Nancy Kaplan
Personal Homepage:
http://iat.ubalt.edu/kaplan/Current place of employment:
University of BaltimoreNancy Kaplan is the Director of the School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore. She holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
Publications by Nancy Kaplan (bibliography)
» 2006 «
Kaplan, Nancy, Chisik, Yoram and Levy, Debra (2006): Reading in the wild: sociable literacy in practice. In: Proceedings of ACM IDC06: Interaction Design and Children 2006. pp. 97-104. Available online
“Online reading, especially among children, is an understudied phenomenon. Thus designers of digital libraries and pedagogic tools for children generally lack deep knowledge about how to shape reading experiences so that they will be attractive for young audiences. Without a nuanced picture of children as readers, we are unlikely to develop systems responsive to their needs and desires. Participatory design coupled with studies of prototypes in natural conditions may help us create experiences that contribute to proficient literacy practices among children 10 to 14 years old. Our participatory design processes revealed that children this age highly value sharing their experiences and that reading sociably can introduce new pleasures. The current study uses the Alph prototype to study how one small group of children responds to its sociable literacy features.”
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Steiner, Brittany, Kaplan, Nancy and Moulthrop, Stuart (2006): When play works: turning game-playing into learning. In: Proceedings of ACM IDC06: Interaction Design and Children 2006. pp. 137-140. Available online
“Current research on technology development for children focuses on children's roles as design partners helping to set high level goals or exploring prototypes and interfaces. In this project, we investigate whether game modification toolkits enable children to build games themselves rather than turning their ideas over to expert developers. Using an accessible toolkit for the game Neverwinter Nights, we invited seven children between the ages of 12 and 14 to design and build their own games. We analyzed their plans, the games, and their reflections on the experience to explore what our participants discovered about the roles of developers and players, how their experience as builders differed from their experiences as players, and what they perceived to be the benefits of building rather than simply designing or playing games. Our results show that children can master modification toolkits and that there may be value in encouraging children to build rather than simply play computer games.”
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Chisik, Yoram and Kaplan, Nancy (2006): The social life of books in the humane library. In: JCDL06: Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2006. pp. 312-313. Available online
“The development of public libraries may have inadvertently brought the age of marginalia to a close but now that digital copies no longer require us to refrain from writing in a shared text, it is possible to create sociable books, texts that sustain communities of readers. How might people respond to opportunities to share their readings through marginalia and how might the process of reading for pleasure be altered by situating it in a more social space? The current study examining sociable reading among a small group of middle-school girls demonstrates the potential of reading sociably and affirms the value of developing digital library books to support social exchanges among readers.”
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» 2005 «
Kaplan, Nancy and Chisik, Yoram (2005): Reading alone together: creating sociable digital library books. In: Proceedings of ACM IDC05: Interaction Design and Children 2005. pp. 88-94. Available online
“Children between 10 and 14 years old continue to need support to develop advanced literacy skills but there is evidence that they may be reading less now. Libraries have long sought to cater to young adults but as more activities vie for the attention of children, the role of traditional libraries in the literacy lives of teens and 'tweens may be diminishing. As Digital Libraries (DLs) begin to offer resources to children in this age cohort, it is important that they support more than convenient access to digital books. The DL must provide engaging reading and writing environments not simply to support the tasks of schooling but also to support literacy as a social practice. In this paper, we discuss the development and field testing of a "sociable digital library book," an application that provides readers with the ability to leave notes and marks in a digital book and to share notes and marks with others. Our field study with a small set of Internet Reading Groups (IRGs) suggests that there are important pleasures to be had from "reading alone together."”
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Kaplan, Nancy and Chisik, Yoram (2005): In the company of readers: the digital library book as "practiced place". In: JCDL05: Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2005. pp. 235-243. Available online
“Most digital libraries (DLs) necessarily focus on the complex issues that arise when library collections are freed from their physical anchors in buildings and on paper. Typical investigations look at supporting adults in work settings, such as school or research. Much less attention has been paid to younger generations of readers. As ever more digital venues cater to youngsters' attentions, a role for the DL as a catalyst of social interactions around traditional literacy practices begins to take shape. Based on prior research on annotation systems, constructive hypertexts, and computer support for cooperative work coupled with our contextual inquiries with children, we have developed a prototype for a digital book that supports social interactions through annotations. By placing and sharing notes, groups of readers transform the book from an artifact into a living record of communal experience. A system of support for marks and notes in the context of reading for pleasure can turn the digital library book into a "practiced place," a location that is not only accessible, but also welcoming, engaging and supportive of the activities children are interested in and therefore likely to engage in. Our experience with Alph, a prototype book-reader supporting a range of rhetorical marks and note-writing, suggests that future DLs need to look beyond augmenting work-based literacy practices by creating dynamic and social reading environments.”
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» 2004 «
Kaplan, Nancy, Chisik, Yoram, Knudtzon, Kendra, Kulkarni, Rahul, Moulthrop, Stuart, Summers, Kathryn and Weeks, Holly (2004): Supporting sociable literacy in the international children's digital library. In: Proceedings of ACM IDC04: Interaction Design and Children 2004. pp. 89-96. Available online
“As each generation of children grows up in a world shaped by the affordances available to them in both physical and digital environments, their expectations of tools to support changing literacy practices make new demands on technologists and designers. To ensure that digital libraries (DLs) for young people support their understandings of libraries and reading (and not just adults' conceptions), an intergenerational design team (IDT) at the University of Baltimore (UB) used contextual inquiry and participatory design to develop concepts for augmenting the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) to make it more appropriate for 10-14 year olds. Our prototype aims to support "sociable literacy," a set of practices made possible by digital storage, retrieval and use of texts.”
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» 2003 «
Knudtzon, Kendra, Druin, Allison, Kaplan, Nancy, Summers, Kathryn, Chisik, Yoram, Kulkarni, Rahul, Moulthrop, Stuart, Weeks, Holly and Bederson, Benjamin B. (2003): Starting an intergenerational technology design team: a case study. In: Proceedings of ACM IDC03: Interaction Design and Children 2003. pp. 51-58. Available online
“This paper presents a case study of the first three months of a new intergenerational design team with children ages 10-13. It discusses the research and design methods used for working with children of this age group, the challenges and opportunities of starting a new team, and the lessons learned.”
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» 1994 «
Kaplan, Nancy and Moulthrop, Stuart (1994): Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Ontological Design for Virtual Spaces. In: Proceedings of ECHT 94 the ACM European Conference on Hypermedia Technology Sept 18-23, 1994, Edinburgh, UK. pp. 206-216. Available online
“Hypermedia designers have tried to move beyond the directed graph concept, which defines hypermedia structures as aggregations of nodes and links. A substantial body of work attempts to describe hypertexts in terms of extended or global spaces. According to this approach, nodes and links acquire meaning in relation to the space in which they are deployed. Some theory of space thus becomes essential for any advance in hypermedia design; but the type of space implied by electronic information systems, from hyperdocuments to "consensual hallucinations," requires careful analysis. Familiar metaphors drawn from physics, architecture, and everyday experience have only limited descriptive or explanatory value for this type of space. As theorists of virtual reality point out, new information systems demand an internal rather than an external perspective. This shift demands a more sophisticated approach to hypermedia space, one that accounts both for stable design properties (architectonic space) and for unforeseen outcomes, or what Winograd and Flores call "breakdowns." Following Wexelblat in cyberspace theory and Dillon, McKnight, and Richardson in hypermedia theory, we call the domain of these outcomes semantic space. In two thought experiments, or brief exercises in interface design, we attempt to reconcile these divergent notions of space within the conceptual system of hypermedia.”
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» 1989 «
Joyce, Michael, Kaplan, Nancy, McDaid, John and Moulthrop, Stuart (1989): Hypertext, Narrative, and Consciousness. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 383-384.
“This panel attempts to initiate a dialogue on the implications of hypertext between information theorists and literary theorists, writers of texts and designers of text systems. Though the panelists base their views on several years of practical work with hypertext in education, they are concerned with broader social and conceptual problems raised by this technology -- its likely effect on the way we teach ourselves and others to understand texts and the way we use those texts to construct an orderly (or disorderly) world. It seems important to raise these issues at Hypertext'89 because hypertext is rapidly being recognized by humanists as a crucial and revolutionary enterprise. This recognition creates an opportunity for humanists and scientists to convene a productive dialogue which could have great significance both for hypertext and for the future of the humanities. We hope for a frank and free-ranging exchange of views and emphasize that this is a forum for questioning and controversy, not a series of monologues. Each panelist will deliver a ten-minute position statements, with the remaining hour of the session devoted to discussion. Abstracts of the three presentations follow.”
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Mar 22nd, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
18 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Nancy Kaplan's author page.24 Jun 2007: Author was edited 24 Jun 2007: Author was edited
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28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography
