User:Joca/grad seminar 0410

Annotated Bibliography

A selection of five key texts with annotations. I chose to make synopses of each text. In the selection I looked for a combination of texts that explores the various sides of interface design for digital news media. I got x Texts from the HCI-community to get a theoretical basis in the commonly used principles of interface design. Two texts from Johanna Drucker that can work as a fundament to formulate a more probabilistic approach for interface design. And text X which dives more into the the context of news and propaganda.

Drucker, J. (2011). Humanities approaches to interface theory. Culture Machine, 12.

In this paper Johanna Drucker formulates a number of principles to create a theory of interface from the perspective of the humanities. Her motivation for that is the move of academic authoring and reading environments from print media to digital media. This creates the need to reflect on and formulate the theory of interface that is behind the interfaces academics use daily.

Traditionally interface is the domain of engineering and developed into its own field: Human Computer Interaction. This is embodies in the task-oriented and efficiency driven approach in interface design. Drucker finds this mechanistic approach problematic, because it looks at people as users of an interface, and not subjects whose engagement with a digital environment can be analyzed with the insights from critical study.

Building on that she looks for a definition of interface that fits this approach. She cites different authors: Chartiers (2004) and his concept of embodiment, Nunberg (1993) who applied embodiment on the context of digital interfaces and relates it to how it mediates cognitive and intellectual activities. Then Drucker refers to authors from the field of HCI, namely Laurel (1990) in which interface is the necessary contact between interactors and tasks to allow certain functions to be executed. She concludes with Long (1989), a sociologist that defined interface as 'a critical point of interaction between life worlds.'

Showing these definitions from different fields, she states that, although diverse, there is much reason to jettison the idea of the interface as a thing. Drucker sees interface as the combination of what we read and how we read, brought together by engagement. Thus, it is a provocation to cognitive experience.

By seeing the interface as a collection of protocols and activities, mediated by the graphical cues, content and the viewer, Drucker tries to find connection practices from mediastudies. One example she draws is from graphical reading practices. McCloud (1993) looks into ways we connect different frames in a comic. A category of connection that relates to digital interface is the non-sequitur: We shift from text to advertisement to video without a visible connection. But unlike comics, there is no existing narrative to organize these tasks of correlation. As an alternative to the narrative, Drucker brings up Frame Analysis by Goffman (1974). It is an schematic outline of basic principles of translating information to cognitive value. It tries to analyze a combination of information, viewer and graphical interface in terms of relations rather then entities. As there is an interaction between the environment and the viewer, which differ at each reading of a text, there are n-dimensional ways to process the interfaced information.

Drucker concludes that her sketch of interface theory from a humanities perspective involves a synthesis of multiple approaches: graphical reading, frame analysis, and constructivist approaches to subject. She states that these are fundamental to understand the dynamics of the codependent relations between (digital) environments and cognitive events.

Next to a mechanistic view on interface, a different perspective should be accepted according to Drucker: one where ambiguity and uncertainty have a place, and accomodate for a reading experience that is probabilistic.

Drucker, Johanna N.d.DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface. Digital Humanities Quarterly. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000143/000143.html

In this article Drucker describes a theory of performative materiality and the application of it to interface design. Using mainstream principles of critical theory, the author wants to extend the analysis of interface, suggesting that it is not just about understanding how an interface is structured, but by what it does within different domains. After showing how she constructed the theory, she analyzes a number of websites to show possible design implications.

Drucker starts by describing the development of discussing materiality in the context of the digital, mentioning different models of materiality.

Models of materiality

Literal materiality

In the 1990's e-humanities were a new field and the discourse was based on binaries: old versus new media, and as a byproduct the idea that digital objects only exist as an absract binary flux. Matt Kirschenbaum argued that digital formats have a certain materiality, which Drucker describes in her literature review:

Formal materiality

This perspective looks at the codes and structures of human expression that are embedded in a certain artefact. An interface is here a set of instrucitons for reading, listening and experiencing etc.

Forensic materiality

Building upon descriptive and analytic bibliography, and methods used in investigations, the forensic view sees materiality and how it is experienced as part of a wide web of cultural assumptions, events and practices. This perspective analyzes the position of materiality within these perspectives, for example by tracking the resources used in production.

Distributed materiality

To exist, digital artifacts depend on other objects. Distributed materiality looks into the complex interdependencies between the digital and objects as servers and networks. It is an extension of the forensic materiality, where the big difference lies in seeing materiality as a network of things, instead of a single nod within a network.

Performative materiality

This model emphasizes the interpretative event of the production of work. It sees materiality as a set of characteristics that work as cues and triggers that provoke an individual experience.

Connecting the performative to critical theory

Drucker relates the performative concept to different concepts in critical theory that dive into the acts of reading and cognition.

Non-representational approaches

This framework envisions that symbolic codes, visual or graphical, can't represent a preexisting entity. They are entities on their own that perform in a certain transfer of meaning.

Theories of enunciation

Systems of enunciation describe the spoken and speaking subject of language and are drawn from linguistics. The theories distinguish types of discource by looking at markers in the used language. Who speaks, and who is spoken?

Interface theory

A method to analyze interfaces from the position of visual semantics using methods from fields like behavioural cognition, ergonomics, psychology, visual and interaction design.

Systems ecology and new materialisms

The notion that things are part of bigger systems, and that traditional approaches to characterize matter are limited in expressing that. Systems ecology assumes that all apparent things are events.

Media archaeology

This field studies inscriptional technologies based on the frame of the 'real'. It analyzes computational, mathematical and process-driven aspects of digital media, acknowledging the dimension of time to these activities and their outcomes.

Gestures/Prototypes

Workshop Breaking News by ACED

© Giada Fiorindi

http://aced.site/news/what-value-can-design-have-in-the-journalism-of-tomorrow

"During Breaking News, we search for this value: we invite designers, journalists, artists, illustrators, image makers, tech innovators, developers and researchers for a record attempt in storytelling. Together we celebrate the richness of our profession and will search for innovative forms of journalism. We combine artistic and journalistic forces to seek and shift the boundaries of storytelling."