For the DWRL’s annual Speaker Series in April 2018, Professor Reider discussed three canons of rhetoric that he developed for the post-PC era of physical computing: transduction, allegorization, and eversion. These canons help his students make projects with microcontrollers and code. Watch the talk here:
We Need to Talk About Credibility
Last week I hid someone from my Facebook news feed. We’ve all done it, and I’m sure people have done it to me. I was tired of seeing things that I found obnoxious or insipid or offensive or false or all of the above, and rather than unfriend them, I simply silenced them. This is not something I make a habit of, but it’s amazing how easy it is to block out what you don’t want to see. It literally …
Lesson Plan: Data Collection and Database Rhetorics
Some public data makes sense , and some data does not. Not only does this have to do with the way data is presented or cherry picked, but research suggests that in order to get credible results, surveys should provide clear questions that are unambiguous, unbiased, and worded in a way that prompts respondents to answer truthfully (Dillman 2007). This might seem obvious when it’s written down as it is here, but the importance of a survey’s rhetoric may not …
Using Raugmenter to Map the 1966 Tower Shooting
If you wanted to design an augmented reality app, but didn’t have programming expertise, what would you do? Last fall, two graduate students, Felipe Cruz (now, Dr. Cruz), Keith Leisner, and Deb Streusand began working on Raugmenter in the DWRL. This tool was designed to make the augmented reality platform LayAR accessible for people who aren’t developers. The application allows users to build a tour of points of interest by entering data into a form and selecting GPS coordinates from a …
Paper Maps and Locative Media
(Paper) map of Austin, 1936. Image via the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. (Paper) map of Austin, 1936. Image via the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. People have told me that I have a good sense of direction. I attribute this to being the navigator during road trips when I was little, before there was GPS or Google or MapQuest or Yahoo Maps. Last semester, while researching augmented reality within locative media and speculating as to its future, …
Augmented Reality: Just Another Marketing Tool?
A lot of the augmented reality apps that are out there right now, though they have the potential to profoundly shape the human experience, are very well-suited for advertising. According to some, this isn’t an accident.
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Anxiety? There’s an App for That
My students often have to give presentations at the end of the semester, and public speaking is something that genuinely terrifies a lot of people. In addition to building a supportive, low-judgment environment, I try to give them a few tips for public speaking and how to approach it with minimal anxiety, but this deserves an entire course in itself. And while it’s normal to be nervous about speaking in public, sometimes this anxiety turns into full-blown panic. If that’s the …
Does Augmented Reality Diminish our Humanity?
Augmented reality, still in the nascent stages of technological development but quickly gaining traction, attempts to alter the way we interact with the world as we know it. Ideally, devices and apps that help to “augment” our reality will help us accomplish tasks that we wouldn’t be able to accomplish otherwise. The Google Glass experiment is probably one of the most famously publicized recent attempts at bringing augmented reality to the general population through wearable technology.