Graduate Student Research
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1807/69169
This collection houses research by iSchool students in master and doctoral programs.
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Item Review of Book Ownership in Stuart England by David Pearson(Penn State University Press, 2024-10) Zani, SamanthaItem Digital Design Marginalization: New Perspectives on Designing Inclusive Interfaces(ACM, 2021) Sin, Jaisie; Franz, Rachel L.; Munteanu, Cosmin; Barbosa Neves, BarbaraWe conceptualize Digital Design Marginalization (DDM) as the process in which a digital interface design excludes certain users and contributes to marginalization in other areas of their lives. Due to non-inclusive designs, many underrepresented users face barriers in accessing essential services that are moving increasingly, sometimes exclusively, online – services such as personal finance, healthcare, social connectivity, and shopping. This can further perpetuate the “digital divide,” a technology-based form of social inequality that has offline consequences. We introduce the term Marginalizing Design to describe designs that contribute to DDM. In this paper, we focus on the impact of Marginalizing Design on older adults through examples from our research and discussions of services that may have marginalizing designs for older adults. Our aim is to provide a conceptual lens for designers, service providers, and policy makers through which they can use to purposely lessen or avoid digitally marginalizing groups of users.Item From Nowhere: Utopian and Dystopian Visions of Our Past, Present, and Future(Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, 2013) Young, Chris J.Since the earliest known works of literature three-thousand years ago, the vision for a better society, an ideal society, has driven and inspired cultures to improve their social conditions. These visions were written around themes of voyage and discovery, the classical age, and medieval Christianity, that culminated in Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516. Since More’s vision of the imaginary society on the island of Utopia, writers have envisioned practical societies that transform our economic, political, technological, and cultural infrastructures taking us to uncharted lands, distant planets, and unimaginable futures that challenge and alter our society’s foundations. These utopian, and sometimes dystopian, visions show us what our society could be like and how we could achieve it, for better or for worse. This exhibition will showcase a selection of these utopian and dystopian visions ranging from Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God to Francis Bacon’sNew Atlantis and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.Item What’s Cached is Prologue: Reviewing Recent Web Archives Research Towards Supporting Scholarly Use(2018) Maemura, EmilyWeb archives are essential to support historical scholarship in the online age. Research on web archives spans many disciplines, often requiring domain-specific expertise. The wide-ranging nature of the literature makes it difficult to obtain a current overview of the field, but this view is needed to identify which core challenges define the field, and assess the different approaches taken to address them. This paper provides such a review of the current landscape of web archives research, focusing on addressing the common challenges faced to support scholarly use of archived web materials. The analysis describes three challenges and identifies key concepts and current approaches for each: (1) how to organize and select from web archives collections; (2) how to critically examine these sources; and (3) how to approach ethics and consent for using archived web materials. The discussion addresses open questions and tensions, highlighting the sociotechnical nature of these challenges and revealing opportunities to apply existing work from the body of knowledge of information studies. It concludes with several recommendations for future research directions to support scholarly use of web archives.Item Understanding Games and the Industry that Produces Them: A Review of the Edited Volume The Video Game Industry(Department of Communication and Media and the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2015-08-01) Young, Chris J.Published as part of Routledge Studies in Innovation, Organization and Technology (RIOT!), The Video Game Industry, edited by Peter Zackariasson and Timothy L. Wilson, provides a predominantly technological and economic perspective on the video game industry in North America and Europe. As the title of this book review suggests, the aim of this volume was to “understand video games and the industry that produces them”. To achieve this aim, the volume was broken into four parts: “The Nature of the Industry” as a distinct industry bordering the software and cultural industries; “Geographical Comparisons” between North America and European video game industries; the technological, ecological, and societal “Effects of the Industry;” and “The Future” of the industry in the years to come. The Video Game Industry provides a must-read overview for scholars researching the video game industry, covering topics that range from the industry as a subculture to the ecological impact of the industry to the localized development of regional industries. However, the edited volume does exclude some important topics, such as the Japanese industry, gender and misogyny within the industry, and the contributions of non-triple-A forms of game making, for scholars researching those fields.Item The Bibliographical Variants Between The Last of Us and The Last of Us Remastered(The University of Chicago Press Journals, 2016-12-01) Young, Chris J.Adopting Matthew Kirschenbaum’s terms for the description of born-digital texts and electronic records—layer, version, release, object, state, instance, and copy—I present a case-study of The Last of Us and The Last of Us Remastered that reveals some of the secretive publishing and manufacturing practices of the videogame industry, and suggest a potential way forward for the description and citation of PS3 and PS4 videogames released on Blu-ray discs and digital downloads through the PS Store. I only discuss the platform-specific knowledge of Sony Computer Entertainment and their PS3 and PS4 consoles and videogames, specifically the editions of The Last of Us and The Last of Us Remastered. However, in doing so I provide a close reading of The Last of Us texts that furthers our knowledge and discussion of the bibliography of videogames. Such an approach draws out the minutiae critical to developing a field of research around the bibliography of videogames that may not be as perceptible in a much larger macro analysis of born-digital texts and electronic records. However, such macro-analysis studies, or distant-reading projects, will be essential in the future if the field of bibliography is to develop systems of documentation for the bibliography of videogames and other born-digital texts and electronic records.Item Issues of Participation: A Framework for Choices and Compromises(IGI Global, 2014) Costantino, TerryMembers of the Participatory Design (PD) community often raise concerns about participation – participation in what, by whom, and for what purpose? To help determine and answer questions important to participatory practice, the author derived a framework of key issues of participation using literature from Participatory Design and related practices such as Participatory Action Research, Participatory Democracy and Participatory Development. The key issues are: values, representation, power relations, context, transformations, effectiveness, and sustainability. The author posits that giving attention to these issues when designing, conducting and reflecting on participation will improve participatory practices by making choices and compromises more explicit to those involved in the research as well as those who review the research results. The paper discusses how the author derived the framework and then uses the selected literature to explore each of the seven issues and how they can be addressed in participatory practice in general, and within PD more specifically.