Ugh. Having been at work since 7.30 a.m. to make some solid progress on the edgeX ("Mapping the Missing Grassroots") project and develop up some tech specs for the site we'll build for it, I got home at 6.30 p.m. only to move right on to producing the next issue of M/C Journal, which I'm happy to say is online as of now (that is, 1 a.m.) - and there'll be a formal announcement shortly. From what I've seen of the articles during the production process, editors Henk Huijser and Brooke Collins-Gearing have done excellent work, and I look forward to reading some of the articles in more detail.
We went on a nice but all-too-short post-V-day getaway to North Stradbroke Island last weekend, but I'm afraid any sense of relaxation went out the window quickly when I saw on Monday that numbers in my Creative Industries unit had risen to nearly 370 students by Monday morning. This meant quickly adding a couple more tutors and giving them an induction to the material, and elsewhere too I've been playing catchup all week already - not because I've been slack in the lead-up to the semester, but because there's just so much to do at the moment.
It's been a busy week - partly also because I'm going on holidays in the middle of next week and wanted to finish a few things before then. So, I spent most of last night working on one of the audio recordings from my recent trip to the U.S.: I've now added a recording from my guest lecture [weblink:286] to this site. As I said back then, my favourite version of that lecture was the one I gave at Temple University in Philadelphia, and so I worked mainly with that recording; however, I also noticed that for some reason the last few minutes of it were missing from the recording, and so I've spliced in the ending from the Brown University recording a few days earlier. In addition, I also made some minor updates to my list of recent publications, splitting this up into publications, recorded talks, and creative work, and added a box with the most recent stuff in the upper right corner of this blog. Hope that's useful. I'm hoping to add recordings from my Wikinews paper at AoIR 2005, and the Northeastern University New Media Panel, soon.
Amidst all sorts of other work, including last-ditch editorial work on Uses of Blogs with Jo Jacobs, end-of-semester assignment marking and moderating for various units, the development of new research projects, and my emerging role as conference chair for the 2006 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Brisbane, I've finally managed to write a first introductory piece on produsers and produsage. This follows on from my residency at the Institute for Distributed Creativity last month (where I also recorded a video statement on produsage), and has also been posted on the iDC site itself (and will probably make …
This text was one of the outcomes of my research residency at the Institute for Distributed Creativity in Buffalo and New York City in late 2005. My thanks especially to my host Trebor Scholz, and the many colleagues and students I met during the residency. (You can also watch a brief video statement on produsage which I recorded during the residency.)
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(Singapore) I've been travelling for around 24 hours straight now, and the end is in sight - currently I'm enjoying the free Internet connections at Singapore's Changi Airport, before the last flight leg into Brisbane in a couple of hours. Strictly speaking, when I arrive in Brisbane I'll have been underway for more than the 34 hours of plane travel over these last couple of days, though - my last day in the U.S. was taken up with another day trip, another guest lecture, this time at Temple University in Philadelphia. Of the four times I've now done the 'Understanding the Produser' lecture, this one was my favourite, I think - I had enough time to expand on some of the key ideas, there were great questions throughout, and some very nice comments afterwards (a close second was the first time, at SUNY Buffalo). Many thanks to Hana Iverson and her group for inviting me in (and shouting me dinner afterwards).
Well, I can't say New York City exactly put its best face forward for me - it's been alternately drizzly, rainy, windy, or just plain miserable here at least as far as the weather was concerned. With the talks on Tuesday and the Boston/Providence and Philadelphia trips on Wednesday and Friday, Thursday was my only 'off' day here, but it wasn't exactly great for sightseeing. In fact, around mid-day it rained so hard that I had to buy a pair of jeans because my other trousers were soaking wet... (Well, the other reason was that on the flight to the U.S. my old jeans developed what here they'd probably call a 'wardrobe malfunction', putting me in danger of mooning people each time I bent over.)
Right now I'm on an Amtrak train to Boston (currently stopping in a town called Mystic), where I'll take part in a panel on "Public/Private Intersections in New Media" with David Marshall and others. David has asked the panellists to prepare some brief points to address a set of questions we will be discussing - here are mine:
As you might have noticed, the red box that's currently at the top of my blog has grown a little more today - I can now confirm a couple more events as part of my iDC residency in New York (even though these events themselves won't be in NYC...). David Marshall has invited me to participate in a panel discussion at Northeastern University in Boston (12 October, 12 noon), and Mark Tribe has asked me to present my 'Understanding the Produser' lecture at Brown University in Providence (12 October, 5 p.m.), so I'll be doing a bit of a New England railway roundtrip that day.
