Kilker, J. (2012). Deadly and barren, or beautiful and fragile? Exploring the nighttime Mojave Desert. Visual Communication Quarterly 19(4), 246-255.
Militarism and its cultural echoes provide an excellent opportunity for visual theorists, and given recent history it’s no surprise that several works about camouflage have been published over the last few years. These include Tim Newark’s Camouflage (2007), focusing on military and fashion, Neil Leach’s psychoanalytic-architectural Camouflage (2006), which combines subtle photographs of (and by) Francesca Woodman, Henrietta Goodden’s sparsely-illustrated history Camouflage and Art: Design for Deception in World War 2 (2007), and Roy Behrens’ eclectic examination of art and camouflage, False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (2002).
Kilker, J. (2012). Time in the Mojave. Solo exhibit at Swatch-sponsored Cité du Temps hall. Geneva, Switzerland.
"The title of each image in this exhibit emphasizes time, a key element in this project. Night photography is widely , and properly , regarded as a technique that encourages the photographer to both be alert and adopt a Zen-like perspective. Dangers require extra care in the dark, and patience is needed as each exposure takes several minutes."
Kilker, J. (2011/12). Lost Places in the Mojave. Solo exhibit at UNLV's Marjorie Barrick museum.
"There are no people in these pictures, yet evidence of them is visible everywhere. What does this subtle presence say about the intertwining between places and people? What lives have both led? And what does this suggest about our relationship with the broader environment?"
Kilker, J. (2011). Mojave after Sunset. Solo exhibit at National Park Service's Kelso Depot located in the Mojave Preserve, California.
"I use night photography and light painting to examine deteriorating structures and the open spaces of the Mojave Desert. Shooting pictures at night and using moonlight and light painting helps me sidestep harsh daytime lighting in the desert and reduce visual clutter in order to emphasize my specific object of interest."
Kilker, J. (2009). Disruptive Pattern Material: An Encyclopedia of Camouflage. Book review in Visual Communication Quarterly.
Militarism and its cultural echoes provide an excellent opportunity for visual theorists, and given recent history it’s no surprise that several works about camouflage have been published over the last few years. These include Tim Newark’s Camouflage (2007), focusing on military and fashion, Neil Leach’s psychoanalytic-architectural Camouflage (2006), which combines subtle photographs of (and by) Francesca Woodman, Henrietta Goodden’s sparsely-illustrated history Camouflage and Art: Design for Deception in World War 2 (2007), and Roy Behrens’ eclectic examination of art and camouflage, False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (2002).
Kilker, J. (2009). Exploring a new methodology: Background, planning, and lessons from the 2007 tradeshow “swarm” project. Social Identities, 15(4), 433-446.
Swarm research is an agile method conducted by researchers with different disciplinary and analytical identities, supported by new collaboration technologies. Intended for exploring complex but ephemeral research sites, a swarm encourages collaboration by selecting a neutral site and using online resources. This article describes how researchers swarmed the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show and critiques the process. In particular, the project raised questions about how to coordinate research across institutional boundaries, how to “grow” an emerging methodology, and how to effectively use collaboration resources. Despite these challenges, the swarm method produced useful experiences and data for individual projects, encouraged constructive discussions about research, and ultimately led to reflection about our roles and identities as researchers.
Kilker, J. (2009). Digital dirt and the entropic artifact: Exploring damage in visual media. Visual Communication Quarterly, 16(1), 50-63.
The transition from photochemical to digital imagery presents an exceptional opportunity to re-examine damage and the “entropic artifact” (one that reveals its interactions with time) as well as how technology mediates our visual experiences. This article compares entropic cues in photochemical and digital images and discusses their processes and outcomes. For example, photochemical media gradually decay while digital media experience glitches that often lead to sudden image destruction. In photochemical media, damage provides intuitively-understood cues about the passage of time, value of the artifact, and its handling. As digital media are adopted, decisions about content encoding, how damage is visually represented, and what contextual metadata is stored influence the inevitable process of damage in digital images.
Kilker, J. (2009). Procrustean pedagogy: The architecture of efficiency in a new medium. In S. Kleinman (Ed.), Cultures of Efficiency (p. 212-229). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
This chapter examines the perils of relying on simplistic notions of “efficiency” in the transition between traditional environments used for education (“schools”) with environments that use computer network technologies (“learning management systems” or LMSs). Proponents of these online environments claim more efficient education that benefits students, instructors, and learning institutions. Because LMSs have been adopted by a large number of schools and training organizations, it is likely that their design shapes current and future educational experiences of many people. Despite this, commercial LMSs do not use design best practices from other new media and physical architectural environments...
Kilker, J. (2008). The World Without Us. Book review in Science Communication, 30(2), 288-291.
Optimism about the world’s environment has been in short supply recently, and recent popular media have echoed these concerns. Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us is one of a periodic wave of post-apocalyptic literary and visual narratives that straddle science and fiction, and that arise during periods of particular societal concerns often related to science...
Kilker, J. (In press, 2008). Overlook. Book review in Visual Communication Quarterly.
Starting with the cover, Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation is an enigmatic work. A standard tour bus, with a guide visibly lecturing within, is halted in nearly featureless surroundings, begging the question of exactly what is worthy of presentation. This tension continues inside and creates a fascinating if ambiguous book worth exploring, along with many questions. ...
Kilker, J. (2007). Risk education: Teaching (and learning) about technology and uncertainty in society. Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society, June 2007.
Recently heightened concerns about governmental and corporate surveillance, coupled with long-term social and psychological research on privacy, present both an opportunity and a challenge for discussions about risks and risk assessments related to national security and civil liberties, as well as discussions about the social implications of technology in general. These issues include ethics, assessing uncertainty, balancing risks, and negotiating multidisciplinary expertise. This paper contextualizes the planning, implementing, and responses to several iterations of the Honors course “Who’s watching? Media, privacy, and surveillance,” within the larger topic of pedagogical practices appropriate for examining important, but controversial, topics related to technology and society.
Kilker, J. (2007). In Katrina’s Wake. Book review in Visual Communication Quarterly, 14(2).
Among the deluge of publications covering the Katrina disaster and its aftermath, several of which telegraph their sorrowful focus by using the word “wake” with its multiple connotations, Chris Jordan, Bill McKibben, Susan Zakin, and Victoria Sloan Jordin’s effort stands out for its compelling images and integration of several genres, including essays and poetry...
Kilker, J. (2007). Breaking free: The shaping and resisting of mobility in personal information and communication technologies. In S. Kleinman (Ed.), Displacing Place: Mobile Communication in the 21st Century (pp. 105-121). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
The mobility of recent information and communication technologies (ICTs) presents new possibilities for the renegotiation of media consumption by both their producers and users. In general, users wish to take full advantage of a technology’s features, while producers wish to control access to them for commercial reasons. This chapter examines “modding communities” that attempt to reshape the characteristics of portable, on-demand (POD) media devices such as mobile phones, game devices, and media players and uses the example of the Rockbox digital audio player software. Examining user-generated modifications provides insight both into aspirations that producers and users have for “mobility,” and into the influence that users have in the shaping and domestication of consumer ICTs.
Gossett, L. & Kilker, J. (2006). My job sucks: Examining counter-institutional websites as locations for organizational member voice, dissent, and resistance. Management Communication Quarterly 20(1), pp. 63-90.
Counter-institutional websites are often portrayed as publicizing the outbursts of disgruntled employees and customers. However, they also enable participants to take part in discussions normally discouraged within traditional work environments. These sites permit individuals to publicly and anonymously voice their concerns and frustrations with particular institutions with reduced fear of retribution or termination. A close examination of one of these counter-institutional websites (RadioShackSucks.com) illustrates the dissent and resistance functions that such sites provide to a wide variety of stakeholders. Our analysis of 1,095 site postings during a one month period finds that participants use these sites to engage in voice and resistance efforts outside formal organizational boundaries. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
Kilker, J., & Tanno, D. (2005). Bridges, trading zones, and zippers: Exploring intercultural metaphors for collaborative interfacing among disciplines. Chapter in International and Intercultural Communication Annual, Vol. 27.
The increasing frequency (and importance) of multidisciplinary collaboration among scholars suggests a need to explore the nature of collaboration interfaces and the expectations for them based on traditional metaphors for collaboration. We explore the implications of collaboration metaphors and how intercultural techniques might assist in understanding collaboration, using our reflections during an intra-disciplinary collaboration as an example. We argue that the commonly used “bridge” metaphor emphasizes the final product of collaborations, while the “trading zone” metaphor emphasizes initial or limited stages of collaboration. Both overlook key challenges and details of the collaboration process itself. To address these issues, we suggest an alternative “zipper” metaphor that highlights the incremental, iterative, and multi-stranded nature of collaboration, including issues of translation. The similarities between our experiences described in this paper and those identified in the intercultural literature suggest that intercultural strategies and processes are valuable in exploring and promoting collaboration opportunities across fields.
Kilker, J. (2003). Shaping convergence media: "Meta-control" and the domestication of DVD and web technologies. Convergence 8(3), 20-39.
A key feature of convergence of media and information technologies is their ability to provide enhanced user control features that potentially provide a wider range of domestication possibilities. Although popular representations of personalized media (such as “The Daily Me” electronic newspaper) typically portray user control in basic terms, such as filtering based on user-defined media topics, recent experience with convergence media indicates that users have additional expectations. For example, users expect to control their media consumption through not only filtering, but also time-shifting, archiving, and reformulating content, as well as resisting control limitations such as those imposed by digital rights management systems and aggressive advertising. There is a considerable tension between user domestication and producer design imperatives in terms of user control in convergence media. To explore this tension, this paper introduces and defines the concept of meta-control, the shaping of user control options, and compares its characteristics in the contexts of two convergence media (DVD and the World-Wide Web) having divergent design standards for and user responses to user control. Historians have noted ample precedent for unintended (from the producers’ design perspective) domestication in earlier technologies, but domestication is more complex in convergence media contexts because information about and technology to shape meta-control can be exchanged online. I argue that negotiation of meta-control is an unintended consequence of convergence media that can result in user control being personalized at a granular level. Meta-control also has important implications for defining instantiations of convergence technologies and for their content.
Kilker, J. (2002). Social and technical interoperability, the construction of users, and 'arrested closure': A case study of networked electronic mail development. Iterations 1(1) (Charles Babbage Institute). [See full text version: Iterations pdf | Iterations html | cached pdf]
Behind the e-mail's success lies a history of extended social interactions among ARPANET developers, programmers, and users from relatively heterogeneous backgrounds. An analysis of social identifications present in online discussions about e-mail development found that inter-organizational computer networking allowed an increasingly wide variety of programmers and users to interact; assumptions about users to be openly stated and challenged; and the prototyping and testing of new technologies in heterogeneous social and technical contexts. Technical interoperation and its social analogue, social collaboration, became key challenges in the development of networked e-mail and led to "arrested closure" in the form of flexible standards.
Kilker, J. (2002). E-commerce. In J. H. Meadows
(Ed.), Communication technology update
(8th ed.). Woburn, MA: Focal Press (Butterworth-Heinemann).
Kilker, J. (2000). E-commerce. In J. H. Meadows
(Ed.), Communication technology update (7th ed.). Woburn, MA: Focal Press
(Butterworth-Heinemann).
These chapters summarize e-commerce's present status and trends. Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is at an early stage, in which regulations, business models, formal and informal standards, and impacts on related business sectors are emerging. In the popular media, however, e-commerce is associated with creating a booming "new economy" (particularly in the United States) based on digital rather then physical commercial transactions.
Kilker, J. (2000). When and where appropriate: Lessons from "foreign" contexts for the pedagogical use of web-based technologies in the U.S. Book chapter in Issues in web-based pedagogy: A critical primer (Ed. Robert Cole).
The challenges encountered in designing, implementing, and evaluating the pedagogical use of emerging Web- and Internet-based technologies parallel those of previous communication technologies in “foreign” contexts. I argue that closely examining the concept of “appropriateness” with regard to technology, a notion that has been debated in international development contexts by researchers and practitioners, encourages reflection about the role of emerging pedagogical technologies. I compare courses at two U.S. academic institutions and summarize appropriate technology literature to elicit specific lessons for Web-based pedagogy. These include considering technical, economic, institutional, and socio-cultural factors in technology planning; expecting notions of appropriate to be context- and time-dependent; incorporating local and user perspectives; and anticipating challenges and successes based on experiences with information technologies in other contexts. [See a later version of the computer survey used for collecting this article's data.]
Kilker, J. (1999). Conflict on collaborative
design teams: Understanding the role of social identities. IEEE Technology and Society, 18(3), 12-21.
Social identity theory provides an appropriate framework for analyzing social aspects of collaborative technology design, in which design team members have different “design identities,” that is, sets of beliefs, attitudes, and values about design. Observations of novice and professional design teams support the notion that collaboration is influenced by designers’ adherence to, and reaction against, idealized technology-centered and socially-centered categorizations of themselves and users. Both case studies demonstrated the challenges to developing a superordinate team identity when polarized ideals about design and collaboration exist. However, approximately half of the professional design team members attempted to synthesize multiple viewpoints in response to the polarized identities, suggesting that design identities serve not only to differentiate design team members from other team members, but also as “anchoring points” for discussions about design. In theoretical terms, social identity assists researchers in modeling how social considerations influence technology design. In practice, encouraging designers to reflect on design identities can improve collaboration.
Kilker, J. Dissertation Networking identity: A case study examining social interactions and identity in the early development of e-mail technology. Access: wwwlib.umi.com/dxweb/gateway and search for "Julian Kilker" or dissertation number "9927373".
Kilker, J. & Gay, G. (1998). The social construction of a digital library: A case study examining implications for evaluation. Information Technology and Libraries, 17(2), 60-70.
The social construction of technology (SCOT) framework encourages a
focus on the multiple perspectives inherent in the development and evaluation of digital libraries. SCOT concepts such as relevant social
groups, interpretative flexibility, and closure are used to examine an evaluation
case study of the Making of America digital library.
Kilker, J., & Kleinman, S. (1997). Researching online environments: Lessons from the history of anthropology. New Jersey Journal of Communication, 5(1), 66-83.
Just as anthropology, the study of culture, was in its infancy about a century ago, studying online environments is a relatively new endeavor today. Online social researchers can learn from disciplines like anthropology that have developed and honed methods for studying social interactions in context. The authors discuss elements of an online version of ethnography, including triangulation, ethics, reflexivity, and the importance of linking online environments to real-world contexts. They describe parallels between the three stages of development of anthropology (formative, classical, and emerging) and the current state of online research, which appears to comprise elements of all three stages because of the varied conceptualizations of online environments.
Kilker, J. (1993). Localization: Successfully launch your product in the international market [Handbook]. Corvallis, OR: Terra Pacific Writing Corporation.
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In a previous life before returning to graduate school,
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