural, political and, most importantly, rhetorical contexts. It analyzes the cultural artifacts that drive us to embrace them as well as design-based writing by inventors and governments. Put simply, the intent of Ready to Wear is that it focuses squarely on motive.

Published works by Isabel Pedersen

Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association Journal, 2024

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2023

Augmentation Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Technical Communication: Designing Ethical Futures , 2023

Augmentation technologies, fueled by artificial intelligence (AI), are undergoing a process of ad... more Augmentation technologies, fueled by artificial intelligence (AI), are undergoing a process of adaptation and normalization geared to everyday users in various roles as practitioners, educators, and students. While new innovations, applications, and algorithms are developed as "augmentation technology," Chapter 1 focuses on human subjects, contexts, and rhetorical strategies proposed for them by external actors. The chapter discusses core functions of technical and professional communication and provides rationale for positioning technical and professional communicators (TPCs) to understand augmentation technologies and AI as a means to design ethical futures across this work. An overview of Augmentation Technologies and AI-An Ethical Design Futures Framework serves as a guide for reframing professional practice and pedagogy to promote digital and AI literacy surrounding the ethical design, adoption, and adaptation of augmentation technologies. The chapter concludes with an overview of the remaining chapters in this book. Key Questions • How might augmentation technologies best be defined? 2 • What powerful rhetorics signal the augmentation technology and AI promise of augmented humans, cyborgs, and posthumans? • The progress of augmentation technologies and AI follows decades of theoretical research on cyborgs, posthumanism, transhumanism, and non-humanism in philosophy, critical theory, critical feminism, and feminist new materialism. How might technical and professional communicators use this research for building understanding of augmentation technologies and AI? • How will core functions of technical and professional communication-understanding audience, user experience, content development, collaboration, and design-transform alongside augmentation technologies and AI? Chapter 1 Links Throughout the chapter, we refer to articles, videos, and reports which can be found in a related chapter collection at Fabric of Digital Life called Augmentation Technologies and AI-An Ethical Design Futures Framework

Augmentation Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Technical Communication: Designing Ethical Futures, 2023

Augmentation technologies are undergoing a process of enculturation due to many factors, one bein... more Augmentation technologies are undergoing a process of enculturation due to many factors, one being the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), or what the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) terms the “AI wave” or “AI boom.” Chapter 3 focuses critical attention on the hyped assumption that sophisticated, emergent, and embodied augmentation technologies will improve lives, literacy, cultures, arts, economies, and social contexts. The chapter begins by discussing the problem of ambiguity with AI terminology, which it aids with a description of the WIPO Categorization of AI Technologies Scheme. It then draws on media and communication studies to explore concepts such as agents, agency, power, and agentive relationships between humans and robots. The chapter focuses on the development of non-human agents in industry as a critical factor in the rise of augmentation technologies. It looks at how marketing communication enculturates future users to adopt and adapt to the technology. Scholars are charting the significant ways that people are drawn further into commercial digital landscapes, such as the Metaverse concept, in post-internet society. It concludes by examining recent claims concerning the Metaverse and augmented reality.

Frontiers in Sociology, 2022

Technologies for people aging at home are increasingly prevalent and include ambient monitoring d... more Technologies for people aging at home are increasingly prevalent and include ambient monitoring devices that work together with wearables to remotely track and monitor older adults' biometric data and activities of daily living. There is, however, little research into the promotional and speculative images of technology-in-use. Our paper examines the ways in which the datafication of aging is offered up visually by technology companies to promote their products. Specifically, we ask: how are data visualized in promotional images of smart sensor technologies for aging at home? And in these visualizations, what happens to the aging body and relations of care? We include in our definition of smart sensor technologies both wearable and ambient monitoring devices, so long as they are used for the in-home passive monitoring of the inhabitant by a caregiver, excluding those devices targeted for institutional settings or those used for self-monitoring purposes. Our sample consists of 221 images collected between January and July of 2021 from the websites of 14 English-language companies that offer smart sensor technology for aging at home. Following a visual semiotic analysis, we present 3 themes on the visual representation of old bodies and their data: (1) Captured Data, (2) Spatialized Data, and (3) Networked Data. Each, we argue, contribute to a broader visualization of the “datasphere”. We conclude by highlighting the underlying assumptions of old bodies in the co-constitution of aging and technologies in which the fleshy and lived corporeality of bodies is more often lost, reduced to data points and automated care scenarios, and further disentangled from other bodies, contexts and things.

Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2022

This exploratory study identifies the tangling of proposed relationships between human and nonhum... more This exploratory study identifies the tangling of proposed relationships between human and nonhuman agents by providing an analysis on how AI technologies are marketed for learning subjects through a critical discourse analysis of corporate advertisements. We ask: Amid these emerging technologies, how are humans and AI technologies framed as agents with agency? How are learners framed by corporate advertising as part of this blurring? We used a public, open-access cultural analytics database and repository, Fabric of Digital Life ('Fabric', https://fabricofdigitallife.com/), to identify a set of artifacts as a dataset for such analysis. Results indicate that advertising promotes corporate products while also promoting idealized social practices for human-computer interaction and humanrobot interaction in learning contexts. Using AI to automate relationships between students and teachers frames AI systems as authorities in both robot and non-robot platforms, blurring and minimizing student and instructor agency in learning environments.

IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS), 2021

This short paper provides a means to classify augmentation technologies to reconceptualize them a... more This short paper provides a means to classify augmentation technologies to reconceptualize them as sociotechnical, discursive and rhetorical phenomena, rather than only through technological classifications. It identifies a set of value systems that constitute augmentation technologies within discourses, namely, the intent to enhance, automate, and build efficiency. This short paper makes a contribution to digital literacy surrounding augmentation technology emergence, as well as the more specific area of AI literacy, which can help identify unintended consequences implied at the design stages of these technologies.

Writing Futures: Collaborative, Algorithmic, Autonomous, 2021

In this chapter, we provide a brief history of virtual assistants, emerging as technocultural ent... more In this chapter, we provide a brief history of virtual assistants, emerging as technocultural entities eventually to serve a role in writing and work practices. We illustrate how automation changes writing collaboration between humans and nonhuman agents, leading to “superteams” (Deloitte) and the seamless integration of AI and other automated processes into workplace teams (Seeber et al., in Information & Management 57: 2020). As AI writing advances to include further communication practices through Natural Language Generation (NLG), we discuss the concept of cowriting with AI systems. We explore how literacy practices must adapt to include AI literacy, discussing the role of professional and technical communication (PTC) educators and professionals in meeting these goals. We emphasize the issue of changing roles and risks which arise as innovation advances before appropriate ethical and regulatory regimes are put in place and how AI bias has led to human rights vio...

Journal of Communication Pedagogy, 2021

Machines produce and operate using complex systems of metadata that need to be catalogued, sorted... more Machines produce and operate using complex systems of metadata that need to be catalogued, sorted, and processed. Many students lack the experience with metadata and sufficient knowledge about it to understand it as part of their data literacy skills. This paper describes an educational and interactive database activity designed for teaching undergraduate communication students about the creation, value, and logic of structured data. Through a set of virtual instructional videos and interactive visualizations, the paper describes how students can gain experience with structured data and apply that knowledge to successfully find, curate, and classify a digital archive of media artifacts. The pedagogical activity, teaching materials, and archives are facilitated through and housed in an online resource called Fabric of Digital Life (fabricofdigitallife.com). We end by discussing the activity's relevance for the emerging field of human-machine communication.

Proceedings of AELFE-TAPP 2021 (19th AELFE Conference, 2nd TAPP Conference), 2021

Translators and technical communicators must be prepared to use immersive technologies as they wo... more Translators and technical communicators must be prepared to use immersive technologies as they work. Visualization has been shown to help translators improve their performance as it provides a more concrete understanding of topic and content (Kußmaul, 2005). In addition, use of augmented and/or virtual reality (AR, VR) has been shown to help technical communicators develop intercultural communication competence (Tham et al., 2018). However, understanding of immersive technologies has not kept pace with the full potential of their benefits and perils (Craig & Georgieva, 2018). Here we ask: How might students examine and/or use immersive technologies as a means to foster intercultural communication and improve translation performance? In this presentation we share two research projects on the design, deployment, and study of student use of immersive technologies as a means to foster intercultural communication and improve translation understanding. Project one focuses on multiple years of TAPP collaborations in which U.S. students at the University of Minnesota (UMN) collaborated with translation teams at the University of Trieste (UT) in Italy. Students used immersive technologies including Google Cardboard and marker-based AR, and most recently, developed visualizations of translation journeys. Project two details two years of U.S.-Canada collaboration in which U.S. students from multiple institutions curated collections on emerging technologies and translation for the digital repository The Fabric of Digital Life (Iliadis & Pedersen, 2018) housed at Ontario Tech University in Canada. Here we share student collections of artifacts on immersive technologies, both emergent and commercialized, with specific focus on translation. Together, these pedagogical deployments provide a framework for advancing intercultural communication and translation performance through use and examination of immersive technologies.

Effective Teaching of Technical Communication: Theory, Practice, and Application, 2021

We contend that collaboration is an imperative disciplinary as- sumption in technical and profess... more We contend that collaboration is an imperative disciplinary as- sumption in technical and professional communication (TPC). Theorists, researchers, and practitioners grapple with ever-changing modes and models for collaborative work in academia, industry, and with communities. Tech- nical and professional communicators today must be prepared to collaborate with engineers, subject matter experts, and programmers; they must be adept at using collaborative software and working with global virtual teams. The purpose of this chapter is to synthesize the rhetoric, science, and technology of collaboration to consolidate a guiding framework for understanding, teaching, and practicing TPC collaboration in the 21st century and beyond. This unified framework provides guidance from which to structure one’s own collaboration and the collaborative projects we assign throughout our curriculum. We discuss collaborative software and team communication platforms and share example projects for preparing students for collaborative and global workplaces.

Computers and Composition, 2021

This study examines student perception of digital literacy from their engagement with the Fabric ... more This study examines student perception of digital literacy from their engagement with the Fabric of Digital Life, a digital archive of emerging technologies. Through grounded theory analysis we identified the ways students make sense of an unfamiliar technology. Our results show students assign metaphors to understand a new digital platform, apply mental models transferred from previous conceptual domains onto new technologies, and express multiply-layered approaches that facilitated their digital literacy development––an indication for instructors to orient toward an expansive description of digital literacy that caters to student learning needs as well as their professional futures.

Networked Learning Conference, 2020

People readily consume an ever-growing range of emerging technologies while largely unaware of th... more People readily consume an ever-growing range of emerging technologies while largely unaware of their lack of control over the impact that such networking, devices, data, and processes have on their lives. Since college-educated people are huge consumers of digital products and are expected to participate in networked learning, it is critical to foster student development of an expanded understanding of digital literacy. To address this challenge, we have created instructional materials for instructor and student use of the internationally known repository, "Fabric" of Digital Life (https://fabricofdigitallife.com/). This research comes as the result of collaboration between the University of Minnesota's Emerging Technology Research Collaboratory (ETRC, https://etrc.umn.edu/), a research group for investigating emerging technologies, and Fabric of Digital Life (https://fabricofdigitallife.com/) and its affiliated Decimal Research Lab at Ontario Tech University. Together, functioning as a collaborative in support of networked learning, we invite and facilitate research on building student digital literacy through examination, contribution, and/or curation of collections regarding emerging technologies. From Spring 2019 to the present, 13 instructors and associated students across nine institutions have developed and are using a set of instructional materials for student exploration and/or curation of collections in this repository. This paper documents initial instructor discussion and study of student development of digital literacy as a result of use and/or curation of Fabric collections on emerging technologies and the discourses surrounding them. We are beginning to study the abilities that students draw upon when exploring the collections and when determining which artifacts might be included in current collections as well as new collections that might be developed. Collaborative interaction with the editorial team at Ontario Tech University not only enhanced the repository content and development of instructional resources, it also further evolved the metadata for Fabric for external users and the public. At its core, this research examines the potential development of digital literacy through the act of exploring and curating collections on emerging technologies. Critical to this core is the networked learning collaborative in place to foster and support this work.

Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, 2020

This paper describes the collaborative process involved in the novel creation of The Wearable Pas... more This paper describes the collaborative process involved in the novel creation of The Wearable Past: a collection of physical museum artifacts, presently on display at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa, digitally re-presented in the context of the Fabric of Digital Life (or Fabric), a database of born-digital objects run by the Decimal Lab at Ontario Tech University. We discuss the multiple stages involved in integrating a physical exhibit of wearables within a database of born-digital artifacts. We argue that the inclusion of historic artifacts in Fabric effectively connects the past to the future, creating a dialogic relationship between digital artifacts rather than a hierarchical schema, facilitated by Fabric’s metadata. Fabric provides a means to explore the cultural turn in wearable technology adoption, contextualized through a complex range of artifact representations. Following Bakhtin’s notion of “dialogic interaction,” we argue that the historic artifacts become dialogically entangled, and weave “in and out of complex interrelationships” (Bakhtin 1981, 276–277). We use Carole L. Palmer’s thematic research collections framework to explain the overarching structure and intent for Fabric’s born-digital collections. We then proceed to explain how The Wearable Past weaves historical cultural narratives from material artifacts into Fabric. We argue that they persist amid technologies that are proposed for future bodies to wear, reframing the conceptualization of wearables as lived phenomena. We draw on the work of several writers, including Lai Tze Fan (2018), Moynihan and Putra (2019), and Johanna Drucker (2009) to interpret The Wearable Past’s contribution to Fabric’s content, metadata, and ontology.

Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles, 2020

This chapter focuses on the concept of body networks, and it brings critical attention to the mou... more This chapter focuses on the concept of body networks, and it brings critical attention to the mounting expectation that personal computing is going to achieve much more direct, bodily integration with automated processes. It also develops the argument against a backdrop of widespread biotechnical advancement, economic upheaval, social disruption, and mass automation through Artificial Intelligence (AI), under hyped public sphere conditions.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=oSHdDwAAQBAJ

Writing Futures: Collaborative, Algorithmic, Autonomous, 2021

Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles, 2020

MIT Press, 2020 Body-centered computing now goes beyond the "wearable" to encompass implants, ... more MIT Press, 2020

https://books.google.ca/books?id=oSHdDwAAQBAJ

Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality- Shifting Media, 2013

Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association Journal, 2024

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2023

Augmentation Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Technical Communication: Designing Ethical Futures , 2023

Augmentation Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Technical Communication: Designing Ethical Futures, 2023

Frontiers in Sociology, 2022

Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2022

IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS), 2021

Writing Futures: Collaborative, Algorithmic, Autonomous, 2021

Journal of Communication Pedagogy, 2021

Proceedings of AELFE-TAPP 2021 (19th AELFE Conference, 2nd TAPP Conference), 2021

Effective Teaching of Technical Communication: Theory, Practice, and Application, 2021

Computers and Composition, 2021

Networked Learning Conference, 2020

Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, 2020

Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles, 2020

Parol: Quaderni d'arte e di epistemologia , 2019

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about the contemporary technological moment and pote... more This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about the contemporary technological moment and potential cinematic futures. We do so by presenting Fearmonger, a new media arts project that probes moving image culture through an embodied digital experience that, in one sense, victimizes a film viewer in figurative terms, but paradoxically might offer an alternative site for spectatorship. Fearmonger’s aesthetic design conceptualization invigorates the cinematic experience with wearable technology that jars viewers’ sensibility rather than attempting seamlessness with the digital, which is so often the motive for our current personal devices. In the sections that follow, we explore the concept of media as prosthesis and contextualize it through previous scholarship but also artistic forms. Second, we explain the Fearmonger project and explore the various ways that it interrogates the realities of a radically embodied cinema.

Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (ACM), 2017

Cultural heritage artifacts connect us to past generations and provide links to previous worlds t... more Cultural heritage artifacts connect us to past generations and provide links to previous worlds that are beyond our reach. We developed TombSeer, an augmented reality application that aims to immerse the wearer in a museum space engaging two senses (seeing and gesturing) through a holographic heads-up interface that brings virtual, historical artifacts "back to life" through gestural interactivity. This article introduces the TombSeer software prototype and highlights the application of embodied interaction to museum visits using an emerging hardware platform for 3D interactive holographic images (e.g., Meta head-mounted display). This article discusses the TombSeer prototype's development and functionality testing with the Tomb of Kitines exhibit, which was conducted at The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. TombSeer's embodied gestural and visual augmented reality experience functions to aesthetically enhance museum exhibits, cultural heritage sites, and galleries. CCS Concepts: Human-centered computing → Mixed/augmented reality; Hardware → Analysis and design of emerging devices and systems Additional

Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence Symposium, Digital Inclusion Lab, Global Affairs Canada, 2019

Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 2018

Purpose – The paper examines how metadata taxonomies in embodied computing databases indicate the... more Purpose – The paper examines how metadata taxonomies in embodied computing databases indicate their orientation (e.g. indicating a marketing focus vs. a focus on ethical and social impact) and describes ways to track the evolution of the embodied computing industry over time through digital media archiving. Design/methodology/approach – We compare the metadata taxonomies of two embodied computing databases by providing a narrative of their top-level categories. After identifying these categories, we describe how they structure the databases around specific themes. Findings – The growing wearables market often hides complex sociotechnical tradeoffs. Marketing information products like Vandrico Inc.'s Wearables Database frame wearables as business solutions without conveying information about the various concessions users make (about giving up their data, for example). Potential solutions to this problem include enhancing embodied computing literacy through the construction of databases that track media about embodied computing technologies using customized metadata categories. Databases like FABRIC contain multimedia related to the emerging embodied computing market – including patents, interviews, promotional videos, and news articles, etc. – and can be archived through user-curated collections and tagged according to specific themes (privacy, policing, labor, etc.). One of the benefits of this approach is that users can use the rich metadata fields to search for terms and create curated collections that focus on tradeoffs related to embodied computing technologies. Originality/value – The article describes the importance of metadata for framing the orientation of embodied computing databases and describes one of the first attempts to comprehensively track the evolution of embodied computing technologies, their developers, and their diverse applications in various social contexts through media archiving.

Our devices are changing the way we think of ourselves as selves. We produce, share, and publiciz... more Our devices are changing the way we think of ourselves as selves. We produce, share, and publicize our very personal data on a daily basis. Algorithms are personal – they make decisions for us, filter what we read, inform what we buy (or think of buying), map our whereabouts, and remember faces of people we know. Increasingly, thoughts, desires, memories, fears, and anxieties will be " read " by digital sensors and computers on, in, and around the body. The influence of algorithms will grow; we can expect digital lifestyle to undergo exponential transformation. The research and advisory company Gartner predicts that " by 2021, AI [artificial intelligence] will support more than 80% of emerging technologies. " 1 Today we can ask our digital home assistant, Apple's Siri, or even our companion robot to help us find the perfect beach vacation. In the future, we predict, we will simply think about holidays to Hawai'i and they will become reality; thinking, feeling, or remembering will amount to asking. When we suffer ailments now, we search for medical help online; in the future, our bodies will simply be scanned in our homes. Now we circulate political news amongst friends across social media; in the future, our political leanings will be conveyed through various cognitive reactions read by sensors. Discursive prediction amounts to an implicit and even celebrated belief that we are on a course to becoming our computers.

Conference presentation abstract for MEDIA ETHICS. Human Ecology in a Connected World is the 20th... more Conference presentation abstract for MEDIA ETHICS. Human Ecology in a Connected World is the 20th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association (MEA)

Most humanoid robots and other conversational avatars are capable of basic personalization through voice and facial recognition, and some claim emotion recognition,ability to conduct personalized conversation, and data collection and analysis capabilities. Use-case scenarios envision them as greeters and guides in hospitals, malls,hotels and airports, but also as caregivers or caregiver supports for independently living older adults, as companions to lonely people, or as a near-members of the family. As they develop further along this vein and become more integrated into health service provider, retail, and home environments, legal and ethical standards for this category of humanoid social support technologies need to be developed to match the varying use-contexts in which they are employed, even by the same user. Attention to social context involves a constant awareness of interrelated conditions,making ethical social robot design especially complicated.

IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), 2019

Immersive technologies, including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR... more Immersive technologies, including augmented reality
(AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), and
extended reality (XR) are fast becoming spaces in which
technical communicators and technical communication
instructors must begin to take notice of and engage in with
their students and in their workplaces.

Studies in computational intelligence, 2021

Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2022

International Journal of Cultural Studies, Jan 13, 2016

This article explores and critiques mainstream speculative news surrounding personal technologies... more This article explores and critiques mainstream speculative news surrounding personal technologies. We focus on news concerning bionic contact lenses, a hardware invention prototype by Google Inc promoted as a ‘future’ personal computing device. Technology is increasingly normalized and configured as inevitable through representations across consumer media outlets. In our analysis of a large corpus of online and print news coverage, we identify three rhetorical strategies that justify it as either a medical/assistive device within a discourse of health, or a device for transhuman enhancement within a discourse of transhumanism. Employing Roland Barthes’s critical theory of myth, we argue that the first medical justification obfuscates but ultimately promotes the second justification, transhuman enhancement. This transhumanist vision endorses enhancement and augmentation without an identifiable purpose or disclosure concerning how people as users might be affected in the future. New media are subtly promoted during invention; yet, their social function, implied ideologies, and commercialized agenda are rarely challenged. We problematize these omissions, and highlight the need for critical dialogue.

The future of content strategy is currently being developed in augmented reality environments, wh... more The future of content strategy is currently being developed in augmented reality environments, where little to no heuristics have been developed and few strategies have been imagined beyond basic design principles. This article explores content strategy in terms of augmented reality and why it is important to create heuristics now for future work in this field.

Communication design quarterly review, Jul 1, 2022

Teaching writing involves helping students develop as critical communicators who use writing to q... more Teaching writing involves helping students develop as critical communicators who use writing to question often-unseen systems of power enabled by infrastructures, including digital spaces and technologies. This article uses Walton, Moore, and Jones' (2019) 3Ps Framework---positionality, privilege, and power---to explore how, through assignments we developed incorporating the Fabric of Digital Life digital archive, instructors can make visible to students the invisible layers of infrastructure. Using the 3Ps framework, we illustrate how our pedagogical approach encourages students to use writing to interrogate digital infrastructure and the ways it is entangled with positionality, privilege, and power.

Journal on computing and cultural heritage, Mar 21, 2017

Routledge eBooks, Mar 21, 2023

Research in networked learning, 2021

Routledge eBooks, Mar 21, 2023

TombSeer immerses the wearer in a museum space engaging two senses (sight and touch) through a ho... more TombSeer immerses the wearer in a museum space engaging two senses (sight and touch) through a holographic, augmented reality, heads-up interface that brings virtual, historical artifacts "back to life" through gestural interactivity. The purpose of TombSeer is to introduce more embodied interaction to museum visits using an emerging hardware platform for 3D interactive holographic images (e.g., META Head-mounted display) in combination with customized software. The Tomb of Kitines case study was conducted at The Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. TombSeer's embodied gestural and visual augmented reality experience functions to aesthetically enhance museum exhibits.

In recent years, new wearable platforms and peripherals requiring unique modes of interaction hav... more In recent years, new wearable platforms and peripherals requiring unique modes of interaction have been emerging in record numbers. Watches, necklaces, glasses, even pants [1] are beginning to incorporate technology. Wearable devices also offer many new ways for users to interact; therefore, more research is needed to evaluate these novel methods of interactions. Our research focuses on proposing a heuristic list to guide design and evaluation of wearable devices in playful applications. In this work-in-progress (WiP) article we show a prototype of a unique, playful, interaction application, META Museum, and propose the development of a heuristic list to evaluate it. This WiP reports on the early evaluation results based on user's inputs and discusses some common mistakes that users make and in what way this relates to how the application is designed.

Routledge eBooks, Mar 21, 2023

Springer eBooks, 2021

In this chapter (see Table 4.1), we provide a brief history of virtual assistants, emerging as te... more In this chapter (see Table 4.1), we provide a brief history of virtual assistants, emerging as technocultural entities eventually to serve a role in writing and work practices. We illustrate how automation changes writing collaboration between humans and nonhuman agents, leading to “superteams” (Deloitte) and the seamless integration of AI and other automated processes into workplace teams (Seeber et al., in Information & Management 57: 2020). As AI writing advances to include further communication practices through Natural Language Generation (NLG), we discuss the concept of cowriting with AI systems. We explore how literacy practices must adapt to include AI literacy, discussing the role of professional and technical communication (PTC) educators and professionals in meeting these goals. We emphasize the issue of changing roles and risks which arise as innovation advances before appropriate ethical and regulatory regimes are put in place and how AI bias has led to human rights violations. We provide case studies of how emerging technologies are inculcated in dataspheres that have inappropriately excluded racialized people through the rise of black boxes and exclusionary algorithms. AI Explainability and Transparency have been flagged as necessary principles for developing this technology, with sectors calling for protocols to explain highly complex tech for human actors.