open question

mokelly · Joined: 29 Jun 2004 Posts: 1

How are the interaction concepts we spoke on yesterday relevant to your discipline and how would students get "interested" in these concepts from your point of view.

janelle · Joined: 26 May 2004 Posts: 4

One of the interersting interaction concepts discussed by Morton -- intervening opportunity -- was introduced to the literature by sociologist Samuel A Stouffer -- see his 1940 article on "Intervening opportunity: A Theory relating mobillity and distance" in the American Anthropological Review vol 5, pp. 845-867. He was looking into intraurban residential moves in the Cleveland area -- if my memory is correct.
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Space resources for use by Don Janelle

virtualme · Joined: 29 Jun 2004 Posts: 4

One of the things that stuck with me is the very basic idea of hubs. They happened to be airline hubs, and the cities happened to be defined by geographic distance and population, but this is something that can be applied easily to Communication in many ways. For example, in Internet Research you have servers that could be "hubs," or portal websites like Google, and rather than physical distance, you could assess things like relatedness of topic or you could look at how many websites someone has to go through until they find exactly the kind of info that they are looking for. Of course you can also map that by space/time but I don't think I could draw that as cyberspace is multi-dimensional, not two or three dimensional.) Instead of population, you can look at number of hits, or number of pages linked to a particular site (that's the logic that Google uses to determine rank order of search results).
For my specific project I will adapt this and have students make logs of the locations on campus that they spend time at. When aggregated and presented as a choropleth map such visualized data would provide a good logical reason to place some wireless computing nodes in those locations. Might not be an optimized solution, but some of the very first slides that Morton showed will be exactly the kind of spatial level that my students can actually grasp.