Teresa Dobson

• PhD
• Professor at University of British Columbia

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.

A demo of the Glass Cast

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...

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...

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...

Two decades of destabilizing developments in Shakespeare studies, theatre and performance studies, theatre history and historiography, and dissemination technologies remain largely unacknowledged in the print-based editorial conventions of most editions of Shakespeare’s works (Roberts-Smith et al. 2009; Hirsch 2011). Among the challenges to Shakesp...

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...

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...

In the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, our primary focus of attention has been on text. In this paper, we discuss our recent innovations in finding ways to capture the subjective interpretation of visual information that has in some way been connected with texts. Previous work has focused on test-based semantic differentials...

In this article, we discuss the various ways in which the experiments we have been doing within the INKE Interface Design team and elsewhere are predicated on the availability of " digital apparatus " – various forms of metadata that can be made consistently available. ese include structural, procedural, and semantic markup, digital indexes, textu...

The Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) is an experimental three-dimensional interface for use in blocking plays. Created using the Unity3D game engine, SET allows directors or student directors to associate character movement and speech with a timeline that represents the line of action, as well as to annotate choices, change the script, place...

As non-specialist researchers gain increasingly direct online access to digital and digitized theatre archives, archivists can no longer expect to be able to provide essential, post-positivist archival literacy training to individual researchers on a case-by-case basis. Archival literacy training must now be embedded directly into the design archiv...

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...

This article discusses a set of prototypes currently being designed and created by the Interface Design team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project. These prototypes attempt to supplement the user experience in reading digital scholarly editions, by supporting a set of tasks that are straightforward in a digital environment b...

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...

This article describes PlotVisML, a simple, flexible XML schema for encoding literary narratives that was developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers in literary studies, interface design, computing studies, and education as part of a research project on reading, writing, and teaching complex literary narrative. PlotVisML is a simple, ada...

This article reports on a study of XML-markup experiences as reading practices of secondary students studying English literature in a public high school in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Since training in the digital humanities (DH) has historically been restricted to those in undergraduate and graduate programs, an important consideration in...

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...

This essay is published in Digital Studies/Le champ numerique, Special Issue Text Tools for the Arts https://www.digitalstudies.org/62/volume/3/issue/2/ Abstract: "This essay considers the opportunities afforded by the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET) for exploring the functions of and relationships between historical theatrical texts and ot...

In this article, we discuss the first year research plan for the INKE interface design team, which focuses on a prototype for chaining. Interpretable as a subclass of Unsworth’s scholarly primitive of “discovering”, “chaining” is the process of beginning with an exemplary article, then finding the articles that it cites, the articles they cite, and...

Starting with the four fundamental functions associated with persistent storage — create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) — we tested, as an organizing rubric for the interface, the acronym CREAM: Create (represent, illustrate); Read (sample, read); Enhance (refer, annotate, process); Analyze (search, select, visualize, mine, cluster); and Manage (...

YouTube is one of the largest databases in the world, providing informative and entertaining video to millions of users around the globe. It is also becoming an important source of homework assistance to young people as they supplement their learning practices with user-generated tutorials on a range of topics. This poster presents our ongoing work...

In this paper, we expand on our presentation at ICDS2010 (Dobson et al., 2010) in describing the design of several new forms of interactive visualization intended for teaching the concept of plot in fiction. The most common visualization currently used for teaching plot is a static diagram known as Freytag's Pyramid, which was initially intended fo...

We describe the design of several new forms of interactive 3D visualizations, to be used in teaching the concept of plot in fiction. Conventional approaches to teaching plot tend to rely on a Victorian visualization known as Freytag's Pyramid, which is well suited to a certain range of material but is not appropriate for all fiction currently being...

Richard Linklater’s film, “Waking Life,” is a visually and philosophically surreal journey exploring theories of consciousness. Since its release in 2001, the film has developed something of a cult following online, in part because of its unusual animation technique and in part because of its philosophical content. From our perspective as humanitie...

In this paper, we present the conceptual and theoretical foundations for work undertaken by the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fi...

In this paper, we discuss the first year research plan for the INKE interface design team, which focuses on a prototype for “chaining” (Ellis and Oldman 2005). Interpretable as a subclass of Unsworth’s (2000) scholarly primitive of “discovering”, “chaining” is the process of beginning with an exemplary article, then finding the articles that it cit...

In this paper, we present the conceptual and theoretical foundations for work undertaken by the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fi...

Dans cet article, nous présentons les fondations conceptuelles et théoriques des travaux entrepris par le groupe de recherche Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE : Mise en oeuvre de nouveaux environnements documentaires), une importante équipe de recherche internationale et interdisciplinaire qui étudie la lecture et les textes, numérique...

This paper presents the conceptual and theoretical foundations for work undertaken by the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team, including over thirty-five researchers from more than twenty institutions. We have come together to study different elements of reading and t...

This document reflects the distributed administrative structure to be put into practice by the INKE group for the purpose of governing itself as it carries out work on its MCRI-funded initiative. The INKE group consists of [1] academic researchers, [2] academic research partners (many invested as stakeholders as well), [3] an international advisory...

In this paper, we present details of the first year work of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fields relating to textual studies...

Understanding of the nature of social negotiations in social software spaces used in support of formal, face‐to‐face education remains limited. In this paper, we consider how a community of learners working collaboratively in a wiki environment established social hierarchies and negotiated power. Described is a study with 36 pre‐service teachers wh...

This article examines the intersection of age and ICT (information and communication technology) competency and critiques the "digital natives versus digital immigrants" argument proposed by Prensky (2001a, 2001b). Quantitative analysis was applied to a statistical data set collected in the context of a study with over 2,000 pre-service teachers co...

In information systems and end-user computer research, ‘using’ appears to encapsulate a range of activities, such as reading, writing, viewing and so on. And yet it is a grossly inadequate descriptor for any of these activities, failing to account for the fact that texts — digital or otherwise — are produced and engaged by humans for a variety of p...

Background: In the industrialized world opportunities for children to explore movement in active, imaginative ways during free play periods are increasingly threatened for a range of reasons, stemming from caregiver concern for children's safety to the abundance of game technologies that capture the attention of youth. In contrast, Kenya, East Afri...

It has often been observed that Alice Munro is a master of narrative complexity. "The love of a good woman", in particular, is a story that challenges conventional notions of structure in short fiction through digression or deferral, discontinuity, layering, and so on. Ross (2002) rightly observes that conventional theories of reading fail to get a...

This paper considers how two related texts—one in print and one in hypertext—are locations for adolescents to undertake the work of ‘literary anthropology’ in considering questions of gender and subjectivity. The first text is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which invites readers to grapple with questions of how adolescents negotiate relations with th...

Hypertext has been promoted as a vehicle that will change literary reading, especially through its recovery of images, supposed to be suppressed by print, and through the choice offered to the reader by links. Evidence from empirical studies of reading, however, suggests that these aspects of hypertext may disrupt reading. In a study of readers who...

this paper, we will present an empirical study with readers of a literary hypertext in which subjects provided us with evidence of their reading processes, enabling us to analyse readers' pathways through a hypertext in relation to reading times per node and self-recorded commentary

As a companion piece to the foregoing study of Ophelia and /, Hamlet, there follows a full appraisal of a project discussed in the previous issue (NTQ53) as part of our feature on the Open University/BBC experiments in ‘multimedia Shakespeare’. For King Lear: Text and Performance – one of the pilot CD-ROMS which were the end-products of the experim...

Electronic literature (e-literature) is a computer-based genre that merges literary arts with multimedia design. Some features of e-literature include multiple modes of representation (e.g., sound, image, text), multiple narrative paths, and lack of closure. The genre began attracting attention almost 20 years ago after the publication of the first...

Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Department of English. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alberta, 1990.