Ammar Halabi

Conducting qualitative field research to study social groups and their appropriation of technology is among the collection of approaches used by ICT4D research. However, the wealth and diversity of the resulting qualitative data poses a challenge to the researcher who needs to extract underlying patterns and organize findings to inform policies, technology design, and implementation. In this contribution, we will highlight a practice we found useful in analyzing qualitative field data: using comparisons of data instances. This approach is informed by the works of qualitative sociologists Juliet Corbin, Anselm Strauss, and Howard Becker. We illustrate this practice in action by analysing data instances taken from our field data on community’s use of online tools and social media in Syria. We conducted the study to inform the design of future collaborative and communication tools for supporting community growth and development.

ICT tools and applications, including the Internet and online social media, are playing an increasing role in the lives of people in the Middle East. In my PhD project, I focus on the appropriation of ICT tools by local communities in Syria to inform the design of tools that support local community development. This interdisciplinary focus requires appropriating methods from social sciences and humanities to conduct the study. In this work-in-progress paper I draw the lines of the research project, while providing examples of concepts that resulted from ethnographical observations of our first case; a community called “Wikilogia”.

Collaborative technologies, such as shared tabletop interfaces, are becoming increasingly pervasive. Meanwhile, social dynamics have long been a major area of inquiry in HCI and CSCW. With a few notable exceptions, little has been done that addresses the roles gender identities play in shaping collaborative work. In this paper, we make the case for a deeper consideration of gender in our field through a study that investigates issues surrounding gendered collaboration around a tabletop interface. We report our findings and conclude with recommendations for future work in this area.

This paper focuses on the problem of archaeological textual information retrieval, covering various field-related topics, and investigating different issues related to special characteristics of Arabic. The suggested hybrid retrieval approach employs various clustering and classification methods that enhances both retrieval and presentation, and infers further information from the results returned by a primary retrieval engine, which, in turn, uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) as a primary retrieval method. In addition, a stemmer for Arabic words was designed and implemented to facilitate the indexing process and to enhance the quality of retrieval.
The performance of our module was measured by carrying out experiments using standard datasets, where the system showed promising results with many possibilities for future research and further development.

Despite various benefits of walking, some people still lack the motivation. In this paper, we present musicWALK - an interactive musical application that aims at enhancing the walking experience.musicWALK generates music by collecting data relevant to personal walking pattern and to thesurrounding environment. By allowing people to listen to interactive music generated along their walks,we aid them to establish a stronger connection with their surroundings. We hope that this will provide a stronger motivation for walking.

David Nemer's photo book provides snapshots on the lives of residents of the Brazilian favela of Vitoria and their appropriation of digital technology. It is a visual collection that is intriguing for researchers and accessible to the general public.Today, where a significant amount of human interactions are carried over ICTs, it is ever more important to address the rights of digital access, usability, usefulness and literacy around technology. Favela Digital provokes this discussion from the ground-up using words and visions from people living in the favelas, making the message concrete, plausibly accessible and generative for policy and design contributions.

This work is concerned with the role of ICT in conflict in local voluntary communities. In late 2012, and while doing fieldwork with a voluntary community (VOCI) in Damascus, Syria, conflict broke out between community members. This conflict, which was due to mounting disagreement over future visions and the rights to access and control, persisted for almost a year, and incurred considerable hardship on the people involved. The study followed the conflict, the actors involved, the spaces where it was expressed, and the tools used in communicating and processing it. The findings involved conceptualizing how the conflict translated to a struggle to control online spaces where members communicated and coordinated. We synthesized our findings in the research team by designing Modus; an online multi-user tool that is intended to enable managing shared ownership of online assets and spaces in local communities.

In this thesis I elaborate on the inductive and qualitative fieldwork which involved observing practices of VOCI members and the conflict that occurred, analyzing and conceptualizing those observations, and designing a critical alternative to what the Internet enables in terms of managing shared ownership. The contributions of this research are qualitative (by describing and analyzing a case in a seldom studied setting and context); methodological (an approach to exploratory participatory research informing design); conceptual (by theorizing the case of conflict in VOCI as related to governance and to a struggle to control material resources); and design-oriented (by weaving the analysis into a concrete design of an online tool to for managing shared ownership and control in local voluntary communities).

This work is rooted in an interest to contribute to local community building and development in Syria, and especially in the recent humanitarian crisis triggered by violence and the deterioration of services and infrastructure. Amidst this context, which has contributed to shaping the growth of VOCI, the life of its members, and the activities they organized, I take a position that values contributing to local voluntary communities as a way to deal with and address the deteriorating conditions. It is by working on building communal ties that local communities could self-organize to pursue common interests and address the service and institutional void.