Social Navigation

Navigation assistance systems are aiming to improve safety and provide traffic optimization and have become more and more popular in a modern vehicular technology. The reason is given by the significant traffic increase and numerous congestion events in large cities, large complexity of road infrastructure, and unexpected or hazardous conditions that can be found on roads. This paper proposes an innovative navigation system solution that intelligently gathers traffic data provided by integrated car sensors and/or onboard security systems and uses it to warn other participants. System concepts, architecture, design, implementation, and performance evaluation aspects are presented, and tasks organization for an embedded cost‐effective implementation using a real‐time kernel is illustrated.

Drawing on a critical race theory framework, this article weaves together sociology, education, history, and performance studies to challenge deficit interpretations of Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory and to analyze Culture Clash’s play Chavez Ravine. The play recounts a decade of Los Angeles history through the perspectives of displaced Mexican American families from three former neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine. Culture Clash’s performance recovers and personifies the community cultural wealth cultivated by these families. This multifaceted portfolio of cultural assets and resources includes aspirational, linguistic, social, navigational, familial, and resistant capital. Chavez Ravine affirms the continuity of Chicana/o communities, utilizing culture as a source of strength that facilitates survival and nurtures resistance. Manazar: I want to talk about this photograph right here. (Manazar points to the photo hovering above him.) I see uncles, primas, I see my sister, mira...

The present work centres around the question of the virginity imperative, a social contract and regime of power that regulates women’s bodies through disciplinary devices surrounding the socially constructed notion of female virginity. Through participant observation and interviews with young people of Iranian origin residing in Montreal, I explain why the virginity imperative persists among this population. Through description of women’s social navigation (Vigh 2006) of marriage and education, I argue that women’s apparent collusion with restrictive norms does not undermine their agency, but indicates their ability to make decisions that maximize social benefits given their particular circumstances. The argument extends to women’s performance of virginity, which is a face-saving tactic and instrumental in the practice of hypergyny among women I interviewed. Nevertheless, I argue, the virginity imperative operates to categorize women according to a virgin/whore dichotomy, rendering unliveable the lives of those who do not adequately perform virginity. Attitudes that define sex as defiling to women
contribute to a gendered politics of knowledge resulting in women’s limited expression of sexuality as compared to men’s, which, along with the patriarchal bargain (Kandiyoti 1988), plays a role in women’s lack of expression of dissent. I argue that men’s preference for virgin women is incompatible with the love marriages they claim to aspire to, and that men lack reflexivity of the consequences for women of attitudes that reinforce the virginity imperative. Bringing an end to these painful consequences requires public discussion to replace their relegation to, and management within, the private sphere.

The lifeworlds of young Gambians are highly affected by their interaction between the partly conflicting poles of social norms and the promises of a globalized world. These poles frame the elaboration of new concepts of modernity and lifecourse strategies on a local scale. Applying the concept of social navigation, the work focuses on the process of growing up among male youth who aim to position themselves in society and to generate new, sometimes imagined, spaces and ‘routes’. What is being outlined here is the impact of their peer group, the so-called Crew. The status of adolescents is set by society and is often linked to a discursive construction of a loss of moral values and the rejection of tradition. The aim of this work is to demonstrate that young Gambians are striving for a socially accepted and respected status of adulthood.

This study aims to collapse the often gendered opposition of agency and victimhood that typically characterizes the analysis of women’s coping strategies in war zones. The term victimcy is proposed to describe the agency of self-staging as victim of war and explore how it is deployed as one tactic—amongst others— in one young Liberian woman’s “social navigation” of war zones. Victimcy is thus revealed as a form of self-representation by which a certain form of tactic agency is effectively exercised under the trying, uncertain, and disempowering circumstances that confront actors in warscapes. However the story of Bintu also reveals the complexity of women’s strategies, roles, and options as they confront conflicting challenges and opportunities in war zones. While in some circumstances women may take humanitarian aid, in others they may also take up arms. An ethnography of social tactics thus counters reductionist portrayals of women in war zones as merely the passive victims of conflict. [Tactic Agency, Victimcy, Women, War zones, Liberia]

This ethnography explores experiences of upward social mobility in Santiago de Chile. I examine the social in-between position that upwardly mobile people feel they occupy in society: they no longer identify with their working class origins, nor do they ever fully integrate into upper-class circles. I argue that this in-between position is not merely the result of exclusionary social structures, as previous research seems to suggest. Rather, it is also strategically preserved by the upwardly mobile themselves, as it allows them to maintain contact with their environment of origin (most importantly their family) and also function in their new environment (university or workplace). I use the concept of navigation (Vigh 2006; 2009), which entails viewing social practice as an interaction between shifting social formations and the movement of agents within those formations, to explore the strategies by which the socially mobile attain and maintain their in-between position. Navigation allows me to investigate the complex interplay of social structures and agency involved in these processes. This analysis builds on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Santiago, where I conducted life history interviews with socially mobile people of a variety of ages and occupations. The findings of this study contribute to an understanding of the sociocultural aspects of social mobility and thereby complement the large amount of quantitative data on these topics.

Globalised tourism brings tourists from all over the world to the small island of Nusa Lembongan lying right next to the famous tourist destination of Bali, Indonesia. Although tourism on Bali is nothing new, the data collected through long-term ethnographic fieldwork shows how life on Nusa Lembongan is undergoing a rapid social change due to the new influx of tourism.
This thesis seeks to explain how the development of a tourist industry on a small Indonesian island influences the livelihood strategies of the Lembongans living there. This thesis, however, is not a study of tourism and tourist culture per se but a study tracing the trajectory of three different livelihood strategies through a critical analysis building on theories of tourism, livelihood strategies, modernity, and world systems analysis. The analysis shows how tourism, on the one hand, provides possibilities in the shape of jobs within the new tourist industry but, on the other hand, introduces a modernity full of ambivalence and restrictions. The livelihood strategies are, in this way, all conditioned by the advent of tourism. The livelihood strategy of seaweed farming, previously the main occupation on the island, now faces difficulties living up to the criteria of a sustainable livelihood strategy due to the increased boat traffic. Contrarily, accommodating tourists in small homestays is now a profitable business, which is why so many families seek out this livelihood strategy. Dealing with tourists, however, involves confusion and frustration. The third livelihood strategy analysed in this thesis shows how a young man skilfully navigates the new possibilities in the pursuit of a better life. However, he is painfully aware of the massive challenges to overcome before he might one day fulfil his dream of living like the very tourists he teaches surf lessons to every day.
In this way, this study partakes in a discussion of the consequences of modernisation through tourism. It concludes that a crucial aspect of the development of tourism is the influence it has on existing and new livelihood strategies. Furthermore, the Lembongans must socially navigate in challenging ways when tourism, embedded in a world system of inequality, forces social change upon their island whether they like or not.

Navigation assistance systems are aiming to improve safety and provide traffic optimization, and have become more and more popular in modern vehicular technology. The reason is given by the significant traffic increase and numerous congestion events in large cities, large complexity of road infrastructure and unexpected or hazardous conditions that can be found on roads. This paper proposes an innovative navigation system solution which intelligently gathers traffic data provided by integrated car sensors and/or onboard security systems and uses it to warn other participants. System concepts, architecture, design, implementation and performance evaluation aspects are presented, and also tasks organization for an embedded cost-effective implementation using a real-time kernel is illustrated.

Participatory information spaces including social media platforms provide affordances for users both to leave behavioural traces of their informational activities and to find such traces from other users, a.k.a. user-to-user mediation and social navigation. Special focus in the paper is on affordances for indirect user-to-user mediation by 'trace leavers' and 'trace finders' in a participatory library setting, particularly in the physical Library 2.0. The paper presents a holistic approach, viewing human, physical, and digital information resources as supplementary parts of an integrated library platform that functions as an enabling space for creative practices like user participation and user-to-user mediation. Such a library may be seen as a participatory medium that can facilitate and support users to develop necessary participatory competencies in all facets of the presented life cycle of information behaviour. Truly participatory libraries thus provide more affordances for users with regard to both leaving behavioural traces (create, store, share) and to following such traces (find, learn). The paper points to both low-tech and hi-tech examples including mobile and ambient technologies with rich potentials for facilitating user-to-user mediation and social navigation.

Based on qualitative research among female Dutch-Moroccan teenagers in two underprivileged neighborhoods in the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands, this article focuses on the spatial practices of young Muslim women in public space. Compared to their male counterparts, who “hang around” in groups, female teens spend less time in public space. We focus on girls’ “wandering practices” through the neighborhood, a spatial practice structured by their search for freedom (to spend time outside the home, to talk to friends in private) and by social control (to avoid the presence of young men, to avoid being gossiped about). Our research shows that wandering both decreases their visibility and pushes against gendered cultural norms about women in public space. By analyzing their wandering as a form of social navigation, we show how these teenagers maneuver through both the physical neighborhood and the gendered cultural norms regarding appropriate behavior in public space.

This paper presents the Open Annotation and Tagging System (OATS) which draws on previous work in social navigation support, web annotations systems, collaborative tagging and educational metadata. The OATS system augments the text highlighting metaphor by providing a “collaborative tagging” and annotation interface which enables social navigation support. These tools aim to help learners in learning managements systems to better organize and navigate content. While there are many examples of web ...

Navigation assistance systems are aiming to improve safety and provide traffic optimization, and have become more and more popular in modern vehicular technology. The reason is given by the significant traffic increase and numerous congestion events in large cities, large complexity of road infrastructure and unexpected or hazardous conditions that can be found on roads. This paper proposes an innovative navigation system solution which intelligently gathers traffic data provided by integrated car sensors and/or onboard security systems and uses it to warn other participants. System concepts, architecture, design, implementation and performance evaluation aspects are presented, and also tasks organization for an embedded cost-effective implementation using a real-time kernel is illustrated.

This chapter examines uncertainty from the perspective of marginalized young men in Addis Ababa’s inner city. Starting from an appreciation of the multiple experiences that have shaped the trajectories of these young men, I examine how and why the fact of not knowing what is going to be next enabled them to navigate their condition of marginality and exclusion. For them, uncertainty was a state of possibility that they embraced as a ground for action and hope. The chapter aims to offer an open-ended approach to the study of life trajectories of young people in Africa, while providing an ethnographic account of how uncertainty is translated culturally, morally and through social practice into a sense of possibility.

Today a wide variety of virtual worlds, cities, and gaming environments exist and become part of life of their human inhabitants. However, our understanding of how technology influences the way people can use these virtual places to access information, expertise, to socialize, etc. is very limited. Previous work [1-4] introduced a tool set that generates visualizations of user interaction data to support social navigation, aid designers of virtual worlds in the evaluation and optimization of world content and layout as well as the selection of interaction possibilities, and enables researchers to monitor, study, and research virtual worlds and their evolving communities. This paper applies an advanced version of this tool set to visualize and analyze local and global usage patterns in a virtual learning environment called LinkWorld. Resulting social visualizations have been used to inform a set of netiquette and reporting procedures, to fine tune training material and moderation guidelines, to analyze and report the progress of the LinkWorld project, and to create a ”social compass” for teachers, moderators and students who collaborate in this unique environment.

This article explores the implications of language and dis- course for the experiences of separated refugee children in Canada, and the ways in which anti-refugee and anti-child discourses shape the terrain of resettlement. The article begins by tracing the academic and popular discourses of refugee populations generally, and separated children specifically. Given the formulaic and rigid portrayals and representations, we introduce the concept of social navigation, which provides a useful framework to study the resettlement experiences of separated children. Following an overview of the study’s methodology, we explore the social navigation and resettlement experiences of seventeen youth. In particular, we highlight the creative, resourceful, and thoughtful ways in which the youth navigated the refugee determination system, experiences of discrimination and isolation, as well as separation and loss during the resettle- ment process. The article ultimately underscores the ways in whic...

Navigation assistance systems, aiming to improve safety and optimize the traffic, become more and more popular in vehicular technology. The reason is given by the significant traffic increase and congestion events in large cities, complexity of road infrastructure and unexpected or hazardous conditions that can be found on roads. This paper proposes an improvement in navigation systems by intelligently gathering traffic data provided by integrated car sensors and/or security systems and use these data to warn other participants. System concepts, architecture, preliminary design and performance evaluation aspects are presented, and also tasks organization for an embedded cost effective implementation using a real time kernel is illustrated.

Navigation assistance systems are aiming to improve safety and provide traffic optimization, and have become more and more popular in modern vehicular technology. The reason is given by the significant traffic increase and numerous congestion events in large cities, large complexity of road infrastructure and unexpected or hazardous conditions that can be found on roads. This paper proposes an innovative navigation system solution which intelligently gathers traffic data provided by integrated car sensors and/or onboard security systems and uses it to warn other participants. System concepts, architecture, design, implementation and performance evaluation aspects are presented, and also tasks organization for an embedded cost-effective implementation using a real-time kernel is illustrated.

We are interested in desiging systems that support communication and collaboration among large groups of people over computing networks. We begin by asking what properties of the physical world support graceful human-human communication in face-to-face situations, and argue that it is possible to design digital systems that support coherent behavior by making participants and their activites visible to one another. We call such systems “socially translucent systems” and suggest that they have three characteristics—visbility, awareness, and accountability—which enable people to draw upon their experience and expertise to structure their interactions with one another. To motivate and focus our ideas we develop a vision of knowledge communities, conversationally based systems that support the creation, management and reuse of knowledge in a social context. We describe our experience in designing and deploying one layer of functionality for knowledge communities, embodied in a working s...

This study explored the relationships between learning outcomes, actions and motivational, learning strategy and social ability profiles in a custom made computer-supported learning environment (CSLE) prototype. The system offered three types of services: 1) Tools that support the use of learning resources; 2) Tools that enable flexible and multifaceted peer-to- peer interaction; 3) Tools that increase awareness of other user's

Navigation assistance systems, aiming to improve safety and optimize the traffic, become more and more popular in vehicular technology. The reason is given by the significant traffic increase and congestion events in large cities, complexity of road infrastructure and unexpected or hazardous conditions that can be found on roads. This paper proposes an improvement in navigation systems by intelligently gathering traffic data provided by integrated car sensors and/or security systems and use these data to warn other participants. System concepts, architecture, preliminary design and performance evaluation aspects are presented, and also tasks organization for an embedded cost effective implementation using a real time kernel is illustrated.

Modern Web, which is frequently called Social Web or Web 2.0, celebrates the power of the user community. Most frequently it is associated with the power of users as contributors or various kinds of contents through Wikis, blogs, and resource sharing sites. However, the community power impacts not only the production of Web content, but also the access to all kinds of Web content. A number of research groups worldwide work on social information access techniques, which help users get to the right information using “community wisdom” distilled from tracked actions of those who worked with this information earlier. The paper provides an overview of this research stream focusing on social search, social navigation, and social visualization techniques.

Drawing on a critical race theory framework, this article weaves together sociology, education, history, and performance studies to challenge deficit interpretations of Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory and to analyze Culture Clash’s play Chavez Ravine. The play recounts a decade of Los Angeles history through the perspectives of displaced Mexican American families from three former neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine. Culture Clash’s performance recovers and personifies the community cultural wealth cultivated by these families. This multifaceted portfolio of cultural assets and resources includes aspirational, linguistic, social, navigational, familial, and resistant capital. Chavez Ravine affirms the continuity of Chicana/o communities, utilizing culture as a source of strength that facilitates survival and nurtures resistance.