Today I'm giving a Pecha Kucha style presentation of our CSCW paper 'Representation and Communication: Challenges in interpreting large social media datasets' (Rost, M., Barkhuus, L., Cramer, H. and Brown, B.), at the University of Gothenburg during an event about social media research.

The purpose of Pecha Kucha is to make the presentations more focused and to the point. The format is to show 20 slides, each slide for 20 seconds. It restricts you from going on and on. It will be the first time I will do a Pecha Kucha presentation and am looking forward to it. I hope it will be as fun for the audience as I will have while giving it!

Find the abstract of the paper below.

Online services provide a range of opportunities for
understanding human behaviour through the large aggregate
data sets that their operation collects. Yet the data sets they
collect do not unproblematically model or mirror the world
events. In this paper we use data from Foursquare, a
popular location check-in service, to argue for the
importance of analysing social media as a communicative
rather than representational system. Drawing on logs of all
Foursquare check-ins over eight weeks we highlight four
features of Foursquare’s use: the relationship between
attendance and check-ins, event check-ins, commercial
incentives to check-in, and lastly humorous check-ins
These points show how large data analysis is affected by
the end user uses to which social networks are put.

If you just updated an Android device to 4.2, and try to develop for it, you may have noticed that there are no Developer Options anymore. They used to be in the settings, just above "About phone", but since 4.2 they are gone. This can make it difficult (impossible) to enable USB debugging. However there is a fix for it that once you know it is simple enough.

All you have to do to enable it is to go to Settings->About phone. Then go down to Build number, and tap it 7 times. After the first three times there will be a count down towards the hidden option. Just go back to the settings menu, and the Developer options will have appeared.

I found this from this forum thread.

On March 11, I will defend my PhD thesis 'Mobility is the Message: Experiments with Mobile Media Sharing'! The official announcement is here, and you can already find the thesis here.

The thesis is comprised of 6 papers and 100 pages of new material that brings the 6 papers together. Find the abstract for the thesis below.

This thesis explores new mobile media sharing applications by building, deploying, and studying their use. While we share media in many different ways both on the web and on mobile phones, there are few ways of sharing media with people physically near us. Studied were three designed and built systems: Push!Music,Columbus, and Portrait Catalog, as well as a fourth commercially available system – Foursquare. This thesis offers four contributions: First, it explores the design space of co-present media sharing of four test systems. Second, through user studies of these systems it reports on how these come to be used. Third, it explores new ways of conducting trials as the technical mobile landscape has changed. Last, we look at how the technical solutions demonstrate different lines of thinking from how similar solutions might look today.

Through a Human-Computer Interaction methodology of design, build, and study, we look at systems through the eyes of embodied interaction and examine how the systems come to be in use. Using Goffman’s understanding of social order, we see how these mobile media sharing systems allow people to actively present themselves through these media. In turn, using McLuhan’s way of understanding media, we reflect on how these new systems enable a new type of medium distinct from the web centric media, and how this relates directly to mobility.

While media sharing is something that takes place everywhere in western society, it is still tied to the way media is shared through computers. Although often mobile, they do not consider the mobile settings. The systems in this thesis treat mobility as an opportunity for design. It is still left to see how this mobile media sharing will come to present itself in people’s everyday life, and when it does, how we will come to understand it and how it will transform society as a medium distinct from those before. This thesis gives a glimpse of what this future may look like.

I wrote a simple database library for rapid prototyping some time back, and decided to put it on github for anyone to use. It mainly takes away the need to setup a database structure before being able to save data on a server when writing simple web apps or other client apps.

It is both a PHP library, a server backend, and a javascript library in one. Use it for prototyping only, as it is not made to be neither secure nor efficient. However, once you got your app up and running, it should be easy to exchange those parts, or just make the library more secure.

Feel free to use and feel free to comment or send pull requests. The repo is here.

I could not find a list of all workshops for CHI 2013 so I figured I might just as well make a list of the workshops as I find out about them. Email me about missing workshops.

The official list is out and can be found here.