The Games Institute acknowledges that we are living and working on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron (also known as Neutral), Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.
English Language and Literature
Adam Bradley, BA (McMaster) MA (Waterloo), was a PhD student interested in the intersections between technology and traditional literary studies. His MA research project, titled "Data Visualization and the Avant-Garde Aesthetic" was a digital humanities project completed in conjunction with the English department's Digital Media Lab and the Computer Science department's Touchlab. His project investigated whether shifting the aesthetics of a given text can offer new insights into the study of its structure and how the integrity of that text can be maintained within this paradigm. Other interests include ancient rhetoric, classical languages, and modernist literature.
Sample Projects
Rival Books of Aster
Adam Bradley was the Game Designer and Writer for Stitch Media's game Rival Books of Aster. It is a digital collectible card game produced in partnership with the Games Institute at the University of Waterloo, The Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Canada Media Fund.
Sample Publications and Presentations
Adam Bradley, Cayley MacArthur, Mark Hancock, and Sheelagh Carpendale. Gendered or neutral? considering the language of hci. In Proc. GI, pp. 163-170, 2015.
In this paper, we present a Mechanical Turk study that explores how the most common words that have been used to refer to people in recent HCI literature are received by non-experts. The top five CHI 2014 people words are: user, participant, person, designer, and researcher. We asked participants to think about one of these words for ten seconds and then to draw an image of it. After the drawing was done we asked simple demographic questions about both the participant and the created image. Our results show that while generally our participants did perceive most of these words as predominately male, there were two notable exceptions. Women appear to perceive the terms “person” and “participant” as gender neutral. That is, they were just as likely to draw a person or a participant as male or female. So while these two words are not exactly gender neutral in that men largely perceived them as male, at least women did not appear to feel excluded by these terms. We offer an increased understanding of the perception of HCI’s people words and discuss the challenges this poses to our community in striving toward gender inclusiveness.
For more information on Adam, please see his personal website.
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo