
Glorianna DavenportLiving Observatory Inc.
Glorianna Davenport
Master of Arts
About
144
Publications
34,828
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Introduction
Glorianna Davenport is President of LivingObservatory.org and a Visiting Scientist at The M.I.T. Media Laboratory. Trained as a documentary filmmaker, Glorianna pioneered work in digital video editing, performance and publication platforms. In 2011, she co-founded Living Observatory, a public interest learning collaborative of scientists, artists, and wetland restoration practitioners engaged in the documenting the "arc of change" on former cranberry farms following wetland restoration.
Additional affiliations
Education
September 1970 - June 1972
September 1963 - June 1966
Publications
Publications (144)
Learning from the Restoration of Wetlands on Cranberry Farmland: Preliminary Benefits Assessment
Climate change and environmental degradation are causing species extinction worldwide. Automatic wildlife sensing is an urgent requirement to track biodiversity losses on Earth. Recent improvements in machine learning can accelerate the development of large-scale monitoring systems at high resolution that would help track conservation targets and o...
Bioacoustic surveys have gained popularity in recent years, largely due to their versatility in rapid biodiversity assessments and long-term monitoring. Improved detection probabilities in acoustic surveys provide value in documenting occupancy of ecologically-cryptic, rare, and secretive species. Today the need for such monitoring is paramount, gi...
Large-scale wetland restoration often focuses on repairing the hydrologic connections degraded by anthropogenic modifications. Of these hydrologic connections, groundwater discharge is an important target, as these surface water ecosystem control points are important for thermal stability, among other ecosystem services. However, evaluating the eff...
Climate change and environmental degradation are causing species extinction worldwide. Automatic wildlife sensing is an urgent requirement to track biodiversity losses on Earth. Recent improvements in machine learning can accelerate the development of large-scale monitoring systems that would help track conservation outcomes and target efforts. In...
Peatland environments provide important ecosystem services including water and carbon storage, nutrient processing and retention, and wildlife habitat. However, these systems and the services they provide have been degraded through historical anthropogenic agricultural conversion and dewatering practices. Effective wetland restoration requires inco...
Peatland environments provide important ecosystem services including water and carbon storage, nutrient processing and retention, and wildlife habitat. However, these systems and the services they provide have been degraded through historical anthropogenic agricultural conversion and dewatering practices. Effective wetland restoration requires inco...
What role will ubiquitous sensing play in our understanding and experience of ecology in the future? What opportunities are created by weaving a continuously sampling, geographically dense web of sensors into the natural environment, from the ground up? In this article, we explore these questions holistically, and present our work on an environment...
Thermal infrared video can capture disparate scales of focused groundwater discharge in real time, allowing unprecedented understanding of the spatial distribution of seepage pathways and how they mix with surface water.
This paper presents textual tinkerability, a new concept for fostering early literacy skills during parent-child reading. Textual tinkerability maps storytelling gestures to changes in animation and text to assist reading exploration and demonstration of the link between text, spoken word, and concept. TinkRBooks are flexible tablet-based storybook...
Wood, A., Davenport, G., Donovan, B., and Strohecker, C. 2004. Stories for remote place: Content, structure, device, trials. Proceedings of International Cultural Heritage Informatics. Abstract (EN) Multimedia story, when invested with mobile sensing technology, is a powerful medium for enhancing the experience of a place. We introduce a mobile com...
This paper presents Textable Movie, an open-ended tool that allows any storyteller to become "video-jockey " able to improvise a media story in real-time drawing from an available collection of annotated images and videos. In the framework of digital storytelling, Textable Movie promotes the idea of maker controlled media and can be contrasted to a...
In the world of visual storytelling, narrative development relies on a particular temporal ordering of shots and sequences and scenes. Rarely is this ordering cast in stone. Rather, the particular ordering of a story reflects a myriad of interdependent decisions about the interplay of structure, narrative arc and character development. For storytel...
Popular online social networks such as Friendster and MySpace do more than simply reveal the superficial structure of social connectedness — the rich meanings bottled within social network profiles themselves imply deeper patterns of culture and taste. If these latent semantic fabrics of taste could be harvested formally, the resultant resource wou...
Popular online social networks such as Friendster and MySpace do more than simply reveal the superficial structure of social connectedness — the rich meanings bottled within social network profiles themselves imply deeper patterns of culture and taste. If these latent semantic fabrics of taste could be harvested formally, the resultant resource wou...
We present a hybrid positioning and communication system for tracking interaction objects called 'pucks' on the surface of a large LCD or plasma display. Pucks are smart sensor packages consisting of a microcontroller as well as a contact-type acoustic receiving transducer and an infrared or radio data link. A puck may take the form of a standalone...
The past several years of computer interaction research have shown an increasing interest in tabletops for shared user interactions through touch or tangible objects. Digital media tables offer the potential to expand our digital interactions into casual social settings that are not appropriate for desktop platforms, such as home living rooms. We h...
Personal stories make our everyday experiences memorable over time. This paper presents 'Everyday Mediated Storytelling', a model of the casual storyteller's process of capturing, creating and sharing personal mediated narratives. Based on this model, an online authoring and publishing application for sharing everyday rich-media narratives named 'C...
The TViews table is a media interaction platform designed for shared living spaces within the home environment. This platform consists of three parts: a dynamic object tracking and identification system that works with an extensible set of tagged objects on the table's surface, a planar display that is integrated into the table's surface, and a set...
Abstract Asdigital entertainment applications evolve, there is a need for new kinds of platforms that can support shared media interactions for everyday consumers. In recent years this has resulted in the development of several technical approaches to digital media tables, but none of these early attempts point to a general purpose, economically vi...
Content of a movie is produced in two different types of design environments. The first is the design environment of shooting where a camera is used to capture what is happening at a particular place and time. The second is the design environment of editing where the rushes are interpreted relative to a movie maker's intent. Annotation of the video...
Popular online social networks such as Friendster and MySpace do more than simply reveal the superficial structure of social connectedness—the rich meanings bottled within social network profiles themselves imply deeper patterns of culture and taste. If these latent semantic fabrics of taste could be harvested formally, the resultant resource would...
As consumer digital media technologies evolve, there is a need for new kinds of platforms that support sociable interactions to manage and display our ever larger personal media content archives. While today's desktop PCs provide a range of applications for media management and sharing, their interfaces force a separation between digital interactio...
Typically performance is a display for others, and is time-limited. But if we also regard everyday life as a performance, we see that it is a continuous improvisation, a multi-faceted dance with an audience that is our social and cultural milieu. In moments of self-reflection, we ourselves motivate this performance, seizing these occasions to explo...
In this paper, the authors present Moving Pictures: Looking Out/Looking In, a robust, tangible, multi-user system that invites young users to create, explore, manipulate and share video content with others. Moving Pictures enables a meaningful, spontaneous and collaborative approach to video creation, selection and sequencing. The authors discuss t...
Recent advances in technology have generated new paradigms and potentials for multimedia story environments. Among these the realization of a wired nomadic consumer heralds the disappearance of the desktop metaphor in favour of one that highlights immersive wearable media and wireless connectivity. As we progress toward the goal of immersive multim...
Live role-playing (LRP) games stand as powerful models for the de- sign of ubiquitous computer games. Offering what can be regarded as the holy grail of interactive entertainment -- the fully immersive experience -- LRP games provide a tangible and distributed interface to a gaming activity that is emergent, improvised, collaboratively and socially...
Live role-playing (LRP) games stand as powerful metaphorical mod- els for the various digital and ubiquitous forms of entertainment that gather un- der the term pervasive games. Offering what can be regarded as the holy grail of interactive entertainment - the fully immersive experience - LRP games provide a tangible and distributed interface to a...
This paper presents Textable Movie, an open-ended interface that al- lows anyone to become "video-jockey." In the framework of computational sto- rytelling, Textable Movie promotes the idea of maker controlled media and can be contrasted to automatic presentation systems. Its graphical interface takes text as input and allows users to improvise a m...
As computing and communications technologies evolve, there is the potential for new forms of digitally orchestrated interactive narratives to emerge. In this process, balanced attention has to be paid to audience ex- perience, creative constraints, and presence and role of the enabling tech- nology. This paper describes the implementation of HopSto...
Imagine the stories we would tell if we could construct media experiences as easily and playfully as we now use spoken language. Today, storytelling approaches are transitioning due in part to the abilities of small, mobile networked devices to capture, manipulate, share, exchange and publish visual and sound sequences. This paper explores a new pa...
This demonstration reports results from the EU-funded project Ambient Agoras, investigating future applications of ubiquitous and ambient computing in workspaces. Instead of presenting underlying system technologies or evaluation findings, this demonstration ...
This article concerns the struggle between artistic expression and technological innovation. The perspective that is articulated is drawn from the work and of the Interactive Cinema group at the MIT Media Laboratory. Situated at the boundary of evolving technologies and media storytelling, research of the group iterates between shaping and presenti...
Over the centuries, stories have moved from the physical environment (around campfires and on the stage), to the printed page, then to movie, television and computer screens. Today, using wireless and tag sensing technologies, researchers and storytellers are able to bring digital stories back into our physical environment. The Tangible Viewpoints...
Mobile Cinema is embodied in temporally and spatially discontinuous narrative segments that can be delivered on wireless PDAs as users navigate physical locations and interact with the environment. Mobile Cinema takes as its starting point the truism that "every story is a journey" and bends this idea into a new form in which the narrative is augme...
M-Views is a system for creating and participating in context-sensitive, mobile cinematic narratives. A Map Agent detects participant location in 802.11 enabled space and triggers a location appropriate video message which is sent
This paper introduces a model for producing common sense metadata during video capture and describes how this technique can have a positive impact on content capture, representation, and presentation. Metadata entered into the system at the moment of capture is used to generate suggestions designed to help the videographer decide what to shoot, how...
This sketch presents a new approach to improvising movies according to the inter-relationship between personal videos and the story of an experience. Textable Movie is a graphical interface that invites a storyteller of any age to compose and visualize movies, images and sound environments while writing a story; the system self-selects and self-edi...
This paper presents a novel coupling of haptics technology and music, introducing the notion of tactile composition or aesthetic composition for the sense of touch. A system that facilitates the composition and perception of intricate, musically structured spatio-temporal patterns of vibration on the surface of the body is described. An initial tes...
Summary This paper concerns a system, texting glances, that can create ambient interludes, moments of entertaining interaction in public urban space at which people gather such as a bus stop. The system proposes to introduce a personal yet sociable and visual activity into urban "waiting" spaces. Personal, because the input device is a cell phone;...
Stories naturally reveal themselves to us through space and over time. Today's digitally networked society provides a fertile environment for the exploration of narrative forms in new and diverse ways. The Digital Dialogues Symposium provided the setting for a series of experimental approaches to the recording and documenting of an event in time. U...
Despite continual consumer demand for richer broadcast media, there have been few examinations of senses other than vision and hearing in this domain. This paper considers the role that touch may be able to play in future broadcast systems. We have begun to explore the addition of haptic cues to children's cartoons, and through this process unearth...
This sketch presents a new approach to improvising moviesaccording to the inter-relationship between personal videos andthe story of an experience. Textable Movie is a graphical interfacethat invites a storyteller of any age to compose and visualizemovies, images and sound environments while writing a story; thesystem self-selects and self-edits mo...
In this paper, we introduce the notion of a socially transforming interface, which is an interface that, when wielded, transforms its user into a more social character in a digital interactive experience than he or she would be normally, one in which the user is more likely to interact and collaborate in an ad-hoc and constructive way with other pe...
This paper presents our arrival at a method for authoring a responsive digital narrative that is fragmented and distributed for the audience in space and time. We framed a simple, generalizable framework for use by content creaters. Our method emerged via exploration of one user scenario: an audience wandering across a remote outdoor landscape with...
Stories are a cultural universal that allow us to reflect on the way we live. Through the act of storytelling, we structure and express our personal experiences and understandings of the world in a form that can be passed on to others – as words, imagery, sounds and gestures. In today's increasingly digital and networked society, we can create medi...
Nature Trailer is an entertainment and navigation platform that attempts to facilitate recreational exploration. Designed for a hiker wandering through a remote place, Nature Trailer virtually embeds context-aware stories throughout a landscape and provides clues of their locations. In this scenario a user is mobile, on foot, outdoors, and with lit...
We present a multimedia storytelling system that couples a tangible interface with a multiple viewpoint approach to interactive narratives. Over the centuries, stories have moved from the physical environment (around campfires and on the stage), to the printed page, then to movie, television and computer screens. Today, using wireless and tag sensi...
Broadband wireless networks coupled with handheld computers and appropriate sensing technologies provide a channel for the delivery of mobile cinema. Mobile cinema changes the consumer experience of motion picture stories in that discrete cinematic sequences are delivered based on the consumer's location and the a story-real-time metric. The M-Stud...
Introduction Over the centuries, stories have moved fro m the physical environment (around campfires and on the stage), to the printed page, then to movie, television, and computer screens. Today, using wireless and tag sensing technologies, story creators are able to bring digital stories back into our physica l environment. The Tangible Viewpoint...
M-Views is an experimental video story-making and sharing system designed for distribution to mobile hand-held video capable devices. Video stories are constructed using the M-Views authoring tool, which allows makers to preview how segments will be sequenced based on any possible navigation path of the viewer. Inspired by environmental artworks an...
Over the centuries, stories have moved from the physical environment (around campfires and on the stage), to the printed page, then to movie, television, and computer screens. Today, using wireless and tag sensing technologies, story creators are able to bring digital stories back into our physical environment. The Tangible Viewpoints project explo...
Video cameras are becoming cheap, small and ubiquitous. With advances in memory, cameras will increasingly be designed to be always ready, always recording. When cameras are always ready, how will videographers -- professional and/or amateur -- decide what to shoot, when to shoot and how to index their video material to best support their communica...
An interactive narrative is a story that is shaped by digital technology and that allows the dynamic presentation of scenes or sequences based on input from the user. In this paper we present a new foundation for interactive storytelling that allows a mobile user to interact with a story. The user is placed at the center of the story and the story...
What if the traditional relationship between touch and music was essentially turned upside down, making the tactile sensation the aesthetic end? This paper presents a novel coupling of haptics technology and music, introducing the notion of tactile composition or aesthetic composition for the sense of touch. A system that facilitates the compositio...
The Empowering Minds Learning Network is a web-based environment that supports discussion and reflection on classroom activities. The environment collects and organizes multimedia files and documents from participating students and teachers, allowing them to share their work with each other, with their communities, and with the world. The environme...
Storytelling -- a fundamental mode of human communication -- has adapted in form, content, and technique as new expressive technologies have appeared and evolved. The past century has witnessed the growth of storytelling tools, electronic media channels, and the mass media one-to-many "broadcast" model. Today -- as we transition to digital media, u...
Storytelling — a fundamental mode of human communication — has adapted in form, content, and technique as new expressive technologies have appeared and evolved. The past century has witnessed the growth of storytelling tools, electronic media channels, and the mass media one-to-many “broadcast” model. Today — as we transition to digital media, ubiq...
I was asked to speak about a vision for “Digital Life.” Digital Life is the name of a research consortium at the Media Laboratory that explores a world of seamless connectivity. In a broader sense, the term reflects something about the quality of our life in the e-society; in particular, it emphasizes how digital networks provide connectedness that...
this paper we explore the hypothesis that aesthetic forms of expression -- such as music, painting, video -- can be used for direct information delivery. In contrast to text or verbal narrative techniques, which require a conscious act of transcoding, these aesthetic forms stimulate a more direct, emotional response. If shown viable, such a hypothe...
This thesis presents I-Views, a system that permits individuals to use published, communally owned media clips to author narratives by assembling clips, and to build communities of similar interests based on comparing these narratives. To facilitate sharing of on-line motion pictures and initiate conversations among storytellers/re-tellers and audi...
One of the most ubiquitous tasks we have to perform is the need to find our way to unknown destinations. We are left alone to deal with maps, ask people for directions, and understand their instructions. How can we avoid this frustrating and time-consuming process? How can we help all the people who can't or won't use printed or spoken instructions...
Current digital tools for cinema have been cast in the same mold as their analog equivalents. The computational medium promises more: to expand expression b e y o n d the physical edge of the film frame. In traditional film, the camera constrains how li ght falls onto the film, but not how you tell a story. In the computer, if authors rely on tools...
Shareable Media is a network-based system that explores how a community of users can share stories and express ideas through a shared database of digital video clips. To adapt this to the rapidly evolving Internet, we need to design and experiment with an extensible architecture for Shareable Media, which has the capability to deploy multiple appli...
Shareable Media is an effort to provide a coherent structure that will facilitate distributed collaboration and communication among filmmakers, storytellers, artists and audiences. The extensible architecture of the Shareable Media Project has the capability to deploy multiple applications targeted towards a variety of uses and audiences. The visua...
to be presented to us in a way which is not fragmented or disruptive of our current activities, for it to become a part of our cognitive space, and be remembered and integrated with the flow of our mental activities, we need to be able to map, directly or by analogy, some of the real-world architecture back into the computer display. We need to bui...
formation to be presented to us in a way which is not fragmented or disruptive of our current activities, for it to become a part of our cognitive space, and be remembered and integrated with the flow of our mental activities, we need to be able to map, directly or by analogy, some of the realworld architecture back into the computer display. We ne...