Cross Cultural Computing An Artist S Journey

This exciting new book explores the relationship between cultural traditions and computers, looking at how people from very different cultures and backgrounds communicate and how the use of information technologies can support and enhance these dialogues. Historically we developed our understanding of other cultures through traditional means (museums, printed literature, etc.) but the advent of information technologies has allowed us access to a plethora of material. Tosa asks the question “Can we understand other cultures using computers as media to supplement thinking and memorization?” Starting with a survey of art and technology, moving into the area of culture and technology, the book culminates with a vision of a new world based on an understanding of these relationships, allowing cultural creators and viewers the opportunity to reach a better and more profound understanding of the role information technology will play going forward.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Culture and Computing, C&C 2023, held as part of the 25th International Conference, HCI International 2023, which was held virtually in Copenhagen, Denmark in July 2023. The total of 1578 papers and 396 posters included in the HCII 2023 proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 7472 submissions. The C&C 2023 proceeding focuses on preserving, disseminating, and creating cultural heritages via ICT (e.g., digital archives), to empower humanities research via ICT (i.e., digital humanities), to create art and expressions via ICT (i.e., media art), to support interactive cultural heritage experiences (e.g., rituals), and to understand new cultures born on the Internet (e.g., net culture, social media, games).

The two-volume set LNCS 12794-12795 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Culture and Computing, C&C 2021, which was held as part of HCI International 2021 and took place virtually during July 24-29, 2021. The total of 1276 papers and 241 posters included in the 39 HCII 2021 proceedings volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 5222 submissions. The papers included in the HCII-C&C volume set were organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: ICT for cultural heritage; technology and art; visitors’ experiences in digital culture; Part II: Design thinking in cultural contexts; digital humanities, new media and culture; perspectives on cultural computing.

The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates.

A Journey Through Cultures addresses one of the hottest topics in contemporary HCI: cultural diversity amongst users. For a number of years the HCI community has been investigating alternatives to enhance the design of cross-cultural systems. Most contributions to date have followed either a ‘design for each’ or a ‘design for all’ strategy. A Journey Through Cultures takes a very different approach. Proponents of CVM – the Cultural Viewpoint Metaphors perspective – the authors invite HCI practitioners to think of how to expose and communicate the idea of cultural diversity. A detailed case study is included which assesses the metaphors’ potential in cross-cultural design and evaluation. The results show that cultural viewpoint metaphors have strong epistemic power, leveraged by a combination of theoretic foundations coming from Anthropology, Semiotics and the authors’ own work in HCI and Semiotic Engineering. Luciana Salgado, Carla Leitão and Clarisse de Souza are members of SERG, the Semiotic Engineering Research Group at the Departamento de Informática of Rio de Janeiro's Pontifical Catholic University (PUC-Rio).

In the light of upcoming global issues, concerning population, energy, the environment, and food, information and communication technologies are required to overcome difficulties in communication among cultures. In this context, the First International Conference on Culture and Computing, which was held in Kyoto, Japan, in February 2010, was conceived as a collection of symposia, panels, workshops, exhibitions, and guided tours intended to share issues, activities, and research results regarding culture and computing. This volume includes 17 invited and selected papers dealing with state-of-the-art topics in culturally situated agents, intercultural collaboration and support systems, culture and computing for art and heritage, as well as culture and computing within regional communities.

The ability to communicate cultural codes in multimedia depends on their meaning and beauty, as perceived by different audiences around the globe. In this book, the ongoing research on computational modeling of visual, musical and textual contents is described in terms of identifying and mapping their semantic representations across different cultures. The underlying psychology of sense-making is quantified through analysis of aesthetics in terms of organizational and structural aspects of the contents that influence an audience’s formation of expectations for future signals, violations of these expectations, and explanations of their meaning. Complexity-accuracy tradeoffs in sound representation are further used to develop new computational methods that capture poietic and aesthetic aspects in music communication. Experimental studies are reported that try to characterize preferences for complexity in abstract, classical and traditional art and music across samples of Western and Far Eastern cultures. These experiments illustrate how aesthetics can be computed in terms of semantic and information measures, highlighting commonalities and uncovering differences in aesthetic preferences across cultures and individuals.

The reasons why governments of developing countries should put computer technology in their schools are highly controversial, but no less than the actual use being made of these comparatively expensive machines and their software. This book looks at experience in African, Asian and Arabic-speaking countries that already have computers in some of their schools. It is based mainly on research in China, Jordan, Kenya, Mauritius, Sri Lanka and Tunisia. The authors debate policy and practice in the light of experience to date. They identify the rationales commonly deployed by Ministries of Education and international agencies, but argue themselves for a long-term view of the potential of computers to liberalise education, and through such education to reduce dependency and inequity.