Month: May 2017

Projects: Technology on the Trail Class Projects Spring 2017

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The Spring 2017 school term provided the opportunity for senior grad students across multiple disciplines to help shape Virginia Tech’s approach to the study of technology on the trail. This group had the added motivation that they had the opportunity to interact with attendees at the Technology on the Trail Workshop at Virginia Tech, including invited guests Alan Dix, Allison Druin, Ellie Harmon, and Norman Su. Below is a summary of the projects that they undertook.

NOTE: most of the students continued their work on the projects, and many resulted in papers, theses, and dissertations. This post has been and will continue to be updated with links to new papers.

  • Identities and Values Reflected in Tweets Regarding America’s Triple Crown Hiking Trails. Master’s student Abigail Bartolome applied topic analysis to collections of tweets pertaining to three distinct American trails–the Appalachian Trail (AT), the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), and the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) to see differences in topic models across the three hiking communities. This research compared the most popular topics from each community with their respective mission statements and values. Abigail featured this work in her M.S. thesis, advised by Edward Fox with committee members Scott McCrickard and Jeff Marion. Abigail is now working on a Ph.D. at Dartmouth University.
  • Would you rather – Probing Tradeoffs with Technology in Hiking and Outdoors Settings Identities and Values Reflected in Tweets Regarding America’s Triple Crown Hiking Trails. Grad students Navya Kondur and Jagath Iyer collected opinions through a “Would you Rather” cultural probe to understand perceptions of humans toward technology in hiking and outdoor settings. This work was continued by Navya toward her M.S. thesis.
  • Augmented Reality for Outdoor Navigation. Wallace Lages investigated how augmented reality can be used to support the creation of new routes on the trail, crafting the design, implementation, and early evaluation of a system for defining waypoints using the Microsoft Hololens. This research describes and compares two techniques for marking, one based on triangulation and another based on perceptual depth judgment. Initial evaluation shows that both techniques offer similar accuracy in long distances and small baselines, and that triangulation can be better for wide baselines. Wallace completed his Ph.D. at Virginia Tech and has taken a faculty position in Virginia Tech’s School of Visual Arts.
  • AwareSpace: Supporting Co-located Document Exploration with Touch, Text-mining and Visualization. Shuo Niu used surface technologies, a tabletop computer, and a vertical large display to support dynamic explorations of textual data—with a focus on social media data like blogs and tweets. The displays highlight hints on possible knowledge of interest, often surprising the authors of the blog. Shuo featured the tool at the Technology on the Trail workshop, surprising workshop invited guests Alan Dix and Ellie Harmon with insights about their own blogs. Shuo featured this work in his Ph.D., which he completed in 2019. Shuo is now an Assistant Professor at Clark University.
  • Zen and the Art of Forest Bathing. Colin Shea-Blymeyer sought to determine if mindful hikers get more out of hiking, and to develop an application to promote mindfulness on the trail. He catalogued a personal experience that demonstrated the scientific and emotional possibilities for this line of research. Colin completed his M.S. degree from Virginia Tech with Ben Jantzen in philosophy.
  • Hiking the Appalachian Trail with Technology. Tim Stelter was my only student who took me up on the challenge to hike 100 miles noting tech experiences along the way for an automatic “A” in the class. (I was joking, but I assumed anyone who did this would earn that grade.) Tim accrued over a dozen different pieces of technology and recruited his father to go with him on a portion of the Appalachian Trail. He took notes and made audio recordings along the way. His attempt attracted the attention of the Roanoke Times, which featured a story about his journey, along with other parts of our workshop. Tim submitted a diary-style writeup for the course. Since the course ended, he has generated 3 position papers at workshops based on his hike, and he is looking to incorporate the lessons learned from the hike into a thesis or dissertation.
  • Modeling Hiking Trails in 3D using GPS Tracks. Phillip Summers crafted visualizations of hiking trails in a 3D interactive environment using geographic information from users traveling the Tour du Mont Blanc who uploaded their data to Wikiloc. The project cleaned raw GPS data, aggregated points on a continuous space disconnected from streets and waypoints. Mont Blanc was chosen because, at the time, it was known for many people uploading GPS data for public use.

Reading Reflection: Tim Ingold’s Lines

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At our Technology on the Trail workshop in March, invited speaker Alan Dix highly recommended a book by Tim Ingold titled Lines: A Brief History. We purchased it and made it available to people taking part in the initiative, with some thoughts listed here.

From Alan Dix’s blog post referencing Lines: “Ingold’s thesis is that we have privileged the point or place in modern thought, seeing the connection as merely the means of getting from A to B. Ingold is an anthropologist and spent time studying reindeer herders. Their way of life is to follow the herds as they make seasonal migrations; for the tribes following the herds it is the way they follow, the path, the line, which is primary.”

Ingold’s book explores how lines are a key part of walking, writing, storytelling, and much more.  The book probes the foundational meaning of a line, and what it is and means across various domains, noting early on that “to an illiterate reader, lines have no more meaning than abstract art”. There are tons of other examples in computing in HCI, e.g., certainly those who study visualization have a skill in recognizing patterns that an unskilled eye could not pick out.

The book is highly speculative, putting forth a series of analyses of topics and situations that were often not well grounded in evidence, which some found unsatisfying. Grad seminar participant Colin Shea-Blymer summed up this viewpoint very well:

I honestly appreciate the book’s magnificent scope, and, when taken as more of an artistic endeavor, it succeeds in that scope in many ways. However, coming into the book from a more critical perspective I found Ingold’s introductory apology for his lack of depth in many of the subjects he tied lines to unsatisfactory. The sections of his book that I muddled through read more like a stringing-together of romantic-era aesthetic arguments as evidence towards an unstated hypothesis; done without criticism of the arguments he appropriates. In brief, the book works well if you’re looking for an eye-opening overview of how lines go undetected in human art and society, but falters if the reader begins to scrutinize the arguments within. The path Ingold illuminates is beautiful and worth peering down, but the steps he takes appear treacherous and unstable upon closer inspection.

There’s more Ingold work, including another book that seems like it might be even more relevant to our Technology on the Trail theme, an edited collection titled Ways of Walking: Ethnographies and Practice on Foot (also available in the Virginia Tech library), stemming from a meeting of anthropologists who split time “sitting in a traditional seminar room” and “climb[ing] up through the forest and out to the open hillside”.  Given the similarity to our own seminar, there may be a review of this book in the near future!