media space selected annotated bibliography

Media space is an enduring research topic and an ICT genre that keeps getting re-invented. This bibliography is intended to help guide researchers looking for the best references on the original media space research. The two books give probably the best detailed look at media space. However, for a comprehensive look at the roots of media space I would start with these two:

Harrison, S. (2008) “Seeing the Hole in Space”, HCI Remixed, Erickson, T. and MacDonald, D. eds. Cambridge, MIT Press, pp 155-160. This book chapter describes one of the ways in which art and technology come together to innovate new forms of social space. It should be read in conjunction with looking at the “Hole In Space” video.

Galloway, K. & Rabinowitz, S. “Hole in Space” video documentation of art project. This telecommunications project showed the social power of joining together disparate locations using audio and video.

BOOKS
Stults, R. Media Space. Xerox Corporation, Palo Alto. 1986. Bob Stults and Steve Harrison started the Media Space project at Xerox PARC in 1985. It was part of the System Concepts Laboratory research into interpersonal computing (which eventually came to be called CSCW). This publication, probably available from PARC, documents the office sharing and casual interaction that occurred between the lab’s two sites — Palo Alto, California and Portland, Oregon. It takes a phenomenological perspective that comes to mark most media space research — and will go on to influence other important HCI and CSCW work.

Harrison, S. ed (2009). Media Space: 20+ Years of Mediated Life. London: Springer CSCW book series. As the reader will see below, the various publications on first versions of media space do not give a comprehensive coherent picture of the topic and do not provide an overview of how the many projects related to one another; this book provides a good compilation organized to assist researchers in making sense of the ideas. A good companion to this is the video of the CHI 2008 Conference panel; see below.

Neustaedter, C., Harrison, S. Sellen, A., eds (2012). Connecting Families: The Impact of New Communication Technologies on Domestic Life. London: Springer CSCW book series. With the availability of cheap bandwidth and commercial audio/video links like Skype, the ideas from the workplace media spaces have re-emerged in the domestic realm. In the home, we see the same spatial and social phenomena.

BOOK CHAPTERS (In addition to those in Media Space: 20+ Years of Mediated Life)
Harrison, S., Bly, S., Anderson, S., Minneman, S., (1997) “The Media Space” Video-Mediated Communication, (Finn, K., Sellen, A., & Wilbur, S. eds.) 1997, Mahwah, NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates pp 273-300. A good overview of the autobiographical design research in the PARC media space.

ARTICLES AND CONFERENCE PAPERS
Bly, S., Harrison, S., and Irwin, S. (19932) “Media Spaces: Bringing people together in a video, audio, and computing environment.Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery, NY; vol. 36, no. 1, January 1993. 28-45. This is the basic article about the first media space project.

Fish, R., Kraut, R., Chalfonte, B. (1990) “The VideoWindow system in informal communication”, Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, p.1-11, October 07-10, 1990, Los Angeles, California, USA Reports on the media space work at BellCoRe. Uses an information-theoretic model to attempt to evaluate the added value of video.

Mantei, M., Baecker, R., Sellen. R., Buxton, W., Milligan, T., Wellman, B. (1991) “Experiences in the use of a media space”, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, p.203-208, April 27-May 02, 1991, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA Reports on the media space work at University of Toronto. Bill Buxton also created the media space at EuroPARC in Cambridge UK. Abigail Sellen has continued looking at media space — most recently its use in domestic settings.

Gaver, W. (1992) “The affordances of media spaces for collaboration”, Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, p.17-24, November 01-04, 1992, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Reports on the media space at EuroPARC using an ecological psychology perspective.

Dourish, P. & Bellotti, V. (1992) “Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces”, Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, p.107-114, November 01-04, 1992, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Reports on the EuroPARC media space using (what later is called) embodied cognition perspective.

Dourish, P. & Bly,S. (1992) Portholes: supporting awareness in a distributed work group, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, p.541-547, May 03-07, 1992, Monterey, California, USA Reports on an awareness server called Portholes that worked in and between Xerox PARC and EuroPARC. It also discusses the role of presence in the social fabric of colleagues.

Dourish, P. (1993) “Culture and control in a media space”. In Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW’93) (Milan, Italy). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 125–138. A phenomenological perspective on the EuroPARC media space. It also discusses the ways in which power are shared, distorted, and manipulated in a media space.

Dourish, P., Adler, A., Bellotti, V., Henderson, A. (1996) “Your place or mine?” Learning from long-term use of audio-video communication, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, v.5 n.1, p.33-62, More general observations on office work space in a media space.

Harrison, S. and Dourish, P., (1996) “Re-Placing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems.Proceedings of ACM CSCW 96. November 18-21, 1996. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley pp 67-76. Highly cited work on space and place that is derived from the comparisons of media spaces, MOO’s, and physical space.

Harrison, S., Minneman, S., Marinacci, J. (1999) “The DrawStream Station or the AVC’s of Video Cocktail Napkins.” The Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimedia Systems ’99. June, 1999, Firenza, Italy, IEEE Press. Last of the first generation media space projects. It incorporates digital video storage and various genres of video-on-video threaded conversations. Innovative design of workstation brought together shared drawing, video recording, and media space.

PANEL
Baecker, R., Harrison, S., Buxton, B., Poltrock, S., and Churchill, E. (2008) “Media spaces: past visions, current realities, future promise” In CHI ’08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 – 10, 2008). CHI ’08. ACM, New York, NY, pp 2245-2248. Video of panel available here. Audio and slides of panel available here.

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