Theme 5

This weeks theme is design research. I have not really heard about design research before this course I think. At least not to the same extent as qualitative and quantitative methods and such. I think the paper by Haibo Li et al. is really interesting! Especially since I am in to mobile development and football is also one of my big interests. I have never really thought of the vibration function in mobile phones as something else than just a way of getting notified of new calls and text messages. But on most mobile phones you can set different vibration patterns for calls and for text messages. So why not use it for something even more advanced, like this. I do not really get why they say that it is unlikely that users are willing to stream an entire game of football. For me when I watch a game, I would like to see it as a whole.

I think that prototypes play an important role in research. It is when you do a prototype that you really can let users try out your design, and it is easier for them to get an understanding of the concept you are developing.  I think it could be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype if you want to see what issues or difficulties your idea might have.


For the “design research” paper I chose “Automatic speech recognition in cocktail-party situations: A specific training for separated speech” which was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Volume 131, Issue 2, pp. 1529-1535 (2012)). In the article the authors give an introduction to ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) and says that quite much research has been made on the subject, but that is primarily on single source speech, and not in a cocktail-party setting. The authors use different diagrams to show the set-ups for their experiments and how they make calculations on their data. They describe what mathematical methods they are using and they also give detailed data on all their measurements. I am not familiar with all the mathematical methods used in this study, but I have heard of some of them during the Spectral Transforms course I took three years ago.

In this paper a framework for robust ASR in cocktail-party situations has been presented. This framework is based on a robust transformed model constructed from separated speech in diverse acoustic environments. Three experiments are conducted in this study: Single speech recognition, Speech recognition with interfering speech, and Simultaneous speech recognition. The experiments were conducted in a room with the measures 5 x 4 x 3 meters. For all three experiments the word recognition rate (WRR) is shown in percent as a function of the wall reflection factor in a diagram. The results of the experiments are that both source separation and specific training provide a considerable improvement in WRR (up to a 35%), reducing the existing mismatch between the training and test data.

Theme 4 - reflections

The theme for this week was qualitative methods. I think it is an interesting theme since I will probably use some kind of qualitative method for my master thesis. During the seminar we added methods to a wiki page and also stated the advantages and disadvantages for every method type. We also wrote a description for every method type and gave examples of studies using the respective methods and also an example of good tools for the method type. The paper I chose used content analysis as the method, and two other people in my group had that method for their papers as well. At the seminar we discussed the term “triangulation” and how it can be used and why it is good to use it. In general I think it is good to try to combine both quantitative methods and qualitative methods, if it is relevant for the task of course. As I have mentioned earlier, I think it is good that we create wiki pages for these kind of things. It helps you remember what all terms are about. 

Except for the seminar this week we also had a lecture with Ylva Fernaeus from the HCI department at KTH. She talked about her paper that we read and about design researched. As design research is the theme for next week I think it was good to bring it up with the help of this lecture. And as it is mentioned on the theme page, this lecture this week served as a bridge between qualitative methods and research design.

We had a meeting with our group for the group project. We have not done that much this week, and that is because all of us were quite busy with other courses, so we will need to get more productive the coming week as the deadline for the project is on Friday the 30th. But we did discuss our topic and kind of refined our main question a bit more and sorted out some potential misunderstandings.

Theme 4

The article I chose is “An anatomy of a YouTube meme” by Limor Shifman which was published in New Media & Society with an impact factor of 1.394. The article is about memetic videos on YouTube and asks the questions “Do YouTube videos that generate a high volume of derivatives share common features? And, if so, what are they?”. A combination of qualitative and quantitative method were used in this study.

1. The method used in this papers is thematic qualitative analysis. The analysis of 30 prominent memetic videos was assembled and yielded six common features: focus on ordinary people, flawed masculinity, humor, simplicity, repetitiveness and whimsical content. The benefits using this method is that you get an in-depth view of the actual content of the videos and not just meta information. The limitations could be that you often need to complement this method with a more quantitative one if you want to see more comprehensive results.

2. I do not know if I learned that much more about qualitative methods from this papers than I already knew actually. But one thing is that qualitative methods can be more complex than what it first looks like, especially when focusing on video.

3. One problem I can see with this method is that it might not be sufficient to just use a qualitative method for this topic, and that is also why a quantitative method is used as well.



The article by Fernaeus and Jacobsson describes design of physical languages for controlling and programming robotic consumer products. The authors explore basic theories of semiotics represented in the two separate fields of comics and fashion, and based on these theories, the design concept of actDresses is defined. The authors talk about three scenarios. The first scenario is designed for the Pleo robot dinosaur, the second is designed for the experimental GlowBots platform, and the third case is designed for a prototype consumer vacuum cleaner robot.

Case 1
In case 1 it is described how to change the way the user interact with the electronic pet. By using RFID tags you could for example put the dinosaur to sleep by putting a pyjama on it.

Case 2
This is a more mechanical looking device than Pleo. This device could perfom five different actions depending on which “amulettes” were attached to it. These actions are: (1) Navigation in space, (2) Display patterns, (3) Generate sound, (4) Send and receive signals from other robots, and (5) Respond to user interactions, e.g. shaking and holding the robot in different ways.

Case 3
This case is about a commercial vacuum cleaning robot. Users can, as with Pleo from case 1, put on different cloth covers for the product. They have also designed a set of comic book like magnetic patches that can be attached to the metallic shield on top of the vacuum robot. If you for example put a sign with the text “shy” on the robot, it will hide under the sofa.

Theme 3 - reflections

This week we did not have a seminar, but we had a lecture and a lab session instead. The lecture was held by Martha Cleveland-Innes who is one of the co-authors of the text we read for this week; The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. I think the lecture was quite interesting.

During the lab session we got to try out the program SPSS. We had like a mini lecture before the lab session where Ester explained the program and how you use it. The instructions for the lab was not that profound, and there were not so specific tasks. I think it would have been better if the lab session was more structured, because now it felt that we just sat there for an hour and clicked around in the program. Ester said that there was not any examination of the lab so it felt a bit pointless to just sit there and try to learn how to use the program. But I think the program is really powerful, if you learn how and when to use it properly. I think it would have been good to have an introduction to this program in the beginning of the bachelor thesis course since most of the people taking that course uses a quantitative survey of some sort. It is good, though, that we got to at least try this program a little bit before our upcoming master theses. I also saw that SPSS is free to download and use for KTH students, that is really good! I have not yet figured out how to export survey data from like Google Docs or Surveymonkey (which are the tools used the most I suppose) to SPSS format. I think this program can be particularly useful since we in our group project for this course focus on “surveys as a method in media technology research” which we later narrowed down to “internet-based questionnaires”.

Theme 3

For this week’s theme we have read two texts. The first one was “Mixed Research and Online Learning: Strategies for Improvement” by Lowenthal & Leech and the second one was “Emotional presence, learning and the online learning environment” by Cleveland-Innes & Campbell. Both texts relate to each other since they both are about the topic “online learning”.

Mixed Research and Online Learning: Strategies for Improvement
In this text they introduce the term “mixed research”. Mixed research is what you get when you mix quantitative research with qualitative research. Quantitative research could be the data you get from for example asking the question “how good was this movie on a scale from 1-10?” whereas quantitative research could be the data you get from asking “what makes this movie that good?”. The authors point out that it is important to have in mind that mixed research should only be called that if there are a mix of sampling, methods, data and analysis for the two research types. If there are a mix of all these it could be called “fully mixed”, otherwise the research should be called partially mixed. Mix research is a quite new model, and the authors say that this method will become more popular in the future, and because of that, the overall quality of research on online learning will be better in the future. I think that mixed research will have a bright future. I that that it is always good to combine the best parts from different areas, what ever it might be, in order to achieve a better understanding of something and to better reach your goal. But on the other hand you need to, more or less, master both quantitative research and qualitative research in order to be able to use mixed research, it is not enough to do well in one of those.

Emotional presence, learning and the online learning environment
This text is about emotions in online learning and it tries to find out if emotions can exist in an online learning environment, and if that is the case, how to best make use of them. The method used in this paper is data collection and questionnaires that were handed out to 217 students. So you can say that this is a quantitative method and they analysed the data through statistical and quantitative analysis.

I think it is interesting with emotions in online learning. The conclusion of the study was that it exists emotions in online learning and you need to be careful about how you make use of that since it can have both positive and negative effects. If students are not feeling that well when they are studying, and the online learning environment knows about that, then the results of their studies might not be that beneficial. So you can say that the feelings might “boost” the outcome of a study session, and it can be of both positive and negative matter.

Theme 2 - reflections

After this week I have learned about what theory is and what theory is not. Or at least I have tried to learn, since it is not a very easy topic. I think this weeks seminar was the best one so far since we really discussed what other seminar groups have discussed about theory and what we all wanted to describe theory as on the wiki page “what is theory?”. I have learned that there are different types of theories (I-V according to Gregor). I also like the wiki page “theory” since it gives good examples of different theories. Maybe it should have been a good idea to create wiki pages during the first and second seminar as well, for like the topics “knowledge” and/or “sense data”.

We have started with our group project and we had our first actual meeting today. We have chosen to do our group project about the topic “surveys as a method in media technology research”. Our main formulation of question for this topic is why you chose surveys as a method and when it is useful as a method. The reasons for this are many. The first one is that we all will probably use some kind of survey for our master’s theses. And then it would be good to know if a surveys really is a good method and when there are other, more suitable methods. Another reason for choosing this topic is that we have all seen a lot of, more or less, badly created surveys from people, especially during the spring term when many people are creating surveys for their bachelor theses. So by focusing on how to create a good survey we will all benefit from it for our upcoming master’s theses and it is good to know in general, for other upcoming projects as well.

Theme 2

In one way it is easier to try to say what theory is not, than try to say what it actually is. So you can say “not theory is...”. Theory is not the personal opinions of the researcher himself/herself. Diagrams, figures, variables, data and references are not theory themselves, but they can be a part of evidence that support a theory. Hypotheses are not theory, but can be links between theory and data. Hypotheses are statements of what is to be expected and not why something is to be expected. This brings us to what theory is. Theory is general and abstract text which answer the question why? Theory is providing explanations with clear argumentation that can be tested. The aim of theories are to describe, explain and predict (theory type I, II and III) the future developments based on revealing of the current connections between the cause and the event.

The paper I have selected is “Mobile Geotagging: Reexamining Our Interactions with Urban Space” by Lee Humphreys and Tony Liao. It was published in 2011 in the journal “Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication” which has an impact factor of 2.172. The paper focuses on a mobile geotagging service called Socialight and the social practices associated with it. By exploring how people use Socialight’s virtual “sticky notes”, the paper demonstrate how people integrate mobile geotagging technology into their everyday lives, what kinds of location-based communication people create, and how people make meaning through this service. Sticky notes are messages that users can leave in particular locations for people in their network. Using GPS, Socialight alerts users if they are near a place which they or someone in their network has tagged by leaving a ‘‘sticky.’’ For example, users could tag the corner deli with a sticky note saying, ‘‘remember to buy milk’’ and when they walk by the deli again, they receive the milk message on their mobile phone. Alternatively, Socialight users have the ability to leave messages for other users.

I would say that the theory type of the paper is II (explanation). Different terms are explained, and with references to other papers. Questions like “how” and “where” are kind of answered through examples. There are no predictions in this theory, but the theory part of the paper ends with “therefore it will be interesting to see if...”, so it still says something about the future.

One limitation of using this type of theory is of course that it does not predict something particular about the future. One benefit using this type of theory is it focuses on getting everything well explained so that the reader will get a more in-depth knowledge about the things and terms.

Theme 1 - reflections

In this blog post I am supposed to post my reflections on theme 1. We have had two seminars and one lecture.

I have learned about the term Impact Factor, and I can see now why this can be useful in the future to find relevant journals with relevant papers. I have learned that there are a lot of different journals out there, and most of them have an impact factor of 1 or above.

We had a lecture by Leif which was supposed to be a kind of crash course in philosophy. I don’t really know if I know more now or before the lecture. The lecture started with the question “what is knowledge?”. Leif brought up the term “justification” and “justified true belief”. I have studied some logic, but this kind of made me more confused. It might have to do with that the lecture was held at three in the afternoon and I was tired. I think it will be a good idea for me to look at the lecture slides again.

We read the book The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russel. It was interesting but a but hard to read for me as an engineering student I think. It is impressive that it was written 100 years ago. On Wednesday's seminar we discussed the book. Leif started by talking a bit about the book and about Bertrand. He mentioned a scene from Monty Python where philosophers are playing football. He said something like “to make philosophers try to learn playing football is as hard as to make engineers try to learn philosophy”. I agree to that in a way.