Social Networks and Archival Context OpenRefine Plugin; Cloud Computing's Impact on Game Developers’ Relationships with Users

Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) is an archival institution working with other institutions to build an archival collection of data on persons, families, and the relationships that connect them. The current method of contributing to the archive by all these contributors is outdated and tedious. Our capstone team has been assigned to work with a developer on the SNAC end to create a SNAC extension to an open source Google project, OpenRefine. OpenRefine is a data cleanup and reconciliation tool that runs locally on a computer and takes in files of data to submit to known online collections of data. The team developed an extension to the tool, allowing SNAC contributors to upload their data to SNAC at a much more convenient speed with little to no flaws in the upload process.

Cloud computing is a popular and expanding technology whose growth and impact on game-developer and player-base relationship is often overlooked. Video games utilize myriad of tools and tricks such as automatic progress backups and feedback forums to make it an enjoyable experience for players and to build these developer-player relationships. Cloud computing is a technology with important implications for the software and video game development industry as well as the relationships formed from these industries, as it wields impressively strong potential in storing data and running other every day technology. The range of uses and potential power it possesses raises questions on how to control it and what effect it could have on society. The technological momentum STS framework will be utilized to analyze how the technology and users (the development team) reciprocally impact each other in addition to how teams and their users (player-base) mutually interact. Interviews with software developers and case studies will be utilized to support components of technological momentum in cloud computing. By interviewing developers, I will gain a new perspective on the current usage of cloud in software and game development. Researching case studies will also yield information about cloud’s adoption, growth, and uses in order to investigate what it means for society to be developing alongside such a rapidly expanding technology. Through this research, I hope to understand how the adoption of cloud has impacted software development companies and what potential effects it could have towards game-developer and player-base relationships. Integrating cloud computing into existing technologies provides a novel method for the public, players, and developers to interact with each other on a global scale. By looking at it through an STS framework, people will be able to gain a better understanding of how shared global experiences enabled by cloud computing can impact the human interaction and experience gained out of software and video games.

School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Technical Advisor: Ahmed Ibrahim
STS Advisor: Rider Foley
Technical Team Members: Charles Chang, Sandra Gould, Mark Jeong, John Perez, Victor Shen, Grace Wu, Jessica Xu