Curating Media and Design

Book: Spreadable Media – Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Spreadable Media, by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, maps fundamental changes taking place in our contemporary media environment, a space where corporations no longer tightly control media distribution and many of us are directly involved in the circulation of content.

The authors introduce the concept of “spreadability” to describe the ways content travels through social media.

If you don’t have the time to read the book you can listen to a discussion about it from SXSW Interactive 2013.

Authors: Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green

Publisher: NYU Press, 2013.

New book: Synthetic Overview of the Collaborative Economy (CC:BY-NC-SA)

This book (or, really, a report) is a “comprehensive survey and analysis of new forms of collaborative production on the Internet”.

Author: Michel Bauwens who runs the P2P Foundation.

Download: http://p2p.coop/files/reports/collaborative-economy-2012.pdf

EXCERPT – Two main agents of transformation guide this work. One is the emergence of community dynamics as an essential ingredient of doing business. It is no longer a matter of autonomous and separated corporations marketing to essentially isolated consumers; it is now a matter of deeply inter-networked economic actors involved in vocal and productive communities. The second is that the combined effect of digital reproduction and the increasingly ‘socialized’ production of value, makes the individual and corporate privatization of ‘intellectual’ property if not untenable, then certainly more difficult and, in all likelihood, ultimately unproductive. Hence the combined development of community-oriented and ‘open’ business models, which rely on more ‘social’ forms of intellectual property.

Dissertation: Going Live - Collaborative Video Production After Television

This thesis explores social and creative practices that emerge with new mobile video technology. We have designed and developed two functional prototype systems and produced a number of theoretical contributions to the understanding of the collaborative mobile video space.

Author: Arvid Engström, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University

Access here: http://www.tii.se/mobility/?page_id=1695 or have a look at http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-75931 where it might also show up.

ABSTRACT - This thesis explores social and creative practices that emerge with new mobile video technology. The work frames a design space that spans across both the social and technical domains. It associates emerging collaborative practices online with new means for producing and broadcasting media in real time, over mobile networks and using low-cost consumer technology just as these technologies are becoming widely available in the world. As a premise, we sketch a scenario where groups of non-professional users, enabled by new technology available in their mobile phones, produce live media collaboratively. We use detailed ethnographic inquiries into the practices of expert media producers to inform design and spur innovation of new technology. Over the course of the design research process, we have designed and developed two functional prototype systems and produced a number of theoretical contributions to the understanding of the collaborative mobile video space.

Parts:

Mobile broadcasting – The whats and hows of live video as a social medium
Lean collaboration through video gestures: co-ordinating the production of live televised sport
Temporal hybridity: Mixing live video footage with instant replay in real time
Mobile collaborative live video mixing
Amateur vision and recreational orientation: Creating live video together

Aca-article: Using Web 2.0 Tools to Enhance Learning in Higher Education - A Case Study in Technological Education

In this paper, we explore the possibility of using social networking tools to support teaching practice in technological courses.

Authors: Chi-Un Lei, Tomas Krilavicius, Nan Zhang, Kaiyu Wan and Ka Lok Man

Published in Proceedings of the International Multiconference of Engineers and Computer Scientists 2012 Vol II, IMECS 2012, March 14-16, Hong Kong.

Access the article here.

Abstract

Pedagogy with Web 2.0 technologies is shown to facilitate the teaching-learning process through content sharing and idea collaboration. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using social networking tools, to support teaching practice in technological courses. In our study, we utilized 1) Facebook Page as a platform to share content, experiences and news of a general engineering course, and 2) blog as a collaborative writing tool to express thoughts and opinions in a common core (general education) course. After our one-semester (threemonths) study, we found that Facebook Page is an easy-touse and familiar tool for students to share and exchange ideas among classmates, peers and public.

Index Terms: Information technology in education, general education, Facebook, social media network, blog, technological education, higher education

CFP: International New Media Conference (due May 10, Istanbul)

Conference that wants to, e.g., develop critical frameworks and methodologies that enable the reception, consumption and impact of new technologies, specifically the conference focuses on human-computer interaction, computer-mediated communication, social interaction and networking, organizational contexts and cultural contexts.

Abstracts due May 10, 2012. Istanbul, Turkey, May 16-18, 2012.

The principal objectives of International New Media Conference are:

to develop critical frameworks and methodologies that enable the reception, consumption and impact of new technologies, specifically the conference focuses on human-computer interaction, computer-mediated communication, social interaction and networking, organizational contexts and cultural contexts.
to contextualize the environments, discourses, ideologies, and uses of new media technologies, and to address the specific implications of the increasing convergence of media forms
to analyze the conditions of emergence of new media technologies, and the development of new cultural forms and media productions
to promote discussion and analysis of the creative and educational potentials of those technologies, and to contextualise those cultural practices within wider cultural and political debates.
to attempt to reveal inter- and intra-disciplinary research of new media texts and technologies.

The themes of the conference will cover but not be limited to:

The mobilization of local, national, and transnational social movements through the use of social network sites, tweets, texting, and other forms of networked and instantaneous communication forms.
The rhetoric of digital equality and unequal access to digital culture: class, race, region, and gender, and access to social media and digital communication technologies.
The impact of digital culture on collective memory, conceptions of the historical, historical research methods, and the writing of history.
The role of history in digital humanities: archival practices, collecting history online, historical text mining, and digital storytelling.

Details for attending, for paying registration, and for submitting abstracts and papers are now available on the website: http://www.inm-c.net/

To submit your papers to this conference, you must first log into the INMC2012 site or create a login account

For more information, please contact inmconference2012@gmail.com

New Book: Net Smart - How to Thrive Online (by Howard Rheingold)

In this book, cyberculture expert Howard Rheingold shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully. To be published March 23, 2012.

Published by the MIT Press. View on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262017458/apophenia-20

Book description

Like it or not, knowing how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century. But how can we use digital media so that they make us empowered participants rather than passive receivers, grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking basket cases? In Net Smart, cyberculture expert Howard Rheingold shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully.

Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this:

attention
participation
collaboration
critical consumption of information (or “crap detection”)
network smarts.

Rheingold explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; he examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and he teaches us a lesson on networks and network building

Rheingold points out that there is a bigger social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal empowerment. If we combine our individual efforts wisely, it could produce a more thoughtful society: countless small acts like publishing a Web page or sharing a link could add up to a public good that enriches everybody.

Found on Twitter via @zephoria

CFP: Internet and New Productive Paradigms - the STS Contribution (due March 1, 2012)

The diffusion of the Internet shows the emergence of new and socio-technical arrangements that seem to call into question our traditional separation between production and consumption. Instead of taking the emergence of the new production paradigm as a matter of fact, the goal of this track is to describe and understand the practices and dynamics that characterize the socio-technical collectives behind the phenomena.

Abstracts due March 31, 2012. Thematic session at EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES, SOCIAL WORLDS, the 4th National Conference of STS Italia (Italian Society of Science and Technology Studies).

The conference will be held in Rovigo from 21 to 23 June 2012, and will be organized in partnership with CIGA of the University of Padua (Centre for Environmental Law Decisions and Corporate Ethical Certification).

Brief
The exponential diffusion of the Internet on a global scale shows the emergence of new and socio-technical arrangements that seem to call into question our traditional separation between production and consumption. For many, we are witnessing the emergence and consolidation of a completely new production paradigm where production processes are decentralised, distributed among an undisclosed mass of actors often proactive, sometimes without a predictable path. The examples of this grow daily: Wikipedia, free and open source software and hardware, folksonomies, crowdsourcing platforms, online hacktivism, Do-it-Yourself communities, and so on.

New concepts have been developed in an attempt to capture these new practices and these new socio-technical arrangements: in the late 1970s, Toffler (1980) theorized the emergence of the prosumer, both producer and consumer of goods. This phenomenon of convergence between the producer and consumer has stimulated research to generate new concepts such as “wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006),” commons-based peer production “(Benkler, 2006),” produsage “(Bruns, 2008), and ideas like the Hacktivism (Auty, 2004) or Mash-ups technology (Hartmann et al. 2006).

At the same time, however, we are witnessing the emergence of criticisms that highlight that these innovative aspects are the perpetuation, more or less obvious, of the traditional capitalist logic. This seems to fuel disputes around the themese of control, surveillance, exploitation of intellectual property management, deskilling, etc. (Lash, 2002, Terranova, 2000, De Paoli and Storni, 2011)

Instead of taking the emergence of the new production paradigm as a matter of fact, the goal of this track is to describe and understand the practices and dynamics that characterize the socio-technical collectives behind the phenomena mentioned above, and discuss how they help us to rethink not only the traditional division of labour between production and consumption, but mostly what we mean with the terms work, production, consumption, and property (commons) in our information society.

In this sense to invite contributions and case studies in different areas to discuss, but are not limited to:

the role of STS in the study of new emerging practices in the information society;
how to rethink and/or deconstruct empirically the concepts of production, consumption, property, work and good: debates, controversies and new definitions;
doing and undoing the boundaries between production and consumption (or design and use);
new conceptions of labor and its distribution;
Do-it-Yourself and Do-it-with-Others: new practices?

Abstracts (in Italian or* English)* should be sent as email attachment (as MS word or Rich Text Format) to the track’s coordinators (and carbon copied to4convegnosts@gmail.com) by* March 1, 2012*. Abstracts with a maximum length of *500 words* should contain the title, author’s name, affiliation and contact details including e-mail.

The call for contributions can be downloaded from http://www.stsitalia.org/conferences/STSITALIA_2012/STS_Track4.pdf

Further information on the conference on: http://www.stsitalia.org/?p=744&lang=en

Aca-article: StoryCrate - Tabletop Storyboarding for Live Film Production

Creating film content for broadcast is a high pressure and complex activity involving multiple experts and highly specialized equipment. We describe a prototype tangible, tabletop interface to be deployed on a film shoot, which uses a storyboard as a shared data representation to drive team creativity.

Authors: Tom Bartindale, Nick Taylor, Peter Wright, Patrick Olivier, Culture Lab, School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, UK and Alia Sheikh BBC Research & Development, London, UK.

CHI’12, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA

ABSTRACT
Creating film content for broadcast is a high pressure and complex activity involving multiple experts and highly specialized equipment. Production teams are under continuous pressure to produce ever more creative and groundbreaking content while reducing the budgets and human resources required. While technologies are being developed for digitizing and streamlining sections of the production workflow, a gap remains between creative decisions made on location, and those made during digital editing and post-production. We describe a prototype tangible, tabletop interface to be deployed on a film shoot, which uses a storyboard as a shared data representation to drive team creativity. We define creativity in terms of team production, discuss our implementation and describe a deployment in which the prototype was used by a
professional production team during a film shoot. Finally we describe a number of interesting interactions that were observed and consider the implications of our design decisions on the creative process of film making and the benefits of tangible, tabletop collaborative interactive displays in live film production.

AUTHOR KEYWORDS
Broadcast; tangible interface; collaborative work; interdisciplinary; prototype, storyboarding; editing

Access full article here, open access http://www.nick-taylor.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/bartindale_chi2012_storycrate.pdf

Call for Papers: Communication Approaches to Participatory Websites and User-Generated Content

In this special issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, we invite evidence-based papers that address the creation and impacts of user-generated content, system-aggregated indicators of user input, and/or their interplay with owner-generated content, on the perceptions, attitudes, and behavior of participants and viewers of Web 2.0 sites.

Deadline for submission is December 10, 2011.

Call for Papers: Special issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, “Communication Approaches to Participatory Websites and User-Generated Content.” Joseph B. Walther, guest editor.

Among the most important developments in CMC are participatory websites featuring user-generated content (e.g., Web 2.0 sites with product/seller reviews, social network sites that invite “friends’” contributions, talk-back features on online news sites, wikis, etc.).

This issue of JCMC will focus on the extension, adaptation, and application of theoretical approaches to the uses and effects of these messaging systems. We invite evidence-based papers that address the creation and impacts of user-generated content, system-aggregated indicators of user input, and/or their interplay with owner-generated content, on the perceptions, attitudes, and behavior of participants and viewers of such sites.

Criteria for acceptance will involve the degree of exemplification of the communication aspects of the topic, and the degree to which articles join theoretical analysis with rigorous empirical investigation. Manuscripts will be reviewed anonymously by a special editorial board and other JCMC reviewers; authors must prepare submissions to facilitate anonymous review.

Submissions must not exceed 30 pages, and must reflect APA (6th ed.) style.

Deadline for submission is December 10, 2011.

Please contact the editor with any questions, or to submit manuscripts as
attachments, at jcmc(at)cmcresearch.org.

Dissertation: Immediacy and Aesthetic Remediation in Television and Digital Media - Mass Media’s Challenge to the Democratization of Media Production

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.

ir.lib.uwo.ca

Posts tagged collaborative media