Journal articles on the topic 'Visual Interactive Labeling'

Linguistic insight in the form of high-level relationships and rules in text builds the basis of our understanding of language. However, the data-driven generation of such structures often lacks labeled resources that can be used as training data for supervised machine learning. The creation of such ground-truth data is a time-consuming process that often requires domain expertise to resolve text ambiguities and characterize linguistic phenomena. Furthermore, the creation and refinement of machine learning models is often challenging for linguists as the models are often complex, in-transparent, and difficult to understand. To tackle these challenges, we present a visual analytics technique for interactive data labeling that applies concepts from gamification and explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to support complex classification tasks. The visual-interactive labeling interface promotes the creation of effective training data. Visual explanations of learned rules unveil the decisions of the machine learning model and support iterative and interactive optimization. The gamification-inspired design guides the user through the labeling process and provides feedback on the model performance. As an instance of the proposed technique, we present QuestionComb , a workspace tailored to the task of question classification (i.e., in information-seeking vs. non-information-seeking questions). Our evaluation studies confirm that gamification concepts are beneficial to engage users through continuous feedback, offering an effective visual analytics technique when combined with active learning and XAI.

This paper describes a fast approach to automatic point label de-confliction on interactive maps. The general Map Labeling problem is NP-hard and has been the subject of much study for decades. Computerized maps have introduced interactive zooming and panning, which has intensified the problem. Providing dynamic labels for such maps typically requires a time-consuming pre-processing phase. In the realm of visual analytics, however, the labeling of interactive maps is further complicated by the use of massive datasets laid out in arbitrary configurations, thus rendering reliance on a pre-processing phase untenable. This paper offers a method for labeling point-features on dynamic maps in real time without pre-processing. The algorithm presented is efficient, scalable, and exceptionally fast; it can label interactive charts and diagrams at speeds of multiple frames per second on maps with tens of thousands of nodes. To accomplish this, the algorithm employs a novel geometric de-confliction approach, the ‘trellis strategy,’ along with a unique label candidate cost analysis to determine the “least expensive” label configuration. The speed and scalability of this approach make it well-suited for visual analytic applications.

Labeling of samples is a recurrent and time-consuming task in data analysis and machine learning and yet generally overlooked in terms of visual analytics approaches to improve the process. As the number of tailored applications of learning models increases, it is crucial that more effective approaches to labeling are developed. In this paper, we report the development of a methodology and a framework to support labeling, with an application case as background. The methodology performs visual active learning and label propagation with 2D embeddings as layouts to achieve faster and interactive labeling of samples. The framework is realized through SoundscapeX, a tool to support labeling in soundscape ecology data. We have applied the framework to a set of audio recordings collected for a Long Term Ecological Research Project in the Cantareira-Mantiqueira Corridor (LTER CCM), localized in the transition between northeastern São Paulo state and southern Minas Gerais state in Brazil. We employed a pre-label data set of groups of animals to test the efficacy of the approach. The results showed the best accuracy at 94.58% in the prediction of labeling for birds and insects; and 91.09% for the prediction of the sound event as frogs and insects.

Strategies for selecting the next data instance to label, in service of generating labeled data for machine learning, have been considered separately in the machine learning literature on active learning and in the visual analytics literature on human-centered approaches. We propose a unified design space for instance selection strategies to support detailed and fine-grained analysis covering both of these perspectives. We identify a concise set of 15 properties, namely measureable characteristics of datasets or of machine learning models applied to them, that cover most of the strategies in these literatures. To quantify these properties, we introduce Property Measures (PM) as fine-grained building blocks that can be used to formalize instance selection strategies. In addition, we present a taxonomy of PMs to support the description, evaluation, and generation of PMs across four dimensions: machine learning (ML) Model Output , Instance Relations , Measure Functionality , and Measure Valence . We also create computational infrastructure to support qualitative visual data analysis: a visual analytics explainer for PMs built around an implementation of PMs using cascades of eight atomic functions. It supports eight analysis tasks, covering the analysis of datasets and ML models using visual comparison within and between PMs and groups of PMs, and over time during the interactive labeling process. We iteratively refined the PM taxonomy, the explainer, and the task abstraction in parallel with each other during a two-year formative process, and show evidence of their utility through a summative evaluation with the same infrastructure. This research builds a formal baseline for the better understanding of the commonalities and differences of instance selection strategies, which can serve as the stepping stone for the synthesis of novel strategies in future work.

Semantic scene understanding is one of the several significant goals of robotics. In this paper, we propose a framework that is able to construct geometric invariants for simultaneous object detection and segmentation using a simple pairwise interactive context term, for the sake of achieving a preliminary milestone of Semantic scene understanding. The context is incorporated as pairwise interactions between pixels, imposing a prior on the labeling. Our model formulates the multi-class image segmentation task as an energy minimization problem and finds a globally optimal solution using belief propagation and neural network. We experimentally evaluate the proposed method on three publicly available datasets: the MSRC-1, the CorelB datasets, and the PASCAL VOC database. Results show the applicability and efficacy of the proposed method to the multi-class segmentation problem.

Electronic health record (EHR) data are widely used to perform early diagnoses and create treatment plans, which are key areas of research. We aimed to increase the efficiency of iteratively applying data-intensive technology and verifying the results for complex and big EHR data. We used a system entailing sequence mining, interpretable deep learning models, and visualization on data extracted from the MIMIC-IIIdatabase for a group of patients diagnosed with heart disease. The results of sequence mining corresponded to specific pathways of interest to medical staff and were used to select patient groups that underwent these pathways. An interactive Sankey diagram representing these pathways and a heat map visually representing the weight of each variable were developed for temporal and quantitative illustration. We applied the proposed system to predict unplanned cardiac surgery using clinical pathways determined by sequence pattern mining to select cardiac surgery from complex EHRs to label subject groups and deep learning models. The proposed system aids in the selection of pathway-based patient groups, simplification of labeling, and exploratory the interpretation of the modeling results. The proposed system can help medical staff explore various pathways that patients have undergone and further facilitate the testing of various clinical hypotheses using big data in the medical domain.

Convolution neural networks usually require large labeled data-sets to construct accurate models. However, in many real-world scenarios, such as global illumination, labeling data are a time-consuming and costly human intelligent task. Semi-supervised learning methods leverage this issue by making use of a small labeled data-set and a larger set of unlabeled data. In this paper, our contributions focus on the development of a robust algorithm that combines active and deep semi-supervised convolution neural network to reduce labeling workload and to accelerate convergence in case of real-time global illumination. While the theoretical concepts of photo-realistic rendering are well understood, the increased need for the delivery of highly dynamic interactive content in vast virtual environments has increased recently. Particularly, the quality measure of computer-generated images is of great importance. The experiments are conducted on global illumination scenes which contain diverse distortions. Compared with human psycho-visual thresholds, the good consistency between these thresholds and the learning models quality measures can been seen. A comparison has also been made with SVM and other state-of-the-art deep learning models. We do transfer learning by running the convolution base of these models over our image set. Then, we use the output features of the convolution base as input to retrain the parameters of the fully connected layer. The obtained results show that our proposed method provides promising efficiency in terms of precision, time complexity, and optimal architecture.

We present a biologically motivated architecture for object recognition that is capable of online learning of several objects based on interaction with a human teacher. The system combines biological principles such as appearance-based representation in topographical feature detection hierarchies and context-driven transfer between different levels of object memory. Training can be performed in an unconstrained environment by presenting objects in front of a stereo camera system and labeling them by speech input. The learning is fully online and thus avoids an artificial separation of the interaction into training and test phases. We demonstrate the performance on a challenging ensemble of 50 objects.

Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has been an active area of research for retrieving similar images from large repositories, without the prerequisite of manual labeling. Most current CBIR algorithms can faithfully return a list of images that matches the visual perspective of their inventors, who might decide to use a certain combination of image features like edges, colors and textures of regions as well as their spatial distribution during processing. In practice, however, the retrieved images rarely correspond exactly to the results expected by the users, a problem that has come to be known as the semantic gap. In this paper, we propose a novel and extensible multidimensional approach called matrix of visual perspectives as a solution for addressing this semantic gap. Our approach exploits the dynamic cross-interaction (in other words, mix-and-match) of image features and similarity metrics to produce results that attempt to mimic the mental visual picture of the user. Experimental results on retrieving similar Japanese cultural heritage symbols called kamons by a prototype system confirm that the interaction of visual perspectives in the user can be effectively captured and reflected. The benefits of this approach are broader. They can be equally applicable to the development of CBIR systems for other types of images, whether cultural or noncultural, by adapting to different sets of application specific image features.

AbstractAcetylcholine (ACh) is one of the transmitters utilized by extrathalamic afferents to modulate stimulus-driven neurotransmission and experience-dependent plasticity in the visual cortex. Since these processes also depend on the activation of glutamatergic receptors, cholinergic terminals may exert their effects via direct modulation of excitatory neurotransmission. The objective of this study was to determine whether the ultrastructural relationships between cholinergic terminals, glutamate-immunoreactive neurons, and other unlabeled cells support this idea. Sections from aldehyde-fixed visual cortex (area 17) of adult cats were immunolabled for the following molecules: (1) choline acetyltransferase (ChAT), the acetylcholine-synthesizing enzyme; (2) L-glutamate; or (3) ChAT simultaneously with L-glutamate by combining electron-microscopic immunogold and immunoperoxidase techniques. None of the cortical terminals were dually labeled, suggesting that (1) the labeling procedure was free of chemical or immunological cross reactions; and (2) glutamate immunoreactivity probably reflects the transmitter, and not metabolic, pool of L-glutamate. Comparisons between cholinergic and noncholinergic axons revealed that (1) ChAT-immunoreactive axons formed fewer identifiable synaptic contacts within single ultrathin sections (P < 0.01 using chi-square test); and (2) more of the cholinergic axons occurred directly opposed to other terminals (P < 0.0015 by chi-square test), including 21% of which resided directly across asymmetric, axo-spinous junctions. Dual labeling showed that a third of the synaptic targets for cholinergic terminals contained detectable levels of glutamate immunoreactivity. Some of the axo-spinous junctions juxtaposed to cholinergic axons also exhibited glutamate immunoreactivity presynaptically. These observations provide ultrastructural evidence for direct, cholinergic modulation of glutamatergic pyramidal neurons within the mammalian neocortex. Prevalence of juxtapositions between cholinergic terminals and axo-spinous synapses supports the following ideas: (1) ACh may modulate the release of noncholinergic transmitters, including Glu; (2) Glu may modulate ACh release; and (3) these processes may be concurrent with cholinergic modulation of glutamatergic synapses at postsynaptic sites.

Abstract The paper presents a web application for navigation through the university campus, which is based on Global Positioning System GPS and OpenStreetMap. The application has a multilayer structure and multi-labelling support. The proposed solution ensures better management of visual data and more efficient image processing comparing to the other known methods. With the new search system, users can place a lot of information on one layer without losing the legibility of displayed data. All the information that was displayed on the map was grouped and assigned to the appropriate categories.Therefore a map contains a lot of related information that needs to be linked to each other. The system has been divided into modules that ensure the integrity of the displayed things. Presenting so much information at the same time is managed by modules. Their main job is to provide results that is then segregated and grouped. The system presented in this paper was applied for Lodz University of Technology.

The accurate segmentation and identification of vertebrae presents the foundations for spine analysis including fractures, malfunctions and other visual insights. The large-scale vertebrae segmentation challenge (VerSe), organized as a competition at the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), is aimed at vertebrae segmentation and labeling. In this paper, we propose a framework that addresses the tasks of vertebrae segmentation and identification by exploiting both deep learning and classical machine learning methodologies. The proposed solution comprises two phases: a binary fully automated segmentation of the whole spine, which exploits a 3D convolutional neural network, and a semi-automated procedure that allows locating vertebrae centroids using traditional machine learning algorithms. Unlike other approaches, the proposed method comes with the added advantage of no requirement for single vertebrae-level annotations to be trained. A dataset of 214 CT scans has been extracted from VerSe’20 challenge data, for training, validating and testing the proposed approach. In addition, to evaluate the robustness of the segmentation and labeling algorithms, 12 CT scans from subjects affected by severe, moderate and mild scoliosis have been collected from a local medical clinic. On the designated test set from Verse’20 data, the binary spine segmentation stage allowed to obtain a binary Dice coefficient of 89.17%, whilst the vertebrae identification one reached an average multi-class Dice coefficient of 90.09%. In order to ensure the reproducibility of the algorithms hereby developed, the code has been made publicly available.

Detection of antibiotics in the blood is necessary for characterizing their common or individual pharmacokinetics. This has increased the need in rapid detection techniques, such as lateral flow immunoassay, for the on-site control of antibiotics. The present study characterized factors influencing the analytical parameters of lateral flow immunoassay to increase its sensitivity for detecting tetracycline in human serum samples. Assay sensitivity was increased by altering the concentrations of immunoreagents and surfactant and the number of interaction stages in the assay with indirect labeling a specific antibody. The optimal assay conditions reduced the limit of visual detection of tetracycline from 100 to 10 ng/mL. The developed assay allowed us to detect tetracycline in both two-fold diluted and undiluted human serum samples within 15 min. Our results suggest that the developed assay can be used to screen patients under antibiotic treatment.

Recognition of human actions form videos has been an active area of research because it has applications in various domains. The results of work in this field are used in video surveillance, automatic video labeling and human-computer interaction, among others. Any advancements in this field are tied to advances in the interrelated fields of object recognition, spatio- temporal video analysis and semantic segmentation. Activity recognition is a challenging task since it faces many problems such as occlusion, view point variation, background differences and clutter and illumination variations. Scientific achievements in the field have been numerous and rapid as the applications are far reaching. In this survey, we cover the growth of the field from the earliest solutions, where handcrafted features were used, to later deep learning approaches that use millions of images and videos to learn features automatically. By this discussion, we intend to highlight the major breakthroughs and the directions the future research might take while benefiting from the state-of-the-art methods.

Pupil detection techniques are an essential diagnostic technique in medical applications. Pupil detection becomes more complex because of the dynamic movement of the pupil region and it’s size. Eye-tracking is either the method of assessing the point of focus (where one sees) or the orientation of an eye relative to the head. An instrument used to control eye positions and eye activity is the eye tracker. As an input tool for human-computer interaction, eye trackers are used in research on the visual system, in psychology, psycholinguistics, marketing, and product design. Eye detection is one in all the applications in the image process. This is very important in human identification and it will improve today’s identification technique that solely involves the eye detection to spot individuals. This technology is still new, only a few domains are applying this technology as their medical system. The proposed work is developing an eye pupil detection method in real-time, stable, using an intensity labeling algorithm. The proposed hardware architecture is designed using the median filter, segmentation using the threshold process, and morphology to detect pupil shape. Finally, an intensity Labeling algorithm is done to locate an exact eye pupil region. A Real-time FPGA implementation is done by Altera Quartus II software with cyclone IV FPGA.

The carbonic anhydrase (CA) inhibitor acetazolamide (AZ) is used routinely to estimate cerebrovascular reserve capacity in patients, as it reliably increases cerebral blood flow (CBF). However, the mechanism by which AZ accomplishes this CBF increase is not entirely understood. We recently discovered that CA can produce nitric oxide (NO) from nitrite, and that AZ enhances this NO production in vitro. In fact, this interaction between AZ and CA accounted for a large part of AZ's vasodilatory action, which fits well with the known vasodilatory potency of NO. The present study aimed to assess whether AZ acts similarly in vivo in the human cerebrovascular system. Hence, we increased or minimized the dietary intake of nitrate in 20 healthy male participants, showed them a full-field flickering dartboard, and measured their CBF response to this visual stimulus with arterial spin labeling. Doing so, we found a significant positive interaction between the dietary intake of nitrate and the CBF modulation afforded by AZ during visual stimulation. In addition, but contrary to studies conducted in elderly participants, we report no effect of nitrate intake on resting CBF in healthy human participants. The present study provides in vivo support for an enhancing effect of AZ on the NO production from nitrite catalyzed by CA in the cerebrovascular system. Furthermore, our results, in combination with the results of other groups, indicate that nitrate may have significant importance to vascular function when the cerebrovascular system is challenged by age or disease.

Determining antibiotic concentration in human blood provides useful pharmacokinetic information. Commonly used methods such as ELISA require a long time to obtain results and thus cannot be applied when information is needed immediately. In this study, a novel antibody-based lateral flow technique was developed for tetracycline detection in human serum. Contrary to tests developed to analyze food samples, the features of work with serum as analyzed probe were studied for the first time here. The application of labeled and unlabeled specific antibodies was compared. For this purpose, specific and anti-species antibodies were labeled with gold nanoparticles and used for antigen–antibody interaction on the membrane surface with observed staining in the test zone. For both schemes, optimal conditions were established to provide the best sensitivity. The developed assay has a limit of visual detection as low as 35 and 11 ng/mL for the direct and indirect labeled antibodies, respectively. The limit of instrumental detection is from 0.4 to 3.5 ng/mL for diluted and undiluted sera. The use of indirect antibody labeling showed a small increase in sensitivity compared to traditional direct antibody labeling. The developed method showed no cross-reactivity with antibiotics of other classes. The method was used to test samples of serum. The results showed high correlation with the data obtained by ELISA (R2 = 0.98968). The assay provides a quick assessment of the amount of antibiotics in the blood and keeps them under control throughout the duration of therapy.

Background: It has been suggested that, in order to validate a diagnosis of (C)APD (central auditory processing disorder), testing using direct cross-modal analogs should be performed to demonstrate that deficits exist solely or primarily in the auditory modality (McFarland and Cacace, 1995; Cacace and McFarland, 2005). This modality-specific viewpoint is controversial and not universally accepted (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association [ASHA], 2005; Musiek et al, 2005). Further, no such analogs have been developed to date, and neither the feasibility of such testing in normally functioning individuals nor the concurrent validity of cross-modal analogs has been established. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility of cross-modal testing by examining the performance of normal adults and children on four tests of central auditory function and their corresponding visual analogs. In addition, this study investigated the degree to which concurrent validity of auditory and visual versions of these tests could be demonstrated. Research Design: An experimental repeated measures design was employed. Study Sample: Participants consisted of two groups (adults, n = 10; children, n = 10) with normal and symmetrical hearing sensitivity, normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity, and no family or personal history of auditory/otologic, language, learning, neurologic, or related disorders. Data Collection and Analysis: Visual analogs of four tests in common clinical use for the diagnosis of (C)APD were developed (Dichotic Digits [Musiek, 1983]; Frequency Patterns [Pinheiro and Ptacek, 1971]; Duration Patterns [Pinheiro and Musiek, 1985]; and the Random Gap Detection Test [RGDT; Keith, 2000]). Participants underwent two 1 hr test sessions separated by at least 1 wk. Order of sessions (auditory, visual) and tests within each session were counterbalanced across participants. ANOVAs (analyses of variance) were used to examine effects of group, modality, and laterality (for the Dichotic/Dichoptic Digits tests) or response condition (for the auditory and visual Frequency Patterns and Duration Patterns tests). Pearson product-moment correlations were used to investigate relationships between auditory and visual performance. Results: Adults performed significantly better than children on the Dichotic/Dichoptic Digits tests. Results also revealed a significant effect of modality, with auditory better than visual, and a significant modality × laterality interaction, with a right-ear advantage seen for the auditory task and a left-visual-field advantage seen for the visual task. For the Frequency Patterns test and its visual analog, results revealed a significant modality × response condition interaction, with humming better than labeling for the auditory version but the reversed effect for the visual version. For Duration Patterns testing, visual performance was significantly poorer than auditory performance. Due to poor test-retest reliability and ceiling effects for the auditory and visual gap-detection tasks, analyses could not be performed. No cross-modal correlations were observed for any test. Conclusions: Results demonstrated that cross-modal testing is at least feasible using easily accessible computer hardware and software. The lack of any cross-modal correlations suggests independent processing mechanisms for auditory and visual versions of each task. Examination of performance in individuals with central auditory and pan-sensory disorders is needed to determine the utility of cross-modal analogs in the differential diagnosis of (C)APD.

Recent physiological studies have suggested that there are several sites of interaction between the neural pathways that control saccadic eye movements and those that control visual pursuit movements. To address the question of saccade/pursuit interaction from a neuroanatomical point of view, we have studied the connections from the smooth and saccadic eye movement subregions of the frontal eye field (FEFsem and FEFsac, respectively) to the rostral interstitial nucleus of the medial longitudinal fasciculus (riMLF) in four Cebus apella monkeys. The riMLF has traditionally been considered to be a premotor center for vertical saccadic eye movements on the basis of single neuron recording experiments, microstimulation experiments, and surgical or chemical lesion experiments. We localized the functional subregions of the FEF with the use of low-threshold (≤50 μA) intracortical microstimulation. Biotinylated dextran amine or lectin from triticum vulgaris (wheat germ), peroxidase labeled, was placed into these functionally defined subregions to label anterogradely the terminals of axons that originated in the FEF. Our results demonstrate that both the FEFsem and FEFsac send direct projections to the ipsilateral riMLF. The distribution and density of labeling from the FEFsem are comparable to those from the FEFsac. The direct FEFsem-to-riMLF projection suggests a possible role of the riMLF in smooth pursuit eye movements and supports the hypothesis that there is interaction between the saccadic and pursuit subsystems at the brain stem level.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Inability to use speech interfaces greatly limits the deaf and hearing impaired people in the possibility of human-machine interaction. To solve this problem and to increase the accuracy and reliability of the automatic Russian sign language recognition system it is proposed to use lip-reading in addition to hand gestures recognition. Deaf and hearing impaired people use sign language as the main way of communication in everyday life. Sign language is a structured form of hand gestures and lips movements involving visual motions and signs, which is used as a communication system. Since sign language includes not only hand gestures, but also lip movements that mimic vocalized pronunciation, it is of interest to investigate how accurately such a visual speech can be recognized by a lip-reading system, especially considering the fact that the visual speech of hearing impaired people is often characterized with hyper-articulation, which should potentially facilitate its recognition. For this purpose, thesaurus of Russian sign language (TheRusLan) collected in SPIIRAS in 2018–19 was used. The database consists of color optical FullHD video recordings of 13 native Russian sign language signers (11 females and 2 males) from “Pavlovsk boarding school for the hearing impaired”. Each of the signers demonstrated 164 phrases for 5 times. This work covers the initial stages of this research, including data collection, data labeling, region-of-interest detection and methods for informative features extraction. The results of this study can later be used to create assistive technologies for deaf or hearing impaired people.</p>

Vision-based human activity recognition is the process of labelling image sequences with action labels. Accurate systems for this problem are applied in areas such as visual surveillance, human computer interaction and video retrieval. The challenges are due to variations in motion, recording settings and gait differences. Here the authors propose an approach to recognize the human activities through gait. Activity recognition through Gait is the process of identifying an activity by the manner in which they walk. The identification of human activities in a video, such as a person is walking, running, jumping, jogging etc are important activities in video surveillance. The authors contribute the use of Model based approach for activity recognition with the help of movement of legs only. Experimental results suggest that their method are able to recognize the human activities with a good accuracy rate and robust to shadows present in the videos.

Tauroursodeoxycholic acid (TUDCA), a hydrophilic bile acid containing taurine conjugated with the ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA), has been known and used from ancient times as a therapeutic compound in traditional Chinese medicine. TUDCA has recently been gaining significant interest as a neuroprotective agent, also exploited in the visual disorders. Among several mechanisms of TUDCA’s protective action, its antioxidant activity and stabilizing effect on mitochondrial and plasma membranes are considered. In this work we investigated antioxidant activity of TUDCA and its impact on structural properties of model membranes of different composition using electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy and the spin labeling technique. Localization of TUDCA molecules in a pure POPC bilayer has been studied using a molecular dynamics simulation (MD). The obtained results indicate that TUDCA is not an efficient singlet oxygen (1O2 (1Δg)) quencher, and the determined rate constant of its interaction with 1O2 (1Δg) is only 1.9 × 105 M−1s−1. However, in lipid oxidation process induced by a Fenton reaction, TUDCA reveals substantial antioxidant activity significantly decreasing the rate of oxygen consumption in the system studied. In addition, TUDCA induces slight, but noticeable changes in the polarity and fluidity of the investigated model membranes. The results of performed MD simulation correspond very well with the experimental results.

Microelectrode recording and 2-deoxyglucose (2dg) labeling were used to investigate center-surround interactions in the middle temporal visual area (MT) of the owl monkey. These techniques revealed columnar groups of neurons whose receptive fields had opposite types of center-surround interaction with respect to moving visual stimuli. In one type of column, neurons responded well to objects such as a single bar or spot but poorly to large textured stimuli such as random dots. This was often due to the fact that the receptive fields had antagonistic surrounds: surround motion in the same direction as that preferred by the center suppressed responses, thus rendering these neurons unresponsive to wide-field motion. In the second set of complementary, interdigitated columns, neuronal receptive fields had reinforcing surrounds and responded optimally to wide-field motion. This functional organization could not be accounted for by systematic differences in binocular disparity. Within both column types, neurons whose receptive fields exhibited center-surround interactions were found less frequently in the input layers compared with the other layers. Additional tests were done on single units to examine the nature of the center-surround interactions. The direction tuning of the surround was broader than that of the center, and the preferred direction, with respect to that of the center, tended to be either in the same or opposite direction and only rarely in orthogonal directions. Surround motion at various velocities modulated the overall responsiveness to centrally placed moving stimuli, but it did not produce shifts in the peaks of the center's tuning curves for either direction or speed. In layers 3B and 5 of the local motion processing columns, a number of neurons responded only to local motion contrast but did so over a region of the visual field that was much larger than the optimal stimulus size. The central feature of this receptive field type was the generalization of surround antagonism over retinotopic space—a property similar to other “complex” receptive fields described previously. The columnar organization of different types of center-surround interactions may reflect the initial segregation of visual motion information into wide-field and local motion contrast systems that serve complementary functions in visual motion processing. Such segregation appears to occur at later stages of the macaque motion processing stream, in the medial superior temporal area (MST), and has also been described in invertebrate visual systems where it appears to be involved in the important function of distinguishing background motion from object motion.

Abstract. Nowadays, point clouds are the standard product when capturing reality independent of scale and measurement technique. Especially, Dense Image Matching (DIM) and Laser Scanning (LS) are state of the art capturing methods for a great variety of applications producing detailed point clouds up to billions of points. In-depth analysis of such huge point clouds typically requires sophisticated spatial indexing structures to support potentially long-lasting automated non-interactive processing tasks like feature extraction, semantic labelling, surface generation, and the like. Nevertheless, a visual inspection of the point data is often necessary to obtain an impression of the scene, roughly check for completeness, quality, and outlier rates of the captured data in advance. Also intermediate processing results, containing additional per-point computed attributes, may require visual analyses to draw conclusions or to parameterize further processing. Over the last decades a variety of commercial, free, and open source viewers have been developed that can visualise huge point clouds and colorize them based on available attributes. However, they have either a poor loading and navigation performance, visualize only a subset of the points, or require the creation of spatial indexing structures in advance. In this paper, we evaluate a progressive method that is capable of rendering any point cloud that fits in GPU memory in real time without the need of time consuming hierarchical acceleration structure generation. In combination with our multi-threaded LAS and LAZ loaders, we achieve load performance of up to 20 million points per second, display points already while loading, support flexible switching between different attributes, and rendering up to one billion points with visually appealing navigation behaviour. Furthermore, loading times of different data sets for different open source and commercial software packages are analysed.

Abstract. Supervised classification of remotely sensed images has been widely used to map land cover and land use. Since the performance of supervised methods depends on the quality of the training data, it is essential to develop methods to generate an enhanced training dataset. Active learning represents an alternative for such purpose as it proposes to create a dataset of optimized samples, normally collected based on classification uncertainty. However, it is heavily dependent on human interaction, since the user has to label selected samples over a number of iterations. In this paper, we explore the use of uncertainty to improve classification accuracy through a single iteration. We conducted experiments in a region of Portugal (Trás-os-Montes), using multi-temporal Sentinel-2 images. The proposed approach consisted in computing the classification uncertainty of a Random Forest to collect additional training data from areas of high uncertainty and perform a new classification. An accuracy assessment was performed to compare the overall accuracy of the initial and new classifications. The results exhibited an increase in accuracy, though considered not statistically significant. Obstacles related to labelling additional sampling units resulted in a lack of additional training data for various classes, which might have limited the accuracy improvement. Additionally, an uneven proportion of additional training sampling units per class and the collection of new sample data from a limited number of uncertainty regions might also have prevented a higher increase in accuracy. Nevertheless, visual inspection of the maps revealed that the new classification reduced the confusion between some classes.

Previous studies indicate that top-down influence plays a critical role in visual information processing and perceptual detection. However, the substrate that carries top-down influence remains poorly understood. Using a combined technique of retrograde neuronal tracing and immunofluorescent double labeling, we characterized the distribution and cell type of feedback neurons in cat’s high-level visual cortical areas that send direct connections to the primary visual cortex (V1: area 17). Our results showed: (1) the high-level visual cortex of area 21a at the ventral stream and PMLS area at the dorsal stream have a similar proportion of feedback neurons back projecting to the V1 area, (2) the distribution of feedback neurons in the higher-order visual area 21a and PMLS was significantly denser than in the intermediate visual cortex of area 19 and 18, (3) feedback neurons in all observed high-level visual cortex were found in layer II–III, IV, V, and VI, with a higher proportion in layer II–III, V, and VI than in layer IV, and (4) most feedback neurons were CaMKII-positive excitatory neurons, and few of them were identified as inhibitory GABAergic neurons. These results may argue against the segregation of ventral and dorsal streams during visual information processing, and support “reverse hierarchy theory” or interactive model proposing that recurrent connections between V1 and higher-order visual areas constitute the functional circuits that mediate visual perception. Also, the corticocortical feedback neurons from high-level visual cortical areas to the V1 area are mostly excitatory in nature.

Previous studies indicate that top-down influence plays a critical role in visual information processing and perceptual detection. However, the substrate that carries top-down influence remains poorly understood. Using a combined technique of retrograde neuronal tracing and immunofluorescent double labeling, we characterized the distribution and cell type of feedback neurons in cat’s high-level visual cortical areas that send direct connections to the primary visual cortex (V1: area 17). Our results showed: (1) the high-level visual cortex of area 21a at the ventral stream and PMLS area at the dorsal stream have a similar proportion of feedback neurons back projecting to the V1 area, (2) the distribution of feedback neurons in the higher-order visual area 21a and PMLS was significantly denser than in the intermediate visual cortex of area 19 and 18, (3) feedback neurons in all observed high-level visual cortex were found in layer II–III, IV, V, and VI, with a higher proportion in layer II–III, V, and VI than in layer IV, and (4) most feedback neurons were CaMKII-positive excitatory neurons, and few of them were identified as inhibitory GABAergic neurons. These results may argue against the segregation of ventral and dorsal streams during visual information processing, and support “reverse hierarchy theory” or interactive model proposing that recurrent connections between V1 and higher-order visual areas constitute the functional circuits that mediate visual perception. Also, the corticocortical feedback neurons from high-level visual cortical areas to the V1 area are mostly excitatory in nature.

Web site accessibility is a serious civil rights concern that has historically been difficult to measure and to establish success criteria for. By conducting automated accessibility analyses via the WAVE tool, we calculated accessibility norms of a statistically appropriate, random sample of K–12 school Web sites across the U.S. (n = 6,226) and merged results with national datasets to determine how school demographics influence accessibility. Results indicated that schools across all demographic groups generally struggle to make their Web sites fully accessible to their universe of diverse users and revealed that the concrete, highest-impact steps that schools nationwide need to take to improve accessibility include improving poor contrast between text and backgrounds, providing alternative text to images and other visual elements, and labeling form controls.

Abstract The tagging of genomic loci in living cells provide visual evidence for the study of genomic spatial organization and gene interaction. CRISPR/dCas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/deactivated Cas9) labeling system labels genes through binding of the dCas9/sgRNA/fluorescent protein complex to repeat sequences in the target genomic loci. However, the existence of numerous fluorescent proteins in the nucleus usually causes a high background fluorescent readout. This study aims to limit the number of fluorescent modules entering the nucleus by redesigning the current CRISPR/dCas9-SunTag labeling system consisting of dCas9-SunTag-NLS (target module) and scFv-sfGFP-NLS (signal module). We removed the nuclear location sequence (NLS) of the signal module and inserted two copies of EGFP into the signal module. The ratio of the fluorescent intensity of the nucleus to that of the cytoplasm (N/C ratio) was decreased by 71%, and the ratio of the signal to the background (S/B ratio) was increased by 1.6 times. The system can stably label randomly selected genomic loci with as few as 9 repeat sequences.

Variability in appearance across different images of the same unfamiliar face often causes participants to perceive different faces. Because perceptual information is not sufficient to link these encounters, top-down guidance may be critical in the initial stages of face learning. Here, we examine the interaction between top-down guidance and perceptual information when forming memory representations of unfamiliar faces. In two experiments, we manipulated the names associated with images of a target face that participants had to find in a search array. In Experiment 1, wrongly labelling two images of the same face with different names resulted in more errors relative to when the faces were labelled correctly. In Experiment 2, we compared this cost of mislabelling with the established “dual-target search cost,” where searching for two targets produces more search errors relative to one target. We found search costs when searching for two different faces, but not when searching for mislabelled images of the same face. Together, these results suggest that perceptual and semantic information interact when we form face memory representations. Mislabelling the identity of perceptually similar faces does not cause dual representations to be created, but rather it impedes the process of forming a single robust representation.

I want to argue here that the use of terms like “disabled” has very concrete and practical consequences; such language choices are significant and constitutive, not simply the abstract subject of a theoretical debate or a “politically correct” storm in a teacup. In this paper I want to examine some significant moments of conflict over and resistance to definitions of “disability” in an arts project, “In the Picture”, run by one of the UK’s largest disability charities, Scope. In the words of its webpages, this project “aims to encourage publishers, illustrators and writers to embrace diversity - so that disabled children are included alongside others in illustrations and story lines in books for young readers” (http://www.childreninthepicture.org.uk/aboutus.htm). It sought to raise awareness of “ableism” in the book world and through its webpage, offer practical advice and examples of how to include disabled children in illustrated children’s books. From 2005 to 2007, I tracked the progress of the project’s Stories strand, which sought to generate exemplary inclusive narratives by drawing on the experiences of disabled people and families of disabled children. My research drew on participant observation and interviews, but also creative audience research — a process where, in the words of David Gauntlett, “participants are asked to create media or artistic artefacts themselves.” Consequently, when I’m talking here about definitions of “disability’, I am discussing not just the ways people talk about what the word “disabled” might mean, but also the ways in which such identities might appear in images. These definitions made a real difference to those participating in various parts of the project and the types of inclusive stories they produced. Scope has been subject to substantial critique from the disability movement in the past (Benjamin; Carvel; Shakespeare, "Sweet Charity"). “In the Picture” was part of an attempt to resituate the charity as a campaigning organization (Benjamin; O’Hara), with the campaign’s new slogan “Time to get Equal” appearing prominently at the top of each page of the project’s website. As a consequence the project espoused the social model of disability, with its shift in focus from individual peoples’ bodily differences, towards the exclusionary and unequal society that systematically makes those differences meaningful. This shift in focus generates, some have argued, a performative account of disability as an identity (Sandhal; Breivik). It’s not simply that non-normative embodiment or impairment can be (and often is) acquired later in life, meaning that non-disabled people are perhaps best referred to as TABs — the “temporarily able bodied” (Duncan, Goggin and Newell). More significantly, what counts as a “disabled person” is constituted in particular social, physical and economic environments. Changing that environment can, in essence, create a disabled person, or make a person cease to be dis-abled. I will argue that, within the “In the Picture” project, this radically constructionist vision of disablement often rubbed against more conventional understandings of the term “disabled people”. In the US, the term “people with disabilities” is favoured as a label, because of its “people first” emphasis, as well as its identification of an oppressed minority group (Haller, Dorries and Rahn, 63; Shakespeare, Disability Rights). In contrast, those espousing the social model of disability in the UK tend to use the phrase “disabled people”. This latter term can flag the fact that disability is not something emanating from individuals’ bodily differences, but a social process by which inaccessible environments disable particular people (Oliver, Politics). From this point of view the phrase “people with disabilities” might appear to ascribe the disability to the individual rather than the society — it suggests that it is the people who “have” the disability, not the society which disables. As Helen Meekosha has pointed out, Australian disability studies draws on both US civil rights languages and the social model as understood in the UK. While I’ve chosen to adopt the British turn of phrase here, the broader concept from an Australian point of view, is that the use of particular sets of languages is no simple key to the perspectives adopted by individual speakers. My observations suggest that the key phrase used in the project — “ disabled people” — is one that, we might say, “passes”. To someone informed by the social model it clearly highlights a disabling society. However, it is a phrase that can be used without obvious miscommunication to talk to people who have not been exposed to the social model. Someone who subscribes to a view of “disability” as impairment, as a medical condition belonging to an individual, might readily use the term “disabled people”. The potentially radical implications of this phrase are in some ways hidden, unlike rival terms like “differently abled”, which might be greeted with mockery in some quarters (eg. Purvis; Parris). This “passing” phrase did important work for the “In the Picture” project. As many disability activists have pointed out, “charity” and “concern” for disabled people is a widely espoused value, playing a range of important psychic roles in an ableist society (eg. Longmore; Hevey). All the more evocative is a call to support disabled children, a favoured object of the kinds of telethons and other charitable events which Longmore discusses. In the words of Rosemarie Garland Thomson, the sentimentality often used in charity advertising featuring children “contains disability’s threat in the sympathetic, helpless child for whom the viewer is empowered to act” (Garland Thomson, 63). In calling for publishers to produce picture books which included disabled children, the project had invested in this broad appeal — who could argue against such an agenda? The project has been successful, for example, in recruiting support from many well known children’s authors and illustrators, including Quentin Blake and Dame Jackie Wilson. The phrase “disabled children”, I would argue, smoothed the way for such successes by enabling the project to graft progressive ideas —about the need for adequate representation of a marginalized group — onto existing conceptions of an imagined recipient needing help from an already constituted group of willing givers. So what were the implications of using the phrase “disabled children” for the way the project unfolded? The capacity of this phrase to refer to both a social model account of disability and more conventional understandings had an impact on the recruitment of participants for writing workshops. Participants were solicited via a range of routes. Some were contacted through the charity’s integrated pre-school and the networks of the social workers working beside it. The workshops were also advertised via a local radio show, through events run by the charity for families of disabled people, through a notice in the Disabled Parents site, and announcements on the local disability arts e- newsletter. I am interested in the way that those who heard about the workshops might have been hailed by —or resisted the lure of — those labels “disabled person” or “parent of a disabled child” or at least the meaning of those labels when used by a large disability charity. For example, despite a workshop appearing on the programme of Northwest Disability Arts’ Deaf and Disability Arts Festival, no Deaf participants became involved in the writing workshops. Some politicised Deaf communities frame their identities as an oppressed linguistic minority of sign language users, rather than as disabled people (Corker; Ladd). As such, I would suggest that they are not hailed by the call to “disabled people” with which the project was framed, despite the real absence of children’s books drawing on Deaf culture and its rich tradition of visual communication (Saunders; Conlon and Napier). Most of those who attended were (non-disabled) parents or grandparents of disabled children, rather than disabled people, a fact critiqued by some participants. It’s only possible to speculate about the reasons for this imbalance. Was it the reputation of this charity or charities in general (see Shakespeare, "Sweet Charity") amongst politicised disabled people that discouraged attendance? A shared perspective with those within the British disabled peoples’ movement who emphasise the overwhelming importance of material changes in employment, education, transport rather than change in the realm of “attitudes” (eg Oliver, Politics)? Or was it the association of disabled people undertaking creative activities with a patronising therapeutic agenda (eg Hevey, 26)? The “pulling power” of a term even favoured by the British disability movement, it seems, might be heavily dependent on who was using it. Nonetheless, this term did clearly speak to some people. In conversation it emerged that most of those who attended the workshops either had young family members who were disabled or were imbricated in educational and social welfare networks that identified them as “disabled” — for example, by having access to Disability Living Allowance. While most of the disabled children in participants’ families were in mainstream education, most also had an educational “statement” enabling them to access extra resources, or were a part of early intervention programmes. These social and educational institutions had thus already hailed them as “families of disabled children” and as such they recognised themselves in the project’s invitation. Here we can see the social and institutional shaping of what counts as “disabled children” in action. One participant who came via an unusual route into the workshops provides an interesting reflection of the impact of an address to “disabled people”. This man had heard about the workshop because the local charity he ran had offices adjacent to the venue of one of the workshops. He started talking to the workshop facilitator, and as he said in an interview, became interested because “well … she mentioned that it was about disabilities and I’m interested in people’s disabilities – I want to improve conditions for them obviously”. I probed him about the relationship between his interest and his own experiences as a person with dyslexia. While he taught himself to read in his thirties, he described his reading difficulties as having ongoing impacts on his working life. He responded: first of all it wasn’t because I have dyslexia, it was because I’m interested in improving people’s lives in general. So, I mean particularly people who are disabled need more care than most of us don’t they? …. and I’d always help whenever I can, you know what I mean. And then thinking that I had a disability myself! The dramatic double-take at the end of this comment points to the way this respondent positions himself throughout as outside of the category of “disabled”. This self- identification points towards the stigma often attached to the category “disabled”. It also indicates the way in which this category is, at least in part, socially organised, such that people can be in various circumstances located both inside and outside it. In this writer’s account “people who are disabled” are “them” needing “more care than most of us”. Here, rather than identifying as a disabled person, imagined as a recipient of support, he draws upon the powerful discourses of charity in a way that positions him giving to and supporting others. The project appealed to him as a charity worker and as a campaigner, and indeed a number of other participants (both “disabled” and “non-disabled”) framed themselves in this way, looking to use their writing as a fundraising tool, for example, or as a means of promoting more effective inclusive education. The permeability of the category of “disabled” presented some challenges in the attempt to solicit “disabled peoples’” voices within the project. This was evident when completed stories came to be illustrated by design, illustration and multimedia students at four British universities: Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Wolverhampton, the University of Teeside and the North East Wales Institute. Students attending an initial briefing on the project completed a questionnaire which included an item asking whether they considered themselves to be disabled. While around eight of the eighty respondents answered “yes” to this question, the answers of these students and some others were by no means clear cut. A number of students identified themselves as dyslexic, but contested the idea that this diagnosis meant that they were disabled. One respondent commented along similar lines: “My boyfriend was very upset that the university considers him to be disabled because he is dyslexic”. How can we make sense of these responses? We could note again that the identity of “disabled” is highly stigmatised. Many disabled students believe that they are seen as lazy, demanding excessive resources, or even in the case of some students with non- visible impairments, lying (Kleege; Olney and Brockman). So we could view such responses as identity management work. From this point of view, an indicator of the success of the project in shifting some of the stigma attached to the label of “disabled” might be the fact that at least one of the students participants “came out” as dyslexic to her tutors in the course of her participation in the project. The pattern of answers on questionnaire returns suggests that particular teaching strategies and administrative languages shape how students imagine and describe themselves. Liverpool John Moores University, one of the four art schools participating in the project, had a high profile programme seeking to make dyslexic students aware of the technical and writing support available to them if they could present appropriate medical certification (Lowy). Questionnaires from LJMU included the largest number of respondents identifying themselves as both disabled and dyslexic, and featured no comment on any mismatch between these labels. In the interests of obtaining appropriate academic support and drawing on a view of dyslexia not as a deficit but as a learning style offering significant advantages, it might be argued, students with dyslexia at this institution had been taught to recognise themselves through the label “disabled”. This acknowledgement that people sharing some similar experiences might describe themselves in very different ways depending on their context suggests another way of interpreting some students’ equivocal relationship to labels like “dyslexia” and “disabled”. The university as an environment demanding the production of very formal styles of writing and rapid assimilation of a high volume of written texts, is one where particular learning strategies of people with dyslexia come to be disabling. In many peoples’ day to day lives – and perhaps particularly in the day to day lives of visual artists – less conventional ways of processing written information simply may not be disabling. As such, students’ responses might be seen less as resistance to a stigmatised identity and more an acknowledgement of the contingent nature of disablement. Or perhaps we might understand these student responses as a complex mix of both of these perspectives. Disability studies has pointed to the coexistence of contradictory discourses around disability within popular culture (eg, Garland-Thomson; Haller, Dorries and Rahn). Similarly, the friezes, interactive games, animations, illustrated books and stand-alone images which came out of this arts project sometimes incorporate rival conceptions of disability side by side. A number of narratives, for example, include pairs of characters, one of which embodies conventional narratives of disability (for example, being diagnostically labelled or ‘cured’), while the other articulates alternative accounts (celebrating diversity and enabling environments). Both students and staff reported that participation in the project prompted critical thinking about accessible design and inclusive representation. Some commented in interviews that their work on the project had changed their professional practice in ways they thought might have longer term impact on the visual arts. However, it is clear that in student work, just as in the project itself, alternative conceptions of what “disability” might mean were at play, even as reframing such conceptions are explicitly the aim of the enterprise. Such contradictions point towards the difficulties of easily labelling individual stories or indeed the wider project “progressive” or otherwise. Some illustrated narratives and animations created by students were understood by the project management to embody the definitions of “disabled children” within the project’s ten principles. This work was mounted on the website to serve as exemplars for the publishing industry (http://www.childreninthepicture.org.uk/stories.htm). Such decisions were not unreflective, however. There was a good deal of discussion by students and project management about how to make “disabled children” visible without labelling or pathologising. For example, one of the project’s principles is that “images of disabled children should be used casually or incidentally, so that disabled children are portrayed playing and doing things alongside their non- disabled peers” (see also Bookmark). Illustrator Jane Ray commented wryly in an article on the website on her experience of including disabled characters in a such a casual way in her published work that no-one notices it! (Ray). As I’ve discussed in more detail elsewhere (Matthews, forthcoming), the social model, espoused by the project, with its primary focus on barriers to equality rather than individual impaired bodies, presented some challenges to such aims. While both fairytales and, increasingly, contemporary books for young people, do sometimes engage with violence, marginalisation and social conflict (Saunders), there is a powerful imperative to avoid such themes in books for very young children. In trying to re-narrativise disabled children outside conventional paradigms of “bravery overcoming adversity”, the project may have also pushed writers and illustrators away from engaging with barriers to equality. The project manager commented in an interview: “probably in the purest form the social model would show in stories the barriers facing disabled children, whereas we want to show what barriers have been knocked down and turn it round into a more positive thing”. While a handful of the 23 stories emerging from the writing workshops included narratives around bullying and or barriers to equal access, many of the stories chose to envisage more utopian, integrated environments. If it is barriers to inequality that, at least in part, create “disabled people”, then how is it possible to identify disabled children with little reference to such barriers? The shorthand used by many student illustrators, and frequently too in the “images for inspiration” part of the project’s website, has been the inclusion of enabling technologies. A white cane, a wheelchair or assistive and augmentative communication technologies can be included in an image without making a “special” point of these technologies in the written text. The downside to this shorthand, however, is the way that the presence of these technologies can serve to naturalise the category of “disabled children”. Rather than being seen as a group identity constituted by shared experiences of discrimination and exclusion, the use of such “clues” to which characters “are disabled” might suggest that disabled people are a known group, independent of particular social and environmental settings. Using this arts project as a case study, I have traced here some of the ways people are recognised or recognise themselves as “disabled”. I’ve also suggested that within this project other conceptions of what “disabled” might mean existed in the shadows of the social constructionist account to which it declared its allegiances. Given the critiques of the social model which have emerged within disability studies over the last fifteen years (e.g. Crowe; Shakespeare, Disability Rights), this need not be a damning observation. The manager of this arts project, along with writer Mike Oliver ("If I Had"), has suggested that the social model might be used strategically as a means of social transformation rather than a complete account of disabled peoples’ lives. However, my analysis here has suggested that we can not only imagine different ways that “disabled people” might be conceptualised in the future. Rather we can see significant consequences of the different ways that the label “disabled” is mobilised here and now. Its inclusion and exclusions, what it makes it easy to say or difficult to imagine needs careful thinking through. References Benjamin, Alison. “Going Undercover.” The Guardian, Society, April 2004: 8. Bookmark. Quentin Blake Award Project Report: Making Exclusion a Thing of the Past. The Roald Dahl Foundation, 2006. Breivik, Jan Kare. “Deaf Identities: Visible Culture, Hidden Dilemmas and Scattered Belonging.” In H.G. Sicakkan and Y.G. Lithman, eds. What Happens When a Society Is Diverse: Exploring Multidimensional Identities. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. 75-104. Carvel, John. “Demonstrators Rattle Scope.” The Guardian, Society section, 6 Oct. 2004: 4. Conlon, Caroline, and Jemina Napier. “Developing Auslan Educational Resources: A Process of Effective Translation of Children’s Books.” Deaf Worlds 20.2. (2004): 141-161. Corker, Mairian. Deaf and Disabled or Deafness Disabled. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998. Crow, Liz. “Including All of Our Lives: Renewing the Social Model of Disability.” In Jenny Morris, ed. Encounters with Strangers: Feminism and Disability. Women’s Press, 1996. 206-227. Davis, John, and Nick Watson. “Countering Stereotypes of Disability: Disabled Children and Resistance.” In Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, eds. Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. London: Continuum, 2002. 159-174. Duncan, Kath, Gerard Goggin, and Christopher Newell. “Don’t Talk about Me… like I’m Not Here: Disability in Australian National Cinema.” Metro Magazine 146-147 (2005): 152-159. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” In Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Bruggemann, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, eds. Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: MLAA, 2002. 56-75. Gauntlett, David. “Using Creative Visual Research Methods to Understand Media Audiences.” MedienPädagogik 4.1 (2005). Haller, Beth, Bruce Dorries, and Jessica Rahn. “Media Labeling versus the US Disability Community Identity: A Study of Shifting Cultural Language.” In Disability & Society 21.1 (2006): 61-75. Hevey, David. The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery. London: Routledge, 1992. Kleege, Georgia. “Disabled Students Come Out: Questions without Answers.” In Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggeman, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, eds. Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. 308-316. Ladd, Paddy. Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2003. Longmore, Paul. “Conspicuous Contribution and American Cultural Dilemma: Telethon Rituals of Cleansing and Renewal.” In David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, eds. The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. 134-158. Lowy, Adrienne. “Dyslexia: A Different Approach to Learning?” JMU Learning and Teaching Press 2.2 (2002). Matthews, Nicole. “Contesting Representations of Disabled Children in Picture Books: Visibility, the Body and the Social Model of Disability.” Children’s Geographies (forthcoming). Meekosha, Helen. “Drifting Down the Gulf Stream: Navigating the Cultures of Disability Studies.” Disability & Society 19.7 (2004): 720-733. O’Hara, Mary. “Closure Motion.” The Guardian, Society section, 30 March 2005: 10. Oliver, Mike. The politics of Disablement. London: Macmillan, 1990. ———. “If I Had a Hammer: The Social Model in Action.” In John Swain, Sally French, Colin Barnes, and Carol Thomas, eds. Disabling Barriers – Enabling Environments. London: Sage, 2002. 7-12. Olney, Marjorie F., and Karin F. Brockelman. "Out of the Disability Closet: Strategic Use of Perception Management by Select University Students with Disabilities." Disability & Society 18.1 (2003): 35-50. Parris, Matthew. “Choose Your Words Carefully If You Want to Be Misunderstood.” The Times 10 July 2004. Purves, Libby. “Handicap, What Handicap?” The Times 9 Aug. 2003. Ray, Jane. “An Illustrator’s View: Still Invisible.” In the Picture. < http://www.childreninthepicture.org.uk/au_illustrateview.htm >.Sandhal, Carrie. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9.1-2 (2003): 25-56. Saunders, Kathy. Happy Ever Afters: A Storybook Guide to Teaching Children about Disability. London: Trenton Books, 2000. Shakespeare, Tom. “Sweet Charity?” 2 May 2003. Ouch! < (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/features/charity.shtml >. Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs. London: Routledge, 2006.

Sometimes people engage in joking talk that might be characterized as blatantly sexist.1 A judgmental label such as "sexist" does not mean the same thing to different people. I've picked instances of joking that I think most readers would judge as sexist. That is not a claim that the participants themselves orient to the talk as sexist; or if they did, that they would agree that such joking is problematic. Indeed, one purpose of undertaking such analysis is to attempt to characterize what the talk is and what it is doing for its producers in the first place. What do people accomplish in and through joking based on negative sexual stereotypes? Three examples are presented below. One involves demeaning joking about categories of women; the other two involve demeaning joking about particular individuals. 2 In all three cases, this talk provides a resource for participants to mark aspects of identity and relationship while furthering joking and laughter. The laughables and laughter provide sequential warrants for extending such talk. Furthermore, analysis will show how participants may implicate themselves more or less in offensive talk; there are minimal ways to play along just as there are ways to mark one's full cooperation in what is getting said. These issues will be taken up in the discussion of each instance and in the closing remarks. Example 1: Stan and Dave Two university students are talking on the phone. At the moment of interest, Stan is telling of his recent whereabouts. Dave takes this mention of a wedding to make a comment (line 39) that opens up a sequence of demeaning talk about women: Dave's initial assessment of the "wool" at weddings is gratuitous in that it takes one element from Stan's prior telling and uses it to sexualize the talk. Weddings are now occasions for noticing good-looking women. Stan immediately agrees with Dave's assessment3 and provides an alternative term, "coot" (line 40), thereby implicating himself fully in the demeaning talk. Their use of metaphorical language helps key a shift into a play frame (Goffman, 1974), and they sustain it with additional metaphors ("shit," "dog meat"). Stan compares girls "down here" (in the college town) to the city girls "up there" (in the big city in that state) in terms of their desirability, sexual availability, and demeanor (lines 44-54). They compare overweight girls to livestock and laugh (lines 58-66). Following Dave's laughter, Stan poses a question that takes them to another topic (lines 67-68). The sexist nature of this talk lies both in the activities done and in the terms used in doing those actions. They refer to women in colloquial, sexual, reductionistic terms, based on the objectifying male gaze. They assess women as either good-looking and a "challenge" or overweight but "easy to grease," both sets of comparisons playing on derogatory stereotypes (cold/standoffish v. easy/sluttish; thin/desirable v. overweight/undesirable). They compare women to wool, coot, shit, dog meat, and livestock. We can see these young men doing identity and relationship work through this talk. By making the blanket assertion about "wool" at weddings, Dave positions himself as worldly and knowledgeable enough to make this assessment. Stan's agreement asserts his membership in the club of discerning, heterosexual male. They claim knowledge of whether women are "easy to grease" or not. Dave positions himself as picking and choosing women for sexual partners, provided they keep themselves thin enough. They are also accomplishing relationship work. Dave is the leader who initiates the assessments. Stan is the follower who reinforces Dave's claims and laughs at Dave's jokes. "Women" serve as topical resources for these endeavors. Example 2: Dan and Jeff Two men talk on the phone, interspersing playful joking with family news and business (Apparently, Dan manages an apartment complex and Jeff does work for him). After a couple of minutes of conversation, Jeff asks Dan's Thanksgiving holiday plans and Dan replies that he and his wife will leave town and leave another person in charge of the apartments. Reference to this person moves them into blatantly sexist talk: Dan's initial reference to Dana as "one a the girls" (line 79) genders the scene4 , but he does not refer to the specific woman until following Jeff's show of interest (line 82). He identifies the "girl" by first name only in a question that calls on Jeff to confirm recognition of her. Jeff does so by providing an additional descriptor of her as having "big- wangers" (line 84)--hearable as a colloquialism for breasts. Jeff's questioning intonation invites Dan to confirm that they are talking about the same person. In this way it slips sexism in as part of the ongoing talk activity5 . It also serves to shift the talk from the topic of holiday plans to Donna and her appearance. Dan produces an unenthusiastic confirmation (line 86) and a nonsexual reference to her by a room location (lines 88-89). Jeff again assesses while shifting the referent from breasts to the whole person ("Big girl, bi:g.="). Dan seconds this assessment and links back to the previous "wangers" reference by adding that "everything's" big on her. Jeff's expressed appreciation (line 94) of Donna draws laughter from Dan but no reciprocal appreciation. Jeff again appreciates (line 98) and Dan agrees but does not share the assessment, implicitly marking it as Jeff's alone (lines 100-101). Dan then asks Jeff's holiday plans, and this moves them away from the playful talk about Donna. Like in the preceding instance, here both playfulness and sexism get keyed by an assessment employing metaphoric language that reduces a woman to a (presumably sexually attractive) body part and instantiates the objectifying male gaze. By this assessment, Jeff identifies himself as heterosexual male who notices women's possible sexual attractiveness. Unlike the previous instance, however, here a co-participant displays some resistance (Glenn, 2003, p. 150). "Wangers" poses a test of sorts for Dan: to "get it" he must recognize the colloquialism, know what constitutes "big," and show whether or not he has noticed this part of Donna's anatomy. To do so is to participate in sexist talk. Dan shows that he understands the talk and has noticed Dana's appearance; he also shows resistance to participating in the sexualized assessments of her. Nevertheless, the "wangers" talk provides a resource for pulling them into joking interaction. While joking they can display identities as heterosexual males who recognize and can talk about sexual, visual features of women. Example 3: W and T Two university students talk in a dormitory room6 . W is telling a story about Monica, who is his "little sister" via his fraternity. Such a relationship implies in part that they spend time together in non-dating, non-sexual relationship. As we pick up on the story in progress, he is telling about her coming out of her room and asking him how she looks. His reference to not starting with her "on the wrong foot" suggests that she was treating him (inappropriately) like a date. In overlap with his talk that would return to events in the story (line 34), T offers a negative assessment of Monica's looks. From there they move into joking talk about Melissa as a possible sexual partner: T packages his assessment of Monica's looks (lines 35-36) with a tag question that explicitly seeks W's agreement. W's ambiguous response marks his unwillingness to agree with the assessment. Orienting to this, T produces a subsequent version (Davidson, 1984) that begins with a more positive but also more explicitly sexual description (lines 39-40). W affiliates by assessing Monica's breasts (line 42). This line also helps key a shift into playfulness by its repetition of the three part assessment: "XXX little XXX" ("nice litt:le- bo:dy" and "cute little breasts"). 7 In a mock-Southern dialect (associated with a stereotypical "redneck" identity), T invokes and then declines the possibility of doing her violence (line 44). W affiliates in expressing sexual desire "in character" also using a mock-Southern dialect (lines 46, 48-49). He makes a sexual pun on the word "rise" (51) which T reworks (52). After lengthy shared laughter, W resumes his story (line 58). These two young men talk about Monica, not as a "little sister" (her role in W's story) but as a sexual object. They describe her body parts in demeaning terms. They invoke joking identities as sexually violent characters who might consider killing a girl if she isn't attractive enough. They get to this talk by T derailing W's story in progress and W going along with the derailment. Derailing the story also means unmasking W's character in the story as someone who is concerned that his "little sister" might be treating him as a date. Dislodging W's big brother identity brings him to acknowledge that he, like T, has turned the male gaze on Monica and can provide assessments of her body and attractiveness. It allows space for them affiliate as heterosexual males who view women and women's bodies. More specifically, they align in their (mildly) positive assessment of Melissa. Talking about Monica as a sexual object provides them a basis for joking, doing character voices, punning, and sharing laughter. Discussion These three instances share several common features. In each, Speaker A is engaged in an extended talk activity (listing events, recounting holiday plans, telling a story). Speaker B plays off of some aspect of Speaker A's talk to introduce a sexually-based assessment of a woman or women. Speaker A responds and the participants move into joking and laughter. All three instances involve "dissector" talk (Hopper, 2003, p. 149) that reduces women to supposedly desirable body parts (wool, wangers, and breasts). The sexual items B Speakers introduce are gratuitous in that they do not pursue the topic of talk on the floor but rather seize an opportunity to sexualize the talk. In the course of doing so they accomplish moving the talk away from what it was in the preceding turn. They initiate a new sequence in which response to the sexual item is relevant. At the same time, in two of the three instances the A speakers explicitly provide a basis for gendering the talk in their previous turns ("one of the girls" and "let's not start this off on the wrong foot"). Joking and laughter occur within sequential environments conducive to producing sexually demeaning talk that forwards an ecology of prejudice. Such talk provides materials for participants to display interactional intimacy. A speaker may introduce sexual references in order to move towards displays of like-mindedness. In each of the three instances, the B speaker produces an impropriety-a potentially offensive comment or term. Jefferson, Sacks, & Schegloff (1987) show the range of responses relevant to an impropriety, ranging from disaffiliation to appreciating with laughter and/or talk to escalating with a new impropriety. To disaffiliate from such an impropriety is to reject the proposed intimate relationship and impose distance. An escalation following an impropriety ratifies a mutual display of interactional intimacy. A first joke or humorous remark prompting laughter provides a sequential warrant for any speaker producing another such to extend the laughter (Glenn, 2003, Ch. 4). Laughter becomes a goal for its own sake. Thus it is no accident that such intimacy sequences routinely accompany (and get accomplished through) joking talk. A second speaker producing a next humorous or playful impropriety both forwards the laughing environment and ratifies like-mindedness. The introduction of sexual joking, whether it involves assessments, metaphorical language, or stereotyping, presents a potent interactional crossroads. By acknowledging the sexualized items the A speakers implicate themselves in this kind of talk. However, if the A Speakers disattend the sexual talk they risk being treated as naive, hypocritical, puritanical, unfriendly, or (perhaps worst of all for these individuals) not a "real" man8. For all these reasons, it is not surprising to find sexually demeaning talk occurring in environments characterized by joking, humor, and laughter. Affirming identity and pursuing relational intimacy are not in and of themselves problematic actions. Neither, of course, is joking. We can ask ourselves what alternatives exist for these men to joke, affirm masculinity, and affiliate, without demeaning women. Yet asking such questions and labeling this talk "sexist" are part of our interaction as writer and reader, not theirs. They produced their talk for and with each other, 9 and substantive critique of such talk will benefit from coming to grips with how it unfolds in situ and what it is about for the people producing it. Otherwise we risk reifying a divide between participants' and analysts' worlds that trivializes both. Notes 1. For a discussion of sexism see Hopper, 2003, 27-30. 2. That these all involve (presumably heterosexual) males talking about females is a matter of convenience sampling. It does not mean that only males engage in such talk, although it is possible that certain groups do so with greater regularity. 3. Interestingly, Stan locates his assessment in a single wedding; Dave's assessment is of weddings, generalized. 4. See analysis of this in Hopper, 2003, pp. 122-123; also see Hopper and LeBaron, 1998 characterizing how participants bring gender into talk 5. See Sacks and Schegloff (1979) regarding rules for person reference in conversation. 6. See insightful analyses of this conversation in Beach, 2000, and Hopper, 2003, p. 162. 7. For a discussion of repetition's role in triggering play, see Hopper and Glenn, 1994. 8. Sacks (1974) shows how in a teenage group therapy session dirty jokes may pose "understanding tests" for which those caught not "getting" the joke may be teased or regarded as naïve. Glenn (2003) shows how a hearer failing to get a sexual joke leads him to be a victim of laughing at. 9. Their talk may also orient to other present and future listeners; we can only speculate how knowledge of being recorded might have figured in their interactions. Works Cited Bateson, G. (1972). A theory of play and fantasy. In Steps to an ecology of mind (pp. 177-193). New York: Ballantine. Beach. W. A. (2000). Inviting collaborations in stories about a woman. Language in Society, 29, 379-407. Booker, J. L. (1991). The Jewish American Princess and other myths: The many faces of self hatred. New York: Shapolsky Publishers. Davidson, J. A. (1984). Subsequent versions of invitations, offers, requests, and proposals dealing with potential or actual rejection. In: J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 102-128). Cambridge University Press. Glenn, P. (2003). Laughter in interaction. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis; An essay on the organization of experience. New York: Harper & Row. Hopper, R. (2003). Gendering talk. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Hopper, R., Glenn, P. J. (1994). Repetition and play in conversation. In: B. Johnstone (Ed.), Repetition in discourse: Interdisciplinary perspectives, Vol. II (pp. 29-40). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Hopper, R., & LeBaron , C. (1998). How gender creeps into talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 31, 1, 59-74. Jefferson, G., Sacks, H., & Schegloff, E. (1987). Notes on laughter in the pursuit of intimacy. In G. Button & J. R. E. Lee (Eds.), Talk and social organisation (pp. 152-205). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Sacks, H. (1974). An analysis of the course of a joke's telling in conversation. In R. Bauman and J. Sherzer (Eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking (pp. 337-353). London: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H., & Schegloff, E. A. (1979). Two preferences in the organization of reference to persons in conversation and their interaction. In G. Psathas (Ed.), Everyday language; Studies in ethnomethdology (pp. 15-21). New York: Irvington. Tannen, D. (1989). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge University Press. Links Transcription symbols http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssca1/notation.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Glenn, Phillip. "On Sexism in Conversational Joking" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/1-glenn-feature-sexism.html>. APA Style Glenn, P. (2003, Nov 10). On Sexism in Conversational Joking. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0311/1-glenn-feature-sexism.html>

The technical apparatus is, then, being made at home with the rest of our world. And that's a thing that's routinely being done, and it's the source of the failure of technocratic dreams that if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine, the world will be transformed. Where what happens is that the object is made at home in the world that has whatever organisation it already has. -- Harvey Sacks (Lectures on Conversation Vol. 2., 548-9) Chatting, or having a conversation, has long been a favourite activity for people. It seemed so ordinary, if not to say trivial, that it has for almost equally long not been studied in any dedicated way. It was only when Harvey Sacks and his early collaborators started using the tape recorder to study telephone conversations that 'conversation' as a topic has become established (cf. Sacks, Lectures Vol. 1). Inspired by Harold Garfinkel, the perspective chosen was a procedural one: they wanted to analyse how conversations are organised on the spot. As Sacks once said: The gross aim of the work I am doing is to see how finely the details of actual, naturally occurring conversation can be subjected to analysis that will yield the technology of conversation. (Sacks, "On Doing 'Being Ordinary'" 411) Later, Sacks also started using data from audio-recorded face-to-face encounters. Most of the phenomena that the research on telephone conversation unearthed could also be found in face-to-face data. Whether something was lost by relying on just audio materials was not clear at the beginning. But with video-based research, as initiated by Charles Goodwin in the 1970s, one was later able to demonstrate that visual exchanges did play an essential role the actual organisation of face-to-face conduct. When using telephone technology, people seemed to rely on a restricted set of the interactional procedures used in face-to-face settings. But new ways to deal with both general and setting-specific problems, such as mutual identification, were also developed. Now that an increasing number of people spend various amounts of their time 'online', chatting with friends or whoever is available, it is time to study Computer-Mediated Conversation (CMC), as we previously studied face-to-face conversation and Telephone (Mediated) Conversation, using the same procedural perspective. We may expect that we will encounter many phenomena that have become familiar to us, and that we will be able to use many of the same concepts. But we will probably also see that people have developed new technical variations of familiar themes as they adapt the technology of conversation to the possibilities and limitations of this new technology of communicative mediation. In so doing, they will make the new technology 'at home in the world that has whatever organisation it already has.' Space does not allow a full discussion of the properties of text-based CMC as instantiated in 'chat' environments, but comparing CMC with face-to-face communication and telephone conversations, it is obvious that the means to convey meanings are severely restricted. In face-to-face encounters, many of the more subtle aspects of the conversation rely on visual and vocal productions and perceptions, which are more or less distinguishable from the 'text' that has been uttered. Following the early work of Gregory Bateson, these aspects are mostly conceived of as a kind of commentary on the core communication available in the 'text', that is as 'meta-communication'. While the 'separation' between 'levels' of communication, that these conceptualisations imply may distort what actually goes on in face-to-face encounters, there is no doubt that telephone conversations, in which the visual 'channel' is not available, and text-based CMC, which in addition lacks access to voice qualities, do confront participants with important communicative restrictions. An important aspect of text-based computer-mediated chatting is that it offers users an unprecedented anonymity, and therefore an unprecedented licence for unaccountable action, ranging from bland banality to criminal threat, while passing through all imaginable sexual 'perversities'. One upshot of this is that they can present themselves as belonging to any plausible category they may choose, but they will -- in the chat context -- never be sure whether the other participants 'really' are legitimate members of the categories they claim for themselves. In various other formats for CMC, like MUDs and MOOs, the looseness of the connections between the people who type messages and the identities they project in the chat environment seems often to be accepted as an inescapable fact, which adds to the fascination of participation1. The typists can then be called 'players' and the projected identities 'characters', while the interaction can be seen as a game of role-playing. In general chat environments, as the one I will discuss later, such a game-like quality seems not to be openly admitted, although quite often hinted at. Rather, the participants stick to playing who they claim they are. In my own text, however, I will use 'player' and 'character' to indicate the two faces of participation in computer-mediated, text-based chats. In the following sections, I will discuss the organised ways in which one particular problem that chat-players have is dealt with. That problem can be glossed as: how do people wanting to 'chat' on the Internet find suitable partners for that activity? The solution to that problem lies in the explicit naming or implicit suggestion of various kinds of social categories, like 'age', 'sex' and 'location'. Chat players very often initiate a chat with a question like: "hi, a/s/l please?", which asks the other party to self-identify in those terms, as, for instance "frits/m/amsterdam", if that fits the character the player wants to project. But, as I will explain, categorisation plays its role both earlier and later in the chat process. 'Membership Categorisation' in Finding Chat Partners The following exploration is, then, an exercise in Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA; Hester & Eglin) as based on the ideas developed by Harvey Sacks in the 1960s (Sacks, "An Initial Investigation", "On the Analyzability of Stories", Lectures on Conversation Vol. 1). An immense part of the mundane knowledge that people use in living their everyday lives is organised in terms of categories that label members of some population as being of certain types. These categories are organised in sets, called Membership Categorisation Devices (MCDs). The MCD 'sex' (or 'gender'), for instance, consists of the two categories of 'male' and 'female'. Labelling a person as being male or female carries with it an enormous amount of implied properties, so called 'category-predicates', such as expectable or required behaviours, capacities, values, etc. My overall thesis is that people who want to chat rely mostly on categorical predications to find suitable chat partners. Finding a chat partner or chat partners is an interactive process between at least two parties. Their job involves a combination of presenting themselves and reading others' self presentations. For each, the job has a structure like 'find an X who wants a Y as a partner', where X is the desired chat character and Y is the character you yourself want to play. The set of XY-combinations varies in scope, of course, from very wide, say any male/female combination, to rather narrow, as we will see. The partner finding process for chats can be loosely compared with partly similar processes in other environments, such as cocktail parties, poster sessions at conferences, and telephone calls. The openings of telephone calls have been researched extensively by conversation analysts, especially Schegloff ("Sequencing", "Identification", "Routine"; also Hopper). An interesting idea from this work is that a call opening tends to follow a loosely defined pattern, called the canonical model for telephone openings. This involves making contact, mutual identification/recognition, greetings and 'how-are-you?'s, before the actual business of the call is tackled. When logging on to a chat environment, one enters a market of sorts, where the participants are both buyers and sellers: a general sociability-market like a cocktail party. And indeed some writers have characterised chat rooms as 'virtual cocktail parties'. Some participants in a cocktail party may, of course, have quite specific purposes in mind, like wanting to meet a particular kind of person, or a particular individual, or even being open to starting a relationship which may endure for some time after the event. The same is true for CMC chats. The trajectory that the partner-finding process will take is partly pre-structured by the technology used. I have limited my explorations to one particular chat environment (Microsoft Chat). In that program, the actual partner-finding starts even before logging on, as one is required to fill in certain information slots when setting up the program, such as Real Name and Nickname and optional slots like Email Address and Profile. When you click on the Chat Room List icon, you are presented with a list of over a thousand rooms, alphabetically arranged, with the number of participants. You can select a Room and click a button to enter it. When you do, you get a new screen, which has three windows, one that represents the ongoing general conversation, one with a list of the participants' nicks, and a window to type your contributions in. When you right-click on a name in the participant list, you get a number of options, including Get Profile. Get Profile allows you to get more information on that person, if he/she has filled in that part of the form, but often you get "This person is too lazy to create a profile entry." Categorisation in Room Names When you log in to the chat server, you can search either the Chat Room List or the Users List. Let us take the Chat Room List first. Some room names seem to be designed to come early in the alphabetically ordered list, by starting with one or more A's, as in A!!!!!!!!!FriendlyChat, while others rely on certain key words. Scanning over a thousand names for those words by scrolling the list might take a lot of time, but the Chat Room List has a search facility. You can type a string and the list will be shortened to only those with that string in their name. Many room names seem to be designed for being found this way, by containing a number of more or less redundant strings that people might use in a search. Some examples of room names are: A!!!!!!!!!FriendlyChat, Animal&Girls, Australia_Sydney_Chat_Room, christian evening post, desert_and_cactus_only, engineer, francais_saloppes, francais_soumise_sub_slave, german_deutsch_rollenspiele, hayatherseyeragmensürüyor, holland_babbel, italia_14_19anni, italia_padania_e_basta, L@Ros@deiVenti, nederlandse_chat, sex_tr, subslavespankbondage, Sweet_Girl_From_Alabama, #BI_LES_FEM_ONLY, #Chinese_Chat, #France, #LesbiansBiTeenGirls_Cam_NetMeeting, #polska_do_flirtowania, #russian_Virtual_Bar?, #tr_%izmir, #ukphonefantasy. A first look at this collection of room names suggests two broad classes of categorisation: first a local/national/cultural/ethnic class, and second one oriented to topics, with a large dose of sexual ones. For the first class, different kinds of indicators are available, such as naming as in Australia_Sydney_Chat_Room, and the use of a local language as in hayatherseyeragmensürüyor, or in combination: german_deutsch_rollenspiele. When you enter this type of room, a first function of such categorisations becomes apparent in that non-English categorisations suggest a different language practice. While English is the default language, quite a few people prefer using their own local language. Some rooms even suggest a more restricted area, as in Australia_Sydney_Chat_Room, for those who are interested in chatting with people not too far off. This seems a bit paradoxical, as chatting in a world-wide network allows contacts between people who are physically distant, as is often mentioned in chats. Rooms with such local restrictions may be designed, however, to facilitate possible subsequent face-to-face meetings or telephone contacts, as is suggested by names like Fr@nce_P@ris_Rencontre and #ukphonefantasy. The collection of sexually suggestive names is not only large, but also indicative of a large variety of interests, including just (probably heterosexual) sex, male gay sex, female lesbian or bi-sexuality. Some names invoke some more specialized practices like BDSM, and a collection of other 'perversities', as in names like 'francais_soumcateise_sub_slave', 'subslavespankbondage', 'golden_shower' or 'family_secrets'. But quite often sexual interest are only revealed in subsequent stages of contact. Non-sexual interests are, of course, also apparent, including religious, professional, political or commercial ones, as in 'christian evening post', or 'culturecrossing', 'holland_paranormaal', 'jesussaves', 'Pokemon_Chat', 'francais_informatique', and '#Russian_Philosophy_2918'. Categorisation through Nicknames Having selected a room, your next step is to see who is there. As chatting ultimately concerns exchanges between (virtual) persons, it is no surprise that nicknames are used as concise 'labels' to announce who is available on the chat network or in a particular room. Consider some examples: ^P0371G , amanda14, anneke, banana81, Dream_Girl, emma69, ericdraven, latex_bi_tch1 , Leeroy, LuCho1, Mary15, Miguelo, SomeFun, Steffi, teaser. Some of these are rather opaque, at least at first, while others seem quite ordinary. Anneke, for instance, is an ordinary Dutch name for girls. So, by using this nick name, a person at the same time categorises herself in two Membership Categorisation Devices: gender: 'female' and language: 'Dutch'. When using this type of nick, you will quite often be addressed in Dutch, for instance with the typically Dutch chat-greeting "hoi" and/or by a question like "ben jij Nederlandse?" ("are you Dutch?" -- female form). This question asks you to categorise yourself, using the nationality device 'Dutch/Belgian', within the language category 'speaker of Dutch'. Many other first names like 'amanda' and 'emma', do not have such a language specificity and so do not 'project' a specific European language/nationality as 'anneke' does. Some French names, like 'nathalie' are a bit ambiguous in that respect, as they are used in quite a number of other language communities, so you may get a more open question like "bonjour, tu parle francais?" ("hi, do you speak French?"). A name like 'Miguelo' suggests a roman language, of course, while 'LuCho1' or 'Konusmaz' indicate non-European languages (here Chinese and Turkish, respectively). Quite often, a first name nick also carries an attached number, as in 'Mary15'. One reason for such attachments is that a nick has to be unique, so if you join the channel with a nick like 'Mary', there will mostly be another who has already claimed that particular name. An error message will appear suggesting that you take another nick. The easiest solution, then, is to add an 'identifying detail', like a number. Technically, any number, letter or other character will do, so you can take Mary1, or Mary~, or Mary_m. Quite often, numbers are used in accord with the nick's age, as is probably the case in our examples 'Mary15' and 'amanda14', but not in 'emma69', which suggests an 'activity preference' rather than an age category. Some of the other nicks in our examples suggest other aspects, claims or interests, as in Dream_Girl, latex_bi_tch1, SomeFun, or teaser. Other examples are: 'machomadness', 'daddyishere', 'LadySusan28', 'maleslave', 'curieuse33', 'patrickcam', or 'YOUNG_GAY_BOY'. More elaborate information about a character can sometimes be collected from his or her profile, but for reasons of space, I will not discuss its use here. This paper's interest is not only in finding out which categories and MCDs are actually used, but also how they are used, what kind of function they can be seen to have. How do chat participants organise their way to 'the anchor point' (Schegloff, "Routine"), at which they start their actual chat 'business'? For the chatting environment that I have observed, there seems to be two major purposes, one may be called social, i.e. 'just chatting', as under the rubric 'friendly chat', and the other is sexual. These purposes may be mixed, of course, in that the first may lead to the second, or the second accompanied by the first. Apart from those two major purposes, a number of others can be inferred from the room titles, including the discussion of political, religious, and technical topics. Sexual chats can take various forms, most prominently 'pic trading' and 'cybersex'. As becomes clear from research by Don Slater, an enormous 'market' for 'pic trading' has emerged, with a quite explicit normative structure of 'fair trading', i.e. if one receives something, one should reciprocate in kind. When one is in an appropriate room, and especially if one plays a female character, other participants quite often try to initiate pic trading. This can have the form of sending a pic, without any verbal exchange, possibly followed by a request like 'send also'. But you may also get a verbal request first, like "do you have a (self) pic?" If you reply in a negative way, you often do not get any further reaction, or just "ok." A 'pic request' can also be preceded by some verbal exchanges; social, sexual or both. That question -- "have a pic?" or "wanna trade" -- can then be considered the real starting point for that particular encounter, or it can be part of a process of getting to know each other: "can i c u?" The second form of sexual chats involves cyber sex. This may be characterised as interactionally improvised pornography, the exchange of sexually explicit messages enacting a sexual fantasy or a shared masturbation session. There is a repertoire of opening moves for these kinds of games, including "wanna cyber?", "are you alone?" and "what are you wearing now?" Functions of Categorisations Categorisations in room names, nicks and profiles has two major functions: guiding the selection of suitable chat partners and suggesting topics. Location information has quite diverse implications in different contexts, e.g. linguistic, cultural, national and geographical. Language is a primordial parameter in any text-based activity, and chatting offers numerous illustrations for this. Cultural implications seem to be more diffuse, but probably important for some (classes of?) participants. Nationality is important in various ways, for instance as an 'identity anchor'. So when you use a typically Dutch nick, like 'frits' or 'anneke', you may get first questions asking whether you are from the Netherlands or from Belgium and subsequently from which region or town. This may be important for indicating reachability, either in person or over the phone. Location information can also be used as topic opener. So when you mention that you live in Amsterdam, you often get positive remarks about the city, like "I visited Amsterdam last June and I liked it very much", or "I would die to live there" (sic) from a pot-smoking U.S. student. After language, age and gender seem to be the most important points in exploring mutual suitability. When possible partners differ in age or gender category, this quite often leads to questions like "Am I not too old/young for you?" Of course, age and gender are basic parameters for sexual selection, as people differ in their range of sexual preferences along the lines of these categories, i.e. same sex or opposite sex, and roughly the same age or older/younger age. Such preferences intersect with straight or kinky ones, of which a large variety can be found. Many rooms are organised around one or another combination, as announced in names like '#LesbiansBiTeenGirls_Cam_NetMeeting', 'Hollandlolita' or '#Lesbian_Domination'. In some of these, the host makes efforts to keep to a more or less strict 'regime', for instance by banning obvious males from a room like '#BI_LES_FEM_ONLY'. In others, an automated welcome message is used to lay out the participation rules. Conclusion To sum up, categorisation plays an essential role in a sorting-out process leading, ideally, to small-group or dyadic suitability. A/S/L, age, sex and location, are obvious starting points, but other differentiations, as in sexual preferences which are themselves partly rooted in age/gender combinations, also play a role. In this process, suitability explorations and topic initiations are intimately related. Chatting, then, is text-based categorisation. New communication technologies are invented with rather limited purposes in mind, but they are quite often adopted by masses of users in unexpected ways. In this process, pre-existing communicational purposes and procedures are adapted to the new environment, but basically there does not seem to be any radical change. Comparing mutual categorisation in face-to-face encounters, telephone calls, and text-based CMC as in online chatting, one can see that similar procedures are being used, although in a more and more explicit manner, as in the question: "a/s/l please?" Footnote These ideas have been inspired by Schaap; for an ethnography focussing on the connection between 'life online' and 'real life', see Markham, 1998. References Hopper, Robert. Telephone Conversation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Hester, Stephen, and Peter Eglin, eds. Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorisation Analysis. Washington, D.C.: UP of America, 1997. Markham, Annette H. Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space. Walnut Creek, London, New Delhi: Altamira P, 1998. Sacks, Harvey. "An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology." Studies in Social Interaction. Ed. D. Sudnow. New York: Free P, 1972. 31-74. ---. Lectures on Conversation. Vol. 1. Ed. Gail Jefferson, with an introduction by Emanuel A. Schegloff. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992. ---. Lectures on Conversation. Vol. 2. Ed. Gail Jefferson, with an introduction by Emanuel A. Schegloff. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992. ---. "On Doing 'Being Ordinary'." Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Ed. J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 413-29. ---. "On the Analyzability of Stories by Children." Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. Ed. John. J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes. New York: Rinehart & Winston, 1972. 325-45. Schaap, Frank. "The Words That Took Us There: Not an Ethnography." M.A. Thesis in Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, 2000. <http://fragment.nl/thesis/>. Schegloff, Emanuel A. "Identification and Recognition in Telephone Conversation Openings." Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology. Ed. George Psathas. New York: Irvington, 1979. 23-78. ---. "The Routine as Achievement." Human Studies 9 (1986): 111-52. ---. "Sequencing in Conversational Openings." American Anthropologist 70 (1968): 1075-95. Slater, Don R. "Trading Sexpics on IRC: Embodiment and Authenticity on the Internet." Body and Society 4.4 (1998): 91-117. Ten Have, Paul. Doing Conversation Analysis: A Practical Guide. Introducing Qualitative Methods. London: Sage, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul ten Have. "Computer-Mediated Chat: Ways of Finding Chat Partners." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.4 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/partners.php>. Chicago style: Paul ten Have, "Computer-Mediated Chat: Ways of Finding Chat Partners," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 4 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/partners.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul ten Have. (2000) Computer-mediated chat: ways of finding chat partners. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(4). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0008/partners.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionSupermarkets are functionally challenging environments for people with vision impairments. A supermarket is likely to house an average of 45,000 products in a median floor-space of 4,529 square meters and many visually impaired people are unable to shop without assistance, which greatly impedes personal independence (Nicholson et al.). The task of selecting goods in a supermarket is an “activity that is expressive of agency, identity and creativity” (Sutherland) from which many vision-impaired persons are excluded. In response to this, a number of proof of concept (demonstrating feasibility) and prototype assistive technologies are being developed which aim to use smart phones as potential sensorial aides for vision impaired persons. In this paper, I discuss two such prototypic technologies, Shop Talk and BlindShopping. I engage with this issue’s list theme by suggesting that, on the one hand, list making is a uniquely human activity that demonstrates our need for order, reliance on memory, reveals our idiosyncrasies, and provides insights into our private lives (Keaggy 12). On the other hand, lists feature in the creation of spatial inventories that represent physical environments (Perec 3-4, 9-10). The use of lists in the architecture of assistive technologies for shopping illuminates the interaction between these two modalities of list use where items contained in a list are not only textual but also cartographic elements that link the material and immaterial in space and time (Haber 63). I argue that despite the emancipatory potential of assistive shopping technologies, their efficacy in practical situations is highly dependent on the extent to which they can integrate a number of lists to produce representations of space that are meaningful for vision impaired users. I suggest that the extent to which these prototypes may translate to becoming commercially viable, widely adopted technologies is heavily reliant upon commercial and institutional infrastructures, data sources, and regulation. Thus, their design, manufacture and adoption-potential are shaped by the extent to which certain data inventories are accessible and made interoperable. To overcome such constraints, it is important to better understand the “spatial syntax” associated with the shopping task for a vision impaired person; that is, the connected ordering of real and virtual spatial elements that result in a supermarket as a knowable space within which an assisted “spatial practice” of shopping can occur (Kellerman 148, Lefebvre 16).In what follows, I use the concept of lists to discuss the production of supermarket-space in relation to the enabling and disabling potentials of assistive technologies. First, I discuss mobile digital technologies relative to disability and impairment and describe how the shopping task produces a disabling spatial practice. Second, I present a case study showing how assistive technologies function in aiding vision impaired users in completing the task of supermarket shopping. Third, I discuss various factors that may inhibit the liberating potential of technology assisted shopping by vision-impaired people. Addressing Shopping as a Disabling Spatial Practice Consider how a shopping list might inform one’s experience of supermarket space. The way shopping lists are written demonstrate the variability in the logic that governs list writing. As Bill Keaggy demonstrates in his found shopping list Web project and subsequent book, Milk, Eggs, Vodka, a shopping list may be written on a variety of materials, be arranged in a number of orientations, and the writer may use differing textual attributes, such as size or underlining to show emphasis. The writer may use longhand, abbreviate, write neatly, scribble, and use an array of alternate spelling and naming conventions. For example, items may be listed based on knowledge of the location of products, they may be arranged on a list as a result of an inventory of a pantry or fridge, or they may be copied in the order they appear in a recipe. Whilst shopping, some may follow strictly the order of their list, crossing back and forth between aisles. Some may work through their list item-by-item, perhaps forward scanning to achieve greater economies of time and space. As a person shops, their memory may be stimulated by visual cues reminding them of products they need that may not be included on their list. For the vision impaired, this task is near impossible to complete without the assistance of a relative, friend, agency volunteer, or store employee. Such forms of assistance are often unsatisfactory, as delays may be caused due to the unavailability of an assistant, or the assistant having limited literacy, knowledge, or patience to adequately meet the shopper’s needs. Home delivery services, though readily available, impede personal independence (Nicholson et al.). Katie Ellis and Mike Kent argue that “an impairment becomes a disability due to the impact of prevailing ableist social structures” (3). It can be said, then, that supermarkets function as a disability producing space for the vision impaired shopper. For the vision impaired, a supermarket is a “hegemonic modern visual infrastructure” where, for example, merchandisers may reposition items regularly to induce customers to explore areas of the shop that they wouldn’t usually, a move which adds to the difficulty faced by those customers with impaired vision who work on the assumption that items remain as they usually are (Schillmeier 161).In addressing this issue, much emphasis has been placed on the potential of mobile communications technologies in affording vision impaired users greater mobility and flexibility (Jolley 27). However, as Gerard Goggin argues, the adoption of mobile communication technologies has not necessarily “gone hand in hand with new personal and collective possibilities” given the limited access to standard features, even if the device is text-to-speech enabled (98). Issues with Digital Rights Management (DRM) limit the way a device accesses and reproduces information, and confusion over whether audio rights are needed to convert text-to-speech, impede the accessibility of mobile communications technologies for vision impaired users (Ellis and Kent 136). Accessibility and functionality issues like these arise out of the needs, desires, and expectations of the visually impaired as a user group being considered as an afterthought as opposed to a significant factor in the early phases of design and prototyping (Goggin 89). Thus, the development of assistive technologies for the vision impaired has been left to third parties who must adopt their solutions to fit within certain technical parameters. It is valuable to consider what is involved in the task of shopping in order to appreciate the considerations that must be made in the design of shopping intended assistive technologies. Shopping generally consists of five sub-tasks: travelling to the store; finding items in-store; paying for and bagging items at the register; exiting the store and getting home; and, the often overlooked task of putting items away once at home. In this process supermarkets exhibit a “trichotomous spatial ontology” consisting of locomotor space that a shopper moves around the store, haptic space in the immediate vicinity of the shopper, and search space where individual products are located (Nicholson et al.). In completing these tasks, a shopper will constantly be moving through and switching between all three of these spaces. In the next section I examine how assistive technologies function in producing supermarkets as both enabling and disabling spaces for the vision impaired. Assistive Technologies for Vision Impaired ShoppersJason Farman (43) and Adriana de Douza e Silva both argue that in many ways spaces have always acted as information interfaces where data of all types can reside. Global Positioning System (GPS), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and Quick Response (QR) codes all allow for practically every spatial encounter to be an encounter with information. Site-specific and location-aware technologies address the desire for meaningful representations of space for use in everyday situations by the vision impaired. Further, the possibility of an “always-on” connection to spatial information via a mobile phone with WiFi or 3G connections transforms spatial experience by “enfolding remote [and latent] contexts inside the present context” (de Souza e Silva). A range of GPS navigation systems adapted for vision-impaired users are currently on the market. Typically, these systems convert GPS information into text-to-speech instructions and are either standalone devices, such as the Trekker Breeze, or they use the compass, accelerometer, and 3G or WiFi functions found on most smart phones, such as Loadstone. Whilst both these products are adequate in guiding a vision-impaired user from their home to a supermarket, there are significant differences in their interfaces and data architectures. Trekker Breeze is a standalone hardware device that produces talking menus, maps, and GPS information. While its navigation functionality relies on a worldwide radio-navigation system that uses a constellation of 24 satellites to triangulate one’s position (May and LaPierre 263-64), its map and text-to-speech functionality relies on data on a DVD provided with the unit. Loadstone is an open source software system for Nokia devices that has been developed within the vision-impaired community. Loadstone is built on GNU General Public License (GPL) software and is developed from private and user based funding; this overcomes the issue of Trekker Breeze’s reliance on trading policies and pricing models of the few global vendors of satellite navigation data. Both products have significant shortcomings if viewed in the broader context of the five sub-tasks involved in shopping described above. Trekker Breeze and Loadstone require that additional devices be connected to it. In the case of Trekker Breeze it is a tactile keypad, and with Loadstone it is an aftermarket screen reader. To function optimally, Trekker Breeze requires that routes be pre-recorded and, according to a review conducted by the American Foundation for the Blind, it requires a 30-minute warm up time to properly orient itself. Both Trekker Breeze and Loadstone allow users to create and share Points of Interest (POI) databases showing the location of various places along a given route. Non-standard or duplicated user generated content in POI databases may, however, have a negative effect on usability (Ellis and Kent 2). Furthermore, GPS-based navigation systems are accurate to approximately ten metres, which means that users must rely on their own mobility skills when they are required to change direction or stop for traffic. This issue with GPS accuracy is more pronounced when a vision-impaired user is approaching a supermarket where they are likely to encounter environmental hazards with greater frequency and both pedestrian and vehicular traffic in greater density. Here the relations between space defined and spaces poorly defined or undefined by the GPS device interact to produce the supermarket surrounds as a disabling space (Galloway). Prototype Systems for Supermarket Navigation and Product SelectionIn the discussion to follow, I look at two prototype systems using QR codes and RFID that are designed to be used in-store by vision-impaired shoppers. Shop Talk is a proof of concept system developed by researchers at Utah State University that uses synthetic verbal route directions to assist vision impaired shoppers with supermarket navigation, product search, and selection (Nicholson et al.). Its hardware consists of a portable computational unit, a numeric keypad, a wireless barcode scanner and base station, headphones for the user to receive the synthetic speech instructions, a USB hub to connect all the components, and a backpack to carry them (with the exception of the barcode scanner) which has been slightly modified with a plastic stabiliser to assist in correct positioning. Shop Talk represents the supermarket environment using two data structures. The first is comprised of two elements: a topological map of locomotor space that allows for directional labels of “left,” “right,” and “forward,” to be added to the supermarket floor plan; and, for navigation of haptic space, the supermarket inventory management system, which is used to create verbal descriptions of product information. The second data structure is a Barcode Connectivity Matrix (BCM), which associates each shelf barcode with several pieces of information such as aisle, aisle side, section, shelf, position, Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode, product description, and price. Nicholson et al. suggest that one of their “most immediate objectives for future work is to migrate the system to a more conventional mobile platform” such as a smart phone (see Mobile Shopping). The Personalisable Interactions with Resources on AMI-Enabled Mobile Dynamic Environments (PRIAmIDE) research group at the University of Deusto is also approaching Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) by exploring the smart phone’s sensing, communication, computing, and storage potential. As part of their work, the prototype system, BlindShopping, was developed to address the issue of assisted shopping using entirely off-the-shelf technology with minimal environmental adjustments to navigate the store and search, browse and select products (López-de-Ipiña et al. 34). Blind Shopping’s architecture is based on three components. Firstly, a navigation system provides the user with synthetic verbal instructions to users via headphones connected to the smart phone device being used in order to guide them around the store. This requires a RFID reader to be attached to the tip of the user’s white cane and road-marking-like RFID tag lines to be distributed throughout the aisles. A smartphone application processes the RFID data that is received by the smart phone via Bluetooth generating the verbal navigation commands as a result. Products are recognised by pointing a QR code reader enabled smart phone at an embossed code located on a shelf. The system is managed by a Rich Internet Application (RIA) interface, which operates by Web browser, and is used to register the RFID tags situated in the aisles and the QR codes located on shelves (López-de-Ipiña and 37-38). A typical use-scenario for Blind Shopping involves a user activating the system by tracing an “L” on the screen or issuing the “Location” voice command, which activates the supermarket navigation system which then asks the user to either touch an RFID floor marking with their cane or scan a QR code on a nearby shelf to orient the system. The application then asks the user to dictate the product or category of product that they wish to locate. The smart phone maintains a continuous Bluetooth connection with the RFID reader to keep track of user location at all times. By drawing a “P” or issuing the “Product” voice command, a user can switch the device into product recognition mode where the smart phone camera is pointed at an embossed QR code on a shelf to retrieve information about a product such as manufacturer, name, weight, and price, via synthetic speech (López-de-Ipiña et al. 38-39). Despite both systems aiming to operate with as little environmental adjustment as possible, as well as minimise the extent to which a supermarket would need to allocate infrastructural, administrative, and human resources to implementing assistive technologies for vision impaired shoppers, there will undoubtedly be significant establishment and maintenance costs associated with the adoption of production versions of systems resembling either prototype described in this paper. As both systems rely on data obtained from a server by invoking Web services, supermarkets would need to provide in-store WiFi. Further, both systems’ dependence on store inventory data would mean that commercial versions of either of these systems are likely to be supermarket specific or exclusive given that there will be policies in place that forbid access to inventory systems, which contain pricing information to third parties. Secondly, an assumption in the design of both prototypes is that the shopping task ends with the user arriving at home; this overlooks the important task of being able to recognise products in order to put them away or to use at a later time.The BCM and QR product recognition components of both respective prototypic systems associates information to products in order to assist users in the product search and selection sub-tasks. However, information such as use-by dates, discount offers, country of manufacture, country of manufacturer’s origin, nutritional information, and the labelling of products as Halal, Kosher, containing alcohol, nuts, gluten, lactose, phenylalanine, and so on, create further challenges in how different data sources are managed within the devices’ software architecture. The reliance of both systems on existing smartphone technology is also problematic. Changes in the production and uptake of mobile communication devices, and the software that they operate on, occurs rapidly. Once the fit-out of a retail space with the necessary instrumentation in order to accommodate a particular system has occurred, this system is unlikely to be able to cater to the requirement for frequent upgrades, as built environments are less flexible in the upgrading of their technological infrastructure (Kellerman 148). This sets up a scenario where the supermarket may persist as a disabling space due to a gap between the functional capacities of applications designed for mobile communication devices and the environments in which they are to be used. Lists and Disabling Spatial PracticeThe development and provision of access to assistive technologies and the data they rely upon is a commercial issue (Ellis and Kent 7). The use of assistive technologies in supermarket-spaces that rely on the inter-functional coordination of multiple inventories may have the unintended effect of excluding people with disabilities from access to legitimate content (Ellis and Kent 7). With de Certeau, we can ask of supermarket-space “What spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space?" (96).In designing assistive technologies, such as those discussed in this paper, developers must strive to achieve integration across multiple data inventories. Software architectures must be optimised to overcome issues relating to intellectual property, cross platform access, standardisation, fidelity, potential duplication, and mass-storage. This need for “cross sectioning,” however, “merely adds to the muddle” (Lefebvre 8). This is a predicament that only intensifies as space and objects in space become increasingly “representable” (Galloway), and as the impetus for the project of spatial politics for the vision impaired moves beyond representation to centre on access and meaning-making.ConclusionSupermarkets act as sites of hegemony, resistance, difference, and transformation, where the vision impaired and their allies resist the “repressive socialization of impaired bodies” through their own social movements relating to environmental accessibility and the technology assisted spatial practice of shopping (Gleeson 129). It is undeniable that the prototype technologies described in this paper, and those like it, indeed do have a great deal of emancipatory potential. However, it should be understood that these devices produce representations of supermarket-space as a simulation within a framework that attempts to mimic the real, and these representations are pre-determined by the industrial, technological, and regulatory forces that govern their production (Lefebvre 8). Thus, the potential of assistive technologies is dependent upon a range of constraints relating to data accessibility, and the interaction of various kinds of lists across the geographic area that surrounds the supermarket, locomotor, haptic, and search spaces of the supermarket, the home-space, and the internal spaces of a shopper’s imaginary. These interactions are important in contributing to the reproduction of disability in supermarkets through the use of assistive shopping technologies. The ways by which people make and read shopping lists complicate the relations between supermarket-space as location data and product inventories versus that which is intuited and experienced by a shopper (Sutherland). Not only should we be creating inventories of supermarket locomotor, haptic, and search spaces, the attention of developers working in this area of assistive technologies should look beyond the challenges of spatial representation and move towards a focus on issues of interoperability and expanded access of spatial inventory databases and data within and beyond supermarket-space.ReferencesDe Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Print.De Souza e Silva, A. “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies As Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces.” Space and Culture 9.3 (2006): 261-78.Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. Disability and New Media. New York: Routledge, 2011.Farman, Jason. Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York: Routledge, 2012.Galloway, Alexander. “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” Theory, Culture and Society 28 (2011): 85-102.Gleeson, Brendan. Geographies of Disability. London: Routledge, 1999.Goggin, Gerard. Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2006.Haber, Alex. “Mapping the Void in Perec’s Species of Spaces.” Tattered Fragments of the Map. Ed. Adam Katz and Brian Rosa. S.l.: Thelimitsoffun.org, 2009.Jolley, William M. When the Tide Comes in: Towards Accessible Telecommunications for People with Disabilities in Australia. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 2003.Keaggy, Bill. Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found. Cincinnati, Ohio: HOW Books, 2007.Kellerman, Aharon. Personal Mobilities. London: Routledge, 2006.Kleege, Georgia. “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account.” The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd edition. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 2006. 391-98.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991.López-de-Ipiña, Diego, Tania Lorido, and Unai López. “Indoor Navigation and Product Recognition for Blind People Assisted Shopping.” Ambient Assisted Living. Ed. J. Bravo, R. Hervás, and V. Villarreal. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2011. 25-32. May, Michael, and Charles LaPierre. “Accessible Global Position System (GPS) and Related Orientation Technologies.” Assistive Technology for Visually Impaired and Blind People. Ed. Marion A. Hersh, and Michael A. Johnson. London: Springer-Verlag, 2008. 261-88. Nicholson, John, Vladimir Kulyukin, and Daniel Coster. “Shoptalk: Independent Blind Shopping Through Verbal Route Directions and Barcode Scans.” The Open Rehabilitation Journal 2.1 (2009): 11-23.Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Trans. and Ed. John Sturrock. London: Penguin Books, 1997.Schillmeier, Michael W. J. Rethinking Disability: Bodies, Senses, and Things. 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IntroductionSince its launch in 2005, YouTube has fast become one of the most popular video sharing sites, one of the largest sources of user generated content, and one of the most frequently visited sites globally (Burgess and Green). As YouTube’s popularity has increased, more and more people have taken up the site’s invitation to “Broadcast Yourself.” Vlogging (video blogging) on YouTube has increased in popularity, creating new genres and communities. Vlogging not only allows individuals to create their own mediated content for mass consumption—making it a site for participatory culture (Burgess and Green; Jenkins) and resembling contemporary forms of entertainment such as reality television—but it also allows individuals to engage in narrative and identity forming practices. Through filming their everyday lives, and presenting themselves on camera, YouTubers are engaging in a process of constructing and presenting their identity online. They often form communities around these identities and continue the practice in dialogue and collaboration with their communities of viewers on YouTube. Because of YouTube’s mass global reach, the ability to create one’s own mediated content and the ability to publicly play with and project different self representations becomes a powerful tool allowing YouTubers to publicly challenge social norms and encourage others to do the same. This paper will explore these features of YouTube using the recent “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement, started by NikkieTutorials, as an example. Through a virtual ethnography of the movement as developed by Christine Hine—following the people, dialogue, connections, and narratives that emerged from Nikkie’s original video—this paper will demonstrate that YouTube is not only a tool for self transformation, but has wider potential to transform norms in society. This is achieved mainly through mobilising communities that form around transformative practices, such as makeup transformations, on YouTube. Vlogging as an Identity Forming Practice Vlogging on YouTube is a contemporary form of autobiography in which individuals engage in a process of documenting their life on a daily or weekly basis and, in doing so, constructing their identity online. Although the aim of beauty vlogs is to teach new makeup techniques, demonstrate and review new products, or circulate beauty-related information, the videos include a large amount of self-disclosure. Beauty vloggers reveal intimate things about themselves and actively engage in the practice of self-representation while filming. Beauty vlogging is unique to other vlogging genres as it almost always involves an immediate transformation of the physical self in each video. The vloggers typically begin with their faces bare and “natural” and throughout the course of the video transform their faces into how they want to be seen, and ultimately, who they want to be that day, using makeup. Thus the process of self-representation is multi-dimensional as not only are they presenting the self, but they are also visually constructing the self on camera. The construction of identity that beauty vloggers engage in on YouTube can be likened to what Robert Ezra Park and later Erving Goffman refer to as the construction and performance of a mask. In his work Race and Culture, Park states that the original meaning of the word person is a mask (249). Goffman responds to this statement in his work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, saying the mask is “our truer self, the self we would like to be” (30). Beauty vloggers are engaging in the process of constructing their mask—their truer self and the self they would like to be—both through their performance on YouTube, and through the visual transformation that takes place on camera. Their performance on YouTube not only communicates a desired identity, but through their performance they realise this identity. The process of filming and the visual process of constructing or transforming the self on camera through makeup brings the subject into being. Scholarship in the fields of Life Writing and Digital Media including Autobiography, Automedia and Persona Studies has acknowledged and explored the ways narratives and identities—both online and offline—are constructed, created, shaped, chosen, and invented by the individual/author (Garner; Bridger; Eakin; Maguire; Poletti and Rak; Marshall; Smith and Watson). It is widely accepted that all representations of the self are constructed. Crucially, it is the process of documenting or communicating the self that is identity forming (Richardson; Bridger), as the process, including writing, filming, and posting, brings the subject or self into being (Neuman). The individual embodies their performance and realises the self through it. Park and Goffman argue that we all engage in this process of performing and realising the self through the roles we play in society. The significance of the beauty vlogger performance and transformation is the space in which it occurs and the community that it fosters. YouTube as a Transformative Tool and MirrorThe space in which beauty vloggers play with and transform the self on camera is significant as digital technologies such as YouTube invite exploration of the self. Networked digital media (Meikle and Young) invite multiplicity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation in/of identity performances (Bolter; Gergen; Turkle, "Parallel Lives"). These technologies create opportunities for defining and re-defining the self (Bolter 130), as they allow people to present a more multi-mediated self, using both audio-visual components and text (Papacharissi 643).YouTube, in particular, allows the individual to experiment with the self, and document an ongoing transformation, through film (Kavoori). Many scholars have described this ongoing process of identity construction online using the metaphor of “the mirror” (see Kavoori; Raun; and Procter as recent examples). In his research on trans gender vlogging on YouTube, Tobias Raun explores the theme of the mirror. He describes vlogging as a “transformative medium for working on, producing and exploring the self” (366). He argues the vlog acts as a mirror allowing the individual to try out and assume various identities (366). He writes, the mirroring function of the vlog “invites the YouTuber to assume the shape of a desired identity/representation, constantly assuming and evaluating oneself as an attractive image, trying out different ‘styles of the flesh’ (Butler 177), poses and appearances” (367). In reference to trans gender vlogging, Raun writes, “The vlog seems to serve an important function in the transitioning process, and is an important part of a process of self-invention, serving as a testing ground for experimentations with, and manifestations of (new) identities” (367). The mirror (vlog) gives the individual a place/space to construct and perform their mask (identity), and an opportunity to see the reflection and adjust the mask (identity) accordingly. An important feature of the vlog as a mirror is the fact that it is less like a conventional mirror and more like a window with a reflective surface. On YouTube the vlog always involves an audience, who not only watch the performance, but also respond to it. This is in keeping with Goffman’s assertion that there is always an audience involved in any performance of the self. On YouTube, Raun argues, “the need to represent oneself goes hand in hand with the need to connect and communicate” (Raun 369). Networked digital media such as YouTube are inherently social. They invite participation (Smith; Sauter)and community through community building functions such as the ability to like, subscribe, and comment. Michael Strangelove refers to YouTube as a social space, “as a domain of self-expression, community and public confession” (4). The audience and community are important in the process of identity construction and representation as they serve a crucial role in providing feedback and encouragement, legitimising the identity being presented. As Raun writes, the vlog is an opportunity “for seeing one’s own experiences and thoughts reflected in others” (366). Raun identifies that for the trans gender vloggers in his study, simply knowing there is an audience watching their vlogs is enough to affirm their identity. He writes the vlog can be both “an individual act of self validation and . . . a social act of recognition and encouragement” (368). However, in the case of beauty vlogging the audience do more than watch, they form communities embodying and projecting the performance in everyday life and thus collectively challenge social norms, as seen in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement. Exploring the “The Power of MAKEUP!” MovementOn 10 May 2015, Nikkie, a well-known beauty vlogger, uploaded a video to her YouTube channel NikkieTutorials titled “The Power of MAKEUP!” Nikkie’s video can be watched here. In her video Nikkie challenges “makeup shaming,” arguing that makeup is not only fun, but can “transform” you into who you want to be. Inspired by an episode of the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race, in which the competing drag queens transform half of their face into “glam” (drag), and leave the other half of their face bare (male), Nikkie demonstrates that anyone can use makeup as a transformative tool. In her video Nikkie mirrors the drag queen transformations, transforming half her face into “glam” and leaving the other half of her face bare, as shown in Figure 1. In only transforming half of her face, Nikkie emphasises the scope of the transformation, demonstrating just how much you can change your appearance using only makeup on your face. Nikkie’s video communicates that both a transformed “glam” image and an “unedited” image of the self are perfectly fine, “there are no rules” and neither representations of the self should bring you shame. Figure 1: thumbnail of Nikkie’s videoNikkie’s video started a movement and spread throughout the beauty community on YouTube as a challenge. Other famous beauty vloggers, and everyday makeup lovers, took on the challenge of creating YouTube videos or posting pictures on Instagram of their faces half bare and half transformed using makeup with the tag #thepowerofmakeupchallenge. Since its release in May 2015, Nikkie’s video has been watched over thirty million times, has been liked over five hundred and thirty thousand times, and has received over twenty three thousand comments, many of which echo Nikkie’s experience of “makeup shaming.” “The power of makeup” video went viral and was picked up not only by the online beauty community but also by mainstream media with articles by Huffington Post, Yahoo.com, Marie Claire, BuzzFeed, DailyLife, POPSUGAR, Enews, Urbanshowbiz, BoredPanda, and kickvick among others. On Instagram, thousands of everyday makeup lovers have recreated the transformation and uploaded their pictures of the finished result. Various hashtags have been created around this movement and can be searched on Instagram including #thepowerofmakeupchallenge, #powerofmakeupchallenge, #powerofmakeup. Nikkie’s Instagram page dedicated to the challenge can be seen here. “The power of makeup” video is a direct reaction against what Nikkie calls “makeup shaming”—the idea that makeup is bad, and the assumption that the leading motivation for using makeup is insecurity. In her video Nikkie also reacts to the idea that the made-up-girl is “not really you,” or worse is “fake.” In the introduction to her video Nikkie says,I’ve been noticing a lot lately that girls have been almost ashamed to say that they love makeup because nowadays when you say you love makeup you either do it because you want to look good for boys, you do it because you’re insecure, or you do it because you don’t love yourself. I feel like in a way lately it’s almost a crime to love doing your makeup. So after last weeks RuPaul’s Drag Race with the half drag half male, I was inspired to show you the power of makeup. I notice a lot that when I don’t wear makeup and I have my hair up in a bun and I meet people and I show them picture of my videos or, or whatever looks I have done, they look at me and straight up tell me “that is not you.” They tell me “that’s funny” because I don’t even look like that girl on the picture. So without any further ado I’m going to do half my face full on glam—I’m truly going to transform one side of my face—and the other side is going to be me, raw, unedited, nothing, me, just me. So let’s do it.In her introduction, Nikkie identifies a social attitude that many of her viewers can relate to, that the made-up face isn’t the “real you.” This idea reveals an interesting contradiction in social attitude. As this issue of Media/Culture highlights, the theme of transformation is increasingly popular in contemporary society. Renovation shows, weight loss shows, and “makeover” shows have increased in number and popularity around the world (Lewis). Tania Lewis attributes this to an international shift towards “the real” on television (447). Accompanying this turn towards “the real,” confession, intimacy, and authenticity are now demanded and consumed as entertainment (Goldthwaite; Dovey; King). Sites such as YouTube are arguably popular because they offer real stories, real lives, and have a core value of authenticity (Strangelove; Wesch; Young; Tolson). The power of makeup transformations are challenging because they juxtapose a transformation against the natural, on the self. By only transforming half their face, the beauty vloggers juxtapose the “makeover” (transformation) with “authenticity” (the natural). The power of makeup movement is therefore caught between two contemporary social values. However, the desire for authenticity, and the lack of acceptance that the transformed image is authentic seems to be the main criticism that the members of this movement receive. Beauty vloggers identify a strong social value that “natural” is “good” and any attempt to alter the natural is taboo. Even in the commercial world “natural beauty” is celebrated and features heavily in the marketing and advertising campaigns of popular beauty, cosmetic, and skincare brands. Consider Maybelline’s emphasis on “natural beauty” in their byline “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.” This is not the way the members of “the power of makeup” movement use and celebrate makeup. They use and celebrate makeup as a transformative and identity forming tool, and their use of makeup is most often criticised for not being natural. In her recreation of Nikkie’s video, Evelina Forsell says “people get upset when I’m not natural.” Like Nikkie, Evelina reveals she often receives the criticism that “the person with a full on face with makeup is not you.” Evelina’s video can be watched here.“The power of makeup” movement and its participants challenge this criticism that the made-up self is not the “real” self. Evelina directly responds to this criticism in her video, stating “when I have a full face of makeup . . . that’s still me, but a more . . . creative me, I guess.” The beauty vloggers in this movement use makeup and YouTube as extensions of the self, as tools for self-expression, self-realisation, and ongoing transformation. Beauty vloggers are demonstrating that makeup is a tool and extension of the self that allows them to explore and play with their self-representations. In the same way that technology enables the individual to extend and “reinvent him/herself online” (Papacharissi 645), so does makeup. And in the same way that technology becomes an extension of the self, or even a second self (Turkle, The Second Self; Vaast) so does makeup. Makeup is a tool and technique of the self. Vlogging is about storytelling (Kavoori), but it is also collective—it’s about telling collective stories (Raun 373) which can be seen in various vlogging genres. As Geert Lovink suggests, YouTube is one of the largest databases of global shared experience. YouTube’s global popularity can be attributed to Strangelove’s assertion that “there’s nothing more interesting to real people . . . than authentic stories told about other real people” (65). Individuals are drawn to Nikkie’s experience, seeing themselves reflected in her story. Famous beauty vloggers on YouTube, and everyday beauty lovers, find community in the collective experience of feeling shame for loving makeup and using makeup to transform and communicate their identity. Effectively, the movement forms communities of practice (Wenger) made up of hundreds of people brought together by the shared value and use of makeup as a transformative tool. The online spaces where these activities take place (mainly on YouTube and Instagram) form affinity spaces (Gee) where the community come together, share information, learn and develop their practice. Hundreds of YouTubers from all over the world took up Nikkie’s invitation to demonstrate the power of makeup by transforming themselves on camera. From well-established beauty vloggers with millions of viewers, to amateur beauty lovers with YouTube channels, many people felt moved by Nikkie’s example and embodied the message, adapting the transformation to suit their circumstances. The movement includes both men and women, children and adults. Some transformations are inspirational such as Shalom Blac’s in which she talks about accepting the scars that are all over her face, but also demonstrates how makeup can make them disappear. Shalom has almost five million views on her “POWER OF MAKEUP” video, and has been labelled “inspirational” by the media. Shalom Blac’s video can be watched here and the media article labelling her as “inspirational” can be viewed here. Others, such as PatrickStarrr, send a powerful message that “It’s okay to be yourself.” Unlike a traditional interpretation of that statement, Patrick is communicating that it is okay to be the self that you construct, on any given day. Patrick also has over four million views on his video which can be watched here. During her transformation, Nikkie points out each feature of her face that she does not like and demonstrates how she can change it using makeup. Nikkie’s video is primarily a tutorial, educating viewers on different makeup techniques that can manipulate the appearance of their natural features into how they would like them to appear. These techniques are also reproduced and embodied through the various contributors to the movement. Thus the tutorial is an educational tool enabling others to use makeup for their own self representations (see Paul A. Soukup for an overview of YouTube as an educational tool). A feminist perspective may deconstruct the empowering, educational intentions of Nikkie’s video, insisting that conceptions of beauty are a social construct (Travis, Meginnis, and Bardari) and should not be re-enforced by encouraging women (and men) to use make-up to feel good. However, this sort of discourse does not appear in the movement, and this paper seeks to analyse the movement as its contributors frame and present it. Rather, “the power of makeup” movement falls within a postfeminist framework celebrating choice, femininity, independence, and the individual construction of modern identity (McRobbie; Butler; Beck, Giddens and Lash). Postfeminism embraces postmodern notions of identity in which individuals are “called up to invent their own structures” (McRobbie 260). Through institutions such as education young women have “become more independent and able,” and “‘dis-embedded’ from communities where gender roles were fixed” (McRobbie 260). Angela McRobbie attributes this to the work of scholars such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck and their emphasis on individualisation and reflexive modernisation. These scholars take a Foucauldian approach to identity construction in the modern age, where the individual must choose their own structures “internally and individualistically” (260), engaging in an ongoing process of self-monitoring and self-improvement, and resulting in the current self-help culture (McRobbie). In addition to being an educational and constructive tool, Nikkie’s video is also an exercise in self-branding and self-promotion(see Marwick; Duffy and Hund; and van Nuenen for scholarship on self-branding). Through her ongoing presence on YouTube, presenting this video in conjunction with her other tutorials, Nikkie is establishing herself as a beauty vlogger/guru. Nikkie lists all of the products that she uses in her transformation below her video with links to where people can buy them. She also lists her social media accounts, ways that people can connect with her, and other videos that people might be interested in watching. There are also prompts to subscribe, both during her video and in the description bar below her video. Nikkie’s transformation is both an ongoing endeavour to create her image and public persona as a beauty vlogger, and a physical transformation on camera. There is also a third transformation that takes place because her vlog is in the public sphere and consequently mobilises a movement. The transformation is of the way people talk about and eventually perceive makeup. Nikkie’s video aims to end makeup shaming and promote makeup as an empowering tool. With each recreation of her video, with each Instagram photo featuring the transformation, and with each mainstream media article featuring the movement, #thepowerofmakeup movement community are transforming the image of the made-up girl—transforming the association of makeup with presenting an inauthentic identity—in society. ConclusionThe “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement, started by NikkieTutorials, demonstrates one way in which people are using YouTube as a transformative tool, and mirror, to document, construct, and present their identity online, using makeup. Through their online transformation the members of the movement not only engage in a process of constructing and presenting their identity, but they form communities who share a love of makeup and its transformative potential. By embodying Nikkie’s original message to rid makeup shaming and transform the self into a desired identity, the movement re-enforces the “made-up” image of the self as real and authentic, and challenges conceptions that the “made-up” image is “fake” and inauthentic. Ultimately, this case study explores YouTube as a site that allows individuals to play with, construct, and present their identity. YouTube is a tool with which, and a space in which, people can transform themselves, and in doing so create communities which can work together to publicly challenge social norms.References Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge, England: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers, 1994. Bolter, Jay David. "Virtual Reality and the Redefinition of Self." Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment. Eds. Ronald L. 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