Extrapolating+and+Abstracting+(3+abstracts+for+conference+length+presentations)

__**Re-thinking Immersion**__ Discussions of immersion in video game play often involve a rigid separation of the real from the virtual: a good game allows players can lose themselves within the game and its narrative. Within such an understanding, immersion becomes an opportunity for escapism where the 'real' physical world can be momentarily left behind. Recent social scientific efforts have attempted to deconstruct this real/virtual dichotomy by arguing that virtual worlds and video games are rich site of meaning-making and allow new configurations of life. However, because of their focus on embodiment through avatars, both approaches imply a division between the material and the immaterial.  This paper attempts to understand how immersion can be understood materially through interface devices. Through participant-observation in a video game event held on the RPI campus, this paper focuses on the role of gamepads in the process of subject formation. This paper argues that, because knowledge of the gamepad is acquired through what Michael Polanyi terms personal knowledge, the gamepad allows the material embodiment of the player to become an element of the game world by allowing a simultaneous material access to both the physical space and the virtual one. Immersion, therefore, becomes the realization that one's own materiality can be manipulated during the boundary moment where the veil dividing physical and virtual is breached.

__**Public Data and Data Publics**__  Recent calls for openness and transparency in government have results in the release of thousands of data sets collected by governmental institutions. Such data sets represent archives of publicly accessible information that can serve to empower groups that are unable to amass the resources necessary in order to collect their own empirical and experimental data. However, such openness and accessibility of information also benefit those disciplines that rely heavily on data modeling and visualization; the predictive and analytical capabilities of these models is improved by the vast amount of information that can be incorporated.  These publicly available data sets are a boom for scientific research in an era of scientific defunding. Expensive experimentally and empirically collected data can be replaced by these accessible resources. This is especially true for disciplines employing models that require vast quantities of data in order to be effective. However, this situation has led to a transformation of scientific practice. Science is increasingly seeing the appearance of data publics: publics who mine through publicly available data sets, as opposed to collecting new data. While data publics are able to be extremely productive due to the simultaneous use of models and publicly available data sets, they nonetheless risk being blind to neglected or marginalized populations that often are not included within such data due to regulatory or jurisdiction issues.

__**Modeling Science**__  Data modeling and visualization technologies (DMVTs) represent a boon for scientific practice in that they represent a possibility for predicting the future. As such, DMVTs extend the reach of the sciences across time and space, enhancing the apparent universality of scientific facts. However, DMVTs also great impact the practice of science itself. Because of their value for the extension of scientific authority, DMVTs recenter practitioner agency towards themselves as opposed to directing it towards the experimental and empirical world. The DMVTs themselves become the objects of scientific practice. Rather than being turned towards experimentalism, scientific agency is focused on improving existing models or creating new ones. As such, the incorporation of DMVTs into scientific practice models science by simultaneously extending and limiting the reach of science.