Webstrates, Codestrates v2, and Varv: A Software Stack for Computational Media

Borowski, Marcel; Klokmose, Clemens Nylandsted

doi:10.1145/3547522.3547714

Cited by 3 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Mirrorverse 6 is built on top of the Webstrates software stack consisting of Webstrates [29], Codestrates v2 [7] and Varv [8]. It is implemented in Varv, HTML, and CSS.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This level of tailorability allows the technically proficient user to seek out new functionality to support a given meeting situation, and for the user who is proficient in programming to share new functionality with other users. Content types in Mirrorverse, such as images, notes or sketches, are bundled as Webstrates packages [7]. Packages can be added and removed from a meeting at run-time, supporting tailoring by extension.…”

Section: Level 3: Extending Content and Tool Types With Packagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Webstrates, further, allows for WebRTC streaming of audio and video 6 Mirrorverse on GitHub: https://github.com/Webstrates/Mirrorverse channels. Codestrates v2 [7] is a development platform for Webstrates consisting of an execution engine and a package manager. Users author code via the Cauldron IDE from within a webstrate, without additional tools.…”

Section: Web-based Software Stackmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It uses a declarative data structure written in JSON to define interaction. 7 The declarative model enables accretive extensibility: applications in Varv are inherently extensible and their interactive behavior can be changed by adding code instead of having to modify existing code -similar to how CSS rules can be overwritten. A view layer supports creating GUIs using HTML templates and CSS.…”

Section: Web-based Software Stackmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Mirrorverse: Live Tailoring of Video Conferencing Interfaces

Grønbæk,

Borowski,

Hoggan

et al. 2023

Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

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HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

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“…Mirrorverse 6 is built on top of the Webstrates software stack consisting of Webstrates [29], Codestrates v2 [7] and Varv [8]. It is implemented in Varv, HTML, and CSS.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Level 3: Extending Content and Tool Types With Packagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Web-based Software Stackmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Web-based Software Stackmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Mirrorverse: Live Tailoring of Video Conferencing Interfaces

Grønbæk,

Borowski,

Hoggan

et al. 2023

Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

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“…The default editor is named CauldRon (see figure 5.19). For a more in-depth explanation of the technical foundation of CodestRates v2, please see Borowski, Kristensen, et al (2021).…”

Section: Codestrates V2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Casting the runes and parsing them: Unpacking software mediation, interactions, and computational literacy in non-conventional programming configurations

Vognstrup Fog

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This dissertation is an investigation of computational literacy and how it is shaped by software use and mediation. Early visionaries such as Perlis and Naur recognized the need for everyone to learn computing, but these ideals are yet to be fully realized. Arguably, a narrow focus on computational thinking is the more popular approach in contemporary computing education research and policymaking. Another branch of researchers, in particular Kay and diSessa, have argued for the need for providing the right media for computing. In line with them, I argue that a more materially grounded literacy is a necessary step. By extension, this means providing a better understanding of how these material conditions (e.g., software) influence the development of computational literacy. Through eight studies, I have employed a mix of qualitative methods and constructive design research. The qualitative methods fall under ethnography, technography, and retrospective autoethnography. The empirically grounded research draws from interviews with five humanities students, interviews and observations of four biomolecular scientists, interviews with 12 experienced programmers, and a workshop and observations of 12 experienced knitters. These interviews focused on their experiences with programming, their ability to use and appropriate unfamiliar software, and their feelings of mastery and disempowerment. This is supplemented with technographic investigations of computational media, literate computing environments, and programming interfaces that focuses on the mediating qualities of software for programming such as interaction, semiotics, ethics, and transformation. My work has shown the importance of the material foundations of computational literacy in these contexts. More specifically, the material conditions affect this literacy in multiple ways such as the dissonance between software visions, people’s expectations, and the practical implementations. People experience disempowerment and crises and resolve those through various means such as enrolling a more capable peer or incorporating supporting artifacts. The dissertation further presents computational media as a promising, yet fragile software paradigm and shows how this paradigm blends use and development, inscribes particular user roles, and balances between evoking trust and alienation in its users. Finally, by emphasizing a theoretical lens of self-concept in the context of computational literacy, the dissertation provides a view of literacy as a product of continuous experiences and confirmations from people’s social and material lifeworlds. These findings should resonate with scholars of new media, human-computer interaction, and computing education, as the dissertation explores the complex mutual relationships between people’s cultural, social, and material environments as well as their ongoing and sometimes contradictory ways of seeing themselves. Computational literacy can be emancipatory for everyone, not just for computer scientists, yet the development of literacy demands adequate conditions. This dissertation is an argument for the importance of those conditions.

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Between Principle and Pragmatism: Reflections on Prototyping Computational Media with Webstrates

Borowski

Fog

Griggio

et al. 2023

ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.

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Computational media describes a vision of software, which, in contrast to application-centric software, is (1) malleable, so users can modify existing functionality, (2) computable, so users can run custom code, (3) distributable, so users can open documents across different devices, and (4) shareable, so users can easily share and collaborate on documents. Over the last ten years, the Webstrates and Codestrates projects aimed to realize this vision of computational media. Webstrates is a server application that synchronizes the DOM of websites. Codestrates builds on top of Webstrates and adds an authoring environment, which blurs the use and development of applications. Grounded in a chronology of the development of Webstrates and Codestrates, we present eight tensions that we needed to balance during their development. We use these tensions as an analytical lens in three case studies and a game challenge in which participants created games using Codestrates. We discuss the results of the game challenge based on these tensions and present key takeaways for six of them. Finally, we present six lessons learned from our endeavor to realize the vision of computational media, demonstrating the balancing act of weighing the vision against the pragmatics of implementing a working system.

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Webstrates, Codestrates v2, and Varv: A Software Stack for Computational Media

Cited by 3 publications

References 14 publications

Mirrorverse: Live Tailoring of Video Conferencing Interfaces

Mirrorverse: Live Tailoring of Video Conferencing Interfaces

Casting the runes and parsing them: Unpacking software mediation, interactions, and computational literacy in non-conventional programming configurations

Between Principle and Pragmatism: Reflections on Prototyping Computational Media with Webstrates

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