interactivecultures

As promised (although delivered later than I planned) here’s a round-up of the Digital Participation – Measuring the Unmeasurable seminar that we ran here at Birmingham City University on the 19th July 2010. We had about 50-60 delegates on the day. The delegate pack for the day is available for download (PDF).

Our three main speakers have allowed us to share their presentations with you:

Alison Preston from Ofcom – outlined Ofcom’s approach to measuring participation online. She highlighted recent results from Ofcom’s ‘Tech Tracker’ survey:

[Data Sources: The Q1 Technology Tracker datasets which are cited in the above presentation (main and subset PDFs) have now been superseded by the Q2 data (main and subset PDFs).]

Paul Watson from Newcastle University – talked about the work of his Social Inclusion Through the Digital Economy project.

Catherine Bunting, Arts Council – took us through some existing work on audience segmentation

There followed a brief panel discussion during which we looked at some innovative work being done by Nick Booth of Podnosh and heard from Audiences Central about how the Arts Council’s research has shaped their delivery of the Arts Nation project.

During the afternoon there were breakout groups – the group discussing ‘depth’ have had their discussion written up in detail up by Jennifer Jones.

Reaction:
There are a few bog posts from delegates about the day –
Steve Mackenzie has written a detailed reaction – ‘Digital Participation, Digital Inclusion and Social Learning‘ – and useful adds additional links to resources.

“From a professional stance, all this was gravy,” reflected Kathryn Ashcroft in her weekly blog column – Ever so social (media) (about half way in).

Trevelyan Wright ‘loved‘ Nick Booth’s work and took away some pointers for an he’s organising himself in 2011.

Fraser Henderson – ‘No Measure‘ felt the event didn’t quite live up to expectations citing a failure to recognise existing research into democracy, e-participation and e- inclusion.

Finally, there’s a record of the twitter stream from the day itself and in and around the day.

Next steps:
The university is keen to make this area of work a key focus and in particular is interested in developing a network of researchers, policy-makers and other interested parties to develop a seminar series on this topic area. Do let us know if you’re keen to contribute (email dave.harte@bcu.ac.uk)

Editors and publishers conference

Monday 6th September 2010

Digital development and Application; Content and Creativity

The publishing industry is currently undergoing major challenges: digitisation: is changing the material form of the industry’s key artefacts; the internet is transforming the potential ways in which publications can be distributed and the expectations of their consumers; and these two lead to profound implications for the business models of companies in the industry. Through this event we hope to bring together individuals and organisations involved in academic publishing to identify the issues and set out a way forward. We will present research we have undertaken into the perceptions of publishers, and identity models for the future which have been developed in both publication and our own work with the music business.

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Professor Tim Wall & Dr Paul Long, recently presented a paper at a ‘On, Archives!’, a conference that took place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA from July 6-9.
This is Paul’s report.

On, Archives! was hosted by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) and also contained within it a dedicated symposium on ‘Broadcasting in the 1930s’ organized by Hugh Chignall (Bournemouth) and Jamie Medhust (Aberystwth).

En route to Madison we stopped over in Chicago. Now Chicago is undoubtedly a ‘cinematic’ city, so mythologised in American and wider cultures as to be already familiar to new visitors like me. We arrived on Independence Day which meant that the Stars and Stripes was ubiquitous and firework displays abounded.

Given the tendency to wax lyrical about such places in comparison to the familiarity of home I’ll reserve further remarks for another occasion. However, and acknowledging the trompe l’oeil effect of the cityscape and delights of wandering the streets in sweltering heat, what impressed were the various ways in which the cultural heritage of the city was celebrated.

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Social capital, and associated terms such as “whuffie” (Doctorow, 2003) or “guanxi” come up often in the comments and thoughts of social media users. It is often used in the sense of a currency, or stock, held by an individual where “I have a lot of social capital” is an online equivalent of “I have a lot of money” in the physical world. Read the rest of this entry »

Tony Palmer’s – All You Need is Love from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

Prof Tim Wall and Dr Paul Long presenting to the Sights and Sounds conference, University of Salford, June 2010. All You Need is Love is a 17 part documentary covering the Story of Popular Music. The program was originally broadcast between 1976 and 1981, but since that time it has neither been commercially released or repeated.

On Friday 25^th June Matt Grimes attended a one-day symposium on Popular Music Fandom.  Here is a full report from his blog.

Popular music fandom: a one day symposium, took place at the University of Chester and was organised by Mark Duffett from the School of Media at Chester. As I will be conducting some research around fans as part of my PhD research I thought it would be useful to attend.

The keynote presentation was from Matt Hills from Cardiff University who is one of the UK’s key thinkers in Fan Culture and Fan studies. I had worked with Matt in the past as part of a research team that conducted some research about audience/fan online interaction with the BBC Radio websites as part of a Knowledge Transfer Project. Matt’s presentation was around considering new ways of looking at and researching fan culture based on three ideas of post-popular music, mnemic communities and intermediary fandoms. What I particularly liked was the area of mnemic communities drawing on the work of Bollas (1993) and how music has personal and/or community memory stored within it. He also touched on the idea of whether those memories are imagined and /or a community narrative. I thought this would be very useful to my research as my object of study centres around cultural/popular memory.
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The Bookaholics competition organised by doingmediastudies.com offers a chance to win a free hard copy of the book Media Studies: Texts, Production and Context by Paul Long and Tim Wall. Five copies of the book will be awarded to lucky winners.

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You are invited to attend a screening of ‘Philip Donnellan’s The Colony’ (1964) followed by a discussion of an ongoing project to explore and promote the resources of the Philip Donnellan Archive.

6-8pm

Wednesday 30th June 2010

Birmingham Library Theatre

The Colony, originally made as an innovative TV documentary, explores the experience of members of the Caribbean migrant community in Birmingham and the Midlands. The film allows its subjects space to candidly evaluate their reception in the UK and their relationships with home and other migrant workers. Controversial at the time of its original broadcast the film is an enduring and powerful document of a key moment in post-war British history.
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Among our collection of academic activities, we have involvements with a number of journals, either as partners, editorial board members, or regular contributors. Midland History is one of these, and as Interactive Cultures’ work is sometimes historical in focus, and often about the midlands, you might find this prize of interest.
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