Friday, April 17, 2015

Data Storage and/as "Mobile Interface Theory"?

In Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media, Jason Farman discusses the ways in which mobile technologies serve as intermediaries that help to negotiate between material and digital spaces. For Farman, mobile technologies demystify existing binary relationships between material and digital spaces insofar as they are imbued with the capacity for unique and personalized movement across contexts, therefore investing users with profound embodied possibilities.

Admittedly, my current research about Cuban digital literacies has yet to really broach the emergence of mobile technologies in Cuba. That being said, it is important to address the manner in which Farman's tacit celebration of mobile technologies in Mobile Interface Theory may fall short of addressing unique cultural contexts--like Cuba--where the vast majority of Cuban citizens either do not have access to digital spaces or they are subjected to a level of surveillance and restriction that actively prevents them from seeking out sources that conflict with the Cuban government's ideological apparatus. Cubans, in this sense, are less concerned with reconciling material and digital spaces--as Farman suggests mobile technologies might accomplish--than merely gaining access to digital spaces and locating Cuba and its cultural heritage within a more global context.

Interestingly enough, though, over the last several years Cubans have taken advantage of advancements in data storage--namely, thumb drives--to facilitate data transfer of sources that would otherwise be unavailable to users on the Internet. In so doing, they have mitigated many of the restrictions imposed by the Cuban government on prospective users while delivering content freely and ubiquitously to more and more Cubans who would have otherwise not had the level of access or the resources to receive and engage with such content.

In gesturing to the prospects for data storage to actively circumvent existing restrictions to digital spaces in Cuba, this raises important questions about what constitutes a mobile technology or a mobile interface. It also highlights the ways in which the scope or Farman's notion of "mobile interface theory" may be limited or hampered by assumptions that distinctions between material and digital spaces may be uniformly exported to different social, cultural, and political contexts. Of course, expanding "mobile interface theory" to include data storage and the like may at the very least begin to speak to a multitude of different contexts, but this is just one example in one context.

Saturday, April 11, 2015

Some New Directions in My Project on Cuban Digital Rhetorics

This passed week, I've had a number of conversations and discoveries that have really helped me further develop the digital humanities project I've been working on the past few months. In a brief conversation with Matt Frye about his own research he mentioned the term, "leapfrogging." "Leapfrogging" communicates the idea that areas that have not developed "stable" or "up-to-date" technological and economic infrastructures might rapidly move themselves forward through the adoption of contemporary systems without going through a series of intermediary steps of development. With purveyors of hardware, technology, telecommunications, etc. lining up to "update" Cuba's existing technological infrastructure in the wake of an agreement between President Obama and Raul Castro to relax trade and travel restrictions between the U.S. and Cuba,

Cuba purportedly stands to experience an unprecedented amount of growth in terms of material access, or at the very least an influx of material contexts in which users could perhaps own or operate digital technologies and participate as users on the Internet and Web 2.0. This "influx of material contexts" is very important to keep in mind given the various economic realities and debilitating restrictions imposed on Cuban citizens attempting to own or operate digital technologies regardless of the setting in which such use actually takes place. Indeed, according to a recent Bendixen & Amandi Poll for Univision Noticias - Fusion in collaboration with The Washington Post, it was reported that only 16% of Cubans living in Cuba have access to the Internet. And while these poll results might lead some to simply assume that Cubans living in Cuba as a whole would stand to benefit from a surge in material access, it is still important to keep in mind the manner in which the aforementioned economic realities and restrictions have tempered the use of digital technologies and the Internet in profoundly different ways for various populations.

In the past couple of years, Roots of Hope, an organization comprised of students and young professionals seeking to empower youth in Cuba to become authors of their own futures, have organized events in which computer programmers and coders from all over the globe are invited to explore the prospects for combating Internet restrictions in Cuba and to develop ideas, applications, and "innovative technology solutions" that speak directly to the existing hardware, literacy, and access limitations that serve as the foundation for the relationship between Cuba and technology.

These are very important contexts for me to consider as I move forward with my project in the digital humanities, in that they challenge me to re-consider the approach I am taking to the notion of digital rhetorics among Cubans living in Cuba. With all of these and more interested parties vying to enter the conversation around Cuba's digital and telecommunications future, I remain focused on how we might imagine and enact these futures in conversation with Cubans living in Cuba themselves.

Saturday, April 4, 2015

StoryCorps, a Mobile Application and a Web site

This past week I explored StoryCorps, a digital storytelling application designed for multiple mobile platforms (Personally, I used my Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 to navigate the application). StoryCorps allows users to conduct interviews with individuals and share them in a vast and burgeoning archive of other interviews collected within the application itself. Overall, it was relatively easy to find (I used the Google Play Store), download (It was only 37.5 MB), and sign up for (It only asks for a Username, Email, and Password, with other optional information). The interface is user-friendly and easy to navigate, with a rather simplified drop-down menu that includes just six options (including logging out). Below I will provide a brief narrative of my specific "user experience" of StoryCorps. Many of the observations that I make in my brief narrative will be expanded further when I articulate the terms of prospective pedagogical applications of StoryCorps in a DTC 101 course or otherwise.



In the "About StoryCorps" tab, they announce that their mission is to "provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives." They also indicate that interviews that are recorded with StoryCorps are preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The language used throughout the application itself is exclusively English without any recognizable options for alternative language or access options.


In looking at the interviews that were archived in the "Browse" tab, I was a bit dismayed by the lack of options available for users to somehow conduct more dedicated and specific keyword searches, thus making it a bit difficult to understand or manipulate the logic of how interviews were initially organized. However, users do have the option to "like" (indicated by the heart) or "friend" (indicated by the plus sign beside the outline of a human body) other users. In this sense, users can personalize their own "People I Follow" pages, though there were no options available to comment on or interact with these same or other users on the mobile application.

Though I did not myself conduct and record an interview with the StoryCorps mobile application, I was very much intrigued by what Melanie Kill dubs, the "hard and soft infrastructure" ("Teaching Digital Rhetoric") of the application in terms of how users are limited in many ways by the existing infrastructure and design components imposed within the platform ("hard infrastructure"), yet also offered unique and important avenues within the platform with which to carve out spaces for more personalized manipulation and agency ("soft infrastructure").

As it stands, StoryCorps generally requires that interviewer(s) and interviewee(s) occupy the same physical space, therefore limiting interview options based on mobility and geographical proximity. While StoryCorps does provide rather extensive and generally categorized lists (ranging from "Family Heritage" to "Love & Relationships" to "War") of sample questions with which to organize and conduct interviews, they also provide options to "Write your own question" as well. What is more, after users complete their interviews they are also invited to provide a title, summary, keywords (which includes keywords that are: "General (ex. birth, marriage, war)"; tied to an "Organization (ex. TED, YMCA)"; and/or related to specific "Places (ex. Chicago, IL)"), participant information (which includes: "First Name (required)", "Last Name (optional)," and Email (optional)"), and location ("City," "State/Region/Province," and "Select Country"). Though I certainly appreciated and valued the capacity with which users might generate and include all of this sort of personalized information, it was unclear how this information could actually be used by users of the StoryCorps mobile application themselves if that information if it is neither made available for perusal in the "Browse" tab nor made searchable with any kind of search field.

Many of the limitations I've described above with regard to the lack of search options available in the StoryCorps web application vexed and gave me enough pause to the extent that I decided to visit the StoryCorps Web site itself. Without engaging in an exhaustive study of the affordances and capabilities available to users on the StoryCorps Web site, I will certainly say that it is far more complex and dynamic than its counterpart, the mobile application. For example, it offers: playlists, recording locations, programs and initiatives, and, most importantly, a search field in which users can find other interviews in accordance with their own keywords and search criteria. The distinctions that I recognized between the mobile application and the Web site really helped me to develop some provisional and half baked activities and assignments which might be used in a DTC 101 course.

While I see quite a bit of value in actually composing with StoryCorps, though, I was primarily interested in the varied levels of affordances and design features that distinguished the mobile application from the Web site. This line of inquiry is intriguing to me, because it highlights the ways in which mobile applications are not simply digital surrogates of the Web sites that they emerge from but profoundly different platforms with which to accomplish comparable tasks. Which is to say, I could certainly imagine a longer sequence of assignments that use StoryCorps, a sequence that begins at the level of "listening to" and recognizing design features and affordances between and among the Web site and mobile application and then moving to actually using the platform itself to conduct and archive interviews. With StoryCorps providing a number of sample questions that users can use in the course of their interviews, it would be valuable to have students perhaps conduct a series of interviews in which they use these sample questions for some interviews and others where they design their own questions. Having students use as well as reflect on their use of StoryCorps in these different registers would go a long way in really simulating the "hard and soft infrastructure" of the digital storytelling platform. I also see quite a bit of potential in asking students to consider the rhetorical implications of the choices they elect to make in the course of their composing the title, summary, keywords, participant information, and location. This is all food for thought, though I am sure I will continue to flesh this out in the days that come.