Faculty publications - Faculty of Information

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1807/18289

Faculty at the iSchool are participating in groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research that investigates information in its many manifestations.

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Remote Robotics, or the Digital Re-embodiment of Labout
(2024) Steinhoff, James; Posada, Julian; Delfanti, Alessandro
The remote operation of robots in logistics is becoming increasingly prevalent, with robots being deployed across various sectors and operated by workers from a distance. This allows manual labour to be conducted remotely. Despite eliminating the need for physical proximity between the robot and the operator, remote robotics still necessitates human interaction to control the machinery, a process we call re-embodiment. This working arrangement introduces constraints on the communities and territories of remote workers. Rather than deviating from traditional labour practices, remote robotics extends the reach of capital and perpetuates existing patterns of exploitation.
Critical Technology: A Case Study in Academic Podcasting
(Knowledge Media Design Institute, 2024-07-11) Knight, Lauren; Grimes, Sara M.
Academic podcasting has been lauded for its possibilities in broadening audiences, centering accessibility, and mobilizing knowledge through publicly oriented scholarship. This report explores these benefits by examining the development and success of the Critical Technology podcast (seasons 1-3), created through the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto. Offering a detailed literature review of academic podcasting, we address the possibilities of this medium as described across scholarship. Further, we provide a detailed account of the development of the Critical Technology podcast across each stage of production: planning, pre-production, recording, editing, designing, scoring, transcribing, and distributing. In sum, this report offers a reflective and thorough discussion on the development of the Critical Technology podcast, to make salient the possibilities of academic podcasting as an invaluable scholarly contribution. Written by Lauren Knight and Sara M. Grimes.
Children's Books as Academic Knowledge Mobilization: Project Report
(2024-05-14) Diaz Agudelo, Marcia; Bui, Alan; Lee, Leigh-Ann; Grimes, Sara M.
There is an emerging trend of picture books written by academic authors who want to share their scholarship and ideas with children. This opens exciting new opportunities for democratizing academic knowledge and advancing scientific and technological literacy across age groups. The Children’s Books as Academic Knowledge Mobilization Project compared and analyzed 90 children’s picture books published between 2017 and 2022 written by academics for the purpose of mobilizing research findings, theories, and ideas. First, our literature review identified six “considerations” representing key trends and insights found in the existing academic literature examining children’s picture books, literacy, and learning about research, which provided the structure of our content analysis. We then describe the findings of our content analysis, while identifying best practices and common mistakes to avoid. We recommend that academics think about the six considerations discussed in this report as (or before) they begin writing their own children’s book. After describing our content analysis findings, we provide an additional seven tips for producing an effective and high-quality children’s picture book, covering issues and decisions that arise over the book-production lifecycle. Throughout the report, we emphasize the benefits that picture books can have for children’s scientific literacy and cultural participation.
Rip It Up and Start Again: Creative Labor and the Industrialization of Remix
(2024) Delfanti, Alessandro; Phan, Michelle
Creative industries rely on workers who use sampling and remix to produce new content assembled from existing materials. In the process, remix cultures are commodified and reshaped by industrial logics. Rip-o-matic videos provide an example. These scissor reels are used as visual storyboards for television commercials. They are produced by video editors who cut and paste clips found on video sharing platforms. Interviews with rip-o-matic producers show the impact of the industrialization of remix on creative workers who face challenges to their ability to assert their creativity, content ownership, and reputation. Other examples, such as social media and fast fashion, nuance the picture. Industrialization also paves the way for automation by generative “AI.” These software tools are based on processes of appropriation and remix that mirror those used by rip-o-matic producers. Remix is in sum at the center of today’s corporate cultural production.
Shaping Learning Online for Making and Sharing Children's DIY Media
(The MIT Press, 2020-10-27) Fields, Deborah A.; Grimes, Sara M.
As children’s do-it-yourself (DIY) media creation increasingly takes place online, it is important to investigate the social networking forums where children create and share their own work. As part of a larger Kids DIY Media Partnership, a cross-sector investigation into the kinds of regulatory, infrastructural, and technical support systems that best foster children’s participation in the evolving digital media culture, we conducted a multi-case study that analyzed several children’s DIY media creation and sharing websites. Our analysis focused on how these adult-designed spaces promoted, supported, and at times limited children’s opportunities to engage in making, sharing, and, critically, understanding their rights and responsibilities in what they publish online.
Penguins, Hype, and MMOGs for Kids: A Critical Reexamination of the 2008 “Boom” in Children’s Virtual Worlds Development
(Sage Journals, 2018-09) Grimes, Sara M.
According to various media and academic sources, the virtual worlds landscape underwent a profound transformation in 2008, with the arrival of numerous new titles designed and targeted specifically to young children. Although a growing body of research has explored some of the titles involved in this shift, little remains known of its overall scope and contents. This article provides a mapping of the initial “boom” in children’s virtual worlds development and identifies a number of significant patterns within the ensuing children’s virtual worlds landscape. The argument is made that while the reported boom in children’s virtual worlds has been exaggerated, a number of important shifts for online gaming culture did unfold during this period, some of which challenge accepted definitions of “virtual world” and “multiplayer online game.” The implications of these findings are discussed in light of contemporary developments and trends within children’s digital culture and within online gaming more broadly.
Transformation of the Digital Payment Ecosystem in India: A Case Study of Paytm
(Cogitatio Press, 2023-09-06) Bhatia-Kalluri, Aditi; Caraway, Brett R.
Paytm is a payment app in India providing e‐wallet services; it is also the most prominent mobile e‐commerce app in the world’s third‐largest economy. This article uses Paytm as a case study to better understand the global platform economy and its implications for social and economic inequities. We contextualize the emergence of Paytm by drawing attention to its relationship with India’s developing digital infrastructure and marginalized populations—many of whom are part of the platform’s user base. We use a political economy lens to investigate Paytm’s market structure, stakeholders, innovations, and beneficiaries. Our research is guided by the question: What resources, infrastructures, and policies have given rise to India’s digital payment ecosystem, and how have these contributed to economic and social inequities? Accordingly, we audited the international and Indian business press and Paytm’s corporate communications from 2016 to 2020. Our analysis points to the tensions between private and public interests in the larger platform ecosystem, dispelling notions of platforms as neutral arbiters of market transactions. We argue that Paytm is socially beneficial to the extent that it reduces transaction costs and makes digital payments more accessible for marginalized populations; it is detrimental to the time that it jeopardizes user data and privacy while suppressing competition in the platform economy.
Video Games with Footnotes: Understanding In-Game Developer Commentary
(De Gruyter, 2023) Galey, Alan; Forget, Ellen
In this chapter, we examine a specific and often overlooked kind of video game paratext: the commentaries inserted by game developers into games themselves, which may illuminate a game’s production history and gameplay details from the perspectives of the people who created it. We offer some thoughts on how to approach a concept like annotation by comparing media forms and then work through a set of examples from the games Portal, Gone Home, Tacoma, Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa), and The Stanley Parable, followed by a conclusion that considers not only how to understand in-game developer commentary, but also why it matters.
Pornography
(MIT Press, 2021) Keilty, Patrick
At the Edge of the Internet: Teaching Coding and Sustainability to Himalayan Girls
(2020-04) Garrett, Frances; Price, Matt; Strazds, Laila; Walker, Dawn
This report introduces a two-week workshop on web coding and environmental sustainability at a school for girls in northeastern India. Our discussion of this teaching project reviews issues that shaped the project’s development, outlines resources required for implementation, and summarizes the workshop’s curriculum. Highspeed internet will soon arrive in the region of this recently-recognized UNESCO World Heritage Site. We believe that the training of girls in particular could help redistribute power and resources in regions where women are often poorer, less educated, and excluded from decision-making in institutional and public contexts. Relatively few code teaching projects have grappled with the difficulty of working in offline environments at the “edge of the internet,” and yet moving skills and knowledge into these regions before the internet arrives in full force might help mitigate some of the web’s worst impacts on equity and justice.
Commoning for Fun and Profit: Experimental Publishing on the Decentralized Web
(Association for Computing Machinery, 2022-11) Walker, Dawn; Ishikawa Sutton, Mai; Vira, Udit; Lau, Benedict
The World Wide Web is dominated by big tech and seemingly endless scandals after a decade of growing distrust about the role technology and the Internet play in our society. As a result, there are calls for the creation of alternatives to the existing platforms and infrastructures. One such alternative is a decentralized web (DWeb) where users have control of their data and decisions. This paper presents a collectively-produced organizational autoethnography of the development of an emerging tool for publishing on the decentralized web and the magazine using it to contribute to the digital commons. Three key themes emerged: 1) how a commons-based understanding of boundaries supports participation in a broader ecosystem; 2) the ways commoning as a frame deepens engagement as opposed to a passive model of a digital commons platform; finally 3) the need to re-assess how a cohort lab model that structured the work feeds back into larger goals. From these findings, we reflect on how this project fits into a maturing DWeb ecosystem and what possibilities for social transformation are present in transitional forms of commons. We discuss the pressing need for CSCW and adjacent research communities to participate in the design of, and debates over, the new computing paradigms developing out of this wave of decentralized technologies.
Sustainability Design: Lessons from Designing A "Green Map"
(Atlantis Press, 2016-08) Walker, Dawn; Becker, Christoph
The prevalence of urban agriculture groups mobilizing to create change in cities provides a rich opportunity to understand how these communities use and can design ICTs to support sustainability. In particular, organizations are using ‘green maps’ to make visible local projects, initiatives, and features, in order to reduce entrance barriers and increase participation. This paper reflects on the role of ICTs in these communities as well as the role of design in addressing sustainability concerns. It reports on a design project that developed a green mapping platform to ameliorate the challenges that individuals face in discovering and participating in community-based ‘green’ initiatives. In order to do so, the project adopted sustainability design principles and a participatory approach. While preliminary evaluation concluded the project did not achieve its original objectives, it provided a valuable exploration of practises to address and evaluate sustainability in design projects. It highlighted the value of participation in processes rather than creation of technology products and pointed to lacking support for sustainability in current methods and techniques for systems design. The paper ends with reflections on sustainability design opportunities for community mapping and identifies future areas for exploration
Practicing environmental data justice: From DataRescue to Data Together
(ohn Wiley & Sons Ltd and the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), 2018-10-31) Walker, Dawn; Nost, Eric; Lemelin, Aaron; Lave, Rebecca; Dillon, Lindsey
The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) formed in response tothe 2016 US elections and the resulting political shifts which created widespreadpublic concern about the future integrity of US environmental agencies and policy.As a distributed, consensus‐based organisation, EDGI has worked to document,contextualise, and analyse changes to environmental data and governance practicesin the US. One project EDGI has undertaken is the grassroots archiving of govern-ment environmental data sets through our involvement with the DataRescue move-ment. However, over the past year, our focus has shifted from savingenvironmental data to a broader project of rethinking the infrastructures requiredfor community stewardship of data: Data Together. Through this project, EDGIseeks to make data more accessible and environmental decision‐making moreaccountable through new social and technical infrastructures. The shift fromDataRescue to Data Together exemplifies EDGI's ongoing attempts to put an“en-vironmental data justice”prioritising community self‐determination into practice.By drawing on environmental justice, critical GIS, critical data studies, and emerg-ing data justice scholarship, EDGI hopes to inform our ongoing engagement inprojects that seek to enact alternative futures for data stewardship.
The Warehouse. Workers and Robots at Amazon
(Pluto Books, 2021-10) Delfanti, Alessandro
'Work hard, have fun, make history' proclaims the slogan on the walls of Amazon's warehouses. This cheerful message hides a reality of digital surveillance, aggressive anti-union tactics and disciplinary layoffs. Reminiscent of the tumult of early industrial capitalism, the hundreds of thousands of workers who help Amazon fulfil consumers' desire are part of an experiment in changing the way we all work. In this book, Alessandro Delfanti takes readers inside Amazon's warehouses to show how technological advancements and managerial techniques subdue the workers rather than empower them, as seen in the sensors that track workers' every movement around the floor and algorithmic systems that re-route orders to circumvent worker sabotage. He looks at new technologies including robotic arms trained by humans and augmented reality goggles, showing that their aim is to standardise, measure and discipline human work rather than replace it. Despite its innovation, Amazon will always need living labour's flexibility and low cost. And as the warehouse is increasingly automated, worker discontent increases. Striking under the banner 'we are not robots', employees have shown that they are acutely aware of such contradictions. The only question remains: how long will it be until Amazon's empire collapses?
Improving data quality in large-scale repositories through conflict resolution
(Springer, 2021-10) Kulmukhametov, Artur; Rauber, Andreas; Becker, Christoph
Digital repositories rely on technical metadata to manage their objects. The output of characterization tools is aggregated and analyzed through content profiling. The accuracy and correctness of characterization tools vary; they frequently produce contradicting outputs, resulting in metadata conflicts. The resulting metadata conflicts limit scalable preservation risk assessment and repository management. This article presents and evaluates a rule-based approach to improving data quality in this scenario through expert-conducted conflict resolution. We characterize the data quality challenges and present a method for developing conflict resolution rules to improve data quality. We evaluate the method and the resulting data quality improvements in an experiment on a publicly available document collection. The results demonstrate that our approach enables the effective resolution of conflicts by producing rules that reduce the number of conflicts in the data set from 17 to 3%. This replicable method for presents a significant improvement in content profiling technology for digital repositories, since the enhanced data quality can improve risk assessment and preservation management in digital repository systems.
Imagining Marshall McLuhan as a Digital Reader: an Experiment in Applied Joyce
(Taylor & Francis, 2021-10-04) Galey, Alan
Was Marshall McLuhan’s greatest work not his published writing but his reading? This article examines McLuhan’s annotation practices in his copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and asks what kinds of evidence a prolific annotator like McLuhan might have left if he had done his reading digitally. The first half profiles McLuhan’s annotation practices, illustrated by examples from books from McLuhan’s personal library. The second half describes an informal experiment, in which the author tests McLuhan’s annotation techniques against the capabilities of digital book platforms and formats, specifically PDF (using the Apple Preview app) and EPUB (using the Apple Books app). Overall, the article works through two questions that are relevant to book history, marginalia studies, and digital archiving. How will we understand the evidence left behind by readers when that evidence is in born-digital forms, as archived digital files? And what can we learn about digital reading and annotation from someone like McLuhan, who did those things exceptionally well in another medium? The conclusion reflects on prospects for the study of born-digital marginalia, and on the role of encyclopedism in understanding both McLuhan’s and Joyce’s media theory.
Assessing Digital Sustainability: The Digital Sustainability Model
(Benchmark DP, 2016) Becker, Christoph; Maemura, Emily; Moles, Nathan; Whyte, Jess; Mann, Jess
Digital sustainability is the capacity of digital resources to endure. It means that the digital resources are preserved, that the life cycle of the organization is predictable, and that the life cycle of the assets is known to be safe beyond the life cycle of the organization. We consider the ideal state of digital sustainability one in which a proactive organization continuously optimizes its digital preservation capabilities towards its identified responsibilities and goals to effectively balance cost, benefit and risk, and is thus able to sustain digital resources for a community that endorses the value provided by digital sustainability. This report presents a framework – a model, method and tool – to support organizations in evaluating their digital sustainability in order to identify and prioritize ways to improve it. The Digital Sustainability Model (DSM) aims to support organizations in evaluating their abilities, strengths and weaknesses by supporting a structured self-assessment process that can be completed quickly, yet provides robust insight and useful input for actions to improve over time. The model has been designed to be extensible and evolve over time. The framework and all components are freely available with licenses that encourage adoption and derivative works with attribution. We explain the design process and the model, and shortly report on two case studies that evaluated its application to assess two organizations with advanced capabilities. We highlight how this empirical evaluation, combined with an independent third-party review, has led to changes in the framework that make it more robust. We conclude with an outline of future opportunities and planned initiatives.
Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility: The Past, Present and Future Values of Participatory Design
(Association of Computing Machinery, 2020-06) Becker, Christoph; Light, Ann; Frauenberger, Chris; Walker, Dawn; Palacin, Victoria; Ishtiaque Ahmed, Syed; Smith, Rachel Charlotte; Reynolds-Cuellar, Pedro; Nemer, David
Values play a central role in technology design. But beyond acknowledging the politics of technology, questions remain around where those values are coming from, which values we need, and how they play out and shape the socio-technical systems we create. New challenges such as the climate crisis and societal polarization call for technologists to become part of the public and political arena. This results in a new sense of responsibility, but the closing of CPSR, the Com- puting Professionals for Social Responsibility, has left a gap. Today, across tech workers, academics and computing pro- fessionals, there is a renewed sense of urgency for engaging the public and politics to change course in how computing shapes society. What should a CPSR for the 21st century look like? This interactive workshop aims to re-invigorate the debate around values and social responsibility in Participatory Design with special attention to the Latin American context.
Reading McLuhan Reading Ulysses
(2019-12) Galey, Alan
Marshall McLuhan was not only a prolific reader but also an expert annotator of his own books. Taking as a case study McLuhan’s copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, this article asks what we can learn about McLuhan’s reading from close analysis of his own books. The article begins with a discussion of McLuhan’s media theory as “applied Joyce,” with particular reference to Ulysses, and then turns to an overview of the annotation techniques and strategies visible in McLuhan’s copies of the novel. The conclusion considers McLuhan’s own books as hybrid artifacts that challenge us to rethink rigid distinctions between print and manuscript cultures.
The Tablets of the Law: Reading Hamlet with Scriptural Technologies
(Taylor & Francis, 2011) Galey, Alan
This chapter explores how the material formats of books and digital reading devices inflects Hamlet’s thematizing of reading, writing, memory, inscription, and commandment. In a physical “book and volume” that deploys strong archival connotations of its own, the images of erasure and covenantal inscription in Hamlet carry a force in the 1623 Folio they would not have in another book. Like the received Bible, which Northrop Frye described as “more like a small library than a real book” (The Great Code, xii), the cultural and material contexts of reading construct Shakespeare’s gathered plays as a textual unity corresponding to the codicological unit of the Folio itself. While there is a clear connection between the folio as an archival format and the reception of Shakespeare’s texts, this chapter argues that the connection between the Folio’s form and content is more complicated than that of simple analogy to folio Bibles. This chapter argues, then, that it is not the case that Shakespeare’s Folio appears biblical, but rather that both books in folio format become scriptural technologies that restructure originary acts of writing within a new archive. The chapter concludes by arguing that the idea of scriptural writing tropes, along with the metaphor of the book as archive, has reentered the cultural imagination through tablet-style digital reading devices such as the Kindle—for which Amazon.com markets a “Kindle Edition” of Hamlet, echoing the First Folio’s enabling fiction of the unity of received text and material format.

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