creativity/machine

Henry Jenkins, leading scholar in fandom, participatory culture, media convergence and vernacular media theory and Director of the Comparative Media Center at MIT has just started a blog, mainly, he says, to promote his new book Convergence Culture. I secretly hope it spirals out of control way beyond that, and with the number of people noting his emergence into the blogosophere, it seems likely that this will happen.

Yesterday I finally made it to my first Brisbane flickr meetup, which is part of my fieldwork but also a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon. We met at the Regatta, hopped on the citycat and went downriver to the University of Queensland, where we wandered along the riverbank up to the construction site of the new Green Bridge, chatting about cameras (and ‘having an eye’ vs. technological mastery) and the life of the city and our jobs and hobbies.

More photos at the group photo pool

Talk about the clash of cultures…

License your office (documents)

Microsoft has released a tool for copyright licensing that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licensing information for works in popular Microsoft Office applications. The software is available free of charge at Microsoft Office Online and will enable the 400 million [PC-based] users of Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint to easily select Creative Commons licenses from directly within the application they are working in.

Not available for Mac though.

Aesthetic critiques and bug reports very welcome - especially if you have the misfortune to be using IE. I’m thinking I will rotate header images in an attempt to stave off the inevitable design fatigue, and hopefully keep this design for more than 6 months or however long the previous one lasted.

I’m using K2 (the new Kubrick) with my own stylesheet, as well as the weighted categories and contact form plugins.

After more than 2 years benefiting from Adrian Miles’ idea to set up a network of new media studies related blogs at hypertext.rmit.edu.au, I’ve decided to move to my own domain and server (almost at the same time as Mel did). I want to publicly thank Adrian for answering all my newbie questions about wordpress and secure ftp and goodness knows what else, and although I’m moving off the network, I’m still in the neighbourhood.

I was going to muck around with new templates and directories and things before making the announcement, but in the process of ftp-ing all over the place I somehow broke the .htaccess file at the old server. I couldn’t fix it and the old blog was horribly, horribly broken - so I ended up just writing a new .htaccess file with nothing but the following permanent redirect thingy in it: Redirect permanent /~burgess http://creativitymachine.net

Which will hopefully redirect all permalinks (i.e. google searches) permanently to this new domain. I can’t believe it worked, I feel like a hacker.

You’ll still need to update your bookmarks and feed subscriptions though.

I’ve just returned to my office, full of scones and lamingtons and date loaf, after the very well-attended launch of the second Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories exhibition at the Creative Industries Precinct at QUT. As part of the launch we screened the digital stories from the 2006 workshop, which I co-ordinated with project leader Helen Klaebe. These stories (and the 2004 batch) are now available for you to view online.

It was great to catch up with the participants (many of whom brought along family, friends and neighbours), to have a laugh (or to be teased about why I haven’t finished my PhD yet) and to share their sense of occasion, pride and achievement. Some of the participants bumped into and reconnected with people from their pasts as a result of the connections made during the project - very cool that this can be a spin-off effect of a project like this, but it gives me a buzz every time it happens. And it amazes me how the audience laughs and cries in the ‘right’ places in every story, every time.

I have hit the books again, and I’m alternately working out ideas and culling stuff from my draft, so no more word counts for a while. When they do return they’ll just show how many words I’ve written that day, too, no more of this mythical ‘total’ word count business.

Like much of my writing, this sentence needs to be turned into at least 6 sentences, but at least it’s neater than my notes pages on cultural citizenship:

I use the concept of ‘vernacular creativity’ to describe the everyday practices of material and digital creativity that serve cultural citizenship, where cultural citizenship is understood, not as the static possession (or dispossession) of rights or obligations, but as a variegated continuum of participation in the cultural public sphere.

I’m using or arguing with (in no particular order) Murdock, Rosaldo, Miller, McGuigan, Stevenson, Uricchio, Hartley, Couldry, Hermes - feel free to shout out “you should read…” if something closely connected to that list comes to mind.

And here’s another sentence I wrote today:

Questioning the widespread idea that the availability of tools and platforms for participatory media somehow in itself enables universal cultural enfranchisement, I go on to examine the often implicit constraints on participation in digital culture, paying especially close attention to the socio-technical construction of literacies and ‘user’ subjectivities in specific contexts.

An announcement from iLounge:

Belkin today announced that its new TuneTalk Stereo will be available in North America in mid-June, with launches in Asia, Europe, and Australia to follow closely. The $70 device, first shown at Macworld Expo in January, lets you record audio in CD-quality stereo sound. It features two high-quality omnidirectional microphones, an auxiliary 3.5mm stereo-input for an external microphone, and comes with a positionable stand. The TuneTalk Stereo also has an adjustable gain control switch, an extended dock connector spacer for using the device with a protective case, and is available in both black and white colors.

It hasn’t been reviewed yet as far as I can see, but this device promises to be the first semi-decent stereo microphone for the iPod video. It would be even better if you could plug two microphones into the microphone adaptor - then again, if you owned two quality microphones you would probably be using a proper field recorder and not an iPod.

Update 06-07-2006: The Tunetalk Stereo has been reviewed at iLounge. They were pleased with the sound, but noted the limited stereo separation (because the built-in microphones are so close together). However, I just realised you could plug a powered stereo microphone, or a pair of microphones through a stereo adapter, into the line-in. So despite having no speakers for immediate playback (and presumably no monitoring through headphones while recording) it does look to be the winner so far.