My research is in three major areas:
New Media: Visual Technologies and Personal Digital Memory
My current research combines approaches from new media, visual anthropology and sociology, visual culture, and human-computer interaction (HCI). Personal photography has been one of the most successful -- even loved -- consumer technologies of the last century. Now new technologies are making it increasingly possible for "ordinary" users to create, share, use, re-use, and remix visual and other media to support their activities, including social networking. Images are powerful in themselves, and important social media.
I seek to understand (1) existing and emergent uses of new visual technologies such as photography and video, and, more broadly, the power, meaning, and uses of visual media, and (2) what the success of personal photography can tell us about the processes of technology adoption and appropriation.
Sample publications, presentations, and teaching:
I290. Visual Research Methods: Creating Visual Narratives (Spring, 2011)
Van House, N.A. (2011, in press) Feminist HCI meets facebook: Performativity and social networking sites. Interact. Comput.
doi:10.1016/j.intcom.2011.03.003
Van House, N.A. (2011). Personal Photography, Digital Technologies, and the Uses of the Visual. Visual Studies 25:1 pp. 125-134.
Van House, N.A. (2009). Collocated photo sharing, story-telling, and the performance of self. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 67, 1073-1086.
Ames, M., Eckles, D., Naaman, M., Spasojevic, M. and Van House, N. (2009) Requirements for Mobile Photoware. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.Published online 6 June 2009
Personal Photograph, New Media, and Embodiment, talk at Berkeley Art Museum's Berkeley Big Bang 08:New Media Symposium and Art Festival, May 30, 2008.
I212, Spring, 08: Personal Digital Memory, with Elizabeth Churchill
Nancy Van House and Elizabeth Churchill (2008). Technologies of Memory: Key Issues and Critical Perspectives. Memory Studies 1:3 (forthcoming)
Nancy Van House (2007). Flickr and Public Image-Sharing: Distant Closeness and Photo Exhibition. Ext. Abstracts CHI 2007. ACM Press.
Science and Technology Studies (STS)
My work is largely rooted in STS,an interdisciplinary field concerned with (1) the development of knowledge within epistemic communities, and (2) the interaction between technology and the social. It is a source of concepts, methods, and precedents for a critical approach to information and communication technologies, and to the field of HCI.
Nancy A. Van House (2003). "Science and Technology Studies and Information Studies." Annual Review of Information Science and Technology vol. 38, pp. 3-86, ed. by Blaise Cronin. Information Today, Inc. for the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
I212: Information and Society: Science and Technology Studies Seminar
Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
I have expertise in user experience research and evaluation. My work is grounded in both traditional HCI and the emerging field of critical HCI, which questions HCI's assumptions about technology, users, designers, and the relationships among them.
Sample publications, presentations, and teaching:
I214, Needs and Usability Assessment, taught annually
Nancy Van House (2007). Flickr and Public Image-Sharing: Distant Closeness and Photo Exhibition. Ext. Abstracts CHI 2007. ACM Press.
Nancy A. Van House (2006). Distant Closeness: Cameraphones and Public Image Sharing. In: Workshop on Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing: New Social Practices and ,Implications for Technology Workshop (PICS 2006) at the Eighth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2006) in Irvine, CA 2006. (Co-organizer)
Nancy A. Van House (2006). Boundary Crossings. Position paper for Reflective HCI: A workshop at CHI 2006.
This page last revised 9 July 2011
