Apr 30, 2011

Take a short break to enjoy a performance by the KAIST Mobile Phone Orchestra!

Thanks to CreativeApplications.Net for sharing this video!

KAMPO Performance @INDAF 2010 from Sihwa Park on Vimeo.

KAMPO KAIST Mobile Phone Orchestra
"Mobile phones (especially smartphones), with more advanced features and computing power than those of ordinary telephones, have been revolutionizing our life and culture in a variety of ways. The KAIST Mobile Phone Orchestra (KAMPO) aims to explore this potential of mobile media for music and media art. In addition to suggesting new and innovative mobile performance paradigms through concerts, KAMPO conducts active research/education in music and mobile media as well as software development." -Intro from the KAMPO website

"Visualize This": Nathan Yau's (FlowingData) book about information and data visualization

I've been following Nathan Yau's FlowingData blog for several years.  It is one of my favorites. His new book,  Visualize This : The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization and Statistics, will be out in July 2011, and is available for  pre-order on-line on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and Wiley.  


I love Nathan's editor's comment about his latest chapter: "Thanks for yet another very enjoyable chapter.  If I had known statistics would be like this, I would have actually taken classes"


Visualize This: The Flowing Data Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics


Here is the plug for Visualize This, from the Wiley website:


"Data doesn't decrease; it is ever-increasing and can be overwhelming to organize in a way that makes sense to its intended audience. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could actually visualize data in such a way that we could maximize its potential and tell a story in a clear, concise manner? Thanks to the creative genius of Nathan Yau, we can. With this full-color book, data visualization guru and author Nathan Yau uses step-by-step tutorials to show you how to visualize and tell stories with data. He explains how to gather, parse, and format data and then design high quality graphics that help you explore and present patterns, outliers, and relationships.
  • Presents a unique approach to visualizing and telling stories with data, from a data visualization expert and the creator of flowingdata.com, Nathan Yau
  • Offers step-by-step tutorials and practical design tips for creating statistical graphics, geographical maps, and information design to find meaning in the numbers
  • Details tools that can be used to visualize data-native graphics for the Web, such as ActionScript, Flash libraries, PHP, and JavaScript and tools to design graphics for print, such as R and Illustrator
  • Contains numerous examples and descriptions of patterns and outliers and explains how to show them
Visualize This demonstrates how to explain data visually so that you can present your information in a way that is easy to understand and appealing."

Are girls allowed in Google's tool shop? Just wondering.

Today I read an article in my local paper about Google workshops that provide a few select employees opportunities to create things with state-of-the art "shop" tools.  I went on to the Google blog and read the following post:


Google Workshops: a place for Googlers to get their hands dirty


Are girls allowed?  Just wondering.


I hope that the percentage of women who access the Google workshops is on par with the percentage of females who are employed at Google. 


Although there have been efforts to increase the number of females who pursue careers in engineering, computer science, and related technical fields, progress has been slow.  If you walk through an "average" high school, you are likely to find that there are few female student enrolled in classes such as computer programming, computer-assisted design (CAD), or engineering technology.   



RELATED
Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering
, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics



Engineering Your Life: A guide to engineering for high school girls


Get Smart Get WISE (Women in Information Science and Engineering, North Carolina Technology Association)


IEEE Women in Engineering


NCWIT: National Center for Women and Information Technology
"In 2009 women earned only 18 percent of all CS [computer science] degrees. Back in 1985, women earned 37 percent of CS degrees."

WEPAN:  Women in Engineering ProActive Network
Record number of girls to take part in Tech Challenge 2011
Sandeep Ravindran, Mercury News, 4/28/11


Women in Engineering:  21 Remarkable Stories
MichiganEngineering, University of Michigan



FYI:
I am old enough to remember a time when girls were strongly discouraged from taking shop classes.  In my case, when I was in high school,  I was told that auto mechanics courses were not appropriate for college-bound students.  My only option was to take a short powder puff mechanics class in the summer!   Despite scoring at the top of the scale on a measure of mechanical reasoning, I was steered towards pursuing a career in a helping profession.   

Apr 29, 2011

Rhizome article about spectral music and software at USCD, via Tom Erbe

Continuing with my music technology theme:


This article below was shared by Tom Erbe, known for Soundhack,  a powerful spectral effects software that has provided me with many hours of music technology joy off and on for years. Playing around with Soundhack was one of the things that inspired me to take a music technology class several years ago.


How Large an Atom of Music? A Tour through Today's Spectral Music and Software at UCSD
Nat Roe, Rhizome, 4/27/11


FYI:  If you are interested in exploring this topic further, visit Tom Erbe's website, which includes information and resources related to the computer music courses he teaches at USCD.


"RHIZOME is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. Read more here."

Musical Multitouch/Gestural Interfaces by Osmosis

I've been pleasantly surprised by the increase of interesting multi-touch and gesture-based applications developed for musical interaction on large displays.  This topic is dear to my heart -  I took a computer music technology class back in 2003, and think it would have been great if this sort of thing was available back then.  Who wants to point and click around a music app for hours on end?!


The video below shows what is new from Osmosis, a company based in NY that focuses on the development of multi-touch and gesture based software for a range of uses, including music applications.


Performance Systems for Stage/Studio from Osmosis on Vimeo.

Transparent Stage System Specs
Design
• Floating, transparent HD displays from 32"
• Haptic surface with tempered glass backing
• High gain image with wide viewing angle
• Rugged aircraft-grade aluminum build
• Enclosed projector and computer
• Minimalist style, compact footprint
• Disassembles for easy transportation


Interactivity
• Projected capacitive foil or IR bezel options
• Up to 32 simultaneous touch points
• Precise, responsive touch tracking (3mm)
• Immune to external light conditions
• Use of fingers, gloves or stylus


Technical
Display:
• DLP portable projector
• 1280×800 HD resolution
• 2500 ANSI-lumen, 1800:1 contrast
Computer:
• Mini-ITX, Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM
• ATI Radeon X1250 graphics card
• Wireless keyboard and mouse
• Windows 7 Pro

Stuart McClean, the founder of Osmosis, shared the following information about his company:

"Osmosis is a consulting firm based in the NYC area with deep experience in interactive technology. Although we cater to a range of markets, we’re especially passionate about music production and performance. Working closely with artists, we build customized interactive systems for stage and studio. HCI technology is integrated into a range of designs including stands, desktop rigs, tables, carts and vertical screens. Interfaces are tailored to specific artist needs and combine controls, generative audio and visuals, instruments, and gestural input. Our unique and flexible systems take full advantage of multi-touch interaction and offer seamless control of Ableton Live, Traktor, or other DAWs via midi and OSC..."


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For more information about the applications developed by the Osmosis team, take a look at their showcase page.  

Apr 28, 2011

Touch the Music: Drums, Keyboards, and More on NextWindow Touchscreens Featured in Megan Slankard's Music Video, "Sails"

Megan Slankard and her band performing "Sails", from the album "a little extra sun":

"To put its technology to the artistic test, NextWindow introduced Megan Slankard and her band to the freedom of creating music using touch screens. With 13 touch screens manufactured by NextWindow – seven 46-inch screens and six All-in-One desktop touch computers – Megan and her band set out to create a music video with a touch of technology they’ve never utilized before."-NextWindow


For detailed information about the touch screens and music applications shown in the video below, visit the Music on Touch Screens page of NextWindow's website. The website shows a good "behind the scenes" video of the various band members exploring the touch screens used to create the music in the video.


Applications and Hardware
Controller/Mixing/Sequencing: FL Studio software.
Touch screen technology:  NextWindow 2550 Profile Touch, NextWindow 2700 Touch  Overlay, NextWindow 1900 Desktop

This technology would be awesome in K-12 music classes!

Apr 26, 2011

Calming Technologies research (Stanford University)

Here is the link:
A Brief Overview of Calming Technology (Research group at Stanford University) TechPsych blog, 4/26/11

Resource:
Calming Technology Research Group website (Stanford University)

Multi-touch and Gesture Interaction News and Updates You Might Have Missed (Part I)

Over the past couple of months, I've come across many interesting links related to multi-touch and gesture interaction, but I haven't had time to devote a thoughtful post to each one.  "Part I",  is a nice collection of experimental, commercial, and non-commercial efforts by a variety of creative technologists, with a smattering of industry news that might be of interest to IMT readers. 


Ideum's MT55 HD Multitouch Table 4/19/11

New MT55 HD Multitouch Table Now Shipping,  Jim Spadaccini, Ideum Blog 4/11/11

Smithsonian American Art Museum to Open Education Center  Sara Beladi, NBC Washington News, 4/4/11 (Rumor has it that the Smithsonian American Art might include touch and multi-touch displays in it's plans for a new education center.  The center was funded by an anonymous $8 million dollar gift.)

Bill Buxton, Microsoft Research, 4/7/11 - Includes lots of pictures, links to videos, and more information of what might be the first touch-screen.  Also see Bill Buxton's companion website, Multi-Touch Systems that I have Known and Loved, updated on 3/21/11.  Bill Buxton knows all (almost!)


"The MTbiggie uses the "Front Diffused Illumination" multitouch technique, with ambient infrared light and a DIY infrared webcam. The MTbiggie is similar to the MTmini, but includes a projected image and infrared webcam (rather than a normal webcam)...The MTbiggie isn’t the most stable and robust setup, but it is the easiest to build. To see other methods of building more stable multitouch displays, view the full multitouch display list." -Seth Sandler

(Also check out NodeBeat, a multi-touch music/audio sequencer/generator app by Seth Sandler and Justin Windle)

Intuilab, 4/13/11
"IntuiLab, a global leader in surface computing software applications, today announced support for the revolutionary Microsoft Kinect device across its full line of IntuiFace products and solutions including IntuiFace Presentation and IntuiFace Commerce...Microsoft Kinect brings distant gesture control to interactive solutions. These gesture controls allow users to interact with displayed digital assets from a distance at their own pace and path – for example, browsing through a large quantity of products in a store catalog or manipulating 3D models (such as a mobile phone) – all without having to actually touch the screen..."  -IntuiLab (Take a look at the IntuiLab team- an interactive page!)




Sparkon:  Videos and links related to multi-touch and gesture-based applications



Official Kinect SDK to be Open SourceJosh Blake, Deconstructing the NUI, 4/18/11  
9 This bit of news excited me, but don't get your hopes up. If anyone knows what will happen with the Kinect SDK, please leave a comment.)
"Update 4/18 7:34pm: Mary Jo Foley picks up this story, but the Microsoft spokesperson she talked to denied that the Kinect SDK will be open source. As she notes, Microsoft has pulled 180’s before regarding Kinect. After spokespeople initially were hostile to the idea of Kinect hacking, Xbox executives later embraced the idea that people are using Kinect for non-gaming purposes on the PC. Let’s hope Microsoft stays open to this idea." -Josh Blake

Kenrick Kin, Tom Miller, Bjoern Bollensdorff, Tony DeRose, Bjoern Hartmann, Manees Agrawala (Pixar Online Library)

Flight Race Game on 3DFeel lm3Labs, 4/18/11


JazzMutant Lemure Version 2 : "The only multi-touch and modular controller for sequencers, synthesizers, virtual instruments, vjing and lights, now even better."


Harry van der Veen's Multitouch Blog (NUITEQ)


Stantum "Unlimited Multi-Touch" Latest News

At Immersive Labs, Ads Watch Who Looks at Them Amy Lee, Huffington Post, 4/26/11 

Immersive Labs

Hard Rock Cafe International Using NextWindow Touch Screens:  "Rock Wall Solo displays enhance music lovers' experience in Seattle, Dallas, Detroit and Berlin" 4/12/11 (Full press release pdf)
Music on Touch Screens (NextWindow)

Razorfish: Thoughts on MIX 11 ,James Ashley, Razorfish Blog, 4/20/11  Also see: Razorfish Lab's Prototypes




"The multitouch microscope brings new dimensions into teaching and research. Researchers at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) and Multitouch Ltd have created a hand and finger gesture controlled microscope. The method is a combination between two technologies: web-based virtual microscopy and a giant size multitouch display."
"The result is an entirely new way of performing microscopy: by touching a table- or wall-sized screen the user can navigate and zoom within a microscope sample in the same way as in a conventional microscope. Using the touch control it is possible to move from the natural size of the sample to a 1000-fold magnification, at which cells and even subcellular details can be seen."  -Multitouchfi  Also see the Multitouch website.



Big Size Multitouch Display Turned into a MicroscopeMicroscopy-News, 3/28/11
Mac OX 10.7 Lion: new multi-touch gestures, Dock integration for Expose, Launchpad, Mission Control Appleinsider, 4/14/11


Vectorform App featured in Royal Caribbean's Video Promotion: James Brolin, Dean Cain get hands-on with Vectorform app Alison Weber, Vectorform Blog, 3/3/11


3M Touch Systems's YouTube Channel

Social Mirror 3D Gestural Display, Now Using Kinnect:  SnibbeInteractive




Apr 24, 2011

Algodoo physics app. for the SMART Board 800 series, supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction!

A few years ago, I came across "Phun", a free, hands-on application designed for use in science education.  I was impressed, and had the chance to use it with a few students.    Phun was Emil Ernerfeldt's MSc Computer Science project, created at the VR lab at UmeÃ¥ Universityin Sweden, under the supervision of Kenneth Bodin. 


Phun is now known as Algodoo, and is part of the family of applications offered by Algoryx, a company that develops multi-physics and 3D simulation software.  As you can see from the recent video below, it has improved over the years.  The most recent news is that the application was transformed for use on the SMART Board 800 series, and supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.  


One of the reasons that I like Algodoo is that it supports social interaction during learning activities, something that can enhance deeper learning among students.  It allows students to move and work in a "hands-on" fashion.  In schools that have invested stimulus money on technology and now have limited funds for upgrading traditional science equipment, applications such as Algodoo will most likely provide a good "bang for the buck".


Algodoo: Science education for a new generation

"Algodoo is a totally unique program. A program that gives you the opportunity to play with physics - using your own hands. Apply a constructionists learning paradigm, learning by doing. Use simple drawing tools to design, construct and explore with. Sounds like an interesting idea? Watch this video and learn how!" -Algoryx


Algodoo demonstration on a SMART Board 800 multi-touch/multiuser interactive whiteboards:





RELATED
Alogryx Simulation integrates Algodoo application with the SMART Board 800 series Smart Technologies
Algodoo website
Algoryx Multiphsyics and 3D Simulation website


Information about Phun, an earlier version of Algodoo:

You can download the music used in the videos and the Phun application from the following URL: http://www.phunland.com/download/Phun_theme.mp3

Video of original version: Phun - 2D physics sandbox:


Interactive Physics: Algodoo, the educational version of Phun, optimized for the Classmate PC (Interactive Multimedia Technology, 1/16/09)



Engaged Learning and Social Physics: Phun, an Interactive 2D Physics Sandbox
Interactive Multimedia Technology, 6/08/08

Apr 23, 2011

April 25th Release Date: Play and Experiment with Music on your iPad/Phone/Pod with NodeBeat iOS Music Sequencer by Affinity Blue, by Seth Sandler and Justin Windle

If you love music and have an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, you'll have fun exploring and experimenting with NodeBeat. As soon as I get my iPad, I plan to get this app! 


"NodeBeat is an experimental node-based audio sequencer and generative music application for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. NodeBeat is designed to let you create a variety of rhythmic sequences and ambient melodies in an intuitive fashion. It is scheduled for release on April 25th." -Affinity Blue


NodeBeat - iOS Music Sequencer from AffinityBlue on Vimeo.

NodeBeat is a collaboration between Seth Sandler and Justin Windle. It was developed using openFrameworks, with PureData for audio synthesis.  According to the NodeBeat website, "Octaves and Notes make up the two types of nodes. Octaves pulse and send messages to Notes within proximity. Each Octave is assigned a random octave and each Note, a random note; therefore, a Note will play in several octaves depending on the Octave it's connected to. Pause nodes to create your own beats or let them roam free to have them generate their own." Features include adjustable node physics, node add/remove, pitch shift, adjustable pulse rate and beat sync, adjustable echo, attack, decay, and release for creative sound sculpting, and for the iPad, audio waveform display and landscape/portrait views.

RELATED
NodeBeat website
Seth Sandler's posts about music
Seth's posts and videos about AudioTouch, and interactive multi-touch interfaces for computer music exploration and collaboration.
Soulwire (Justin Windle's blog)


Cross-posted on The World Is My Interactive Interface and TechPsych blogs.

Apr 22, 2011

Pervasive Retail Part I: Web UX Meets Retail CX - Screens Large and Small at the Mall, Revisited

If you follow my blog(s), you know that I have a passion for interactive displays in public spaces, and that I enjoy watching how various technologies converge, jump across platforms and devices, inter-operate, and re-purpose over time.  

The best places for watching this unfold, in my opinion, are airports, malls, shopping districts,  and larger "big box" establishments, where the Web meets Digital Out of Home (DOOH), old-fashioned kiosks morph into multi-touch screens and gesture-based windows, and visual merchandising meets technology, digital culture, architecture, and consumer metrics At the center of it all is the user/consumer - regular people, moms, dads, kids, teens, the elderly, the disabled, the hurried and the worried. Adding to the complexity is that an increasing number of people who are out-and-about are tethered to various mobile devices.

In scholarly tech circles, the concept of DOOH is known "Pervasive Retail".  The explosion of mobile devices and ubiquitous screens has fueled the fire for research, and is the focus of the current issue of IEEE's Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing.   

Despite the influx of technology, no-one is exactly sure how to do it quite right.  (I have some ideas, which I'll save for a future post.)

If you are interested in learning more about concepts related to "pervasive retail", the Retail Customer Experience website is a treasure trove of information related to DOOH, digital signage, multi-channel retailing, in-store media, kiosks, interactive touch screens and windows, related metrics, and more, with stories about real-life technology implementation.


Mall Video
The following video, taken with my handy HTC Incredible, provides a quick sampling of the screens I encountered during a recent visit to South Park Mall, in Charlotte, N.C.  The last screens in the clip were taken in the Brookstone store, and will be included in another clip that focuses solely on all of the screens that were scattered about the retail space.  


I have a hunch that some of the smaller displays in the Brookstone store were iPads.  iPads and tablets have great potential for use for shelf-level in-store interactive visual merchandising deployments, given the right apps and mounting systems. (See iPads as Cheap Digital Signage, by Tony Hymes of DOOHSocial and the video about Premier's iPad mounts, for more information.)

Much of what you'll see in the following video, taken at the same mall in December of 2009, wasn't around during my most recent trip:
Screens Large and Small at the Mall

Interactive Coke Machine and Kid at the Mall












I was sad to see that the interactive screen on the Coke machine  had been replaced by an ordinary one.  Part of the problem, I think, is that the interactive display was too busy and as a consequence, made the goal getting a quick drink a bit too complicated for the average thirsty customer, as seen in the video below:


Touch Screen Coke Machine at the Mall: 90 seconds to get a coke!

RELATED

Previous Posts:

References and Resources (Partial List)
Ron Brunt, InTouch with Retailing Whitepaper, 1/15/06
Brian Monahan, IPG Emerging Media Blog, 4/15/11
When all the world is a screen (The video is worth taking the time to watch.)
Narayanswami, C.,  Kruger, A.,  Marmasse, N. Pervasive Retail, IEEE Pervasive Computing
April-June 2011 (Vol. 10, No. 2) pp. 16-18 1536-1268/11/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE 
References from the Pervasive Retail article:
Mobile Retail Blueprint, Nat'l Retail Federation; www.nrf.commodules.php?name=Pages&op=viewlive&sp_id=1268 .
G. Belkin, Pervasive Retail Business Intelligence, Aberdeen Group, Apr. 2010; www.slideshare.net/AxiomConsultingAustralia pervasive-retail-business-intelligence .
R. Wasinger, A. Krüger, and O. Jacobs, "Integrating Intra and Extra Gestures into a Mobile and Multimodal Shopping Assistant,"Proc. 3rd Int'l Conf. Pervasive Computing (Pervasive), Springer, 2005, pp. 297–314.
A. Meschtscherjakov et al., "Enhanced Shopping: A Dynamic Map in a Retail Store," Proc. 10th Int'l Conf. Ubiquitous Computing(UbiComp 08), ACM Press, 2008, pp. 336–339.
C. Stahl and J. Haupert, "Taking Location Modelling to New Levels: A Map Modelling Toolkit for Intelligent Environments," Proc. Int'l Workshop Location- and Context-Awareness (LoCA), LNCS 3987, Springer, 2006, pp. 74–85.

Interactive Visual Merchandising, Interactive Window-Shopping at Nordstrom, Downtown Seattle: "Writing With Light"

Please DO Touch the Glass: Our Interactive Window
Nordstrom Blog, 3/25/11


Nordstorm's Interactive Development, Visual Merchandising and Operations Teams worked on this interactive visual merchandising project, outlined in the following video:

Nordstrom Downtown Seattle: Writing with Light


FYI:  I will be exploring the topic of Pervasive Retail over a series of posts.  Here are some tentative blog post titles:
Interactive Visual Merchandising, Screens Large and Small at the Mall Revisited, Large Displays in Public Spaces (preview of CHI 2011 workshop),  Privacy and Security Issues in Interactive, Cross-Platform/Device Pervasive Retail,  Accessibility and Cognitive Load Issues in Pervasive Retail,  Overview of Retail Customer Experience's resources, and more.

Apr 21, 2011

Revisiting Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, an on-line publication (includes links)

Aether is an on-line publication that focuses on the emerging and converging field of geographic media.  Given my interest in interactive multimedia technology and the fact that Social Science was one of my undegraduate majors, it makes sense that many of the topics covered in Aether would appeal to me. I discovered Aether about a year or so ago, and shared some information about it in the following post: Aether- The Journal of Media Geography (A Convergence of Disciplines).  


Aether  is hosted by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Northridge.   In addition to the on-line publication, Aether has a blog, "Aether, The Blog of Media Geography", which is a great resource about workshops, events, and resources related to the focus of the publication. 

Since a good number of the readers of this blog are graduate students, I decided to take the time to include in this post information and links that might be helpful to someone gathering information on a deeper level. 

"Aether offers a forum that examines the geography of media, including cinema, television, the Internet, music, art, advertising, newspapers and magazines, video and animation. It is our goal to provide a space for contributions to current issues surrounding these media, beginning with constructions of space and place, cultural landscapes, society, and identity."

"We invite inquiries into the production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption of all types of media and thus we will offer critical, pedagogical and discursive content that views the world in new and exciting ways. We welcome submissions from anyone wishing to publish material that extends the boundaries of the traditional academic journal. We encourage work that is highly visual or aural, including video, and will actively promote material that makes use of our digital technologies."

I appreciate the fact that Aether's editors value the importance of using multimedia representation in scholarly research, embodied in the following quote from the introduction of Volume 3:
"All too often we remain wedded to textuality when it comes to presenting our research.  However, as we move further into a world of advance capitalism driven by new information technologies and spaces of flow, streams of innovations, knowledge and ideas are increasingly circulated in non-textual formats. Academic geographers have long dabbled in video technology and the production of documentaries...We strongly encourage and support the use of multimedia productions in our journal and we hope we can offer an acceptable venue for those seeking to transcend (and even transgress) the knowledge-limiting restraints of traditional academic publications." - Jim Craine, Jason Dittmer, and Chris Lukinbeal, Aether, Volume Three


One of the good things about Aether is that all of the volumes can be freely downloaded from the website.  For the convenience of knowledge-junkies,  I've posted links to the past seven volumes, along with information/links about the editors and editorial board of Aether.  

Volume Seven | Fall, 2010
Theme: Space and Sound: "Geographies of Music, Geographers Who Play Music"
http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_07/volume_07.pdf


Volume Six | October 2010
http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_06/volume_06.pdf



Volume Five a | March, 2010 (Edited by Tristan Thielmann)
Theme: Locative Media
"This special issue of Aether, edited by Tristan Thielmann, explores the spatial turn in media studies and the media turn in geographical studies, providing a sketch of the subject area “geomedia” from a phenomenological perspective and the field of “media geography” from a disciplinary perspective."
http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_05a/volume_05a.pdf

Volume Four | March, 2009
Theme: The Geography of Journalism (Edited by Mike Gasher)
"This special issue of Aether brings together six papers that address news geography on a range of scales. Each speaks to the question of how the news media position the people and places that constitute their particular communities."
http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_04/volume_04.pdf


Volume Three | June, 2008
"One of the main reasons Aether was developed as an ejournal was to offer authors alternative publishing outlets– something that went beyond the textural format of both traditional hard journals and text-based ejournals. Volume Three presents the first articles that justify these editorial goals."
http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_03/volume_03.pdf

Volume Two | April, 2008
Theme:  Imagining Geography Through Interactive Media
"This special issue of Aether offers an examination of the utopian and dystopian representations of digital landscapes including narratives of colonialism, gaming as social space and the influence of historical ideologies on social game space plus much more."

Volume One | November, 2007
"The premiere issue of Aether consists of a series of short essays by members of the editorial board. Each explores the author's personal interests in Media Geography and discusses the future direction of the field."
http://130.166.124.2/~aether/pdf/volume_01/volume_01.pdf

Aether's "Who's Who"
Review Editor

Giorgio Hadi Curti


San Diego State University
cedarboot@gmail.com

Editors

Jim Craine


California State University, Northridge

jwc53531@csun.edu

Jason Dittmer

University College London

j.dittmer@ucl.ac.uk

Chris Lukinbeal

The University of Arizona

chris.lukinbeal@arizona.edu


Contributors
Shawna Dark, Director
Center for Geographical Studies

Department of Geography

California State University, Northridge

shawna.dark@csun.edu

David Deis

Staff Cartographer

Department of Geography

California State University, Northridge

david.deis@csun.edu


Editorial Board
Paul C. Adams • University of Texas at Austin
Stuart C. Aitken • San Diego State University
David B. Clarke • Swansea University
Christina Dando • University of Nebraska, Omaha
Deborah Dixon • Aberystwyth University
Marcus Doel • Swansea University
Colin R. Gardner • University of California, Santa Barbara
Ken Hillis • The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Sarah F. Ives • Stanford University
Ed Jackiewicz • California State University, Northridge
John Paul Jones III • University of Arizona
Christina Kennedy • Northern Arizona University
Minelle Mahtani • University of Toronto
Susan Mains • University of the West Indies, Mona
Kevin McHugh • Arizona State University
Christopher M. Moreno • San Diego State University
Wolfgang Natter • Virginia Polytechnic Institute
Joseph Palis • University of the Philippines

Brent J. Piepergerdes • University of Kansas
Rob Shields • University of Alberta
Amy Siciliano • University of Wisconsin
Paul F. Starrs • University of Reno, Nevada
Dan Sutko • North Carolina State University
Jonathan Taylor • California State University, Fullerton
Stefan Zimmermann • University of Mainz
Leo Zonn • University of Texas

Aether's "Special Thanks"
Stella Theodoulou, Dean • The College of Social & Behavioral Sciences

California State University, Northridge

stella.theodoulou@csun.edu

Darrick Danta, Chair • Department of Geography

California State University, Northridge

darrick.danta@csun.edu

Paul Adams, Communication Geography Specialty Group

Department of Geography and the Environment 
University of Texas, Austin