AoIR 2019

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Arnt Maasø, who shifts our attention to the role of metrics in the music business. Datafication has grown in the music industry as well, with a strong turn to metrics in recent years. Where some decades ago the industry was run by self-taught entrepreneurs who were running their businesses predominantly by gut instinct, now music metrics are everywhere and directly influence decision-making.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is my colleague Kim Osman, presenting outcomes from our research project in collaboration with The Conversation and the Cooperative Research Centres Association in Australia. We are interested in assessments of the public value and impact of scholarly work, which are also increasingly demanded by the governments that fund scholarly research. Slides here:

It’s Thursday morning, and after the fabulous opening keynote by Bronwyn Carlson last night the AoIR 2019 conference at QUT in Brisbane is now getting started properly. This morning I’m in a panel on metrics in journalism, academia, and music that begins with a paper I’ve been involved in, and which my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals will present. The slides are here:

It’s finally here – the 2019 Association of Internet Researchers conference has begun on my home turf at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane. We begin with a keynote by Professor Bronwyn Carlson, who opens by highlighting the continuing digital divides experienced by Indigenous Australians – while social media platforms are increasingly popular with these communities, access is largely via mobile technologies, and unevenly distributed across regions and age groups.

Bronwyn’s work has long focussed on the uses of social media by Indigenous Australians, and increasingly also on help-seeking activities on social media platforms. This year’s conference theme is Trust in the System, and this is especially relevant also to Indigenous users of digital and social media platforms. How might Indigenous users understand ‘trust in the system’? Trust is a contentious term that embodies and disembodies Indigenous experience in the last 250 years; trust in data, online archives, and information on Indigenous peoples is not guaranteed, and many such technologies, online as well as offline, have been used historically to harm Indigenous peoples.