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Background Constructing a sample of real users as participants in user studies is considered by most researchers to be vital for the validity, usefulness, and applicability of research findings. However, how often user studies reported in information technology academic literature sample real users or surrogate users is unknown. Therefore, it is uncertain whether or not the use of surrogate users in place of real users is a widespread problem within user study practice. Objective To determine how often user studies reported in peer-reviewed information technology literature sample real users or surrogate users as participants. Method We analyzed 725 user studies reported in 628 peer-reviewed articles published from 2013 through 2021 in 233 unique conference and journal outlets, retrieved from the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, and Web of Science archives. To study the sample selection choices, we categorized each study as generic (i.e., users are from the general population) or targeted (i.e., users are from a specific subpopulation), and the sampled study participants as real users (i.e., from the study population) or surrogate users (i.e., other than real users). Results Our analysis of all 725 user studies shows that roughly two-thirds (75.4%) sampled real users. However, of the targeted studies, only around half (58.4%) sampled real users. Of the targeted studies sampling surrogate users, the majority (69.7%) used students, around one-in-four (23.6%) sampled through crowdsourcing, and the remaining 6.7% of studies used researchers or did not specify who the participants were. Conclusions Key findings are as follows: (a) the state of sampling real users in information technology research has substantial room for improvement for targeted studies; (b) researchers often do not explicitly characterize their study participants in adequate detail, which is probably the most disconcerting finding; and (c) suggestions are provided for recruiting real users, which may be challenging for researchers. Implications The results imply a need for standard guidelines for reporting the types of users sampled for a user study. We provide a template for reporting user study sampling with examples.
In the first book on music published in Afrikaans, Toonkuns 1 by Willem Gerke, 2 music is explained as a thoroughly racialised form of expression. In the section on jazz (or, "die Jazz", as Gerke calls it), the author writes that music is prone to influences of white and black magic: the former constituting "good" influences (encouragement to good deeds), and the latter "bad" influences (promptings to evil, lustful passions). Dance and music, Gerke writes, have always exerted powerful influences on people, and each nation ("volk"), each race, has songs exhibiting both the good and the bad. Writing about the genealogy of jazz, Gerke asserts that the songs of North American negroes consisted of bastardised melodies, characterised by a strong rhythmic character, small ambit and preference for pentatonic (five-tone) pitch organisation, inherited from the original ("oer") African negroes. The negro, according to Gerke, has always displayed a penchant for gliding from one pitch to another, leading to an overwrought sentimentality in religious singing (negro spirituals), whereas the desire to mimic ("om na te aap"), over time led to the adoption of non-percussive instruments in forms of accompaniment. These instruments were used to produce shrieks and grumbling sounds ("gillende en brommende tone"), as negroes could not sing high or low. Thus was born the "negro orchestra", in which negroes developed "a kind of virtuosity" in the squeals and quacks ("die gil en kwek") of the clarinet and trumpet. At this point, two and a half pages into his narrative on the evolution and character of jazz, Gerke makes a startling cognitive leap. He asserts that this kind of music,
The desire for the ineffable: on the myth of music as absolute This article proposes to establish and critique connections between religious and musico-aesthetic conceptions of ineffability by exploring the link between neoplatonic thought and romantic aesthetics. The central thesis is that recourse to the ineffable is often made by resorting to theological tenets and, consequently, that romantic aesthetics, although desperately trying to disengage itself from theological thinking, can in fact be interpreted as being inextricably bound up with it. Taking Plotinus' conception of the relationship between the "One" and "Intellect" as model, the romantic conception of the absolute is revealed to be a fallacy. It is shown that claims of the ineffability of music not only locate music as a false absolute, but also confer on music a quasi-religious authority. This results in an ungrounded secular faith in the power of music and the mastery of its composer-god to lead mankind to the truth. Untangling the myths of ineffability leads the way to a detranscendentalised conception of music with performance at its centre. OpsommingDie soeke na die onsegbare: oor die mite van musiek as die absolute Hierdie artikel poog om konneksies tussen religieuse en musiek-estetiese beskouings oor die onsegbare uit te wys en te kritiseer, deur die gebruik van die term in onderskeidelik neoplatoniese en romantiese denke te ondersoek. Die sentrale hipotese is dat 'n diskoers rondom die onuitspreeklike dikwels op teologiese uitgangspunte moet steun en gevolglik, dat die
In this contribution I juxtapose two tales of borehole drilling in the Karoo in order to reflect on the relationship between music, landscape, history and everyday life. The first narrative is based on British colonial hydraulic engineering in the Karoo, and the second is an ethnographic portrait of borehole driller and concertinist Theo Slabbert. When landscape is considered vertically, different categories emerge for delving into the unruly, omnidirectional correlation between music and landscape. Here I focus on 'residue', 'grain', and, when the two narratives collide, 'reverberation'.
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