… were two of the themes of the movie Avatara, which was shown in HUMlab yesterday. In this 72 minute long documentary members of the Traveler community share their thoughts on what being part of this community means to them, and on why they have chosen Traveler over other platforms. Many of the issues they bring up correspond with my findings, as for instance the importance of the immediacy of communication in experiencing a sense of presence. It was also interesting to see how they referred to the different spaces in Traveler, and what an important role these seem to play in their online experience. It could be claimed that involvement is the key, and that the characteristics of the environment are less important, but I would argue that in this case the feeling of being in a shared space is very strong and definately adds qualities.

The first part of this spring semester I will take a literature course together with a group of students at the (Swedish university) D-level of English. The general theme for the whole course is “Otherness”, and we will mainly read and discuss post-colonial literature.
Here are a few examples from the reading list:
- William Shakespeare: The Tempest
- Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
- Toni Morrison: Beloved
- George Lamming: In the Castle of My Skin
I’m looking forward to doing something a little different this semester, and considering the theme of this course I’m sure it’ll be interesting and fun.

Make sure to be online during February 5th-7th, as you will get to experience a Sami cultural Festival taking place in Northern Sweden through four visitors moblogging the event. My three HUMlab colleagues (an American, an Australian and a Swede) and I (from Lappland, but knowing surprisingly little about Sami culture) will report on the events as well as on our and others’ experiences.

It’s interesting to see how the news about this is spreading: Stephanie posted about it in her blog earlier today, and already Erik has picked it up. It will be interesting to see how this piece of information continues spreading through the blogosphere!

Another one of my colleagues in HUMlab, Jim Barrett, has sent me a link to ResearchIndex, a scientific literature digital library with a good search engine, CiteSeer. I have done a few searches, and am surprised at how much relevant material I’ve found. (For instance, those interested in text messaging (see previous entry) can find articles there).

My colleague in HUMlab, Stefan Blomberg, has shown me a great site with among other things book reviews of books on cyberculture: The Resource Centre for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS).

A quick note on an interesting conference in an interesting place: The 8th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, CATALOG 2004. The conference is to be held in Barcelona, which is also the host of Forum2004.

The web site doesn’t provide a whole lot of information, but from an e-mail to the Humanist discussion group, I have learnt that the topics include the following:

- models of common ground/mutual belief in communication
- modelling agents’ information states and how they get updated
- multi-agent models and turn-taking
- goals, intentions and commitments in communication
- semantic interpretation in dialogues
- reference in dialogues
- ellipsis resolution in dialogues
- dialogue and discourse structure
- interpretation of questions and answers
- nonlinguistic interaction in communication
- natural language understanding and reasoning in spoken dialogue systems
- multimodal dialogue systems
- dialogue management in practical implementations
- categorisation of dialogue moves or speech acts in corpora
- designing and evaluating dialogue systems

Again, it sounds interesting.