In my new role as Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation (CCI for short), I’m excited to be leading the team that’s organising our most ambitious PhD and Early Career Researcher activity to date – the CCI Winter School, to be held in balmy Brisbane in late June this year. It’s a selective but free event (you or your institution only need to cover your travel), involving a fairly small group of promising PhD students and early career researchers from around the world. Applications close on 31 January 7 February – don’t miss out!

CCI’s 2012 Winter School (coinciding with summer in the northern hemisphere) offers selected doctoral students and early career researchers a week-long program of interdisciplinary study, collaboration and social interaction in the broad area of creative industries and innovation research, drawing on the Centre’s expertise in media, cultural and communication studies, economics, education, policy and law, in relation to the creative economy.

We welcome applications from emerging scholars working on related topics including, but not limited to:

• Cultural, media and creative industries policy
• Digital society
• Community arts and media
• New business models in the creative economy
• Innovation studies
• Economics of the creative industries
• The creative industries in Asia
• Transmedia
• Internet studies
• Copyright and intellectual property
• The challenges of ‘big data’
• Creative careers and creative labour

Participants will work with leading researchers, engage in intensive workshop activities and receive direct feedback and individual mentoring on their own work. Social activities will provide additional opportunities for participants to get to know each other and form collaborative relationships that will last for years to come.

For all the info, lists of mentors, an indicative program and the online application form, visit the CCI Winter School website.

On the 1st and 2nd of September I was in London at the third Transforming Audiences conference, hosted by CAMRI at the University of Westminster. I was one of four keynote presenters – alongside Nancy Baym, Patricia Lange, and Adriana de Souza e Silva. I had a great time, and I’m very grateful to David Gauntlett and the other conference organisers for inviting me. The keynotes were all video-recorded, and I’ll post the video of mine here once it becomes available. In the meantime, here are my abstract and a copy of the slides (mostly pictures, as is my practice when giving these kinds of talks).

From ‘Broadcast Yourself’ to ‘Follow Your Interests’: Social media five years on

When YouTube started to become popular in 2006, it had little functionality beyond the uploading and sharing of videos, and the invocation to ‘broadcast yourself’. Around the same time, Twitter first invited users to share everyday updates with friends and colleagues in response to the simple question ‘What are you doing?’. In 2011, YouTube is a central player in the contemporary media ecology, extending well beyond amateur videosharing; and Twitter plays an increasingly central role in the origination and dissemination of real-time news, largely as a result of social, cultural and technological innovations originally introduced by the user community. At the same time, the ongoing commercial evolution of these and other ‘social media’ platforms has gradually repositioned us – as ‘users’ – in new ways. In this presentation I trace some common trajectories across several social media platforms, and discuss their consequences for the future of participatory culture.

So, John Hartley and I spent most of last week in Turkey at the very kind invitation of our colleague and PhD student Burcu Simsek, who is both a member of staff at Hacettepe University in Ankara, and a CCI doctoral candidate. Thanks to Burcu we had an excellent tour of both of Hacettepe’s campuses, as well as all the must-see tourist stuff: museums, the older bazaar streets, and plenty of excellent food.

The main purpose of the trip for John and me was to do one keynote presentation each, as well as a joint panel on Digital Storytelling, at Bilism 2010, a big national IT conference. My presentation on YouTube discussed the ways we might use YouTube’s 5 year history and its competing futures to think about current controversies concerning the future of the Internet more broadly – tensions between various nationally-specific ideologies of ‘openness’, in tension with equally different norms of ‘control’ was what I tried to boil it down to. Of course giving a paper on the popular uses of YouTube in a country where it is currently blocked by official legislation was slightly surreal, but given the number of people who were already familiar with Charlie Bit my Finger and Susan Boyle, (and how easy it is to bypass the block), I think it went OK.

John, Burcu and I also presented a joint panel on Digital Storytelling, which Burcu has introduced to Turkey via a very productive partnership between Hacettepe University and the womens’ organisation Amargi. The digital storytelling workshops she has run so far are also the primary fieldwork component of Burcu’s PhD on digital storytelling and womens’ participation in the Turkish public sphere. In fact the panel was kind of the first public launch of digital storytelling in the Turkish context, so it was pretty exciting to be part of that.

At the end of the conference all three of us flew to Istanbul for the most intensive day of touristing I have ever experienced, including among many other things 2 hours of awe and wonderment at the Hagia Sofia, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (video below), and the Sultan’s Palace.

After all that (and of course more food), we survived what has to be the world’s best example of Extreme Shopping: the Grand Bazaar; and finally, a brief dip into Istanbul’s extremely lively nightlife, finishing up with a gig (part of the Akbank Jazz Festival) at Babylon, a pretty important insitution in the local music industry, with its own magazine, record label, and so on.

Next up: Urbino, where I’m writing this!

Given I know how valuable the SDP Programme is to those who are fortunate enough to participate in it, I’m very pleased to be able to announce that the next one will be held in Brisbane at QUT next year.

From the official website:

We are delighted to announce that the seventh OII Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP) will be conducted and organised by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) in partnership with the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia from 6-17 July, 2009.

The thematic focus this year will be on ‘Creativity, Innovation and the Internet’.

The aim of the programme is to bring together advanced doctoral students engaged in dissertation research on diverse aspects of creativity and innovation relating to the Internet and other ICTs. By sharing their work and learning from leading academics in the field, students can enhance the quality and significance of their thesis research and create a peer network of excellent early-stage researchers.

We welcome applications from advanced doctoral students in any discipline whose work in the field of Internet research engages with the overall themes of creativity and innovation.

Specific topics will include, but are not limited to:

• Methodological innovation and multidisciplinarity
• Innovative uses of ICTs in developing contexts
• Practice-led and performance-based Internet research
• The economics of creativity and innovation
• Community and industry partnerships
• User-led innovation and user-generated content
• Citizen journalism and community media
• Mobile, locative and urban media
• Digital literacy and pedagogical innovation
• Regulatory barriers to creativity and innovation
• Copyright and its alternatives
• Innovation policy

As well as drawing on the OII’s faculty and research interests, the 2009 SDP will reflect the research interests of the nationally-funded ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation (which is where I work) and the QUT Institute for Creative Industries & Innovation (iCi).

This collaboration has been in the works for some time, and I’m really looking forward to it.

And yes, technically it will be winter here, but let’s not give anyone the impression that the weather will be anything other than gloriously sunny. I should also mention that the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association conference, themed ‘Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship’ will also be taking place in Brisbane at almost the same time, so it’s going to be a good place to be.

More information and the application form at the OII website.

The first is at City University, where the CCI has established a ‘node’. QUT colleague John Banks and I will be kicking off their Creative Industries Policy and Research seminar series with a two-handed presentation based on our recent work on YouTube and the games industry respectively:

Navigating Expertise

Across the new media landscape, both the pessimists and the optimists recognise a blurring of the professional-amateur divide, and the increasingly interdependent relationships between ‘producers’ – whether of media ‘content’, experiences, or new technologies – and users. Among the most frequently discussed examples of online co-creation are the Wikipedia (a significant site of collective knowledge production), YouTube (where the production and consumption of broadcast, user-created and remixed video content converge within a more or less ‘flat’ common architecture), and Massively Multiplayer Online Games (where gamers are collectively undertaking work that was formerly undertaken only by professional designers and developers). Beyond the specificities of these examples, the shifts that they represent have broader implications for the way we understand knowledge, innovation and agency.

This seminar explores the ways that knowledge and value is produced, contested and mobilised in new media contexts, working through two case studies (the games industry and the YouTube community). Banks and Burgess consider how the ‘problem’ of expertise is playing out in each case.

Date: Wednesday 22 October
Time: 15.00-16.00
Room: AG03
RSVP to lucy.montgomery@qut.edu.au

Following that I’m heading back up to the Oxford Internet Institute not only to indulge in some nostalgia for the Summer Doctoral Program, but also to give a talk about the study of YouTube Joshua Green and I completed earlier this year:

Making Sense of YouTube

Monday 20 October 2008 16:30 – 17:30 Tuesday 21 October 2008 16:30 – 17:30

Location: Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS. This event is open to the public. If you would like to attend please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk

This presentation reports on a recent study of YouTube that relied principally on a survey of 4300 of the most ‘popular’ videos, which were categorised according to criteria derived from media and cultural studies approaches to the analysis of media genres and practices.

The analysis produced new knowledge about the extent of particular uses of the platform (such as vlogging, political commentary, or the ‘distribution’ of broadcast content); and the relationship between different modes of ‘audience’ engagement (commenting, responding, rating) and particular content genres.

The presentation builds on the findings of the study to discuss the co-existing and competing uses that are actually being made of YouTube – by the media industries, by audiences and amateur producers, and by particular communities of interest; as well as to consider the way that these practices challenge existing understandings of cultural ‘production’ and ‘consumption’, and their implications for the uncertain and competing futures of participatory culture online.

Also, the book out of that study, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, is now finally going into production at Polity Press (woo!), and should be out early next year. More very soon (including groovy cover art)…

Go here to view the videos.

I was there primarily to present with Josh on our empirical YouTube research — the content survey that forms the middle chapter of our book YouTube: Online Video and the Politics of Participatory Culture, which is forthcoming from Polity later in the year (bonus moment of excitement: seeing it in the Polity 2008 catalogue!). It was the first time we had presented our findings together in a really comprehensive way, and although we had ‘seen’ each other on video chat almost daily while writing the book, it was actually the first time we had been in the same country since we started the project. We’ll be presenting on the study again at the CCI Conference at the end of June, by the way.

Our panel was called Engaging With YouTube: Methodologies, Practices, Publics, and it was designed to bring together a group of people doing empirical work that deals with the problem of how to approach YouTube as a research object (or research problem), rather than as a convenient source of examples.

Our fellow presenters included Greg Elmer, Fenwick McKelvey and Brady Curlew, the dynamic team from the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University, who were discussing their work on the uses of YouTube in relation to Canadian electoral politics, making use of a range of methodological approaches and tools, including hyperlink analysis and content analysis. Also, Ashlee Humphreys demonstrated some unconventional ways of thinking through the relations between ‘consumers’ and ‘celebrities’ in the YouTube attention economy, drawing on ethnographic (‘netnographic’, actually) data, and using the innovative models that she and Rob Kozinets have developed.

Finally, we were especially privileged to be presenting alongside Patricia Lange, whose 2 year ethnography with the YouTube community has produced a number of important insights into the ways in which YouTube operates as a social networking site for certain participants; and the rich mundanity of the communicative practices that take place there. Most importantly, her work insistently reminds us of the need to fully consider the lived experience and materiality of everyday cultural practice–which is very important, because discussions of the media in everyday life still tend to the weightless. I’m really looking forward to the book that will eventually come out of this work. In the meantime, check out the AnthroVlog!

Overall, the panel turned out to be a well-balanced and highly energetic event, despite the fact that few of us knew each other beforehand. And most pleasingly, the discussion flowed on seamlessly into a number of simultaneous and highly animated conversations among the panellists as well as with fellow YouTube researchers from the audience, continuing on all the way down the street to the pub for celebratory drinks. I take that as a good sign of things to come, and I’m looking forward to continuing the conversations into some collaboration. Based on the number of projects we heard about that are underway, it’s clear that there is going to be a proliferation of research-based articles on YouTube coming out in print in the next 12 months.

My conference highlight would have to be the excellent party generously thrown by Jonathan Sterne. I have no idea how that many people fit into one apartment, but it was a fantastic night and the site of some really stimulating arguments and discussions [and Jonathan, I didn't break anything!]. I’m looking forward to Jonathan’s visit to Australia next month, where we will attempt to return his hospitality, as well as getting down to doing some much-needed work on the importance and materiality of sound and listening practices in contemporary culture as part of the Technologies of Listening Workshop.

At Jonathan’s party, I finally managed to connect up with Will Straw, but not until after putting a number of very accommodating Canadians to work on a Straw-hunting mission. It was a very crowded party! Will was one of the external examiners for my Masters thesis, but we had never met before, so I was excited that we got to have a bit of a chat.

Oh, and there was some pretty spectacular dancing done. Not by me, obviously.

As a research fellow in an ARC-funded research centre I have had certain things drummed into me–not least by virtue of hanging out with actual ARC heavyweights from time to time. Especially in the lead-up to the now defunct Research Quality Framework, one of the things I had drummed into me was the difference between research outputs and research outcomes. Outputs, I have learned, are (merely) the things you make out of your research–products, publications, patents and processes. We all scramble to produce enough ‘outputs’, to the point that I am often at a loss to figure out where the time to process ‘inputs’ (like, reading books) is meant to come from.

But the productivity agenda is only half the story. Outcomes, apparently, only occur when the outputs get taken up and used for something in the ‘real world’–this is what the RQF framed as research ‘impact’. Despite the limits of ‘impact’ as a metaphor, which doesn’t really capture very well the slow and difficult to trace dynamics of diffusion that actually characterise the influence of humanities-based research, the pragmatist in me likes the idea that I might have some kind of direct usefulness, one day. Clearly, I have travelled a long way from the Oxbridge-esque imagined future in which I would be musing over great books by a cosy fire in Hobbiton, absorbing and transmitting knowledge via osmosis.

Anyway, in the last 6 months I’ve produced some ‘outputs’ that have now seen the light of day. Most exciting: some digital stories about biodiversity in Queensland backyards, and some more about the experiences of refugees who have settled in Queensland, both projects undertaken with the Queensland Museum, produced with a team run by my long-term collaborator Helen Klaebe, from QUT. I’m not sure if they’re outputs or outcomes, since they are clearly evidence that the digital storytelling idea is being taken up with a fair bit of enthusiasm around the place. There’s also some more digital stories about the history of the gold coast (during the course of which project i discovered the wonder of margarine sculptures, among other things), and some about the gay history of Brisbane, both of which I think will be launched in a few weeks.

Last: Joshua Green and I have sent the manuscript of our YouTube book off to the publisher, where it has now gone to readers. I hope to make a more celebratory announcement in the very near future. And we’ll be presenting on the major content survey that underpinned parts of the book at the ICA conference in Montreal next month–hope to catch up with some of you there!

If you know of anyone who might be good for this position, please forward this on to them, and please note it’s closing on the 25th Jan, which is very soon!

Brief info pasted below, for full details of the position, how to apply and how to make any further enquiries (not to me!), go to the QUT website.

A Project Officer is required by the Research Office of the Creative Industries Faculty to assist a Steering Committee in the coordination, development and maintenance of Digital Storytelling and co-creative initiatives at the nexus of research, teaching and engagement.

Closes: 25 January 2008

Salary: $45 907 to $51 777 pa (AUD)

Benefits available at QUT include 17% employer superannuation contributions, a generous study assistance scheme, salary packaging, extensive development and training programs and access to a range of state-of-the-art facilities.

INFORMATION FOR APPLICANTS

Whilst the University welcomes applications from candidates outside the greater Brisbane area, candidates will be responsible for any travel and relocation expenses involved in interview/commencing appointment.

DUTY STATEMENT

Purpose of Position

A newly formed Steering and Advisory group of senior and active researchers has been established to steer and manage the coordination, development and maintenance of Digital Storytelling and co-creative initiatives at the nexus of research, teaching and engagement. The Project Officer will assist the Creative Industries Faculty Research Office, under close supervision and direction from the Steering/Advisory Group, to develop applied commercial research opportunities by assisting in the building, coordination and facilitation of the Faculty’s capacity to lead innovation in Digital Storytelling and co-creative media. The Project Officer will assist in the development and maintenance of collaborative relationships within the Faculty, across the University, and with external clients such as the State Library Queensland; maintain and organise recordkeeping; arrange meetings; ensure communications are maintained amongst all parties; and assist in the organisation and delivery of training.

as much as this is an experiment with a new kind of political coverage, its also a chance for you to hold local representatives accountable and renew parliamentary democracy. Its also a chance for you to be creative, and provide us with the kind of news coverage you’d like to see. We’re accepting multimedia content, including text, video, audio and photos, so featured content could include:

- short, print-style reports
- longer opinion pieces.
- video or audio vox-pops in your local area.
- personal opinion pieces to webcam
- recorded interviews with candidates and opinion leaders
- slideshows combining photographs and audio
- photographic essays
- comment on other people’s articles

Already, the project has had an impact in the wider public sphere, partly because of an interview conducted by Jason Wilson with Peter Lindsay, in which he said that mortgage stress was partly caused by consumers’ ‘financial illiteracy’ and that in his day he had ‘sat on milk crates’ until he could afford furniture. This fantastic sound bite apparently prompted a question from Kevin 07 in parliament, sparking a debate on housing affordability and delivering YouDecide’s first ‘gate’: you guessed, they’re gleefully calling it ‘crate gate’. Fantastic stuff.

I gather there is still plenty of room for citizen journalists to sign up to cover the campaign and related issues in their local seat, so if you’re anywhere in Australia, do check it out.

Here’s Jason introducing the project:

In the citizen journalism session at the Australian Blogging Conference last week, we had some very interesting and robust discussion – focused around the YouDecide project – about citizen journalism, what counts as citizenship, and – my own particular interest – strategies for engaging citizens who are not ‘political junkies’ but who may be very actively engaged in local or interest-based issues.

Related:

The team over at MIT have launched a blog for their new Center for Future Civic Media:

Bridging two established programs at MIT—one known for inventing alternate technical futures, the other for identifying the cultural and social potential of media change—the Center for Future Civic Media is a joint effort between the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. It has been made possible by a four-year grant from the Knight Foundation. The Center for Future Civic Media will work to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information. These include developing new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action; serving as an international resource for the study and analysis of civic media; and coordinating community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.

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Henry Jenkins discusses what ‘civic media’ might mean as read through the priorities and activities of the Center, why it isn’t synonymous with citizen journalism, and the ways in which we might re-imagine everyday uses of social media as civic media in this entry. He also very kindly refers to some of my work on Flickr and cultural citizenship as part of that discussion. Looking forward to seeing what develops out of the Center as the work there goes forward.

Update: See also Chuck Tyron’s thoughtful article on YouTube and (US Federal) politics in the new issue of Flow.