Curating Media and Design

Community media journalists are, in essence, ‘filling in the gaps’ left by mainstream news outlets. Forde’s extensive 10 year study now develops an understanding of the journalistic practices at work in independent and community news organisations. Alternative media has never been so widely written about until now.

By: Susan Forde

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Understanding alternative and independent journalism
• Chapter 2: Defining moments in the history of alternative journalism
• Chapter 3: Finding the basis for alternative and independent journalism
• Chapter 4: Looking for answers: How alternative media journalists engage their audiences
• Chapter 5: Connecting with democracy: The ‘new’ alternative media
• Chapter 6: Throwing out the bathwater (but not the baby): Objectivity, ‘professionalism’ and the economics of alternative journalism
• Chapter 7: The global policy environment for alternative and community media forms
• Chapter 8: Concluding thoughts: The nature of alternative journalism
• References

Published by Palgrave and can be purchased here.

It has become commonplace to employ dialogue-based approaches in producing and communicating knowledge in diverse fields. Here, “dialogue” has become a buzzword that promises democratic, participatory processes of mutual learning and knowledge co-production. But what does “dialogue” actually entail in the fields in which it is practised and how can we analyse those practices in ways that take account of their complexities?

By: Louise Phillips, Professor of Communication, Roskilde University, Denmark.

The Promise of Dialogue presents a novel theoretical framework for analysing the dialogic turn in the production and communication of knowledge that builds bridges across three research traditions - dialogic communication theory, action research, and science and technology studies. It also provides an empirically rich account of the dialogic turn through case studies of how dialogue is enacted in the fields of planned communication, public engagement with science and collaborative research. A critical, reflexive approach is taken that interrogates the complexities, tensions and dilemmas inherent in the enactment of “dialogue” and is oriented towards further developing dialogic practices from a position normatively supportive of the dialogic turn.

The book can be purchased here.

Design Creativity is an important and interesting topic of study in design. Since it involves the profound and essential nature of design, design creativity is expected to be a key in not only addressing the social problems that we are facing, but also producing an innate appreciation for beauty and happiness in our minds.

Full paper submission: 09 March 2012

The 2nd International Conference on Design Creativity (ICDC 2012) will take
place on 18.-20.09.2012 in Glasgow, Scotland.

In order to elucidate the nature of design creativity, the following issues are being studied:

• Cognitive processes underlying design creativity
• Computational models of design creativity
• Practical processes to incorporate the human and social dimensions

After the success of the first ever International Conference on Design Creativity in 2010 in Kobe, Japan, the 2012 event will take place in Scotland in close cooperation with the University of Strathclyde.

Please check the conference website for further details: http://www.icdc2012.org.uk

The aim of this conference is to provide a platform for international scholars from disciplines such as media, communication and cultural studies, film studies, sociology and political communication to debate the complexity and ambiguity at work in public participation in mediated spaces and places.

International Conference, Media and Communication, Lund University, Sweden, March 29th 2012. Organisers Professor Annette Hill, Michael Rübsamen and Tina Askanius.

Abstracts due December 9, 2011.

Media and participation signals the merging of ideas around democracy, power and politics, and producers, audiences and publics. Media and participation includes a broad understanding of our involvement, engagement and interaction with politics and civic cultures. Media and participation also considers the individual, audience and public as an agent of change, engaged in dynamic practices. This range of ideas across the public and popular makes this topic a rich site for analysis. To understand media and participation today involves historical, social, political and cultural perspectives on such issues as live events, social networking, political communication, museums and galleries, sports, talkshows and reality TV.

The conference will be organised thematically, focusing on the political, social, cultural and historical approaches to media and participation. Papers should address one or more of the following research questions:

• what is the role of social, political and cultural participation in people’s experiences of the media?
• What is the relationship between the political and non-political in cases of media participation?
• How can different approaches and methods open up our understanding of media and participation?

The aim is to provide a platform for international scholars from disciplines such as media, communication and cultural studies, film studies, sociology and political communication to debate the complexity and ambiguity at work in public participation in mediated spaces and places.

Read more on http://mediaparticipation2012.se/

Mediatization has emerged as an important new research agenda for understanding the complex interplay between media and cultural change. By shifting the focus from ‘mediation’ to ‘mediatization’, mediatization theory has provided new impetus to examine the long-term influence of media on a variety of cultural spheres and phenomena such as family, education, religion, sports, science, work, war and politics.

Submission deadline: Sep 1, 2012.
Publication deadline: Spring 2013.

Editors: Stig Hjarvard (guest editor) and Line Nybro Petersen, University of Copenhagen

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Theoretical discussions of mediatization theory (macro-, meso- or micro- level) and the relationship between mediatization and other key transformative processes of modernity: globalization, individualization, commercialization etc.
• Empirical analysis of a specific cultural sphere or a specific media in order to understand transformative processes relating to the theory of mediatization
• Analysis and discussion of mediatization in relation to new media: social network media, personal media, participatory culture, user-produced texts etc.

See the full call on mediekultur.dk.

The primary objectives of this study were to identify a set of journals that report on industrial design research and to propose quality rankings of those journals. Based on an online survey, design journals were assessed in terms of two quality metrics: popularity and indexed average rank position. We find that both general and specialized design journals are highly valued and that geographic origin and academic background can be related with journal rankings. The results of the study offer a guide to both evaluators and those evaluated when judging or selecting research outlets.

By: Gerda Gemsera, Cees de Bonta, Paul Hekkerta, Ken Friedman

Access full article here.

Online participatory culture means that people who were previously just consumers of media can now be much more active and engaged, producing and distributing their own creative material, as well as enjoying professional and amateur work from around the world. Has this fundamentally changed what Media Studies is all about?

By: David Gauntlett

The idea of ‘Media Studies 2.0’ has been the subject of intense debate since it was proposed by David Gauntlett in 2007. For the first time, Media Studies 2.0, and Other Battles around the Future of Media Research brings together the original essay alongside more recent responses and rejoinders. This Kindle book includes brand new introduction and conclusion chapters, and other previously unpublished material, as well as a lively interview where Gauntlett tackles a range of issues around creativity, participation, and social media.

David Gauntlett is Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster, UK. He is the author of several books, including Creative Explorations (2007) and Making is Connecting: The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 (2011).

Read more about this publication here.

‘Mediatization’ has evolved as a key concept to describe a fundamental transformation of the relationship between the media, culture, and society. The aim of this special issue of Communication Theory  is to stimulate debate by “Conceptualizing Mediatization” in a wider perspective.

Manuscripts due April 1, 2012.

Guest editors: Nick Couldry (Goldsmiths, University of London), Andreas Hepp (ZeMKI, University of Bremen)

Today, we can no longer understand culture and society in isolation from the media: If we do politics, for instance, it is politics by and through media. The way we spend our work time as well as our spare time is increasingly marked by the use of computers. Against this backdrop, ‘mediatization’ has evolved as a key concept to describe a fundamental transformation of the relationship between the media, culture, and society. Generally speaking, ‘mediatization’ captures the interrelation between media-communicative change, on the one hand, and socio-cultural change, on the other. The core idea behind this concept is that the changing media exert an influence in that they alter communication processes and, in so doing, our sociocultural construction of reality. In this sense, media are ‘moulding forces’. However, the specificity of certain media opens up various possibilities for dealing with them, depending on the contexts of their appropriation, as well as on power-relations. In such a perspective, ‘mediatization theory’ is less concerned with direct and unidirectional effects of media contents on culture and society but allows for a complex and critical reflection of the role of contemporary media communication, as well as the history of culture and society.

Over the past decade, the discussion surrounding mediatization has stimulated important empirical research. It has produced a wide array of sophisticated analyses of the mediatization of various fields of culture and society, most notably on politics, religion, and popular culture. As mediatization research becomes more and more differentiated today, it is time to reflect on the theoretical power of mediatization theory, particularly against the background of empirical research in and beyond its tradition.

The aim of this special issue of Communication Theory therefore is to stimulate debate by “Conceptualizing Mediatization” in a wider perspective. Within such a general scope, we invite manuscript submissions on the following non-exclusive list of topics:

• Re-thinking the complexity of mediatization.
• Theorizing historical dimensions of mediatization.
• Reflections on (trans-)cultural and (trans-)national aspects of mediatization.
• Mediatization as critical approach of media research.
• Mediatization in relation to other concepts of change within communication and media research.

Manuscripts must be submitted no later than 1 April 2012 through the online system of Communication Theory. Submissions should indicate that authors wish to have their manuscript considered for the special issue. Manuscript inquiries should be sent to Nick Couldry (<n.couldry@gold.ac.uk>) and Andreas Hepp (<andreas.hepp@uni-bremen.de>).

This book is dedicated to Internet surveillance in the age of what has come to be termed “social media” or “web 2.0″ (blogs, wikis, file sharing, social networking sites, microblogs, user-generated content sites, etc). The Internet has been transformed in the past years from a system primarily oriented on information provision into a medium for communication and community-building. The notion of “Web 2.0”, social software, and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have emerged in this context. With such platforms comes the massive provision and storage of personal data that are systematically evaluated, marketed, and used for targeting users with advertising. In a world of global economic competition, economic crisis, and fear of terrorism after 9/11, both corporations and state institutions have a growing interest in accessing this personal data. Here, contributors explore this changing landscape by addressing topics such as commercial data collection by advertising, consumer sites and interactive media; self-disclosure in the social web; surveillance of file-sharers; privacy in the age of the internet; civil watch-surveillance on social networking sites; and networked interactive surveillance in transnational space. This book is a result of a research action launched by the intergovernmental network COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

Fuchs, Christian, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund and Marisol Sandoval (Eds.). 2011. Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-89160-8. EU COST Publication. 332 pages.

Read more about the book here.

This dissertation analyzes North American television’s aesthetic remediation of user-produced media forms. I argue that the use of the aesthetics of user-produced media in television production is more indicative of the television industry’s hegemonic influence over cultural creation and  discourse than of the democratization of media production. It includes a semiotic analysis of television and user-produced reality-based media such as television news, citizen journalism, video blogs, and reality programming. This is followed by another case study on animation centering on television’s recent appropriation of the aesthetics of userproduced Web cartoons. These case studies are on one hand an historical analysis of television’s use of reality and animated content and, on the other, a semiotic analysis of the aesthetics of user- and mass-produced media which is used to elaborate upon the television industry’s adaption to a post-network, digital media age. Drawing on concepts such as Raymond Williams’ dominant and emergent cultures, Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, Walter Benjamin’s notion of the Urvergangenheit (mythic past), and Nick Couldry’s “myth of the mediated centre” as a theoretical framework, the final sections explore the relationship between aesthetic remediation, cultural production, and ideology in order to challenge assumptions about and posit alternative approaches to user-produced media.

Keywords: television, digital media, remediation, Flash, reality TV, citizen journalism, participatory culture, user/producers

By: Michael S. Daubs, The University of Western Ontario

Access the full dissertation here.

A research study was conducted on an Alternate Reality Game Evoke in spring 2010. The questions  explored were around the participants narrative practices, and the potential for players and educators who use similar spaces to develop knowledge and application of critical literacy, as well as grow as individuals in their ethical sensibilities. This paper focuses on players’ moral functioning in the gameworld, analyzed through a Four-component model, including moral judgment, moral sensitivity, moral motivation and moral action. Based on the model, four different themes emerged as a result of players’ participation in the game. Those are: becoming a leader, being a good citizen, supporting and understanding others and expressing freedom of speech. All of those demonstrated that immersive gameworlds could provide space for rich, exhilarating, thought-provoking debate and knowledge building.

By: Natasha Boskic, The University of British Columbia, Canada

Access article here, open-access.

Keywords: Alternate Reality Games; ethics; personal growth; global citizen; leadership

This paper aims to contribute to the discussion about the co-creation of Intelligent Products in the emerging paradigm of the “Internet of Things”. The direct involvement of human actors such as designers, manufacturers, end-users, and recycling operators into the design process of Intelligent Products is a powerful means to ensure a high degree of the fulfilment of requirements towards functionality, ergonomics, sustainability and other factors which directly affect the acceptance of Intelligent Products. This paper discusses the potential of applying the Arduino Platform as a low-cost, easy-to-use micro-controller and sensor kit to facilitate co-creation Use cases illustrating first experiences with the Arduino platform in the co-creation of Intelligent Products are presented. A critical appraisal of the approach and an outlook towards future work in the area concludes the paper.

By: Hribernik, Karl A.; Ghrairi, Zied; Hans, Carl; Thoben, Klaus-Dieter; BIBA - Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Hochschulring 20, 28359 Bremen, Germany

This paper appears in: Concurrent Enterprising (ICE), 2011. Access the paper here, toll-access.

Visualising deas and concepts in culture, heritage the arts and sciences: digital arts, sound, music, film and animation, 2D and 3D imaging, European projects, archaeology, architecture, social media for museums, heritage and fine art photography, medical visualisation and more.

Deadline: 22nd January 2012

A feature of EVA London is its varied session types. We invite proposals of papers, demonstrations, short performances, workshops or panel discussions. Demonstrations and performances will be an important part of this year’s conference.  We especially invite papers or presentations on topical subjects, and the newest and cutting edge
technologies and applications. Only a summary of the proposal, on up to one page, is required for selection. This must be submitted electronically according to the instructions on the EVA London website. Proposals may be on any aspect of EVA London’s focus on visualisation for arts and culture, heritage and medical science, broadly interpreted. Papers are peer reviewed and may be edited for publication as hard copy and online. Other presentations may be published as summaries or as papers.

If your proposal is a case study, we will be looking for discussions of wider principles or applications using the case study as an example. A few bursaries for EVA London registration fees will again be available if you don’t have access to grants.

EVA London’s Conference themes will particularly include new and emerging technologies and applications, including but not limited to:

* Visualising ideas and concepts * Imaging and images in museums and galleries * Digital performance * Music, sound, film and animation * Medical humanities

* Reconstructive archaeology and architecture * Digital and computational art and photography * Visualisation in museums, historic sites and buildings * Immersive environments

* Technologies of digitisation * 2D, 3D and high definition imaging * Virtual and augmented worlds * Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies in art and culture * Digital visualisation of performance and music

Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA) London 2012
Tuesday 10th July - Thursday 12th July 2012
Venue: British Computer Society, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7HA
www.eva-london.org

How can new media be used for serious artistic purposes and how can we create a suitable critical vocabulary for this? What is the relationship between digital writers and the commercial world of ‘gaming’. Who are the audiences for digital writing and how can they be accessed?

Mix: Merging Intermedia X11 Conference

Deadline Dec 30, 2011

The conference will take place at Bath Spa University’s postgraduate centre at Corsham Court from 16th-18th July 2012. Its aim is to bring together practitioners and theorists working with writing in digital media. The purpose is to create a core of research knowledge both practical and theoretical. The conference will present academic papers and also presentations and workshops by current digital practitioners. There will also be a public exhibition of work by the Fluxus artists.

The questions we will be addressing are: How can new media be used for serious artistic purposes and how can we create a suitable critical vocabulary for this? What is the relationship between digital writers and the commercial world of ‘gaming’. Who are the audiences for digital writing and how can they be accessed?

We welcome submissions from those who work in digital media, concrete poetry, text art, poetry and performance, poetry and film, film poems, digital poetics, poetry and art, poetry and music, digital narratives, game writing, intermedia poetry, transmedia writing, language art, visual writing and installations.

The conference will produce an e-book of critical essays, examples of work and also an online forum where the debate can be continued.

Confirmed Key Speakers are: Marc America, Maria Mencia, and Tom Konyves.

We invite proposals of 300 words for 30 min presentations and/or 90 min practical workshops. Deadline Friday 30th Dec 2011. Conference booking opens 9th January 2012.

More information on the conference website.

Thanks to @cscolari for tweeting this link!

This paper describes an exploratory concept for how video communication can address the potential collaboration opportunities (and challenges) that arise with an emerging networked society in which the “material” to be used in the collaboration no longer is restrained to simple presentations, but can include services, Internet enabled objects, and many other types of systems and features. The concept illustrates how tangible objects can be utilized as props for the interaction and collaboration, and as access points to services, functionality and information. The findings from a qualitative user study suggest that this contributes to creating a form of collaboration in which technology is less visible and the actual meeting between humans becomes more significant. The user study also showed the importance of security and trust for such a system to work.

By: Marcus Nyberg, Christian Norlin, Peter Gomez, User Experience Lab, Stockholm, Sweden.

Published in: Proceeding. MobileHCI ‘11 Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services.

Access article here, toll-access.

What happens when non-human objects enter social media and start imitating social relations with people? Starting from a social networking stance towards connected objects this workshop looks at the challenges of designing for the dualism in objects consisting of a physical thing and a digital representation online, and how we could develop user interaction models that are understandable, liberates from the screens and move out in the physical world.

By: Joakim Formo, Ericsson AB; Jarmo Laaksolahti, Mobile Life @ SICS; Marcus Gårdman, Ericsson AB.

Published in: Proceeding. MobileHCI ‘11 Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services

Access article here, toll-access.

This book was written for anyone interested in learning more about the Arduino and robotics in general. Though some projects are geared toward college students and adults, several chapters cover robotics projects suitable for middle-school to high-school students.

by John-David Warren, Josh Adams and Harald Molle

The Arduino microcontroller is like a little command center that is awaiting your orders. With a few lines of code, you can make your Arduino turn a light on or off, read a sensor value and display it on your computer screen, or even use it to build a homemade circuit to repair a broken kitchen appliance. Because of the versatility of the Arduino and the massive support available from the online community of Arduino users, it has attracted a new breed of electronics hobbyists who have never before touched a microcontroller, let alone programmed one.

Access the book on Google Books.

As news organizations are moving towards systematically using the power of crowds in news reporting, mobile phones are potential mobile tools for reader reporters. We conducted two user studies to support the development of future mobile crowdsourcing processes and mobile tools for news reporting. In a quasi-experiment on future mobile crowdsourcing process with location-based assignments, SMS messages were experienced as an easy and handy means for news assignments. A customized mobile client prototype was preferred for submission of multimedia content (photo and video), since submission was experienced simple to use and reliable especially for videos. Based on our findings and earlier research we discuss implications for the development of mobile crowdsourcing processes with mobile news reporting assignments.

Authors: Heli Väätäjä, Tampere Univ. of Technology; Teija Vainio, Tampere Univ. of Technology; Esa Sirkkunen, University of Tampere; Kari Salo, Helsinki Metropolia University.

Published in: Proceeding MobileHCI ‘11 Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, ACM New York, NY, USA ©2011

Access article here, (toll-access).

How can new technologies be designed to support communities in reducing their energy consumption?

The Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) research team (Mike Michael, Bill Gaver, Jennifer Gabrys, Alex Wilkie, Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovalle) at Goldsmiths, University of London would like to inform you of their new interactive website at www.ecdc.ac.uk.

As a collaboration between Science and Technology Studies and Design, ECDC seeks to
understand how new technologies can be designed to support communities in reducing their energy consumption. In particular, we are interested in getting at what is often neglected in studies of energy consumption and its reduction: the imaginative, playful, emotional and potential aspects of people’s use of relevant technologies.

We are working with existing communities engaged in reducing energy demand, to understand the range of perspectives and knowledge they embody. Using materials drawn from field trips, workshops, and probes, we will design novel devices and give them to participating communities to test in their own settings. These devices will be unfamiliar, playful, ambiguous but will hopefully expose new possible ways of thinking, doing and feeling in relation to energy consumption. We will visit our participants and study what they have made of our designs. We are also interested to see what sorts of discussions have been sparked off by our designs. To this end, we have also designed this website to encourage exchanges between our participants and between our participants and wider community.

We invite you to visit the website and we welcome all contributions whether they be comments on the project, reflections on the website itself, stories about your own experiences with energy reduction projects or technologies, or suggestions of additional resources or contacts. You can contribute by emailing us at info@ecdc.ac.uk or by registering as a user and blogging directly into the website.

This interdisciplinary conference therefore aims at bringing scholars and  practitioners together from various fields interested in exploring the different ways people and societies live with, deal with, fight with  and transform capitalism.

Deadline for abstracts is November 1, 2011

In practice and theory, in daily life choices and organizational changes, in legislative initiatives, in entrepreneurial education, in artistic inventions, in individual and collective projects interesting work is being done to unfold immaterial values, human resources and utopias within a capitalist framework.

This interdisciplinary conference therefore aims at bringing scholars and  practitioners together from various fields interested in exploring the different ways people and societies live with, deal with, fight with  and transform capitalism.

Papers may be related to a range of academic disciplines and areas, e.g.sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, political sciences, entrepreneurial studies and management, media and communication studies, tourism studies, religious studies, economic and cultural geography, architecture and design studies, and aesthetics.

See more at: http://www.begivenhedskultur.dk/_events/2011/capitalism/