Wednesday 14 January 2015 – Lunchtime Seminar with Dr Luigina Ciolfi (Communication, SHU)

Some digital social interaction examples.

Title: Understanding Digital Social Interactions Through Foursquare
Speaker: Dr Luigina Ciolfi (Reader in Communication, SHU)

Dr Luigina Ciolfi is Reader in Communication at Sheffield Hallam University. She holds a Laurea (Univ. of Siena, Italy) and a PhD (Univ. of Limerick, Ireland) in Human-Computer Interaction, and has researched for many years the design and evaluation of interactive technologies for human use and enjoyment, with particular focus on situated interaction, collaboration and participation. Lui has worked on several national and international research projects on topics such as heritage technologies, interaction in public spaces and mobile and nomadic work, and has published extensively on these topics in international conferences and journals.

Location-based social media increasingly mediates social and interpersonal interactions in urban settings. Such practices become coded in software representing both the log and content of social interactions and the location to which they relate. Therefore a digital “cloud” of social interactions becomes embedded into the physical reality of the city, of its neighbourhoods, public places, cafés, transportation hubs and any other location identified by social media users (by user-initiated “check-ins” or by the content that they generate, such as photographs) and by the tools they use (for example, through automatic geo-tagging). How are such localised interactions populating the algorithms and infrastructures provided by the software? How is location-based social media framing people’s perceptions and identifications of locations? How is code both facilitating and representing a set of social interactions relating to various spatial configurations? This talk will attempt to define and discuss these issues drawing both from interaction design and human-computer interaction literature on physical/digital interactions and from two preliminary empirical studies of location-based social media use in Sheffield and Limerick.

1.00PM – 2.00PM
WEDNESDAY 14 JANUARY 2015
CANTOR 9020a

See here for details of other seminars in the series.

All SHU staff and students are welcome to attend the C3RI Lunchtime Research Seminars. If you are from outside of the University and would like to attend a seminar, please email C3RI Administrator to arrange entry.