Research Statement
Humanistic Informatics
I am interested in the emerging domain of humanistic informatics. This domain involves the fusion of theories from many traditions, including HCI, critical and media theory, design, film and video game theory, and philosophy. Humanistic informatics explores how the methodologies embedded in each of these traditions need to be revisited, because the nature of the artifacts they study have changed or the use to which these methodologies are put have changed substantially since their original development. For example, critical theory is powerful at discovering the subtle operations of ideology and sign systems, which may contribute to our understanding of interface design and evaluation; less helpfully, critical theory tends to view all artifacts as texts, which creates problems when we study cultural artifacts, such as video games and mobile phone interfaces, that are not texts. Likewise, the application of theories of visual culture, is problematic, though far from useless, when examining multimodal and interactive interfaces.
The problem goes the other way as well: whereas traditional HCI has a powerful vocabulary for analyzing tasks and interactions, its focus on the individual, rational subject obfuscates the significance of culture, ideology, and technological determinisms. In recent years, HCI’s focus seems to have changed, as evidenced by the papers presented at conferences such as ACM CHI, toward a more experiential, embodied, and even aesthetic turn. This turn is encouraged by forms of computing that go beyond the one-brain, one-screen paradigm, including collaborative computing, ubiquitous computing, and mixed and virtual reality.
While HCI devotes more attention toward subjective experiences, computing continues to transform how humans relate to their work, their play, and each other. Old distinctions between the producer and consumer, between the professional and the amateur, between the private and the public, and so on are all breaking down in the age of MySpace, game mods, and podcasts. Increasingly, software applications are designed to be modified, rather than merely used: from Dreamweaver’s and Flash’s APIs to Second Life and programmable game engines, platforms’ users are often their developers. Application and interaction design is more than ever a cultural process (it always was, of course, but now it is far more obvious and far more urgent that we understand it as such).
Humanistic informatics should help bridge the gap between HCI (including interface and interaction design) and humanistic studies of the experience of media (including literary and film theory, ideology- and gender-based criticism, etc.). Ways that humanistic informatics can help bridge this gap include examining key concepts from the humanities in the context of computing and bringing methodologies (or approaches) from the humanities into HCI research.
Humanistic concepts relevant to HCI include aesthetics, ideology, identity, and authorship, among others. Each of these has a rich history of theoretical development and application in the humanities. A simple example is aesthetics, which in HCI has often been used in the impoverished sense of “looks nice,” whereas in the humanities, aesthetics has a long history of reflecting on art, beauty, pleasure, and self-transcendence and the relationship of these to material artifacts, from poems to frescoes. Clearly interfaces also can be art, embody beauty, cause pleasure, and help us improve ourselves, and we should endeavor to understand how they do.
Humanistic methodologies include textual criticism, semiotic analysis, genealogical analysis, and phenomenological and hermeneutic interpretation. How do we classify and understand the meaning of relationships among people, technologies, and artifacts? How do we evaluate the role of intentionality relative to other pressures and agencies in the creation and use of technologies? How might we study people’s “horizons” to help us design more humane interfaces, from standpoints as diverse as usability, cybersecurity, and social justice? How might the value of the system be seen as a product of emergent responses to system “breakdown” in the phenomenological sense, and can we design to encourage it? Critical inquiry should help interface and interaction designers ask compelling questions; established empirical methodologies from the social sciences and HCI itself can provide answers. In this way, critical inquiry and empirical evaluation can work together to ensure rigorous understanding of digital experiences.
The discipline described here is a large one, so in what follows I summarize some of the projects I am actively working on in this space.
Amateur Multimedia
Massive communities of amateur filmmakers, animators, and game designers have developed in recent years, often around a particular technology. Examples include the Flash community Newgrounds, which hosts hundreds of thousands of Flash animations and games, and YouTube, a video site presently growing by 65,000 videos a day. The emergence (and disappearance) of new genres, visual languages, and aesthetics is occurring on a scale that confounds traditional approaches to genre and aesthetics: the window of the "synchronic" is no longer an era or a generation, but now rather a few weeks or months.
These communities have emerged alongside innovations in affordable and accessible technologies. Resources such as Google Images and file types such as JPG and MP3 make the Internet a media library on a scale never before seen; iMovie, Flash, and Photoshop offer quick content authoring; sites like Grouper, Flickr, Newgrounds, and YouTube allow free uploads and storage. The combination of portable multimedia resources, accessible authoring tools, and free global distribution channels has spawned new cultural forms while technologizing creativity itself. My research has focused on the reconfiguration of creativity in this era, suggesting ways to understand and anticipate innovations in these quickly changing arenas.
Machinima and the Evolution of “Machinimatic Language”
Machinima, which is the art of filmmaking inside of video games, has emerged as a new genre over the past decade. Starting as a simple mechanism for recording games to show friends and rivals a braggable performance, machinima has grown into a complex storytelling medium. Both game mods and increasingly the games themselves are adding features to facilitate machinima authoring, resulting in an increasingly sophisticated “machinimatic language.” Underlying the emergence of machinimatic language is a tension between the logic of cinema—storytelling, character development, and cinematic illusion—and the logic of games—play, glitching, competition.
Given the fluidity of the tools and the unresolved tensions between machinima’s two greatest precursors—ludic gameplay and narrative film—the nature and future directions of machinima is unclear. How might machinima filmmakers and interaction designers encourage the continued aesthetic maturation of machinima? Beyond its capacity for entertainment, how can machinima be useful for “serious” (i.e., non-entertainment) computing, such as its use as a platform for virtual video prototyping? What is the significance of the appropriation of machinima by mainstream corporate media, from South Park’s use of World of Warcraft to Coca-Cola’s use of Grand Theft Auto? What does machinima give back to film and video games? My research on machinima studies the emergence of its language, with a special focus on the new meanings and the cultural values embedded in them.
Online Identity Construction as a Techno-Aesthetic
The construction of identity online has been a major area of research at least since Turkle’s landmark Life on the Screen (1996). Yet it is often studied as a phenomenon of primarily psychological or sociological significance. Without detracting from these approaches, I argue that increasingly it can also be seen as an aesthetic phenomenon. It involves the design of artifacts of beauty (which today generally means 3D avatars), the elaboration of narratives (both for the avatar and for the “real” person playing the avatar), virtual journeys of self-discovery (especially with regard to cybersexuality), and all of these processes occur in the unique sociocultural context of a given game or world. The combination of formal density, symbolic complexity, self-transcendence, and cultural participation includes many of the hallmarks of the aesthetic.
In my research, I combine Foucault’s theories of the construction and maintenance of identity as an aesthetic activity with my own research in amateur multimedia. The emergence of one’s deeply personal identity in a massively multiuser world such as Second Life is not simply a function of self-discovery and expression, but also of its unique cultures as well as the sophisticated technologies of avatar design available to Second Life avatars. The result is an intimate self-exploration and identity performance that literally is mediated and expressed by computer objects.