There's a quiet revolution underway - a revolution that could result in the birth of an entirely new academic discipline. Spearheaded by John Hartley and Stuart Cunningham in QUT's Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi), and in collaboration with an international group of high-profile researchers, they're investigating the potential for joining elements of cultural studies, evolutionary economics, anthropology, and other disciplines in a new field called cultural science.

Over the next few weeks I'll be a participant in a number of events in Brisbane and online. As always, I'll try to do as much live-blogging as possible. Here's a preview of what's coming up:

• This Wednesday and Thursday I'm at the AMIC conference on Convergence, Citizen Journalism, and Social Change, where I'll also present my paper "[weblink:787]". I've already uploaded the Powerpoint slides and full paper for this (a round-up of citizen journalism developments during the 2007 Australian federal election), and I'll try to record the presentation as well.
  

• I'll end up missing the last half-day of …

This morning I'm spending time in a seminar by Ralph Schroeder from the Oxford Internet Institute, organised by the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation. There's another seminar this afternoon, but this morning Ralph's talking about e-Research and the development of tools for distributed knowledge production.

He begins by noting the significant interest and investment in e-research - the shared use of digital distributed tools, data, and resources for research; these change the research landscape by globalising knowledge, reconfiguring disciplines, and (perhaps) ultimately advancing science. Knowledge, however, is traditionally understood as being always local, and tends to be siloed in specific disciplines - e-research breaks with such assumptions, and allows scientists to conduct interdisciplinary work which shifts boundaries. Science, at any rate, is drifting gradually towards more team-based research approaches, and the amount of scientific data and information is increasing rapidly.

Vancouver.
We're coming towards the end of the last day here at AoIR 2007, and Kirsten Foot is the first speaker in the post-lunch session, presenting a co-authored paper on link structures and engagement practices in U.S. and U.K. fair trade networks. Fair trade movements aim to develop more equitable practices in international commerce in a variety of commodities (not just coffee), and Kirsten and her colleagues examined fair trade movements' historical roots (since the end of World War II) in a previous study; in the U.K., contrary to the U.S., there are also important relationships with government bodies (and there are a number of official 'fair trade towns' in the U.K., but only one in the U.S.). U.K. movements are now having some impact even on European Union policy, in fact. In the U.S., targets of such movements are usually corporations, by comparison.

Heh. At least it seems like the Higher Education section of The Australian has managed to quarantine itself from the melt-down that's occurred amongst its political journalists. There's a nice piece there today about our efforts at QUT to develop the C4C framework of collaborative capacities required of graduates in the developing produsage environment - an article which was sparked by our paper at Mobile Media 2007 (and a similar paper I presented at ICE 3 earlier this year). Campus Review also reported on this recently, following a Sydney University press release. Neither note Trendwatching as the originators …