Hello, and welcome to my introduction post. My name is Tim Stelter, and I am a 4th year PhD student in Computer Science advised by Dr. Scott McCrickard. My research is with the Tech on the Trail initiative that came to fruition in Spring 2017 with the first workshop hosted by the Center for Human-Computer Interaction. Currently, I am exploring a couple of spaces related to the outdoors. These spaces are tensions of the use of technology in the outdoors, awareness and interruption in the outdoors, and how technology can benefit science in the outdoors through citizen science. My hope is that this class will help me advance some sliver of my research using lens grounded in CSCW domain.
I have a couple ideas for the course project:
1) Citizen science is not a new concept. Many civilizations have harnessed the power of the crowd to answer scientific inquires by collecting the necessary data. One project here at VT is ITCHY, where poison ivy data is collected by Dr. John Jelesko’s lab. ITCHY main focus is to use the power of the crowd to . We have helped develop a mobile application to help provide a seamless data collection micro-task where users can collect data on poison ivy in as little time as possible, but require evaluation and potentially new grounding. If poison ivy as a context does not fit, I have worked with sustainable campsites and the hobby of birding.
2) (Personal interest) Twitch is one of the leading sites for live streaming (particularly video games). Many subsection exist to help categorize streamers that focus on particular content. However, there persists a few content sections like just chatting, art, music and performing arts, social eating, and Travel and outdoors where streamers stream their lives in there contexts. One of particular interest, travel and outdoors, has people carrying streaming equipment to share in their experience (and sometimes just provide entertainment). There could be a .. study of the individual stream communities in how the chat (those watching the stream) experience the outdoor activities compared to the streamer? .. Build a tool to enhance the experience? .. a manual survey of activities streamed? ..maybe perform an ethnographic approach of trying it out myself and documenting the procedure and experience. Or so on.
https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Just%20Chatting
https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Travel%20%26%20Outdoors
3) “Disease on the Trail” is a n interesting topic because it deals with find ways to track disease and sickness on long distance trails. I don’t have maybe thoughts on it since it is new – but I’m willing to talk more about it!
4) Speedrunning communities on Twitch (and other platforms like mIRC or Discord). Speedrunning has been an interest for gamers who want to complete some video game as fast as possible.
Thanks for reading!