Digital Encounters of Surrogacy: Nodes of a Fictional Ethnography

The article addresses the question of alternative ways to writing ethnography and more specifically, the ethnography of surrogacy. It focuses on the example of a digital ethnographic artifact that was created in order to host fictional representations of surrogacy practices. The article presents ethnographic material from a recent research project that focused on experiences of surrogate parenthood of Greek and Cypriot intended parents. The digital artifact demonstrates how multimodal anthropological narrations may represent, and simultaneously evoke, sensory experience through the temporal and spatial digital unfolding of interlocutors’ stories. Indeed, the article explains the structure of the artifact and discusses specific digital nodes which depict interlocutors’ testimonies of longing, waiting, uncertainty, vulnerability, pain, loss, joy, and safekeeping before, during, and after surrogacy procedures. In the context of the ethnographic artifact narratives and non-narratives of motherhood, fatherhood, and pregnancy refer to a variety of precarious contexts of placeness/emplacement, legality/illegality, and connectedness/disconnectedness without relying on conventional textual ethnographic writing. Drawing from selected ethnographic examples as they relate to the literature of assisted reproduction, the authors argue that digital nodal narration enables both the cultural contextualization of individual experience as well as its affective and intellectual correlation with similar and antithetical experiences of other field interlocutors.

Information Inspirations

Taking a step backward from overt digital practices, this chapter looks at a digital artifact so widely used that it has become communicative infrastructure: the web browser. Its framing of our entire online information content and practice shapes digital identity through interactions with online services, while its customizability encourages perceptions of individual, rather than social, technocultural identity. This chapter looks at the Blackbird browser, specifically targeted to Black users, to unpack how browsers can shape Black identity from a technocultural framework. While digital interfaces are so mutable that they encourage beliefs of universalism and individualization, this chapter argues that racial digital practices can and do shape information design and behaviors.

Developing the Digital Artifact for the Sustainability of Marketing Research Results

The rapid development of technology transforms the way researchers conduct projects, communicate with others, and disseminate findings. In addition to traditional presentations of research results, this paper argues that building a digital artifact is another optional method for the dissemination of research findings from the perspective of marketing. Thus, 20 Irish and Chinese micro-influencers were investigated from March 2016 to March 2019, and their microblogs were analyzed by text mining techniques. Consequently, the paper finds four types of keywords that micro-influencers apply to their marketing on social media. Based on the marketing keywords, a digital tool is designed to label fashion keywords in the microblogging automatically. The proposed tool not only contributes to model fashion bloggers’ content and increase the influence of marketing on social media but also enlightens marketing scholars to develop digital tools for the sustainability of disseminating research results.

De-Centralized Hash URI Procedure for Making Digital Artifacts as Immutable, Reliable, Verifiable on Web

Main vision behind semantic web data maintenance is to make the text or content of web is interpretable, among different things, and sophisticated search procedures over huge amount linked web data. In this case different human beings perform fraudulent text which can be found on internet web. So that main research concentrated on automated approaches autonomously identified and analyzed content present in web. Making digital artifacts on web in terms of text, code and others verifiable and reliable, because of general nature of digital artifacts i.e immutability, it is a serious concept to produce reproduces the updated results of processes that display modified content in web resources. So that in this paper, we propose De-centralized Hash URI approach (DHURI) to solve the immutable concept of digital artifact generation in nano-publication with unique hash based cryptography value. In this approach, we provide Decentralized secure URI for identification of digital artifacts with parallel structure representation of data such as nano-publication. Basic concept of this approach is to handle digital artifact immutable concept with evaluation of existing approaches, and also describe the performance of proposed approach in de-centralized framework.

Meta-Remediation as a Mechanism to Address Crowd Decision-Making in the Context of Media Art

uTurn is a digital art installation that allows interaction inside a cinema-like environment or a similar public space — an exhibition system in the context of an audience, retrieving an elected media from the choices made by the majority of the public. The software in its core manages the selection — a meta-remediation that elects a media block, in the form of short-story movies (Vidbits) to be watched by a crowd. The interaction model assumes the need to find a preference in the viewing room in order to identify and choose the next Vidbit. The system allows navigation through media blocks in environments like a cinema room, a summer festival, or a public event. It can be configured to support visual concepts, or to integrate a narrative system in which other types of structures in the story demand that the content follows a segmentation of media. uTurn was exhibited during the 5th Artech International Conference, in 2015. The article addresses the creative process towards the production of the digital artifact using Apple's Quartz Composer.

Photographs as a Research Tool in Child Studies: Some Analytical Metaphors and Choices

This methodological paper discusses how photographs can be used in multi-layered data projects with children and families. We present photographs as a versatile low-fi digital artifact that can be used under a variety of research circumstances and critically discuss this particular visual tool in the context of the growing body of visual and multimodal research with children and families. The critical discussion draws on a series of research projects in which we have employed photographs (topics of the projects include family diversity or children's routines). The comparisons between projects highlights some of the procedural and analytical choices that are opened up when using photographs. In particular, we focus on two issues: (a) differences that emerge when materials are created by participants or are elicited by researchers, and; (b) the metaphors that are applied to interpret and work with photographs.

Interactive Compositions

Interaction design is a relational practice where interaction designers bring together many different materials into compositions that in return enable particular forms of interaction. However, and even though interaction design is about the design of interaction, interaction as this act that unfolds between a user and a digital artifact cannot be completely “pre-designed” in terms of fully controlled from a design point of view. Users might use a piece of technology as intended, but sometimes technologies are also used in unintended ways. Therefore, what the interaction designer can do is not to design the interaction, but to design good preconditions for a particular form of interaction, a particular materiality. When this materiality is used during acts of interaction we can refer to this intertwined relation of interaction enabled by, and performed with and through material configurations as the materiality of interaction. Clearly there are many aspects and dimensions to take into account when designing interaction (an in addition to thinking about how to materialize its intended form), so in this chapter I present a set of ideas for how an interaction designer can think about, and do, compositional and material-centered interaction design.

Question the Inherent Tension between Memory and Oblivion within a Patrimonial Digital Artifact

Nowadays, the common way to transmit cultural heritage is under its digital form. The digital document suffers from a technological and cultural gap, its integrity and cultural meaning disappearing over time. We show that restoring the document intelligibility is possible through a redocumentation approach. The digital heritage document is processed into an annotational artefact, which uses the web of data as an experimental source of linked and open knowledge. We build the artefact through a double process. On the first hand, a semiotic study of digital heritage documents allows us to understand a universal interpretation path while watching a cultural archive. On the second hand, we convert the results of the semiotic study into ergonomic and editorial recommendations for the annotational device. Considering its patrimonial positioning, the artefact emphasises an editorial tension between memory and oblivion. Then, we examine the device conception environment, its editorial features and its associated prescriptive issues. This paper highlights two aspects: a situational analysis of the current semio-technological doctoral research, and an original hindsight of the editorial project through memory and oblivion concepts mobilized in a digital environment.

“Smooth Space” for Avatars

During the years of Suprematism, between 1919 and 1923 in Russia, one of the movement's most significant contributors, architect, artist and designer El Lissitzky developed a series of works which he entitled “Prouns,” a name the exact meaning of which El Lissitzky never fully revealed, although he later described the purpose of his creations as interchange stations from painting to architecture, i.e., from two dimensional to three dimensional visuality. The author has re-created El Lissitzky's “Proun #5A” from 1919 in the metaverse, as an architecture for avatars. The process in which the translation from analogue drawing to three dimensional digital artifact was undertaken, the challenges encountered during its re-building; framed within a literature review that examines both El Lissitzky's influence on contemporary cyber-architecture, as well as the significance of his spatial investigations and his sources of inspiration during the early decades of the twentieth century will form the contents of this text.