<p> Information visualization offers a unique method to assist users in understanding large quantities of data, such as that which is found in social media. The recent surge in the use of social media platforms, the abundance of data generated, and the implications about what this data means has made it increasingly necessary to provide feedback to these users about what they and others are presenting online. Thus, it is critical for these individuals to access this information and gain some level of visual understanding regarding their own identities or that of a particular group. This dissertation is organized in the format of a three-paper dissertation. Chapter 1 is the introduction for the subsequent three chapters and provides background on information visualization and identity presentation in social media, while exploring theoretical approaches to visual perception and design. Chapter 2 demonstrates a variety of past and current multidimensional information visualization techniques that are relevant to social media data, as related to online identity presentation. The overview includes data portraits, motion-based visualization, music visualization, and textual structures. Chapter 3 introduces <i>CarrinaCongress</i>, an information visualization dashboard that affords users with the ability to compare two members of Congress in order to better understanding the elected officials&rsquo; tweets and external information. Chapter 4 presents <i> HadithViz</i>, a motion-based information visualization dashboard that borrows from video game interfaces and focuses on event-based tweets, as defined by hashtags related to sexism in the video gaming industry. Finally, Chapter 5 is the conclusion to this dissertation and will summarize the three individual studies, discuss limitations and implications, and provide recommendations that future work consist of simple, accessible visualizations that are based on existing visual languages and can be interpreted by a wide-ranging audience. </p>

<p> Telepresence uses the latest video conferencing technology, with high definition video, surround sound audio, and specially constructed studios, to create a near face-to-face meeting experience. A Fortune 500 company which markets information technology has organizations distributed around the globe, and has extensive collaboration needs among those organizations. Having invested heavily in telepresence technology to assist in the collaboration, the company has experienced a broad range of use among departments, but some departments do not use it at all. The purpose of this research was to study the reasons for widely disparate levels of telepresence use. The research is based upon factors contained in the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology and assessed the impact of each upon the use of telepresence technology. The results of the research showed some factors affected telepresence acceptance and use while other factors had little or no effect. Underlying practices and conditions, such as the need to multi-task and to telecommute, impacted the factors. The research provided recommendations for assessing the likelihood of technology adoption before making investments, and for positively influencing adoption.</p>

<p> Augmented Reality (AR) is very useful for many different fields and purposes such as entertainment, education, military, navigation, industrial, or electric utility. Electric utilities find use in AR due to the flexibility of location and the real-time information sharing with visuals to keep employees safe and efficient. This exploratory study investigated the use of infographic templates as a way to introduce this new technology to line workers in the electric utility field. Infographics were used as a way to prime workers to be more aware of the technology and its possible uses as well as usefulness. Through the use of Communication Accommodation Theory and the Technology Acceptance Model, the researcher found evidence indicating that presenting information in a clear and interesting way increased electric utility workers desire to adopt the new technology through perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness (Davis, Bagozzi &amp; Warshaw, 1989).</p><p>

No description available.

<p> Despite decades of advocacy, women still struggle to gain access to public spaces, in particular to spaces of power such as formal governance and decision-making processes, economic sites, and media institutions. Globalization has enabled the emergence of transnational feminist organizing in response to these exclusions, yet scholars have largely not attended to the spaces within which transnational feminist organizing takes place and the implications of those spaces. These spaces matter as they have the potential to both disrupt and reproduce existing power relations and exclusions. This study identified <i>digital space </i> as a site of transnational feminist organizing and explored how digital &lsquo;safe&rsquo; counter-spaces are communicatively constructed and their potentials and limitations for organizing across difference. As an engaged feminist project, this study also had an action goal of creating safer and more inclusive counter-spaces for women to gain a voice and organize collectively. Specifically, this project aimed to contribute to the <i> transformation</i> of such spaces to further enable women&rsquo;s mobilizing and organizing for social change. In this study, I adopted a critical transnational feminist lens and drew on scholarship in the areas of transnational feminist organizing, space, and tension. In line with this study&rsquo;s engaged feminist approach, I conducted what I termed a digital feminist participatory action research (D+FPAR) project involving a collaborative partnership with the digitally based transnational feminist network, World Pulse. Data collection involved multiple qualitative and participatory online methods.</p><p> Findings from this study illuminated the ways digital counter-space is discursively and materially constructed as &lsquo;safe&rsquo; and &lsquo;inclusive&rsquo;, how these constructions produce contradictions, and how both community and staff members respond to these contradictions. First, the digital space was communicatively constituted as safe and inclusive through particular material-discursive practices, through members&rsquo; talk and interaction enabled by the affordances of the digital space, and through interrelations with overlapping digital and physical spaces. Second, contradictions were produced when these material-discursive practices took on different meanings or made difference visible for members based on their identities, locations, or experiences, leaving members feeling simultaneously safe/unsafe and included/excluded. Third, community and staff members enacted a variety of strategies in response to these contradictions that limited and/or enhanced the potentials for organizing across difference and contributed to the ongoing construction of the digital space.</p><p> This study advances scholarship on space, transnational feminist organizing, and tension. In defining and interrogating digital space, this project contributes to theorizing the communicative construction of space, how it interrelates and is embedded with the material, and the ways digital spaces (re)produce and challenge power relations. More specifically, this project contributes to understandings of how materiality intra-acts with discourse in the construction of space to shape possibilities for organizing and produce contradictions, revealing the ways &lsquo;safe&rsquo; counter-spaces are in a constant state of becoming (un)safe. Methodologically, this project contributes to scholarship by introducing D+FPAR, providing tools for collaborative analysis, and expanding reflexive praxis. Additionally, this study also provides practical strategies, co-constructed with participants, for individuals and organizations seeking to design &lsquo;safe&rsquo; digital spaces for voice, participation, and collective action.</p><p>

This dissertation studies the promise of inclusion in the global information society for marginalized groups in India, a nation that represents a modular case for technology and modernization initiatives in the global South. There has been significant research on the problematic notion of the "digital divide," based on the premise that access to technology will ensure economic and cultural transformations. Combining approaches from the political economy of communication and from cultural studies, my research is located in the growing critical and ethnographic scholarship on technology and modernity in the global South. I examine the institutional and cultural politics of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) initiatives in rapidly globalizing Delhi through a multi-method study that includes archival research and an extended period of fieldwork at the sites of interconnected global and local institutions, markets and communities. Forms of institutions and governance, starting from the colonial period, demonstrate continuities to the evolution of digital inclusion initiatives in the 21st century. Through archival and ethnographic research, I trace the beginnings of public-private partnerships in education and the establishment of the Industrial Training Institutes to 19th century colonial India, when the British Empire sought to strengthen its rule. My ethnographic research also studies the modern, postcolonial state as it changes from the Nehruvian socialist model to a neoliberal one and increasingly becomes a deliverer of social services, enabled by ICT programs. Corporations emerge as important welfare actors through hybrid public-private partnerships. I argue that such new institutional forms renegotiate, reify and occasionally reproduce structural inequalities, especially for low-income and marginalized communities. My project connects institutional politics to the politics of culture. I study the habitus of "new middle-class," corporate professionals in India who comprise the initiators of ICTD projects. In addition, my ethnographic research follows "urban poor Muslim women" and "slum youth" from the doorsteps of the ICT center into their everyday lives to understand policy shifts from subaltern perspectives. My study unpacks concepts of the "digital divide" and "access" in the context of complex histories of gender, class, caste, religion and the politics of urban space in global Delhi.

<p> This research investigates the discourse around the terms web 2.0 and cloud computing, which are used as metaphors for information technology. In addition to the disruptive technologies and applications to which they refer, both of these terms have affected information technology, its use, and the way it is perceived. This research examines how this impact has varied over time and by audience. The usage of the terms is examined through a rhetorical analysis of a sampling of articles from the general publications The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today, and the professional publications InformationWeek and CIO Magazine. The research is an analysis of these artifacts using critical methods influenced by metaphoric analysis, symbolic interactionism, and Burke's concept of symbolic action. Metaphors serve as cognitive tools in discourse communities for understanding new domains, the tenor or target of the metaphor, through references to shared symbols, the vehicle or source of the metaphor. Metaphors may be mostly descriptive, as epiphors, or persuasive, as diaphors. This research shows that the web 2.0 and cloud computing metaphors served a persuasive purpose for helping people understand disruptive technology through familiar experiences. Rhetors used the metaphors in persuading audiences whether or not to adopt the new technologies. As the new technologies became accepted and adopted, problems arose which were obscured in the original metaphor, so new metaphors emerged to highlight and conceal various aspects of the technologies. Some of these new metaphors arose with systematicity in the same domain of the original metaphor, while others came from different domains. The ability of the metaphor to be used in various rhetorical situations as the technology evolves affects the usefulness of the metaphor over time. The usage of web 2.0 shortly after the dot com boom and bust cycle of the late 1990s and early 2000s allowed rhetors to frame web 2.0 as an economic phenomenon, casting the collaborative aspects of the technology as tools for making money in a perceived second dot com bubble. The failure of the second dot com bubble to materialize, along with user frustration with the emphasis of the economic aspects of collaboration and the limited usefulness of the software release cycle in representing continuous technical change, led to infrequency of the use of web 2.0 as a metaphor. Other metaphors, like social networking and social media, arose as a new source domain to represent some of the collaborative aspects of the original technologies. Some minor referents of web 2.0, like software as a service and data centers, became referents of cloud computing, which uses a natural archetype of clouds as the source domain to reference the target domain of hosted information technology services accessible through multiple devices. As a natural domain, the cloud metaphor is more extensible than web 2.0 and as a result may have more longevity than web 2.0. The cloud computing metaphor also became associated with lightning, electricity, experimentation, and utility through a fuzzy semantic relationship. The utility metaphor worked with cloud to emphasize the ease of implementation of cloud based solutions. As practical problems arose with implementing cloud solutions, new metaphors arose. Some of these worked within the cloud domain, such as the idea of storms, to emphasize the downsides of cloud computing. Other metaphors arose in new source domains to emphasize territory and private ownership in hosted solutions. By providing an in-depth rhetorical analysis of these IT metaphors, this research can serve as a guide for evaluating rhetorical and metaphoric responses to future disruptive technical changes.</p>

<p> Information Technology (IT) professionals use the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process to better manage their business operations, measure performance, improve reliability and lower costs. This study examined the operational results of those data centers using ITIL against those that do not, and whether the results change when traditional facilities engineers are included in the process. Overall, those IT departments using ITIL processes had no statistically significant improvements when compared to those who do not. Inclusion of Critical Facilities (CF) personnel in the framework offered a statistically significant improvement in their overall reliability of their data centers. Those IT departments who do not include CF personnel in the ITIL framework have a slightly lower level of reliability than those who do not use the ITIL processes at all.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 306-341). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-117).