
Ernesto PeñaNortheastern University | NEU · College of Arts, Media and Design
Ernesto Peña
Doctor of Philosophy
About
62
Publications
23,046
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Introduction
I am a Mexican/Canadian designer, researcher and educator. I write, speak and teach about various design- and media-related topics. Currently, I am an Associate Professor of Teaching at the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University, Vancouver campus.
Additional affiliations
May 2015 - February 2019
March 2019 - January 2024
September 2013 - present
Education
September 2012 - July 2018
July 2002 - July 2009
September 1995 - January 2000
Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas
Field of study
- Graphic Design
Publications
Publications (62)
By experimenting with computer glitches as provocation of accepted norms of user interactions with digital technologies, this paper extends and radicalizes Dewey’s (1934) pedagogical principle of “consummatory experience,” observing computational error, logical accidents, and procedural glitches as creative and productive forces in the lived curric...
Until today, the most accepted notion about the coinage of visual literacy as a concept has been credited to John Debes in the late 1960s. In this paper, the authors describe the use of available digital tools to unearth a history of the concept of visual literacy in education that precedes in roughly 30 years these events. These overlooked years s...
Looks at the use of prototyping in design research across a range of disciplines. Uses case studies to demonstrate theoretical and methodological transferability among disciplines not typically thought to be related to one another. This is an important contribution to the emerging field of integrative design.
The Journal of Marketing Management recently published an article titled "Towards Glitch Pedagogy". As part of their discussion, Preece & Whittaker (2023), misrepresent an earlier work titled "A Glitch Pedagogy…" (Peña & James, 2016) in an effort to minimize the potential influence and effect that our work would have on the general concept of glitc...
The concept of transmediation might be one of the most influential intellectual tools for studying, discussing and fostering innovative phenomena across fields of study. One could argue that the term itself is self-explanatory. Etymologically, it suggests a transition (to go across) between different media but the concept of transmediation has been...
This paper describes a live transmediatic impro-visualization that started with the production of a digital photograph. The artifact-as-raw-data was translated into sound and played through a transducer (vibrating speaker), thus filtering the digital file as an analogue signal through different physical materials before its re-digitization, re-reco...
In this article, I introduce the notion of remix as a form of metadesign—a methodological system—applicable to type design. Although the concept of metadesign has been entertained since at least the mid-1960s, it has gained new relevance as it has resurfaced in academic literature during the twenty-first century. This new relevance has been credite...
El propósito de este artículo es presentar Glass Cast, una interfaz para la visualización de redes de conocimiento, la cual podría considerarse como un ejemplo del involucramiento de diseñadores profesionales desde la conceptualización de visualizaciones específicamente para humanidades digitales. La visualización de redes de conocimiento está basa...
The transformation of physical phenomena into data —the pass from analog to digital— has played an important role in expanding our understandings of what is art and what it means to be an artist. This transformation has also changed the way we understand and perform with media and has opened innumerable avenues for experimentation within and across...
Visual literacy is a concept that has been reshaped and nuanced according to various factors through time, such as the increasing prevalence of contemporary visual technologies and evolving notions of literacy. This dissertation explores the mobilization of this concept through the last century and addresses the implications of its interdisciplinar...
In this paper, the authors present the initial findings from explorations on transformation patterns of data in raw format when crossing or transmediating directly (i.e., unaffected by any other form of codification) between audio and visual media. These patterns have allowed the authors to engage in the production of transmediatic artifacts with s...
In this paper, we present documental evidence of the influence that Kodak Eastman had since the late 60's in the advancement of the term "visual literacy". Here, we argue that the involvement that this company had with the framing of a particular type of literacy might have set a precedent for a still current trend: the use of concepts particularly...
Data visualization, pixel sorting, data bending, photography. Due to their trans-modal affordances, techniques mainly used for the production of glitch art such as pixel sorting and data-bending are potential data visualization tools that can be effectively adapted to the representation of abstract relations. To demonstrate this assertion, we prese...
After more than 10 years of Knowledge Mobilization being promoted as a crucial mindset for the advancement of knowledge, it might be healthy to ask ourselves: How are we doing? Is the adoption of KMb by funding agencies enough? is proposing atomized formats for dissemination of research (e.g., 3MT, SSHRC Storytellers), or rewarding media attention...
Computational thinking & pedagogical playing
Ernesto Peña, Kedrick James & The Digital Literacy Centre
Department of Language and Literacy Education
University of British Columbia
Over the last few years, the need to integrate computer coding to formal education has been both entertained and contested within and outside academic circles (Bierend,...
A demo of the Glass Cast
It could be argued that one of the most remarkable affordances of digital technology is the possibility to translate information across different kinds of media, a practice that has traditionally been known as transmediation. Although the concept of transmediation predates digital technology, contemporary practices translate between various electro...
Part of the Information Everything Exhibition, the Glass Cast is an interface in development intended for the visualization of knowledge networks, including parameters such as authorship, time, subject, discipline, and connections between documents in a corpus. The name Glass Cast refers to the working metaphor of the prototype, which is a cast scu...
Purpose
In this presentation we explore the pedagogical potential of disrupting automated processes of digital media production across modalities to produce unpredictable and educational results. In doing so, the learner/artist/researcher is provided with evidence of hitherto invisible, automated means of digital production. In particular we are in...
The role of technology in the persuasive affordances of media and the concern that it posits to education has been addressed by several scholars (e.g., Messaris, 2012). Although the challenges that deceptive media represents tend to be presented as a contemporary issue under the label of digital literacy and other related terms, the history is pave...
This paper introduces an arithmetic formula for the calculation of text line length (also referred to as line width) for roman alphabet from 1) the length of the alphabet in lowercase, 2) a value for the desired character density and 3) a mathematical constant. A short-range study with this formula has shown a margin of error of less than 5% in com...
Visualizing Texts Through Experimental Interfaces: Plot Vis And Glass Cast
Este texto describe un protocolo utilizado por los autores para generar un panorama general de la movilización del término alfabetización visual entre las disciplinas que lo han adoptado de su supuesta acuñación. Este protocolo, basado en parte en el principio de “lectura distante” propuesto por Franco Moretti (2000), utiliza Google Ngram Viewer co...
This article reflects on the importance of user feedback in early stages of the design process of Glass Cast. A 3-D interface, Glass Cast is intended for the visualization of knowledge networks, including parameters such as authorship, time, subject, discipline, and connections between documents in a corpus. The name Glass Cast refers to the workin...
In my presentation, I will introduce the methodology that I have been following to discover the documents that host early occurrences of the term ‘visual literacy’, a methodology partially based on the use of open access browsing environments such as Google Ngrams, Google Books and World Cat, as means to alternate between distant reading and close...
This study focuses on online Language Socialization (LS) practices of a cohort group of first-year doctoral students (both domestic and international) in a Canadian university. Analysis focuses on written discourse within asynchronous discussion forums. Results from this study will be of interest to university students, instructors, curriculum deve...
This paper discusses our work conducting reader studies with prototypical reading interfaces designed in the context of funded Digital Humanities (DH) research projects. We discuss our conceptual and methodological approaches and contemplate which methods have been most productive in advancing our understandings of reading practices and interfaces....
Following up with the presentation of the Glass Cast prototype at “Research Foundations for Understanding Books and Reading in the Digital Age” (Peña, Dobson, & INKE Team, 2013), this paper reports the results of a study on the metaphorical entailments of this interface, performed through paper prototyping. Elsewhere (i.e., Dobson, Brown, & Peña, 2...
Academic prototyping, like ethnography or bench studies, is a way of producing new knowledge about an idea. It can result in a kind of evidence that can be used to strengthen or weaken an argument. A prototype is an artifact, but it is not just an artifact; it may be a phase in product development, but it is not necessarily so. It is also, and perh...
This paper addressed the metaphorical entailments of the Glass Cast prototype, a visualization interface designed to track the mobilization of particular concepts along time and across disciplines. The use of metaphors as resources to convey meaning has been generally established (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Turbayne, 1991), and metaphor’s relev...
Increasingly multilingual and transnational university student populations have created manyexciting opportunities as well as a number of new (and not so new) challenges for administration, instructors, and students. This study investigates the academic discourse socialization (ADS) of two domestic and two international doctoral students (also the...
El término ‘movilidad del conocimiento’ (KMb) se refiere al creciente interés que se ha dado en varias disciplinas de, por un lado, conectar de manera exitosa los resultados de investigación con su implementación y las políticas institucionales que lo harían posible, y por el otro, diseminar el conocimiento que se tiene sobre ciertos temas de un ca...
It is sometimes said that the academy today is undergoing rapid change, and that one of the changes we have been experiencing is in the rate of dissemination of research results. Our previous generation could comfortably spend 10 years on a project, and produce a monograph at the end, confident that they were meeting the expectations of everyone in...
In this article, we provide a discussion of the concept of visual interactive workflows, how they relate to our previous work
on structured surfaces, and how they have been adapted to experiments in managing articles for journal publication and managing
biographical histories being written and tagged in XML. We conclude with a user experience study...
In this article, we provide a discussion of the concept of visual interactive workflows, how they relate to our previous work on structured surfaces, and how they have been adapted to experiments in managing articles for journal publication and managing biographical histories being written and tagged in XML. We conclude with a user experience study...
Metaphors are a widely used resource for interface design and analysis. Based on Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal work on metaphor, Barr (2002) developed a model that acknowledges three types of metaphors commonly used by designers to give individuals who interact with an interface a sense of its logic from first sight, and to scaffold their understand...
Orlando Workflow is a prototypical browsing interface designed for the Orlando Project, an electronic text base on women’s writing in the British Isles, to enable tracking of the writing and XML encoding–by multiple team members–of interpretive documents (see Figure 2). The user study with Orlando Workflow is the second phase of a two-phase study o...
Recent experiments in developing scalable, open-source publishing and research support software for the humanities have begun to realize some of the opportunities of the ongoing digital revolution. As Project 5 of the International Association for Visual Culture (IAVC) remarks, recent developments in online publishing present “opportunities and cha...
Tracking the origin and mobilization of concepts across time and through different disciplinary fields is a key challenge in humanities and social sciences scholarship. For example, in this project a topic of interest has been the origin and mobilization of the phrase “visual literacy,” a trans-disciplinary concept that has garnered increasing atte...
In this panel, we report on our year 4 work in the Interface Design (ID) research team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project. INKE is a 7-year major collaborative research initiative (MCRI) project funded in Canada by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). INKE is led by Ray Siemens at the University of...
This paper examined the importance of visual metaphor as a key element of visual literacy to be addressed in literacy instruction, particularly in view of students’ increased exposure to visual metaphor in digital reading environments.
Theoretical framework. The practice of basing the design of a digital interface on an existing, commonly used mod...
El libro es un producto tecnológico. De hecho, es una de las primeras tecnologías exitosas para el registro y posterior consulta de textos. Y como cualquier otro producto tecnológico ha pasado por un proceso evolutivo que ahora nos obliga a redefinirlo. Sabemos que el libro no se define por el carácter de su contenido, no se define por su composici...
Ernesto Peña A lonso Licenciado en Diseño Gráfico por la Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas. Maestro en Diseño de la información por la Universidad de las Américas, Puebla. Introducción El modo como entendemos actualmente la palabra escrita es resultado de una evolución en varios sentidos; por un lado, el modo como entendemos el ejercicio de leer;...
Questions
Question (1)
Is it still part of the curriculum in graphic/information design education programs?