Blog

Canberra.
The next speaker at DHA2012 is Sora Park, whose interest is in the processes of online discussion participation, initially especially in the context of the 100 days of political protest in South Korea in 2008. Different online discussion platforms have different affordances, of course – some will list only the most recent or most popular (or most recently popular) posts, for example, thus directing users’ attention towards specific contributions.

Questions around online discussion address topics such as whether there is true debate or just an exchange of partisan statements; whether there is a disparity between readership and authorship; whether …

Canberra.
The first paper session at the Digital Humanities Australasia conference starts with a paper presented by Cynthia Witney, and deals with the differences between social networks and online communities. This is part of an ARC Linkage project which develops guidelines for an online community for breast cancer survivors, also sponsored by the Steel Blue boot company’s ‘purple boots’ philanthropic campaign.

Part of the aim here was also to move the campaign into a Web 2.0 space by developing a ‘purple boot brigade’ social network site; an early version of this network (based on Ning) attracted some 880 supporters …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …