Cits Videos

Originally recorded March 11th, 2005. Larry Martinez is an alumnus of UC Santa Barbara and current Associate Professor of Political Science at California State University in Long Beach. Larry Martinez, a long time supporter of CITS presents a lecture entitled "Cyberspace as Political Marketplace: How Does Democracy Rate as Reality TV?" Dr. Martinez's talk will focus on the commercialization of the democratic process and the emergence of what he calls the "political industrial complex." Involved in this discussion is the degree to which online technologies contribute to the commercialization of democracy. In his talk Dr. Martinez will argue that online technologies play a major role in the acceleration of commercialization. Dr. Martinez will present evidence from the most recent Presidential campaign.

Originally recorded October 22, 2004. Ketan Mayer-Patel is professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He was visiting UC Santa Barbara at the time of the recording. A decade ago, many multimedia researchers and experts were predicting that the myriad devices in our homes that receive, display, create, and otherwise manipulate media information (e.g., televisions, VCR's, phones, etc.) would be replaced by fewer, more powerful, devices that satisfied many of these functions. This idea was known as "convergence" and it has, for the most part, not come to pass. In this talk, Dr. Mayer-Patel explores some of the barriers to media convergence and characterize when and why convergence can be successful and when and why convergence is likely to fail. In doing so, he articulates a new model for thinking about the future of multimedia which he calls "confederated media". One essential feature of future multimedia applications within a confederated media context is that applications are likely to be distributed over a number of different specialized devices that share resources in a local environment while transmitting and receiving a number of independent, but semantically related media streams. Within the confederated media model are a number of challenges and open research questions concerning application adaptation, network coordination, and media representation. The talk will provide a survey of Dr. Mayer-Patel s research group's efforts to address these problems along with a more detailed examination of their proposed network mechanisms for coordinated, peer-aware streaming.

Originally recorded April 15, 2005. Jennifer Earl is a professor in the Sociology department at UC Santa Barbara. She is also currently the Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society www.cits.ucsb.edu. Online political activism has rapidly increased over the past decade, forcing state authorities to adapt repressive strategies to handle this change. Few researchers, however, have explored hostile state reactions to online, unconventional political activity and fewer still have tried to analyze the impacts of state repression on internet-based activism. This presentation will use data on strategic voting, which occurred during the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections, to examine two core concerns of social movements scholars: (1) the effects of repression on subsequent movement mobilization; and (2) the effects of repression on subsequent tactical choices. Findings suggest that researchers must account for core technological and social features of the Internet as an activist environment in explaining repression's effects in the 21st century. This is particularly true when researchers study activism that emerges and thrives online, as compared to activism that begins offline and migrates online at a later point.

Originally recorded October 29, 2004. Jacqueline Spafford is Visual Resources Curator in the Department of Art History provides potential users with a tour through the wealth and variety of images available, the search and presentation features of Insight, and what other advances are in store.

Originally recorded May 6, 2005. Karen Lunsford is a Professor in the Education and Writing Program departments at UC Santa Barbara.In recent years, scholars (e.g., Bolter, 2001; White, 2000) have fore-grounded hypertext genres as the primary challenge to traditional argumentation that digital media offer. For example, hypertexts may replace the hierarchical, linear logic of traditional argumentative texts with more rhizomatic, associative, yet equally persuasive argument structures. However, this focus on hypertext genres has overshadowed the often invisible, black-boxed technologies that also should be seen as argumentative agents: databases.To be sure, information specialists (e.g., Lakoff, 1987; Bowker Spinuzzi, 2003) have commented on how information architectures affect employees and other database users, and they have discussed the responsibilities that rhetoricians have in contributing to effective information design. Yet what are needed are more accounts of the discussions that groups engage in as they decide what values should be reflected by their information architectures--particularly when these groups are composed of information specialists alongside "content area" specialists. What strategies do they employ to embed their decisions into elements such as database fieldnames, and, more important, how do they also actively persuade the intended database users to align with values they have chosen?In this presentation, Professor Lunsford reports on a case study of a consortium that was funded to develop a database of resources for fostering diversity in educational settings. She draws on semi-structured and text-based interviews with six key consortium members, along with rhetorical analyses of several of the project's central documents. She examines how the consortium took on the challenge of not only developing the database but also subtly acclimating teachers to the values that the database embodied--thus building the distributed common ground needed for the consortium's more traditional written arguments and the database to succeed.

Originally recorded October 7, 2005. Dr. Kelly Garrett is Senior Research Fellow, University of California, Irvine, Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO) www.crito.uci.edu.Dr. Garrett premises his talk with a question, how will people use the Internet and other emerging information and communication technologies to shape their exposure to political information? In his talk Dr. Garrett will focus on two interconnected questions, how contemporary use of the Internet is influencing citizens overall exposure to political information? And how individual choices about exposure to news items in an online environment afford enhanced control over partisanship.

Originally recorded January 16, 2004. Francesca Bray at the time was Professor of Cultural Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara.

Originally recorded December 6, 2002. George Legrady is an artist and Professor of Art Studio and Media Arts and Technology at UC Santa Barbara. Professor Legrady's presentation focuses on digital media arts exhibitions that use computer technology as a means of recording the audience's presence and movement within the gallery space. He discusses a presentation of projects, and issues to address in the design of such installations. Topics include: audience motion study, interface sensing technology, planning around limitations, designing the interface, creating the audio/visual/mechanical event. Professor Legrady addresses questions about audience activity such as, how does the space influence the action to be generated? He considers the audience as a group and actions such as clustering, swarming, flocking behavior, and sampling. He also presents work that interacts with the individual spectator through movement in the space, location, movement, timing. And works that modify behaviors such as calmness, nervousness, encounters, etc. Another aspect he considers involves cultural questions: How can the audience's movements be integrated as a process in the narrative development? And finally he speaks to the issue of what are the consequences of such environments in terms of the development of "intelligent spaces" in artistic exhibition?

Originally recorded in January of 2003. Dorothy Chun is Professor of German and Applied Linguistics in the Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She edits the on-line journal Language Learning and Technology and is currently director of the Ph.D. Emphasis in Applied Linguistics at UCSB. Her areas of research involve second language acquisition (L2 phonology and intonation, L2 reading and vocabulary acquisition). She has conducted studies on cognitive process in learning with multimedia and has developed CD-ROMs and websites for language acquisition.

Originally recorded March 14, 2002. Cynthia Stohl is a professor of Communicaition at UC Santa Barbara. Professor Stohl work connects several areas in organizational and group studies. She is concerned with the relationships among internal and external communication processes as they are manifest in global collaborations. Her most recent work addresses a diversity of network and collective action organizations in the global context including a focus on new communication technologies and terrorist organizations. Her talk in March 2002 explored how in today's complex and volatile global environment members of different organizations (often competitors) are working together, for a limited time, to collaborate on solving technical and social problems and creating products that they would be unable to do themselves in an effective and efficient manner. New communication technologies and the ability to share data through new knowledge-management techniques make such collaborations feasible and sometimes quite successful. These technological innovations and the changing nature of group membership, however, have also created several challenges for the study and understanding of group process. For example, traditional notions of power and commitment are less useful in understanding group process when group members identify with differential targets, technologies enable resources and information to be shared equally, and group members are not necessarily co-located study of engineering collaborations illustrates the ways in which power and commitment can be re-conceptualized through semantic network analyses to better understand the dynamics of group collaboration.

Originally recorded November 19, 2004. Sara Fabrikant at the time was a Professor in the Geography Department at UC Santa Barbara. She now heads the Geographic Information Visualization & Analysis (GIVA) Division in the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich - Irchel. Her talk on Spatialization: using spatial metaphors to represent non-spatial information is premised on the notion that in recent years, cartographers and GIScientists have become involved in extending geographic concepts and cartographic design approaches to the depiction of non-geographic data archives. Dr. Fabrikant's presentation reports on current progress and future opportunities in this emerging research field commonly known as spatialization or information visualization. More specifically, this talk proposes a design framework for the construction of cartographically sound spatialized displays. Spatializations differ from ordinary data visualization and geovisualization in that they may be explored as if they represented spatial information. Three design areas can be identified for this endeavor: the visuo-spatial structure employed to represent the world of information, the representation of meaning encapsulated in the database for knowledge discovery, and finally the potential experiential effects spatialized views have on information seekers when exploring semantic spaces to satisfy a particular information need. Using an information space of Reuters news wire articles as an example, key elements of the proposed framework will be highlighted.

Today's Internet applications are becoming integral components of our everyday life. We rely on the Internet for performing financial transactions (Etrade), access to personal records (DMV), and communication with friends and family (Myspace/Facebook). Yet all this comes at a time when the Internet's security vulnerabilities are exploited on a daily basis for financial gain by malicious parties. This talk will describe some of the recent efforts to improve security of network applications through the use of reputation systems. Reputations are robust security mechanisms increasingly deployed in online communities such as Amazon and EBay. He will describe how reputations can be improved and used to secure network level services such as social networks. In addition he will also highlight and initiate discussion on the tension between accountability via reputations and information privacy.

Undergraduate honors student in Communication Kier Wallis and Professor of Communication Ron Rice discuss research on technology and health information privacy? The presentation includes a findings on how consumers?are adopting to?digital medical record technology. Originally recorded as part of the UC Santa Barbara's Center for Information Technology & Society's Fall Quarter 2005 Lecture series, October 21, 2005.

Katy Pearce a graduate student in Communication speaks about her experiences in the Former Soviet regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus with respect to technology and internet use. Katy discusses her work with both School Connectivity Programs in Armenia and Azerbaijan, funded by the U.S. State Department to build telecom infrastructure, provide internet access to secondary schools and train school communities as well as regional grass-roots blogging and podcasting projects. Katy also discusses future research opportunities. Original recorded as part of UC Santa Barbara's Center for Information Technology & Society's 2006 Fall Quarter lecture series, November 17, 2006.

Doc Searls is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and one of the world's best-known bloggers. (A search for his name on google brings up millions of results). His work as a journalist, speaker and advocate of the Internet led to a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator in 2005. Author and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman calls Doc "one of the most respected technology writers in America." The title of Doc's lecture is also the title of the new book he's writing as a Visiting Scholar at CITS. His thesis is that the Net is both a whole new world and a critical new infrastructure, destined to become a basic utility similar to roads, electric service, telephone, cable and water. As a world it is growing and changing rapidly, thanks to contributions by countless individuals, with profound empowering effects on individuals, social groups, educational institutions, and governments. As a utility it is reducing distance, and costs of connecting across those distances, to zero -- posing huge challenges to infrastructure builders old and new.Doc is also the first observer to note that the Web's infrastructure now supports more and more live activities, as well as the static constructions we call "sites." Thanks to podcasting, blogging, instant messaging and "texting" on cell phones, knowledge and ideas can "snowball" at unprecedented rates, with large effects. In his lecture he'll show how the "Live Web" of engaged individuals instantly provided helpful information about the recent Day Fire when official sources and the mainstream media both broke down or ignored the topic. Originally recorded as part of UC Santa Barbara's Center for Information Technology and Society's 2006 Fall Quarter lecture series, October 19, 2006.

Here is a brief selection of interview clips from the UC Santa Barbara Forum on Digital Transitions. What do vloggers like Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson do the day after Videoblogging Week 2006? They join JD Lasica and others to record dozens of interviews with leaders from both academia and business about transitions and challanges for online communites. Some of the people interviewed include Howard Reingold, Mena Trott, danah boyd, John Sealy Brown and many other interesting folks on the cutting edge of online communities.