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Amateurism?
by Tyler Bickford 13 May '12

13 May '12

Hi all, As part of a project I'm working on, I'm interested in finding literature on amateurism and the internet, especially involving entertainment, music performance, and youtube/video sharing (the sweet spot would center on Justin Bieber, Ellen, Rebecca Black, etc), but I'm certainly open to broader perspectives. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated! Thanks much, Tyler ________ Tyler Bickford, PhD Core Lecturer Columbia University tb2139(a)columbia.edu 845-418-4049 http://www.tylerbickford.com

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New Publication: Migration, Diaspora and Information Technology in Globla Societies
by J.Vincent＠surrey.ac.uk 11 May '12

11 May '12

Some members of this list are contributors to a new Routledge volume selected for their Research in Information Technology and Society series. It is peer reviewed and contains exciting and topical new work discussing the role of new media in the lives of migrants. Journal articles are currently proposed to continue discussion of the themes in this volume and if you are interested in contributing a review do get in touch. Regards Jane Jane Vincent PhD FRSA Visiting Fellow Digital World Research Centre Department of Sociology Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences University of Surrey Stag Hill Guildford Surrey GU2 7XH UK www.dwrc.surrey.ac.uk<http://www.dwrc.surrey.ac.uk/> mailto: j.vincent(a)surrey.ac.uk<mailto:j.vincent@surrey.ac.uk> http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415887090/ Migration, Diaspora and Information Technology in Global Societies Edited by Leopoldina Fortunati<http://www.routledge.com/books/search/author/leopoldina_fortunati/>, Raul Pertierra<http://www.routledge.com/books/search/author/raul_pertierra/>, Jane Vincent<http://www.routledge.com/books/search/author/jane_vincent/> Series: Routledge Research in Information Technology and Society<http://www.routledge.com/books/series/SE0448/> Description Migrants and diaspora communities are shaped by their use of information and communication technologies. This book explores the multifaceted role played by new media in the re-location of these groups of people, assisting them in their efforts to defeat nostalgia, construct new communities, and keep connected with their communities of origin. Furthermore, the book analyses the different ways in which migrants contribute, along with natives, in co-constructing contemporary societies – a process in which the cultures of both groups are considered. Drawing on contributions from a range of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, psychology and linguistics, it offers a more profound understanding of one of the most significant phenomena of contemporary international societies – the migration of nearly a billion people worldwide - and the relationship between technology and society. Preface: Mediating a Restless World Daniel Miller. Introduction: Migrations and Diasporas: Making Their World Elsewhere Leopoldina Fortunati, Raul Pertierra and Jane Vincent Theme 1: Conceptual Perspectives of Migrants in Post-Modern Societies 1. New Media, Migrations and Culture: From Multi to Interculture Giuseppe Mantovani 2. From English to New Englishes: Language Migration Towards New Paradigms Maria Bortoluzzi 3. Frame Setting of Contestable Categories: The Construction of Multiracial Identity in the Mass Media Alice Robbin Theme 2: Gender and Generation Intertwining with Migrations 4. Grandmothers, Girlfriends and Big Men: The Gendered Geographies of Jamaican Transnational Communication Heather Horst 5. Mobiles, Men and Migration: Mobile Communication and Everyday Multiculturalism in Australia Clifton Evers and Gerard Goggin 6. Australian Migrant Children: ICT Use and the Construction of Future Lives Lelia Green and Nahid Kabir Theme 3: Looking at the Migrations and Diasporas Through the Lens of the New Media 7. Diasporas, the New Media and the Globalized Homeland Raul Pertierra 8. Make Yourself at Home in www.ciberville.com: Meanings of Proximity and Togetherness in the Era of "Broadband Society" Heike Mónika Greschke 9. The Bulgarian-Language Media Diaspora Polina Stoyanova and Lilia Raycheva Theme 4: Religion, Mobility and Social Policies: How Migrants’ Use of the New Media Is Shaping Society 10. "God is Technology": Mediating the Sacred in the Congolese Diaspora David Garbin and Manuel A. Vásquez 11. Mediatized Migrants: Media Cultures and Communicative Networking in the Diaspora Andreas Hepp, Cigdem Bozdag and Laura Suna 12. ICT Adoption by Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in Europe: Overview of Quantitative Evidence and Discussion of Drivers Stefano Kluzer and Cristiano Codagnone Theme 5: A Case Study: China, Its Internal Migrations, Diasporas and Expatriates 13. Migrant Workers, New Media Technologies, and Decontextualization: A Preliminary Observation in Southern China Pui-lam Law 14. Floating Workers and Mobile QQ: The Struggle in the Search for Roots Chung-tai Cheng 15. Community Connections and ICT: The Chinese Community in Prato, Italy and Melbourne, Australia: Networks, ICTs and Chinese Diasporas Tom Denison and Graeme Johanson 16. Imagining China: Online Expatriates as "Bridge Bloggers" on the Chinese Internet David Kurt Herold

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Special Issue on: Risk Assessment in Mobile Social Media
by Babiga Birregah 11 May '12

11 May '12

Dear colleagues and dear all, Sorry in case of multiple posts. It is with a great pleasure that I invite you to consider to publish one of your original research papers in this special issue: http://special-issue-ramsm2012.birregah.org/ or http://www.inderscience.com/browse/callpaper.php?callID=1822 You can contact me for any inquiry. Would you also be kind to follow up this call to your network and to any PhD and Post-doc researchers working in this field. Best regards Go Top Important Dates First submission deadline: 20 June, 2012 First notification: 20 August, 2012 Revision deadline: 30 September, 2012 Final decision and notification: 20 November, 2012

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Postdoc announcement
by L. Wynholds 11 May '12

11 May '12

The UCLA Knowledge Infrastructures team seeks applications for an open post-doctoral position: We are conducting ethnographic and interview studies of digital data practices among scientists, including their research design, data collection, data analysis, data management, and data sharing with colleagues and the public. The project sites are four distributed data-driven research projects, two of which are ramping up their activities and two of which are ramping down. Review of applications begins May 15; submission deadline is May 30, 2012. One year appointment beginning August 2012; possible renewal for up to two more years. For more information, download the call for applications: http://knowledgeinfrastructures.gseis.ucla.edu/docs/SloanPostdoc_BorgmanTra…

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5 New Features to Try In DiscoverText
by Stuart Shulman 11 May '12

11 May '12

5 New Features to Try In DiscoverText - Sign Up for a 30-Day Free Beta with Full Enterprise Access https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dF9NWjZFS1A3d… or http://bit.ly/pArIvj 1) GNIP PowerTrack Sampling For the first time since the GNIP Powertrack was integrated into DiscoverText, users can import random samples of Tweets from the Powertrack. What this means is that broad search terms such as "Obama" or "has:hashtag" (A search for every tweet that contains a hashtag), will no longer ingest millions of tweets per minute, but rather will be limited to the random sample proportion of your choosing. To utilize this new function, just enter "sample:##" after your GNIP search term. (#= the sample percentage from 1-100). 2) Twitter User Bio Searches As of this week, users of the GNIP PowerTrack can now import tweets, according to keyword(s) in Twitter user bios. What this means is that a user of the Powertrack can now search for - by way of example - 50% of all comments about Obama that are said by people who claim to tweet about Fashion. (Obama bio_contains:fashion sample:50) 3) Foreign Language CloudExplorers Also as of this week, DiscoverText tag clouds can process non-English characters such as Arabic and Chinese. In these foreign language tag clouds, users may now alter word colors, exclude stop words & search terms, and quickly search for any word in the tag cloud. 4) Retweet Searching Users may now use a GNIP operator to import only "retweeted" tweets. For example, to import retweeted tweets that contain the word Obama, one would search: Obama is:retweet. Additionally, users can now also filter according to the specific retweets of a particular twitter account. For example, to import those tweets that are retweeted by Justin Bieber, one would search: retweets_of:justinbieber. 5) TopMeta Exporting Announced last week, DiscoverText Enterprise users may now export TopMeta lists, which highlight the most (or least) frequently occurring items in particular metadata field. See our blog for more details: http://blog.texifter.com/index.php/2012/04/26/exporting-topmeta/ If you have any questions about these new features, teh free 30-day beta, or any other DiscoverText functions, please contact Josh@discoverText for support. Josh Sowalsky Director of User Support Texifter, LLC 1-800-936-0534 Ext. 704 Josh(a)discovertext.com http://www.texifter.com/Home/JoshSowalsky

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New book: "Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play"
by Jenny Sundén 11 May '12

11 May '12

Dear all, we thought we should spread the word. Apologies for cross-posting! Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play By Jenny Sundén & Malin Sveningsson Routledge, New York, 2012 Series: Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies in Intersectionality How do gender and sexuality come to matter in online game cultures? Why is it important to explore "straight" versus "queer" contexts of play? And what does it mean to play together with others over time, as co-players and researchers? Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play is a book about female players and their passionate encounters with the online game World of Warcraft and its player cultures. It takes seriously women’s passions in games, and as such draws attention to questions of pleasure in and desire for technology. It is also a book about passionate scholarship, of allowing for one’s passions as a researcher to guide and shape ways of thinking and writing scholarly texts. The authors use a unique approach of what they term a "twin ethnography" that develops two parallel stories. Sveningsson studies "straight" game culture, and makes explicit that which is of the norm by exploring the experiences of female gamers in a male-dominated gaming context. Sundén investigates "queer" game culture through the queer potentials of mainstream World of Warcraft culture, as well as through the case of a guild explicitly defined as LGBT. Academic research on game culture is flourishing, yet feminist accounts of gender and sexuality in games are still in the making. Drawing on feminist notions of performance, performativity and positionality, as well as the recent turn to affect and phenomenology within cultural theory, the authors develop queer, feminist studies of online player cultures in ways that are situated and embodied. Jenny Sundén jenny.sunden(a)sh.se Ph. D., Associate Professor School of Gender, Culture and History Södertörn University SWEDEN

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24/5/2012 Convergence, Engagement and Power: Digital Convergence and the Challenge to Global Hegemony - Postgraduate Conference, University of Leeds, UK
by Stuart Shaw [RPG] 11 May '12

11 May '12

Dear colleagues, University of Leeds 1 day Postgraduate Conference - Convergence, Engagement and Power: Digital Convergence and the Challenge to Global Hegemony We warmly invite you to attend the Institute of Communications Studies 6th Annual PhD Conference, taking place in the ICS Building, Clothworker's North, University of Leeds on May 24th 2012, at 9am until 6pm Full details, including registration information and abstracts, can be found on our website; http://www.ics-phd-conference.leeds.ac.uk/ All enquiries can be directed to ics-pg-conference(a)leeds.ac.uk Keynote Speakers: Prof. Natalie Fenton (Goldsmiths College) and Prof. Stephen Coleman (Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds) Synopsis: >From Iran to China, Cairo to Oakland, Chechnya to Tunisia, bold claims are being made about the role that new technologies are playing in the emergence, sustenance, and viability of populist political movements. Empowered by the prosthesis of technical devices, the ’99%’ appear to have bypassed the monopoly of the mass media through the creation and sustenance of alternative media channels, disseminating information, ideas and political expression unhindered. As such, a question must be asked; how is the authority, legitimacy, and hegemony of the ruling elite being threatened by convergent media? Focusing deeper on the role of technology, these events are often mediated by popular social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook. These interactive platforms have permeated every aspect of day-to-day life, but questions remain as to the role they play in building and sustaining a true democratic discourse. The innovation of these technologies originates in a global hegemonic system which retains their ultimate ownership through existing corporate and financial systems. On the world stage, Western governments pour praise on so-called technologically mediated movements like the ‘Arab Spring’, yet domestically the same leaders oppress similar political collectives such as the Occupy movement. In addition to the political and technological dimensions, there is a multifaceted and multi-layered convergence at play which is influencing the ways existing media forms are produced. Consumers simultaneously become producers, and traditional cultural industries now share space with user-created digital domains of production. Has the notion of convergence reinvigorated the cultural industries by making the production process more democratic, or is it undermining their hegemony over the media we consume? Optimistic expectations and pessimistic disdain are polarizing the debate within academia, hence these issues beg for critical questioning; to what extent are publics, through their engagement with new technology and convergent media, influencing or challenging political, corporate, and social power structures within society? Once the issues are laid bare to analysis, is the global hegemonic landscape really changing in the digital age? In light of these technological, cultural, social and political events, we cordially invite you to the 6th annual Institute of Communications Studies PhD Conference, University of Leeds. This student-led initiative aims at fostering debate among future academics by bringing together those researching areas related to media convergence in a formal conference environment, to critically engage with this exciting topic while also gaining the chance to hear from leading keynote speakers in the field of political communication. The Venue: The Institute of Communications Studies is an internationally renowned centre for teaching and research in communications, media and culture. Our research is multidisciplinary and we have particular strengths in the areas of cultural industries, international communication and political communication. The study of communication and media at the University of Leeds has its origins in the Centre for Television Research, established in the late 1950s and led from 1963 to 1989 by Professor Jay Blumler. With the Centre, the University of Leeds was one of the first to embark on the academic study of communication in Europe and one of the very few universities to undertake serious research on contemporary media at that time. ICS is now one of the largest departments of its kind in Europe, currently offering a number of undergraduate degrees, postgraduate taught degrees and a postgraduate research programme. Best wishes, ICS PhD Conference Organising Committee

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Alexander Galloway Workshop at Sussex on 16.05.2012
by Aristea Fotopoulou 11 May '12

11 May '12

Dear All, The Digital and Social Media Research Theme at the University of Sussex is hosting the final event of its successful 'Digital Humanities' series on Wednesday, 16th May 2012. This exciting workshop on 'In the Aftermath of the Cybernetic Hypothesis' is held by guest speaker Alexander R. Galloway (New York University) and will take place from 16:30 until 18:00 in Shawcross A501. An abstract of Alexander's work can be found below: ******************************************************************************************* "In an essay from 2001, the French collective Tiqqun speaks of what they call the cybernetic hypothesis: "[A]t the end of the twentieth century the image of steering, that is to say management, has become the primary metaphor to describe not only politics but all of human activity as well." The cybernetic hypothesis is a vast experiment beginning in the overdeveloped nations after World War II and eventually spreading to swallow the planet in an impervious logic of administration and interconnectivity. What are the origins of the cybernetic hypothesis, and what are its futures? This talk offers a media archeology of cybernetics through an exploration of nineteenth-century chronophotography, the history of the pixel, developments in computer modeling, bit arrays and grid systems, and that most enigmatic cybernetic device, the black box. Instead of contributing to the many heroic histories of cybernetics that already populate the cultural imagination, this talk aims to uncover an alternative history of digital systems via an examination of the aesthetics and politics of control". ******************************************************************************************* For more details on the workshop, please go to http://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/digital/newsandevents/events?id=13601 or refer to the attached poster. Best wishes and I hope to see many of you next Wednesday for this insightful and stimulating workshop, Bettina Bettina Zenz Research Themes Assistant University of Sussex Research and Enterprise Services Falmer House Falmer Brighton BN1 9QF DIVISIONAL RELOCATION NOTICE Please note that Research & Enterprise Services has moved to new offices in Falmer House (in the South-West wing, opposite the Union shop, facing the A27). Our email addresses and telephone numbers remain the same. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/res

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New Appointments, Digital Anthropology, UCL
by Daniel Miller 11 May '12

11 May '12

*We are delighted to announce two new appointments to strengthen our team teaching Digital Anthropology at the Dept. of Anthropology University College London.* * * *Stefana Broadbent is an internationally renowned specialist on social media. She presented at TED in 2009 and is cited by journals such as The Economist. Her recent book L’Intimite au Travail derives from many years working with teams of social scientists in Switzerland and elsewhere using ethnography to examine the way new media transforms the relationship between work and the home. She theorises new media in terms of their relative demand for attention within polymedia. She has also worked on the analysis of complex and highly automated work environments in aviation and process control.* * * *Haidy Geismar will be coming to UCL from the Dept. of Anthropology at NYU, where she was assistant professor in anthropology and in museum studies and taught courses on digital culture. She has worked on issues of the digital with respect to indigenous ownership and control, archiving, cataloguing and property and conducted fieldwork in New Zealand and Vanuatu. Her book Treasured Possessions will be out later this year with Duke University Press. She has papers in many leading journals such as American Ethnologist, Journal of Material Culture Studies, Comparative Studies in History and Society.* * * *Both Haidy and Stefana have chapters in the forthcoming volume Digital Anthropology (Berg October).*

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tweetadder - any experiences or thoughts?
by Monica Barratt 11 May '12

11 May '12

Hi AoIR :) I am part of an international collaboration of researchers studying cannabis cultivation, especially among small-scale growers. I have an extensive plan for recruiting cannabis growers. One of the methods is through in-person and online engagement with user groups - so far I've been working with one user group who, after a fairly suspicious start, has agreed to support the research and is even piloting the questionnaire for us. One of my other methods is through a Twitter account I've just started @Wor1dWideWeed My question for the group is whether any of you have: 1. used twitter successfully to recruit participants to research, especially participants in hidden populations 2. if yes, have you used Twitter marketing and automation programs like tweetadder to assist the process? I've been looking into tweetadder - see http://www.tweetadder.com/ - because it allows fine-grained automation of many of the tasks which take time on Twitter, especially sourcing new people to follow to whom you are relevant and have a fair chance of following you back. I can see that automating everything just makes you into an annoying Twitter bot... but automating some tasks while still spending a little time actually reading your feed and manually interacting and curating your content, could really assist the process, grow your follower base, and likely result in more relevant people being aware of and participating in the study. On another note, I saw on the tweetadder forums that some people were having their accounts suspended for using tweetadder. Can anyone tell me more about why this is as I'm a bit confused as to whether tweetadder is actually even legal according to Twitter tos? Really interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks! Monica Monica Barratt Research Fellow National Drug Research Institute http://db.ndri.curtin.edu.au/staff/staff.asp?persid=650 @monicabarratt

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