Are Surveys Necessary? Designing Virtual Environments for Participatory Research
A prototype Virtual Environment (VE) designed as an immersive online 'guest book' where hundreds of users could asynchronously decorate a shared virtual space and leave messages for one another. I developed this VE for a workshop on the intangible cultural heritage of Córdoba's communal patios, introducing key design strategies for asynchronous interaction ('claims' and 'traces') and a novel workflow using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate qualitative coding and moderation of text contributions. Published as a book chapter in the 2025 Bloomsbury Academic volume, Clever Design in Critical Times: Conceptualizing the Callidocene, arguing that interactive VEs can serve as powerful tools for participatory research, moving beyond the limitations of traditional surveys in the Digital Humanities. The book is available from Bloomsbury Academic ↗.
Related Projects
MetaFraming: A Methodology for Democratizing Heritage Interpretation through Wiki Surveys
A participatory methodology to democratize heritage study through AI-assisted wiki surveys, a technology from the computational social sciences that allows the survey itself to evolve as people interact with it. I developed MetaFraming using three distinct GPT-3.5 pipelines: one generates hundreds of 'seed' propositions from background research (controlled for tone and topic), another interprets user-submitted comments by providing contextual history of their interactions, and a third automatically codes comments for sentiment and topics to speed qualitative analysis and aid abuse detection. The methodology was developed through a case study on Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation and published as a conference paper. Read the full paper here.
Córdoba Court
Córdoba Court is an innovative social game I designed and developed to foster community building. Modeled after the communal patios of Córdoba, Spain, the game invites players to cultivate a shared virtual environment, expressing their individuality by designing personalized totems from millions of possible combinations. The project serves as a social experiment in digital placemaking and community greening practices. A report is also available, which analyzes player content and observed behaviors.
"Patio Walk": Córdoba
A pair of web applications for a Dariah Udigish Working Group project on the intangible cultural heritage of Córdoba's communal patios. The first was a site-specific recording tool for field workers that automatically linked photos, texts, audio interviews, and surveys to their GPS locations in a GIS database. The second was an interactive map-based visualization that displayed all collected materials overlaid on the city's patios. As a member of the working group, I was responsible for the design and development of both the data collection and final visualization tools.
Unité d'Habitation Wikisurvey
A wiki survey tool implementing methods from two previous wiki survey systems (All Our Ideas and POLIS) with new innovations. I developed this web application as part of the MetaFraming research. See the MetaFraming paper for more details.