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.
Hi Johan,
SvaraRaderaI have read your article with grait interest. I wonder what method of these two is mostly used in this research?
Johan, I like your choice of article too. When I was looking for topic for my bachelor thesis I had an idea to analyse memetic videos but I never could figure out why one with kitties is more popular than other (if they share general topic and some other characteristics like simplicity/humour) and I dropped this idea. How researchers solve this question in article you've read? How they confirm those "6 common features" on a bigger sample? In my impression half of the videos on Youtube share this features. :)
SvaraRaderaYou're telling us that qualitative methods can be more complex than what they first look like. I most certainly agree with that. I had a hard time getting deeper into this area since none of this weeks paper discussed the methodologies closer. At least I would've preferred to read more about the actual sub-methods, rather than choosing a paper which covers only one, or at tops, two areas.
SvaraRadera