Showing papers in "Convergence in 2015"
TL;DR: Hippocrates' Quadrature of the Lune (ca. 440 B.C.). Euclid's Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem (c. 300 B. A.D. as mentioned in this paper ).
Abstract: Hippocrates' Quadrature of the Lune (ca. 440 B.C.). Euclid's Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem (ca. 300 B.C.). Euclid and the Infinitude of Primes (ca. 300 B.C.). Archimedes' Determination of Circular Area (ca. 225 B.C.). Heron's Formula for Triangular Area (ca. A.D. 75). Cardano and the Solution of the Cubic (1545). A Gem from Isaac Newton (Late 1660s). The Bernoullis and the Harmonic Series (1689). The Extraordinary Sums of Leonhard Euler (1734). A Sampler of Euler's Number Theory (1736). The Non-Denumerability of the Continuum (1874). Cantor and the Transfinite Realm (1891). Afterword. Chapter Notes. References. Index.
82 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the distribution of expertise in the performance of digital housekeeping required to maintain a networked home and examine the ways in which expertise is gendered in distribution amongst household members.
Abstract: This article examines the distribution of expertise in the performance of ‘digital housekeeping’ required to maintain a networked home. It considers the labours required to maintain a networked home, the forms of digital expertise that are available and valued in digital housekeeping, and ways in which expertise is gendered in distribution amongst household members. As part of this discussion, we consider how digital housekeeping implicitly situates technology work within the home in the role of the ‘housekeeper’, a term that is complicated by gendered sensitivities. Digital housework, like other forms of domestic labour, contributes to identity and self-worth. The concept of housework also affords visibility of the digital housekeeper’s enrolment in the project of maintaining the household. This article therefore asks, what is at stake in the gendered distribution of digital housekeeping?
53 citations
TL;DR: Fan studies scholar Henry Jenkins lays out a blueprint for participatory culture that highlights its potential for more democratic, more inclusive mediascapes, asserting that corporate media produces a "corporate media produc...
Abstract: Fan studies scholar Henry Jenkins lays out a blueprint for participatory culture that highlights its potential for more democratic, more inclusive mediascapes, asserting that corporate media produc...
48 citations
TL;DR: The increased level of technical abstractness poses a challenge for laypersons and politicians alike to notice the political impacts specific technical developments might bring as discussed by the authors, by presenting qualitatively qualitatively different approaches.
Abstract: The increased level of technical abstractness poses a challenge for laypersons and politicians alike to notice the political impacts specific technical developments might bring. By presenting quali...
42 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that Doctor Who fan expertise has become part of a ‘nexus of multimembership’ – placed in an uneasy position between the ‘official’ knowledge of showrunner fans and unofficial fan practices of re-narrating/archiving.
Abstract: It has been assumed that Web 2.0 has democratized participatory culture, challenging the significance of ‘expertise’ via ‘collective intelligence’ (Jenkins, 2006). However, fan-cultural logics of e...
37 citations
TL;DR: An exploratory study examined whether the iPad was replacing traditional TV viewing, and showed that, rather than displacing time with TV, the amount of TV viewing on an iPad was positively related to theamount of time watching traditional TV.
Abstract: Over the past 3 years, tablet computers have become increasingly popular devices. In particular, Apple’s iPad and its accompanying apps have taken the tablet market by storm. The technology enables users to accomplish a variety of tasks, including viewing television (TV) programs and other video sources on the device. Based on media uses and gratifications, an exploratory study examined whether the iPad was replacing traditional TV viewing. Results showed that, rather than displacing time with TV, the amount of TV viewing on an iPad was positively related to the amount of time watching traditional TV.
33 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine media freedom in Indonesia, an age where the media landscape is being remade by convergence, and explore how convergence is both contributing to and undermining media freedom.
Abstract: This article examines media freedom in Indonesia, an age where the media landscape is being remade by convergence. Media scholars are debating the implications of this trend for media freedom, with some believing it is opening new possibilities for a greater range of voices to be heard and others identifying new threats it poses. The Indonesian case, where media freedom is viewed as threatened, shows how technological convergence has led to commercial convergence. This article explores how convergence is both contributing to and undermining media freedom in Indonesia. It will do so through an in-depth analysis of the current trends in the Indonesian media industry.
31 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue in favour of a research program for the exploration of experimental collaborations, a methodological approach whose epistemic engagement with the empirical work is ex ective.
Abstract: This position article argues in favour of a research programme for the exploration of experimental collaborations, a methodological approach whose epistemic engagement with the empirical work is ex...
26 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that opinion leaders are intermediaries who play a vital role in do-it-yourself audience building for independent films in today's Internet age.
Abstract: How are contemporary film-makers building audiences independently from distributors or sales agents? This article uses two case studies, Tenner Films and The Hunt for Gollum, to argue that opinion leaders are intermediaries who play a vital role in do-it-yourself audience building for independent films in today’s Internet age. The article concludes that (1) the Internet has increased the number of potential and accessible opinion leaders, (2) online opinion leaders have potentially bigger audiences than their offline counterparts, (3) new opinion leaders have emerged, (4) opinion leaders act as multipliers and (5) non-experts can be opinion leaders too. (6) The Internet allows cultural producers to reach different opinion leaders through a single medium and while (7) different opinion leaders come with different audience sizes, (8) they all continue to function as taste guides. Finally, (9) the Internet makes it easier for independent film-makers to nurture personal audiences and therefore, partially repl...
18 citations
TL;DR: Based on ethnographic research among former Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front combatants, militia, and supporters, this paper addressed the complex ways in which the incorporation of cell phones among rural populations in northern Morazan contributes to the reconfiguration of class in postwar El Salvador.
Abstract: Based on ethnographic research among former Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front combatants, militia, and supporters, this article addresses the complex ways in which the incorporation of cell phones among rural populations in northern Morazan contributes to the reconfiguration of class in postwar El Salvador. Countering the dominant paradigm of the so-called digital divide as the new incarnation of the promise of development for the Third World, I propose that these societies are experiencing a process of subordinated digitization. Drawing on the Marxist analysis of the commodity form, I suggest that cell phone incorporation in the Latin American Third World is subordinated to the capitalistic logic of profit seeking.
13 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the concept of expertise emerges through a bigger array of social capital as well as traditional structures of power such as class, gender and race, and the notion of the imaginary emerges in their research as so central to expertise.
Abstract: In the digital age, it seems that participation has been conflated with literacy, content with engagement, novelty with innovation and ubiquity with meaning (e.g. see Thornham and McFarlane, 2014; Gillespie, 2010; Dean, 2008; Livingstone, 2009; van Dijck, 2013) and encapsulated in terms such as ‘digital native’, ‘digital divide’ or ‘born digital’. In turn, these conflations have done something to technology, which is constructed as malleable, a supportive facilitator, and the user, who is constructed as active agent. Neither of these account for mediations nor for – crucial for us – the notion of the imaginary, which emerges in our research as so central to expertise. Drawing on ethnographic work carried out in Studio12, a media production facility for young people with disadvantaged backgrounds in Leeds, United Kingdom, we propose that the concept of expertise emerges through a bigger array of social capital as well as traditional structures of power such as class, gender and race. Expertise is claimed, ...
TL;DR: It is found that audiences grant a great deal of ‘mindshare’ to media texts and create fan works in response to those texts immediately after viewing a film but that what sustains fan productivity are the attractiveness of specific online archiving platforms and the liveliness of activity in a given fandom.
Abstract: In the Fan Data project, we collected data from online databases that archive media fan production (specifically, fictional fan texts). We developed software and visualization tools to analyze these archives. Digital analysis focused on counting and graphing the rate of the fan fiction production over time in three Hollywood blockbuster movie fandoms: The Avengers, the Batman trilogy, and Inception. We found that audiences grant a great deal of ‘mindshare’ to media texts and create fan works in response to those texts immediately after viewing a film but that what sustains fan productivity are the attractiveness of specific online archiving platforms and the liveliness of activity in a given fandom. Internet archives have a decisive function in offering the creative and conserving infrarstructure for ‘unofficial’ communication, art, and knowledge. Today, they are trendsetting organs and their impact verifies the assumption that the Hollywood studios’ market strategies are not the sole, or most crucial, pr...
TL;DR: The Sydney Graffiti Archive as mentioned in this paper is a virtual image archive that is used to collect and preserve graffiti images and their discursive sites to reshapes present relations to the past through photographic reframing, image digitization, interface design and user engagement.
Abstract: Centred on the theorization, design and implications of the Sydney Graffiti Archive, this article considers how the virtual image archive intervenes in the experience of graffiti to shift negative perceptions about graffiti as damage to cultural heritage. As a parallel discursive arena (see Fraser, 1995; Hauser, 1998), the Sydney Graffiti Archive infiltrates and transgresses normative conceptions of place and cultural narratives through the formation and circulation of unofficial visual discourses embedded in graffiti photographs. This article evaluates the place of the archive as a heuristic device and heterotopic entity and encourages new ways of seeing illicit graffiti, and other everyday digital cultures of commemoration, in that it reshapes present relations to the past through photographic reframing, image digitization, interface design and user engagement. Essentially, this research is about hacking into, recovering and honouring graffiti’s discursive sites to reimagine graffiti’s place as digital ...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the stakes of digital transformation through a consideration of digital expertise, and investigate how expertise operates in everyday situations, drawing on empirical resea... and find that expertise is investigated as it operates in real-world situations.
Abstract: This article explores the stakes of digital transformation through a consideration of digital expertise. Expertise is investigated as it operates in everyday situations – drawing on empirical resea...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors define an Intangible Space as a particular gathering together of influences, including those of people, things, locations and technologies, and they are fascinating for thinking about how technologies inf...
Abstract: Intangible spaces exist as a particular gathering together of influences, including those of people, things, locations and technologies. They are fascinating for thinking about how technologies inf...
TL;DR: The archive city as discussed by the authors is a conceptualization of archival space that straddles the material and symbolic city and which invites reflection on the ways cultural geographies of memory are enfolded across the multi-sited and multilayered spaces of everyday urban practice.
Abstract: This article examines the idea of the ‘archive city’: a spatiotemporal construct oriented around the central metaphor of the ‘city as archive’. Surfing the cusp between the material and immaterial, the tangible and intangible, the embodied and virtual, the producer and consumer and – not least – the analogue and the digital, the archive city denotes a conceptualization of ‘archival space’ that straddles the material and symbolic city and which invites reflection on the ways cultural geographies of memory – in this case those specific to cities and other urban landscapes – are enfolded across the multi-sited and multilayered spaces of everyday urban practice. Reframing the ontological question of ‘what is the archive in the digital age?’ in terms of ‘where is the archive?’, in the first part of the article I survey the theoretical precincts of the archive city before moving on to discuss how we might conceive of a digital spatial humanities in which this more open and purposefully elusive conceptualization...
TL;DR: The ongoing Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Pararchive project as discussed by the authors seeks to build new interactive environments that explore issues of ownership, public and institutional relationships and p....
Abstract: The ongoing Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Pararchive project seeks to build new interactive environments that explore issues of ownership, public and institutional relationships and p...
TL;DR: A study capturing the experiences of workers engaged in THT’s digital outreach service, Netreach, identifies the shifting nature of health promotion outreach work and the changes in expert–client relationship that occur when community outreach takes place on digital platforms.
Abstract: The Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) is a leading UK HIV and sexual health organization, and community outreach and support remain a key tenet of the charity’s philosophy. Outreach work includes campaign drives in bars, clubs and saunas, peer-led workshops, support groups, condom distribution in community venues and one-to-one intervention programmes to help raise HIV/AIDS awareness. But what happens to community activism and outreach when the community one seeks to engage moves online? In this article, we report on a study capturing the experiences of workers engaged in THT’s digital outreach service, Netreach. Using ethnographic and other qualitative methods, we identify the shifting nature of health promotion outreach work and the changes in expert–client relationship that occur when community outreach takes place on digital platforms. We identify how issues of (dis)embodiment, expertise and cultural capital play a role in determining the success – or failure – of online outreach work.
TL;DR: The authors argue that expertise is not a measurable and fixed capacity but rather relational, something produced within a techno-social system, where technology, gender, corporeality and identity intersect in complex multilayered ways, conditioned by the social contexts of use and the corporeal-locomotive expressions of craftsmanship technicity.
Abstract: This article is an attempt to rethink the assumptions and presumptions made about work on expertise and gameplay in an effort to tease out how such assumptions and presumptions are not only implicated in our analyses to date, but also misleading with regard to what we would see if we had a different framework for viewing. Our starting point here is that expertise is not a measurable and fixed capacity but rather relational, something produced within a techno-social system, where technology, gender, corporeality and identity intersect in complex multilayered ways, conditioned by the social contexts of use and the corporeal–locomotive expressions of craftsmanship technicity. In this article, we show how different methodological lenses and conceptual frameworks can be used to highlight different but interconnected aspects of the performance of expertise with regard to gaming.
TL;DR: O'Reilly and O'Neill as mentioned in this paper described a small group of amateur photographers from all parts of the City, the vast majority unemployed, who participated in the Belfast Exposed project.
Abstract: ‘Belfast Exposed is a small group of amateur photographers from all parts of the City, the vast majority unemployed’ (O’Reilly, 1985). ‘Belfast Exposed is Northern Ireland’s principal gallery of co...
TL;DR: Although DC++ was found to have a number of properties that coincide with the theories of SOC, two barriers were found that hindered DC++ from working as a genuine community.
Abstract: This study examines how a file sharing system affects its users’ sense of community (SOC). It was expected that the file sharing system would increase members’ knowledge about and participation in ...
TL;DR: Within academic music research, "musical expertise" is often employed as a "moderator variable" when conducting empirical studies on music listening as mentioned in this paper, which is often referred to as music expert variable.
Abstract: Within academic music research, ‘musical expertise’ is often employed as a ‘moderator variable’ when conducting empirical studies on music listening. Prevalent conceptualizations typically conceive...
TL;DR: The authors investigates the high-profile film repatriation projects between such organizations as the US Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia, and the New Zealand Film Archive.
Abstract: This article investigates the high-profile film repatriation projects between such organizations as the US Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia, and the New Zealand Film Archive. Heralded for bringing ‘home’ the so-called lost films, repatriation projects capture public imagination and prove vital in galvanizing the much needed press interest in the media preservation movement. National film archives, however, continue to pursue traditional modes of repatriating film material, spending thousands of dollars to ship nitrate film prints to underfunded and overwhelmed US media repositories, and perpetuating the dominance of the nation-state in preservation discourse. This article challenges the long-standing, celluloid-focused approach by providing an overview of media repatriation practice and policy, contemporary analysis of cultural property theory and law, and offering a pragmatic suggestion for digital repatriation models that can empower a great...
TL;DR: The Walkman and iPod have often been viewed as individualizing technologies as mentioned in this paper, and people use these forms of mobile media to impart a sound track of their own choosing over their experience of physical space.
Abstract: The Walkman and iPod have often been viewed as individualizing technologies. People use these forms of mobile media to impart a sound track of their own choosing over their experience of physical space. However, newer mobile projects have examined the links that tie mobile media and sound to experiences of movement. These projects focus on the collaborative construction of shared soundscapes through mobile media, in a sense responding to the individualizing tendencies of dominant auditory mobile media. This article draws from literature in sound studies, media studies, and locative media art to examine these relatively new forms of what we call social soundscaping. Through our analysis, we show the potential for new mobile sound practices that allow for the more participatory production of public soundscapes.
TL;DR: In this paper, a macrophotography of photographic negatives being chemically and physically destroyed is presented, along with a discussion about personal and material memory and about archival preservation and dissolution; the negatives come from Grayson Cooke's studies in photography at high school.
Abstract: We are surrounded by archives, archives personal and national; our externalized memories and their material placeholders line our shelves and attics, just as they crowd the vaults of our national repositories. But how do we relate to archives as material memories? What do we gain in their preservation, and what, paradoxically, might we lose? For good reason, archival materials are conserved and preserved in order to ward off dissolution, of both the things themselves and their memory function. But what does archival preservation prevent us from feeling, seeing and doing? What creative possibilities might be released when the archive is dissolved? In this article, we discuss our art–science collaboration, after | image. This project is about personal and material memory and about archival preservation and dissolution; it features time-lapse macrophotography of photographic negatives being chemically and physically destroyed. The negatives come from Grayson Cooke’s studies in photography at high school – th...
TL;DR: In the United Kingdom, there is a debate about how media studies should be taught to 16 to 18 year olds as discussed by the authors, where the authors argue that if they are to study artefacts then what artefacts should these be? BBC news and the much exported period drama Downton Abbey or popular television franchises which have worldwide take-up such as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (ITV 1998-) The problem with this debate is that it misunderstands the ontological basis of media studies.
Abstract: In the United Kingdom there is a debate about how media studies should be taught to 16 to 18 year olds. Should they be studying the artefacts as literature students do with canonical readings of Austen and Shakespeare or the institutions and hegemonic structures of the means of production? If they are to study artefacts then what artefacts should these be? BBC news and the much exported period drama Downton Abbey or popular television franchises which have worldwide take-up such as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (ITV 1998-) The problem with this debate is that it misunderstands the ontological basis of media studies. Media studies have claimed the realms of television, newspapers, cinema, radio and audiovisual texts, their forms, the industries that produce them and the means of distribution and consumption as its object of study. New media researchers have added identity, interactivity, geolocation, engagement, affectivity, sharing, creativity and fan crowd and other forms of online and real life community building through new communications technologies. Ontologically we accept as a basis of our field that as humans we construct and visualize stories – both from fact and fiction – to make sense of the world around us and that by analysing and deconstructing these narratives as researchers we review, challenge or change erroneous or simply dominant knowledge paradigms. Contrary to this basis of media studies, in this debate we are being asked to give dominance to the best of the type. For students and early career researchers this is confusing and we swiftly fall into a definitional mele: is this the form of the period drama or the industry format of the game show or the professional procedures that provenance and verify news stories we are required to study? Educationalists may refer to the canon of English literature, yet new media critics will cite the fans’ definition of the canon as the storyworld or the storyworld’s ‘bible’ or past set characters, storylines and rules. Just consider for a moment the array of attempts to define and revise the definition of transmedia storytelling. Researchers have found it easier to state the platforms and channels for transmedia stories – the book, periodical, game, television, Web, cinema, mobile app., radio and event – than to say comprehensively and decisively what it is. Like much of new media, transmedia storytelling is participatory, often soliciting creative contributions, it is user-led and
TL;DR: The essay analyses two cases of digital activism in Turkey, which visualize ‘networked erasure’ to illustrate how censorship is a systematic process and hacks into ‘switching power’ in the digital age.
Abstract: The essay analyses two cases of digital activism in Turkey, which visualize ‘networked erasure’ to illustrate how censorship is a systematic process. The first case, an interactive online database ...
TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors argued that the generational assumptions can have the effect of reinforcing project hierarchies and denying expert users of digital tools their claims to creativity, and pointed out that such generational assumptions may have the same effect as those of the balinghou generation (born 1980-1989) to their younger competitors.
Abstract: Animators, architects, designers, and others active in the Chinese creative industries are expert users of tools, both analog and digital Performances of expert tool use (the wearing of professional identity badges) are strategic ways of signaling creativity understood as sets of skills and character traits essential for attracting work projects but also for professional identity formation Analogue tools are generally associated with creative openness and fluidity whereas digital tools are discursively constructed as a technological other to the analogue ‘Older’ creatives (born before 1980) tend to apply some of the media-inflected discourse around the balinghou generation (born 1980–1989) to their younger competitors, including an assumed affinity with digital media and technologies (the pinning on of a generational identity badge) Such generational assumptions can have the effect of reinforcing project hierarchies and denying expert users of digital tools their claims to creativity
TL;DR: In this paper, the first essay on women's issues was written at the request of the James Dator, then editor of Convergence, the journal of the International Association for Adult Education.
Abstract: This essay, among the first I published on women’s issues, was written at the request of the James Dator, then editor of Convergence, the journal of the International Association for Adult Education.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the meeting between the archive and technology that the Google publicity announces by focusing on a relatively minor subset of the Life images digitized as a result of this partnership, foregrounding "user builders" and their roles in both making meaning from digital archives and making digital archives meaningful.
Abstract: When Google announced in November 2008 that it was to host online one of the world’s largest corpus of photographic images, thanks to its collaboration with the Life magazine picture collection, it also said something, almost incidentally, about the state of the archive in the digital age. This essay examines the meeting between the archive and technology that the Google publicity announces by focusing on a relatively minor subset of the Life images digitized as a result of this partnership. It does so by foregrounding ‘user builders’ and their roles in both making meaning from digital archives and making digital archives meaningful.