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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the usability and user perceptions of the display technology in the library to evaluate the utility of the Liquid Galaxy (LG) technology and how it was deployed in a library setting.

This paper presents the results of a mixed method (survey and interview) qualitative study of users of the LG Google Earth/Google Street View immersive display in the Research Hub of Davis Library of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill conducted in April 2015. In total, 25 users of the LG responded to survey or interview questions about their user experience and their emotional response to the LG.

Users found the LG easy to use and they had many reasons for using the LG including: research, education, entertainment, trip planning and nostalgic virtual travel.

There are few studies on users’ experience of innovative non-way finding display technology in library settings and this study then adds to the literature on this subject. These results may assist organizations evaluating incorporating an immersive display such as the LG into their offerings.

Studies on the socio-technical relations between bodies and self-tracking apps have become more relevant as the number of digital solutions for monitoring our bodies are increasing and becoming even more embedded in our everyday lives. While a strong body of literature within the fields of self-tracking and the quantified self has evolved during the recent years, the author suggests it is time we (once again) start paying attention to the specific bodies in question when we look into the quantification of bodies, particularly about the question as to whose bodies are we talking about when we say, ‘quantified bodies’. The author also proposes that, when discussing the quantification of bodies, we take interest in the bodies designing, producing, and guiding the logic behind the algorithms embedded in the technological solutions in question. By suggesting this focus on bodies as knowledge producing, the author draws from a feminist perspective of situated knowledges (Haraway 1988; Harding, 1986, 2004) with a particular interest in knowledge production and the understanding of bodies as active, epistemological objects. Feminist theory of science replaces, so to speak, the idea of a universal human identity with a knowing subject who can occupy many different positions – in co-creative and transforming constellations. Following this line of thought, all kinds of knowledge production must be bodily anchored and situated. However, knowledge production always takes place in relation to or with something/someone else/other. As explained by philosopher Rosi Braidotti ‘[t]he post-human knowing subject has to be understood as a relational embodied and embedded, affective and accountable entity and not only as a transcendental consciousness’ (Braidotti, 2018, p. 1). Thus, the bodies in this chapter are the bodies who menstruate. The author wishes to discuss a particular socio-technical relation between smartphone applications (apps) to track and monitor the female cycle; period-apps, and the menstruating bodies engaging with these apps. Building on early feminist thoughts from the science and technology studies (STS), the author seeks to move beyond the algorithmic quantification of bodies to study the network of knowledge production formed by bodies, materialities, technology and history with all its reminiscence of stigma and taboo surrounding these leaking bodies (Shildrich, 1999). These inquiries are not only theoretical accounts but are also rooted in empirical soil. Based on a feminist ethnography of Danish women’s everyday engagement with period-apps, the female developers from the Femtech-industry and the women-only groups within the quantified self-movement, the author aims to provide a broad perspective on what the author defines as the gendered data body. The author argues for a feminist approach to better understand the socio-technical relations and the socio-cultural discourses the menstruating body is situated in, as well as to better understand the unique relation between knowledge production and technology as being constitutional for the gendered data body.

The purpose of this paper is to apply a self‐reflexive interpretive method of writing as a method of analysis of findings from a critical research based on videography documenting the relationship between ethnicity, consumption, and place.

An innovative theoretical approach employed is interpretativist ethnography inspired by creative writing. This methodological approach allows the researcher to move beyond the rigidness of academic discourse and consequently enables a more intimate connection with the object of research.

The main outcome of this paper is realization that the presence of the researcher and her own autobiography affects the results of research and that articulation as much as execution of research is always subjective. A significant implication of this kind of approach is uncertainty and unreliability which questions the positivist objectivism dominating in both consumer studies and marketing. A subsequent limitation is a free reading which evades possibility of definite conclusions.

By providing a film and a commentary to it in one publication, this paper overcomes the traditional separation between the visual and the textual and contributes to the multisensory model of academic practice. It is particularly important for ethnography and visual studies where the application of the senses has both a theoretical and a practical value.