Curating Media and Design

Edited book: “Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions, Education” to be published by Peter Lang.

Update: the book has now been published.

Editors: Dr. Indrek Ibrus (Tallinn University), Dr. Carlos A. Scolari (University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona).

The book is supported by First Motion consortium (see: http://www.firstmotion.eu), which is an EU funded initiative aimed at supporting the audiovisual industries in innovating with crossmedia output. The focus of the edited book will be on how crossmedia output constitutes and effects many of the most central innovations in modern media industries. The book will trace what are the innovative crossmedia forms like, what are the innovative institutional forms of production, how are the markets changing relatedly, and, lastly, what are the new ways of educating industry professionals to produce and innovate crossmedia output. By encompassing all these interrelated aspects the book is envisioned to offer a holistic take of the role of crossmedia output in innovating the modern media industries, markets and culture.

The rationale of the book relies on the recognition that digitalisation and convergence of existing media platforms into seamless networks of devices and platforms across which increasingly sophisticated and multimodal forms of content can travel has created an historically unprecedented situation for the media industries. Their content can be consumed on a variety of platforms creating new opportunities for establishing contacts with audiences. Hence, crossmedia content is increasingly a priority for broadcasters (Erdal 2009; Evans 2011; Perryman 2008; Villa 2010). Similarly, “Transmedia Producer” is the newest addition to the recognised professions by the Producers Guild of America. Such developments indicate how much hope the industry invests into crossmedia as constituting the core innovation strategy for media institutions (Bechmann 2007; Bolin 2007; Dena 2009; Jenkins 2006). The aim of the proposed book will be to critically investigate the nature of such innovations from a variety of perspectives.

We expect 800 words abstracts that are responsive to one of the following sub-themes of the book:

• Crossmedia innovations: textual (analyses and conceptualisations of innovative crossmedia forms and narratives how are textual forms innovated?).
• Crossmedia innovations: economic (the economic gains and challenges that relate to crossmedia strategies and output; branding; the politicial economy of crossmedia).
• Crossmedia innovations: organisational (analyses of the ways how different kinds of media institutions are reorganising themselves and innovating their practices for the crossmedia output).
• Crossmedia innovations: pedagogical (how to teach crossmedia production or transmedia storytelling, relevant case studies).

Please add 100 words biographical note to the abstract. Please send the abstracts as email-attachments to the following address: crossmedia(at)tlu.ee. In case of any questions please contact Indrek Ibrus on the following email: indrek.ibrus(at)tlu.ee.

DEADLINES:

• Deadline for 800 words abstracts: September 20, 2011
• Invitation notifications sent to authors: October 15, 2011
• Deadline for completed manuscripts (6000 words): February 29, 2012
• Acceptance letters sent to authors: May 31, 2012

Deadline has passed but the outcome of this call might be worth keeping an eye open for.

Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Boston, MA, March 21-25, 2012.

This panel invites papers on relationships between film and media industry festivals and the urban, sub-urban or rural communities that claim them.

As film and media festivals of all stripe proliferate around the world, a variety of stakeholders jockey for position and advantage in the geographical and cultural contexts chosen to host them. Many of these events are well-established and have assumed a defensive position aimed at maintaining brand identity and prestige. Others are ascendant, still others nascent at best. Each of these communities, however, have a unique relationship to their event(s), and each of these relationships provides fertile ground for investigating the role of media festivals in promoting discourses of community identity, establishing infrastructural networks, reifying the importance of being mediated, utilizing the ”local” to speak “globally”, and a variety of other processes. Case studies on particular events/locations, comparative analyses, and attempts to theorize the event-location relationship are welcome, among other approaches.

Questions addressed might include:

• how do local communities create and grow a successful media festival?
• how do established festivals deal politically, economically, structurally with host communities?
• what benefits or challenges accrue for host communities?
• what is the role of the festival in supporting both the community and the industry of which it is a part, and are these imperatives always in a state of cooperation?
• what does it mean to be a “host city”?
• what is the nature of the mediation occurring around festivals (as opposed to that deriving from other events)?
• how do we approach theoretically and epistemologically the festival/community relationship?
• how do historical/archival approaches to yesterday’s festivals help us understand today’s?

Submissions are welcome on these and related questions, and international foci are encouraged. Please send abstracts of 250 words plus a short bio to robert.peaslee(at)ttu.edu by August 15, 2011.

Submissions due Sep 30th, 2011.

We are seeking moving image work on film, video and new media platforms. We welcome work from doctoral students and post doctoral researchers, as well as those at the cutting edge of practice research both nationally and internationally. Following a hiatus, Screenworks has been relaunched online, under the new JMPScreenworks banner, under the editorship of Dr Charlotte Crofts (University of the West of England). Volumes 1 (2007) and 2 (2008) were published on DVD and distributed with The Journal of Media Practice. We are now seeking new submissions for our online publication, following the relaunch at the JMP Symposium in June 2011, aiming to make work available for the annual MeCCSA Conference in Jan 2012.

This volume of Screenworks will be an open call.

Guidelines for Contributors

Videos or documentation of other screen practice must be uploaded on Vimeo.com, even if they are available online elsewhere. If you do not already have an account, you will need to join, upload and, if necessary password protect your film using the privacy settings. You will then include the URL and the password on the Submission Form. Only if and when your work is accepted for publication will we make it available on the JMPScreenworks.com website, as an embedded Vimeo file. If your work takes any other form or you have a problem with uploading it to Vimeo, then please contact us to arrange an alternative review method.

Where submissions are documentation of interactive or installation work we encourage contributors to consider the problems of documentation as part of the research process. We want to showcase as many pieces of high quality screen media research as we can so approx. 30 minutes will probably be our maximum run time for each piece of work. We will consider extracting if the research case is made by the contributor.

The Supporting Research Statement

Statements of up to a 1500 words should outline Research Questions, Context, Methods, Outcomes and Impact using the Submission Form – although we also welcome the development of alternative ways of writing about practice which can identify new knowledge, research contexts and rigour – as long as they clearly identify the research in your submission.

There are many different kinds of screen media practice research. Our aim is to generate new knowledge in Communication, Media and Cultural Studies, Art and Design, Performing Arts and related fields. The purpose of the statement is not to explain the screenwork, but rather to offer a route map of the research process, as well as a means to provide evidence for the dissemination and wider impact of the practice.

The Peer Review Process

All work submitted to Screenworks undergoes rigourous peer review, based on initial editor screening and refereeing by at least two anonymous referees.

The submission process is that contributors should submit work via Vimeo and email the URL, plus a 1500-word supporting research statement that situates the work within a research context.

Both the statement and the work are then subject to open but anonymous peer review selected from the Screenworks editorial board representing scholar practitioners working across the field of screen media both in the UK and internationally. Reviewers will have the choice of recommending publication of both work and research statement, acceptance of work with minor rewrites of statement required, invitation to resubmit both in reworked form or of rejecting. In the case of selected work, the 500-word reviews will be published online at JMPScreenworks.com, alongside the screenwork itself and supporting research statement.

The aim is that through this process criteria for research will be generated by the community over a period of time that we will use a dialogic model of criteria generation and research. The process of open reviewing is intended to promote an active, concrete dialogue within the community of screen media scholar practitioners as to how our research is constituted, defined and disseminated.

Submission Deadline

The deadline for consideration for Vol 3 is Friday Sep 30th 2011. Submissions should be emailed to Dr Charlotte Crofts at screenworks@jmpscreenworks.com, with “Screenworks Submission” in the subject line - with the 1500-word supporting research statement attached as a Word .doc, including a live URL to the screenwork itself on Vimeo, with password where necessary.

For the Submission Form please go to: http://www.jmpscreenworks.com/page/submissions

Abstracts (200 words) due Oct 2nd.

The annual conference of the Institute of Communication Ethics is to be held on October 28 at the Commonwealth Club, 25 Northumberland Avenue, London WC2N 5AP, from 10 am to 5 pm. The theme is to be “Cops, Hacks and Hackers: Communication and Ethics in the Internet Age”. The on-going “Hackgate” controversy, the rise and rise of Twitter and the implications for personal privacy and journalistic responsibilities; and the Guardian’s use of mobile footage provided by a “citizen journalist” in its exposé on the death of news vendor Ian Tomlinson on the G20 demo in April 2009 provide some of the context for the conference.

Papers are invited on a range of issues:

• Ethics of modern (especially tabloid) journalism
• Internet ethics for journalists
• Hacks and police PR: is the relationship too close?
• Super-injunctions and serial philanderers: are there any solutions?
• The long, murky history of journalists’ relationship with the Metropolitan Police
• Is there a special role for social networks in investigative journalism?
• Law and disorder: the coverage of crime in the local media
• What’s the place for an ethically engaged literary reportage in an age of sound-bites and PR-fed churnalism?
• The history of Special Branch’s links with mainstream journalists
• How do journalists cover the crimes of the powerful and the wealthy? Are there consistent cover-ups in the coverage?
• Can internet-based investigative journalism fulfil the watchdog role that the traditional mainstream media have so often failed to provide?
• Has the framing of the WikiLeaks story by the mainstream media undermined rather than endorsed the role of whistleblowers?

Abstracts (of 200 words) on these and other related issues should be sent to ICE director Prof Richard Lance Keeble, of the University of Lincoln, (rkeeble(at)lincoln.ac.uk) before October 2. Papers chosen for the conference will be published in a special edition of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics (which has gained an A ranking in the Australian equivalent of the RAE). Leading figures from the world of academia and the communications industries will give keynote talks to the conference.

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Special Issue on Consuming the ‘Illegal’: Situating Online Piracy in Everyday Experience (Vol 19, no 1, February 2013) Deadlines for refereed research articles: 1st Feb 2012.

Research interest on peer-to-peer file exchange through services such as BitTorrent and file lockers such a MegaUpload have tended to view piracy as a product of legislative, criminal, behavioural or business contexts. It has often adopted a priori assumptions that consumers of pirated goods are ‘deviant’, ‘unethical’ or demonstrate consumer ‘misbehaviour’. Little work has yet approached piracy from an ethically neutral, bottom up, perspective and explored it through established literatures on routine consumption, everyday practice, and consumer engagement with cultural media and new technologies.

Quantitative research on piracy has demonstrated that demand for cultural goods - such as music, videogames and films - parallels that of consumption of legal versions of those goods. Moreover, research has shown that consumers of illicit downloads are also the very same people who purchase legitimate digital goods in significant quantities. In other words, piracy is profoundly linked to the ‘doing’ and ‘experiencing’ of other forms of (legitimate) consumption, rather than standing apart from it.

This special issue of Convergence seeks to bring together innovative theoretical and methodological frameworks which explore piracy through work on the socio-economics of consumption, media research and cultural policy in a manner thus far underexplored in broadening our understanding of piracy whether from a empirical, theoretical or policy relevant perspective. We invite contributions that engage with online piracy within a cultural context addressing themes including:

• Counterfeiting Cultures: Investigating tensions in the control and consumption of knowledge, social- and cultural-capital embodied in pirated texts to look at ways in which user access is limited through the use of copyright to generate revenue.
• Criminalising the Consumer: Looking at discourses of deviance in academic research as well as media representations and trade campaigns questioning their use and implications for researchers.
• Communities of Fans/Collections of Pirates: Exploring the research on enthusiasts - especially for cultural goods such as music, film and games - considering how fan identity and communities of practice integrate consumption practices.
• Policy and Practice: Considering the impacts state policy has had upon internet use, mapping the unintended consequences of legislative changes such as the emergence of services offering identity protection to file-sharers.
• Piracy and Innovation: Questioning whether piracy as a cultural, technological and political activity can have an impact on developments in business and cultural activities.

Please send all proposals and completed articles to robert.jewitt(at)sunderland.ac.uk

Deadlines for refereed research articles: 1st Feb 2012.

All contributors must read the Convergence Instructions to authors http://convergence.beds.ac.uk/submissions/instructions before submission.

More information: http://convergence.beds.ac.uk/

Locked deep in the bowels of Winchester University a team of deranged (social) scientists from the School of Media and Film have been conducting hideous research into the living dead (clearly ignoring the guidelines of the Faculty of Arts Research Ethics committee).  The research has now escaped and we invite colleagues to join us and spread your own diabolical research on Zombies at ‘ZOMBOSIUM’ - a one day symposium/conference on zombies on the 28th October 2011.

The Zombie virus (if that is what caused them) has spread across the media and now infects film, television, new media (especially web 2.0 and social media), computer and video games, print media (comics and other formats) and literary texts.

We welcome papers that will infect the audience with research considering zombies in the above media and with topics such as:

• Zombie culture;
• Aspects of Zombie films and ‘Cinema Zombie’;
• Zombie B movies;
• George A. Romero’s world;
• Shopping malls and zombie geography;
• Self help videos for the post apocalyptic world;
• Zombie guides;
• Zombie creatives and practitioners;
• Theorising zombies;
• Zombie fan fiction and fan film;
• Online communal texts on zombie;
• Zombie TV shows: including The Walking Dead and Dead Set;
• Nazi zombies;
• Zombie games and mods;
• Zombie novels;
• Zombie comics;
• Zombies in music.

Keynote to be announced.

Abstracts of up to 250 words should be emailed to marcus.leaning(at)winchester.ac.uk by September 9th 2011.

The Zombosium is free to attend and lunch will be provided.

This year, 2011, marks the centenary of the famous Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan. The Institute of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen is proud to present “The Legacy of Marshall McLuhan - Revisiting the Message”: a seminar dedicated to this visionary yet controversial, but undeniably deeply influential media theorist.

Monday, October 31, 2011 – Copenhagen

http://hum.ku.dk/kalender/2011/oktober/the_legacy_of_marshall_mcluhan/ (in Danish)

http://hum.ku.dk/kalender/2011/oktober/the_legacy_of_marshall_mcluhan/Seminar_-_The_Legacy_of_Marshall_McLuhan.pdf/

Keynote speakers:

Paul Levinson, Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University, New York

Robert Logan, Professor Emeritus, U. of Toronto

Presentation:

This year, 2011, marks the centenary of the famous Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan. The Institute of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen is proud to present “The Legacy of Marshall McLuhan - Revisiting the Message”: a seminar dedicated to this visionary yet controversial, but undeniably deeply influential media theorist.

McLuhan revolutionized media studies in the 1960’s by simply pointing to the importance of the media itself as opposed to the content they carry. This is best illustrated by his seminal observation that “The Medium is the Message”. To further prove his point, McLuhan followed with thought-provoking claims like “Media are the Extensions of Man”, and his observation that we live in a “Global Village” which received much attention within as well as outside academic spheres. He argued that the emergence of electronic technology introduced a need to re-think media and communication. While many were puzzled by McLuhan’s extensive visions of electronic media at the time, his ideas have since been revitalised, especially with the rise of digital media from the 1990’s onwards.

Today, with our daily lives immersed in all sorts of media - social media, mobile media, converging media etc. - it seems more natural than ever to talk about media being the message. Thus, the centenary of Marshall McLuhan provides a welcome opportunity to consider his legacy, how the work of McLuhan can help bring insights into our current media environment and where it might be heading.

Programme:

To be announced…

Address: Festsalen, IVA/Royal School of Library and Information Science (formerly known as Biblioteksskolen). Birketinget 6, København S.

For more information:

Mogens Olesen - Assistant Professor, PhD - Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen - olesen@hum.ku.dk

Arranged by University of Copenhagen, Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics & Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, and Royal School of Library and Information Science.

May 09 - 11, 2012. Istanbul – Turkey.

International Conference on Communication, Media, Technology and Design (ICCMTD) aims on gathering all the academicians around the globe to share and discuss their ideas, work and research by presenting their work and/or participate in valuable panel discussions about all topics on;

1. New Communication Technologies: Social aspects of the new Communication Technologies, Convergence of the Communication Technologies, Communication Technologies in Education, Computer Mediated Communication and Social Media.
2. Communication Barriers: Communication Barriers in Education, Communication Barriers in Distance Education, Communication Barriers in Media and Communication Barriers in Politics.
3. Visual Arts & Visual Communication Design: Visual Literacy, Visual Representation Semiotics, Theory of Perception, New Media Art, Digital Art, Photography, Graphics, Art and Design
4. Marketing Communication: Integrated Marketing Communication, Advertising, Public Relations, Point of Purchase, Package Design and E–Marketing
5. Communication and Media Studies in general

ICCMTD is powered by the

• Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies - OJCMT (www.ojcmt.net)
• Contemporary Educational Technology - CEDTECH (www.cedtech.net)
• Anadolu University - Institute of Communication Sciences – Turkey
• Department of Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design – Faculty of Communication and Media Studies – Eastern Mediterranean University.

ICCMTD is proud to inform you that the following precious keynote speakers are also invited:

Ali Simsek, Turkey – Communication Technologies

Besim Mustafa, UK - Communication Technologies (Behind the Scenes)

Zane Berge, USA – Communication Barriers (Distance Education)

Umit Inatci, North Cyprus – Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design

Rachel Barker, South Africa – Integrated Marketing Communication

Important Deadlines

• Last day for submission of Presentation/Panel abstracts - 31 December 2011
• Last day for Author notification of acceptance - 15 January 2012
• Last day for submission of Camera-ready Presentation/Panel manuscript - 15 March 2012
• Audience Registration; Accompanying Person Registration(s); Accommodation Reservation(s) - 16 - 31 March 2012
• Last day for Payments - 31 March 2012
• ICCMTD – 2012 Istanbul/Turkey - 12 - 14 May 2012

(The given deadlines are according to Istanbul/Turkey date and time)

For more details please visit the conference website http://www.cmdconf.net