Snurb's blog

Brisbane.
The next plenary speaker here at the CCi conference is Camilla Cooke. She managed the Australian Labor Party's digital campaign during the 2007 Australian federal election - "Australia's first digital election", as she describes it. Initial ideas for this campaign (even before the arrival of Kevin Rudd as opposition leader) were to engage debate, to use the Web for propagating messages, to utilise it as the key route to youth, and to use it for highly efficient and cost-effective marketing. Ultimately, these goals transformed into components like the Kevin07 Website, the social networking spaces, in Facebook and elsewhere, the YouTube channel, and a variety of other online platforms - and they also enabled the campaign to do some slightly cheeky things which would not have worked in other media works.

Brisbane.
There's a great line-up of keynotes and plenary speeches starting this second day of the CCi conference, before we get back to paper sessions: we kick off with Convergence Culture guru and serial book launcher Henry Jenkins, then move on to Camilla Cooke who was the driving force behind the online arm of the Australian Labor Party's successful Kevin07 campaign in the last federal election, and follow this with journalist and commentator Margaret Simons speaking on future directions for mainstream journalism. Should be good!

The first day at the CCi conference ended with Henry Jenkins launching a bunch of recent books, including my own Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage and a number of other books by QUT colleagues. Among the books launched were:

Brisbane.
We're now in the final session of the first day at the CCi conference, which I'll try to chair and blog at the same time - we'll see how it goes. My colleague Terry Flew is the first presenter, and he begins by outlining the three layers of impact of new media technologies as artefacts or devices (technologies); communication activities and practices using these technologies; and the social arrangements, institutions, and organisational forms which develop around the use and management of such technologies. Journalism has so far responded to the Internet as a new technology mainly in the first sense, no so much in the two latter senses. This also takes place at a time of perceived crisis in journalism, and in the face of the emergence of citizen journalism in responding to that crisis.

Brisbane.
The second plenary speaker here at the CCi conference is Richard Allan, a former UK member of parliament who is now working with Cisco Systems and is involved with the UK government Power of Information Task Force. Public sector information consists in part of information about people and places, about public services, and about public culture; traditionally it exists across a data, an analysis, and a presentation layer. The former two are increasingly open for access, the latter also for more flexible interaction. With the rise of the Web as a public information medium, the number of public information Websites has multiplied almost beyond control, and in the UK there is now a drive to consolidate government Websites from over 2500 to a more manageable number in the future. (Even the UK and Australian secret services now have their Websites.)

Brisbane.
The next session I'm attending at the CCi conference is also (broadly) on citizen journalism. Andrew Kenyon from the University of Melbourne is the first speaker, and his focus is especially on the legal perspective on journalism as public speech, building on interviews with editors, journalists, and other media workers. Legal frameworks enable in particular the search for truth, the maintenance of democracy, and (especially in the US) a critique of government, but public speech is often positioned as fulfilling a more generic function (such as consensus formation). Public speech often critiques, and limited protections for public speech is often seen as having a chilling effect on the diversity of public speech that is possible.

Brisbane.
We're now starting the first panel session of the CCi conference, and this is the panel on citizen journalism that my paper is in as well, so I'm including the Powerpoint below (audio to be added later available now).

The first speaker is David McKnight from UNSW, whose focus is on the future of quality journalism in the emerging media environment. He points to a perspective that newspapers are now an 'endangered species'; The Australian passionately rejected this in a September 2006 editorial. It suggested a commitment to quality journalism as an important continuing strategy for newspapers. Nonetheless, the economic case for newspaper publishing is becoming increasingly difficult; circulations are falling and especially classified advertising is moving away from print.

Brisbane.
The CCi conference is about to start, with the opening keynote address by the wonderfully titled Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield. She begins by highlighting the role of creativity as a key commodity of the 21st century, and (as a neuroscientist) points especially to the question of what happens physically in the creative brain. The brain determines our perspective on the world, yet it is impossible to convey to others exactly what that perspective is (we resort to various forms of communication as a means for doing so); some views say that the abilities of the brain are themself determined by DNA.

I'll be spending the rest of this week at the inaugural conference of the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) here in Brisbane, and I'll try to live-blog as much as possible from the conference. This should be a great event - keynote speakers include Baroness Susan Greenfield, MIT's Henry Jenkins, Mark Deuze (the author of Media Work), and a number of other luminaries in the field. Henry will also be launching a number of books (including my own Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage) on Wednesday evening.

There's a strong citizen journalism stream in the conference, and my own paper operates in that field, too - titled "Beyond the Pro/Am Schism: Opportunities for Collaboration between Professional and Citizen Journalists under a Produsage Framework", it's more of an exploratory rumination on questions which I've found myself coming back to repeatedly over the past few years; from my study of organisational models for the collaborative production of online news in Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production to my work on produsage across various domains of knowledge creation in Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond, it seems to me that the great unanswered question remains how to effectively combine broad participatory (i.e. citizen) involvement and enable the recognition of expert ('professional') knowledges.

(Crossposted from Gatewatching.)

In this second part, we'll follow on from our discussion of key themes in The Other Cheek, Larvatus Prodeo, and Club Troppo by looking at the concept maps which Leximancer produces. But first, a recap of the background for this study: I've already posted about our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) and the end of January 2008. We distinguish between different functional components of blogs and blog pages, and what I'm focussing on here are the blog posts themselves, which are of course the major discursive element of any blog - as part of our approach, we've separated these posts from all other content on the blog (headers, footers, blogrolls, sidebars, comments sections, etc.).

What I've done here in the first place is to run the concept mapping software Leximancer over the content gathered from a selection of key Australian blogs. In the first part of this post, I simply listed the key terms for each blog in order of frequency (giving a quick indication of what they're frequently talking about), which produced some notable differences between the three blogs. My reading of this is that Club Troppo focusses much more strongly on policy analysis over political wonkery and insider gossip; for The Other Cheek, the balance is reversed, while Larvatus Prodeo sits somewhere in the middle.

In this second part, I'll map these blogs' key terms in relation to one another - terms which frequently co-occur in close proximity to one another in the text are located closer to one another on the map than terms which don't, in other words. The resulting maps provide further support to the observation that the blogs have different points of focus in their day-to-day coverage of politics - and by plotting all frequently-used terms on the map, the exact nature of these topical clusters becomes a little clearer, too.