Snurb's blog

Canberra.
It’s a rainy morning in Canberra, and I’ve made it to the inaugural conference of the Australasian Association for the Digital Humanities. The opening keynote is by Alan Liu, who begins by noting the rise of the ‘digital humanities’ concept, and its attendant controversies (what do we mean by the term, in the first place?).

Alan’s specific interest is in literary studies, and in the debate between ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading. New critical close reading first forged the professional identity of the humanities, especially in literary studies, but distant reading has now emerged as a conscious agenda of the digital humanities, and is shaping new perspectives on academic literacies.

Twelve months ago Brisbane, and the South East Queensland region, were just about to begin the long process of recovery from the major floods which affected Toowoomba, the Lockyer Valley, Ipswich, and Brisbane itself. One of the more positive stories to emerge from the crisis, though, was how social media were used as a tool for sharing news and information about the disaster, and for assisting locals with organising the (significantly volunteer-driven) relief and recovery effort.

To document these uses – especially of Twitter, though Facebook was also important –, we’ve now released a major research report through the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, as an outcome from our overall efforts in researching the uses of Twitter and developing tools and methods for such research, which we’re sharing over on the Mapping Online Publics site. The report is available here.

Time for a quick update again: I’m hardly even back from the SBPJor conference in Rio de Janeiro in November, but my keynote “Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, Real-Time Feedback: New Challenges for Journalism” from the conference has already been published in the Brazilian Journalism Research journal, alongside the other keynotes. I posted the slides and audio from the presentation last month – and a similar presentation in German, from my visit to Vienna in March, is also online here.

When I arrived back in my office from the Rio trip, I was also very pleased to see that the Digital Difference book, collecting papers from the 2007 Ideas, Cyberspace, Education 3 conference on the shores of Loch Lomond, had finally arrived. It’s been a long road, but congratulations to the editors, Ray Land and Siân Bayne, for sticking with the project. My article, “Beyond Difference: Reconfiguring Education for the User-Led Age”, applies produsage concepts to explore new approaches to education.

Rio de Janeiro.
My own keynote presentation started the second day of SBPJor. Powerpoint and audio are below; the full paper (which attacks the topic from a slightly different angle, but makes much the same points) is also online.

My sincere thanks to Carlos Franciscato and the SBPJor organisation for the invitation to speak at the conference; it’s been great to meet some of the many Brazilian journalism researchers whose work I’ve been aware of for some time now. I’m sorry that because of the language barrier I’ve not been able to participate more fully in the conference itself, but I hope my contribution has been useful – some good discussion in question time, certainly!

Rio de Janeiro.
The next keynote speaker at SBPJor is Marcos Palacios (whose speech I hear in live translation, so we’ll see how this liveblog goes…). Marcos suggests that there are hurrahs as well as uh-ohs in the transformation of journalism for the digital media environment: in the first place, as we venture into a digital environment, we learn that media have memory – that there are more uses for yesterday’s newspaper than to wrap today’s fish.

News has been called the first draft of history, of course – journalism has an input into both historiography, and into the formation of the collective memory of societies. Such journalistic memory was only able to be used in a limited fashion during the pre-digital age; today, it is much more widely and permanently available. The place of memory in journalism production is growing, therefore; memory becomes the fabric that builds the journalism we are coming to know today, and is embodied in it. This enables historical analogies and nostalgia, for example, but also has many other uses.

Rio de Janeiro.
As part of my last overseas trip for this year, I’ve made it to Brazil for SBPJor, the conference of Brazilian journalism researchers – which opens with a keynote by John Pavlik. (My own plenary presentation follows tomorrow morning.) John’s focus is on the consequences of digital journalism for democracy: chief amongst these, disruption and innovation in the journalism industry; the emergence of a digital divide between those with and without access; the development of more robust interactive media; greater transparency in government; and increased civic participation.

Disruption and innovation is driven by greater access to high-speed wired and wireless Internet, as well as new (also mobile) technologies which enable us to connect to these networks. Additionally, the global economic downturn also presents great challenges for the media to reinvent themselves; this has been a problem for the mainstream media, but also provides opportunities for new media players to step into the breach.

Berlin.
The third day at the Berlin Symposium starts with a brief keynote by Damon Horowitz from Google, who outlines some further research challenges for the new Institute for Internet and Society. He begins by considering the auto-complete function of Web forms (as in Google search) – this is a simple indication of how data is gathered about usage patterns in pursuit of greater systems efficiency: it can be beneficial, but also a sign of humans losing agency to the system.

Second, the social media status update: a simple way of starting a conversation, of sharing information, of spreading ourselves; but where do such updates go? Who are the intended, or actual recipients? What are the consequences? Once we’ve tasted the pleasure of communicating more widely this way, it’s difficult to restrain ourselves from using this functionality – but do we understand the full implications of doing so?

Berlin.
Finally, Karl-Heinz Ladeur responds to Wolfgang’s talk at the Berlin Symposium by also highlighting the fragmentation of the public sphere: first, on the one hand, there was a vision of a homogeneous political public organised in concentric circles, whose deliberative processes are facilitated by a supposedly neutral media; on the other hand, there was a view of a cultural public which integrates the imagined nation state with the society of individuals.

But through the gradual transformation of the media, a more active media role came to greater prominence; media were no longer seen as neutral, but as actors in their own right, and the notion of an entertainment public arose. Audiovisual media played an immediate role in the reproduction of everyday life in its fragmentation, and in the presentation of possible social norms – reality TV is the culmination of this process.

Berlin.
The next speaker in this session at the Berlin Symposium is the Hans-Bredow-Institut’s Wolfgang Schulz, whose focus is on the impact of social media in changing the public sphere. Social media combine two key aspects: they articulate the social graph (providing social networking functionalities), and they lower the barriers for user-generated content (providing communicative and content sharing functionalities).

Uses of social media are governed by various rules: legally protected interests include copyright, personal data, communication transparency, protection of the private sphere, protection of minors, prohibition of hate speech, etc.; governance, though, takes place through technological means (software design and code), crowd-originated social norms, and other processes.

Berlin.
In response to Chris W. Anderson’s talk at the Berlin Symposium, Lorenz Matzat now discusses the question of ‘robot journalism’ and its impact on newsroom jobs. There is a substantial increase in the amount of data being collected (and to some extent, made available) by all sorts of devices; these data would also be valuable for journalistic purposes, of course.