Tag Archives: Research

Local in a Digital Age

What does it mean to be local in a digital age?

This research sets out to examine confluences between the types of communication and exchange networks and constructions of personal & community identity that are enabled & encouraged by digital technology, on the one hand, and physical proximity and location on the other.

Its particular context is the creative industries, taking Greenwich as the overall case study, and, within Greenwich, five more specific case studies, relating to different creative sectors.

Principal Research Questions:

What significance do creative practitioners / businesses / customers / audiences ascribe to their location in Greenwich?

What is the role of face to face interaction (between creative producers and customers/audiences, other practitioners, members of the wider community etc.) in creative arts and events? What significance (personal, social, economic, logistical etc.) do they ascribe to this interaction?

How do creative practitioners / businesses / audiences use digital technology to produce, promote and participate in creative arts and events? What significance (personal, social, economic, logistical etc.) do they ascribe to this technology?

As part of this research we are conducting a short questionnaire. If you are local to the Greenwich Borough and have a couple of spare minutes, please feel free to tell us your opinion.

Click here: https://goo.gl/forms/jeQkJdAKLJRK3Ac33.

Digitising Academic Publishing

How has the digital revolution changed academic publishing?

This research aims to examine the changing shape of academic publishing; contrasting new and old academic publishing models and identifying how digital publications have affected the way in which the public, scholars and students access information. The crux of the research is to present the best possible way for academics to disseminate their work to the widest audience.

The work aims to understand the effects of Open Access on academics, publishers and academic institutes. It will include, examine and assess business models used by publishing companies, university libraries/ presses and distributors, and identify how these entities have adjusted in the digital market place.

Principal Research Questions:

How should an academic publish their work? – Identifying if traditional publishing has become synonymous with reputation and how quality can be maintained within new publishing models.

What is the future of the academic publishing market? – A look at worldwide programmes to create universal dissemination of knowledge.

Should an academic self-publish? – How self-publishing has become an integral part of the industry and why it should or shouldn’t be considered for academics.

How has the digital market redefined conventional publishing tropes? – With the majority of reading conducted on digital devices, how has the market adjusted to maintain consistence and ease of use?

creativity, Past Events, Research

Feminism, Policy and Otherness, 20th July, University of Greenwich

6th July 2016 miriam

The past week of British politics seems surreal in its ambiguity over the future. Reflecting not only the political but deeply embedded social challenges facing us in the 21st Century. As we look across Europe (and indeed the world) we see similar challenges for politicians and policy makers to tackle. Institutions we thought were immortal suddenly seem very vulnerable; both to collapse but perhaps more importantly to change, where fresh ideas and ways of seeing could find the space come to the forefront.

Woman also seem to be playing a key role in these political landscapes with newspapers like the Guardian running stories about May, Sturgeon, Merkel: women rising from the political ashes of men (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/05/sturgeon-may-leadsom-women-to-the-rescue-amid-political-turmoil). However it seems that despite the gender of politicians there does not appear to be a significant shift in the way that policy is constructed or legislated. This will be the core focus of this conversation which will look at how feminist philosophy can push policy making into creating new ethical guidelines which draw from a more inclusive and plural range of ideas.

The Feminism, Policy and Otherness Creative Conversation will feature Nicole Dewandre, from the European Commission in conversation with Felicity Colman, Professor of Film and Media Arts at the Manchester School of Art. The event will be chaired by Ghislaine Boddington, Creative Director of Body>Data>Space and Reader at the University of Greenwich

We will aim to address the key questions:

What would policy-making look like if it implemented creative and feminist philosophy?

What are the prejudices in current policy-making?
What new ethical frameworks might evolve?
What are the potential barriers to these forms of creative intervention?

The conversation will also welcome questions and debate from the audience as we attempt to navigate the turbulent waters of deeply established convention. This promises to be an exciting meeting of minds unpicking the relationship between feminist philosophy and policy-making!

Register at Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/creative-conversations-feminism-policy-and-otherness-tickets-26323549445

Speakers Profiles:

Felicity Colman is Professor of Film and Media Arts at the Manchester

School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Prof. Colman is Vice-Chair of the EU funded COST [European Cooperation in Science and Technology] Network Grant Action IS1307 on New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter [2014-2018] http://www.cost.eu/domains_actions/isch/Actions/IS1307. She is the author of Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic Grammar (Columbia University Press, 2014), Deleuze and Cinema (Berg, 2011), and editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers ((McGill-Queens University Press/ Routledge /Acumen, 2009), and co-editor of Global Arts & Local Knowledge (Lexington, 2015), and Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (Cambridge Scholars, 2007). She is Co-Editor [with Dr David Deamer and Prof. Joanna Hodge] of the A/V Journal of Practical and Creative Philosophy. Her current book projects are on “Digital Feminicity” and “Materialist Film”.

Web: http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/fcolman

Twitter: @felcolman

Nicole Dewandre is advisor for societal issues to the Director General of the Directorate General for Communications, Networks, Content and Technologies (DG CONNECT) at the European Commission. She studied applied physics engineering and economics at the University of Louvain, operations research at the University of California (Berkeley) and philosophy at the Free University of Brussels (ULB).

She published “Critique de la raison administrative, pour une Europe ironiste”, coll. L’ordre philosophique, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 2002. She entered the European Commission in 1983. She has been a member of the Central Advisory Group and the Forward Study Unit, dealing with strategic analysis of research and industrial policy for the President of the Commission (1986-1992). In 1993, she supported the Belgian Presidency of the European Union in the areas of industry, energy, and consumer policies. She then worked in “science and society” issues (women and science, research and civil society) from 1994 until 2006, before being in charge of the “sustainable development” unit that has been put in place in DG Research between 2007 and 2010. She is now working on the societal interface of the Digital Single Market.

Website: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/onlife-initiative

Ted Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcGywYSJlf0

Twitter @NicoleDewandre

Ghislaine Boddington, Co-founder and Creative Director of body>data>space and Women Shift Digital, is a researcher, artist, dramaturg, curator and thought leader specialising in body responsive technologies. Ghislaine is recognised as an international pioneer advocating the use of the entire body as a digital interaction canvas for over 25 years. She has created live telepresence projects between thousands of participants/audiences across the world for arts, educational and creative industries usage, using her work to deeply examine the representation of our physical selves and our shifting identities in virtual environments. She has co-created and directed many art works exploring the hyper enhancement of our human senses, including “me and my shadow” for the National Theatre in 2012. She has been lead director of many international multi-partner projects, most recently the successful EU project “Robots and Avatars”.

In 2016 she co-curates Nesta’s FutureFest, is curator for the EUNIC series of exhibitions”The Games Europe Plays” and continues her research into virtual physical bodies through her Fellowship at Middlesex University and Readership at CPDA University of Greenwich.

Website: http://www.bodydataspace.net

Twitter @GBoddington

creativity, Markets and Communities, Past Events, Research, Uncategorised

What #MakingLondon Made

12th January 2016 miriam

This blogpost is the final reflection on the event Making London, held on the 18th July 2015 at the University of Greenwich (see #MAKINGLONDON – A First Person Account for full breakdown of the day).

The desire to run a design-led community engagement event like #MakingLondon was ignited by our Creative Professions & Digital Arts department settling into our new home in Stockwell Street, Greenwich. As we became habituated to our new setting and began enjoying the high tech equipment and creative environment, I couldn’t help but reflect on the vintage market place that, on weekends, used to take over this small piece of industrial land with its haphazard collection of furniture, books, clothes and traders. By reflecting on this I began to question what this shiny new RIBA nominated building does to the community here in Greenwich; does it offer new opportunities, collaborations and cultural activities, or is this just what we would like to see reflected in our possession of this space? Are we giving something to the community or displacing it through continued building and development? Through the series of Creative Conversations events we have begun to challenge ourselves, and allow ourselves to be challenged by others, to map out the impact and constellation of networks that have been shifted, altered and re-formed through our occupation of Stockwell Street.

From personal experience we also began to question ‘what does it mean to belong to such an amorphic city as London?’ and ‘whether this alters our sense of belonging and our ability to form connections with those around us?’

Fig 1: Our original Making London brainstorm considering everything from agile belonging to Pop-ups.

To consider this we have begun by looking outwards to see whether design could have an impact on the way that London is currently being shaped, and to question the relationship forming between building developments, financial markets, local communities and the creative industries. It became a trajectory that sought to give people a voice and space to reflect on and construct new perspectives on their own personal London-based issues. By bringing together a collection of diverse people from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines; from game developers to political activists, from ages 20 to 65, our aim was to use design methods and workshops that would allow them to creatively rethink their relationship to London. These activities, writing and thoughts were spatialised within an oversized map of London. Attendees were invited to inscribe their most powerful memories of living in London, what they value about London in its current incarnation and the growing issues of living in a city that has become filtered through it being a financial hub.

The map data could be divided into four main themes; these are London in Flux, London Debates, Londoners on the Go and London Pride (further analysis of these can be found in the Making London report).

For the full information:

Read the report on our Making London Workshop

Watch footage of Making London, including interviews with participants (5 Minutes)

creativity, Markets and Communities, Research, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

Experimental publishing, copyright laws and Mix03

13th July 2015 miriam

I have had a fascination with publishing and its potential most of my life, so much so that I was Head of Art for a small publishing company for nearly four years alongside my teaching commitments. I am very interested in the new space opened up by the advent of digital publishing and all of the new business models that are emerging.

It could be argued that everything nowadays is publishing: the social streams in which we document every part of our lives for a variety of audiences as well as our blogs. We need to be careful about what we write in these digital spaces as we are just as responsible for the comments we make, defamatory statements or intellectual property infringement as the traditional and mainstream press. As Alex Newson with Deryck Houghton and Justin Patten point out, we can’t cite ignorance of these laws as our defense. Even high profile comedian Alan Davies had to pay £15,000 in damages to Lord McAlpine to settle a libel action over a tweet relating to false child sex abuse allegations in 2013. We are all fast becoming published authors, even if we are not very good ones.

It was with this interest and an awareness of the published nature of our modern lives that I went to Mix03. Co organised by one of our key Creative Conversations The New Space of Publishing speakers, Kate Pullinger, the Mix Digital Conference at Bath Spa was held over 3 days and explored the various worlds of publishing looking at transmedia, ambient literature, reader participation, moving from analogue to digital, pedagogy, interactive forms and digital poetry to mention only a few areas.

Mix03 had speakers that explore and innovate in this fast growing sector. I was able to listen to exciting key note speakers, such as award winning novelist and game creator Naomi Alderman, Anna Gerber and Britt Iversen of Visual Editions and Ju Row Farr from Blast Theory. There were also interesting projects presented such as Colin Thomas’s Making Digital History and Claudio Pires Franco‘s research on new media forms of the book: both experimenting with the more interactive components in the digital publishing space.

It is the copyright laws, and their relationship with fan fiction and participatory writing projects that I find particularly interesting and while not under the remit of this conference, as it was more experimental and creative, they have an impact on all of us amateur journalists/authors/commentators/artists. In particular Fan Fiction as described by Ciaran Roberts has interesting and complex issues around copyright. For experimental participatory writing projects such as Sarah Haynes’ The Memory Store mutual respect and recognition is a pre-requisite as the project requires participation in order for it to evolve ‘Participatory projects are about both process and product.’ and so the copyright laws need to evolve in order to protect and not hinder these new projects and participants.

The great joy of such conferences is not only to meet like minded people but also to meet people that have a viewpoint at odds with your own, or come at a subject from an entirely different angle. This allows you to reflect and think more deeply about your subject. For me new collaborations and new projects were sparked and new ways to think about existing projects were suggested. I came away feeling wonderfully invigorated, as though my brain had taken a much needed holiday to somewhere new and exciting. It is a conference that I would heartily recommend and I will be booking myself in for next year’s when the option arises.

Business Models, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

Considering the ‘Open Portal’ effect on publishing

26th May 2015 miriam

May 20th’s New Space of Publishing panel, masterfully chaired by Justine Solomons of Byte the Book, saw some energetic discussion and a really engaged audience. We were encouraged to hear all the panelists urging potential and practicing writers to continue writing; to keep at it, to hone their work and to find their audience. Steve Carsey, Director of Original Programming for Audible, Katrina Hopewell, marketing consultant in broadcast and digital publishing, and Jeremy Thompson, MD of independent publisher, Troubadour and its self publishing arm, Matador, made a clear case for discovering and creating work for your audience. On the other hand Kate Pullinger, award winning novelist and digital storyteller and members of the audience made an equally strong case for letting your audience find you rather than writing for a perceived audience, acknowledging experimental poetry’s online success.

This notion of the author as solely in charge of what they choose to write with the freedom to hope that it resonates with some members of the public is key. Before the panel we asked if the traditional roles of writer, agent, publisher and publicist have changed and what was clear is that with advent of the internet, blogging and eplatforms the writer has many more options. Eszter Hargittai noted as far back as 2000 in ‘Open portals or closed gates? Channeling content on the World Wide Web’ that we no longer have to get past ‘gatekeepers’ to a potential audience, that a lack of big budgets and influence needn’t stop creators any more. The panel spoke about the plethera of ways to get content out there, Katrina espoused the Wattpad model highlighting how that has earned some authors great deals with established publishing houses while creating an audience in the process, such as Macmillan signing UK writer Nikkei Kelly’s Stylcar Saga trilogy.

But here we have the dichotomy of the modern publishing phenomena. Jeremy brought up, to the amusement of the whole audience, the notion that some books are better left inside their author. While he made the point light-heartedly he exposed the other side of this new found freedom. We are now bombarded with content and trying to find meaningful content is hard. The author is competing for people’s time, not just their click through attention. In 2009 Hat Trick Associates cited technorati estimates of over 200 million blogs worldwide, and blogging is only one form of sharing written content.

So now we have another set of questions, with so much content out there how can we find those newly written gems? Will we rely on crowd sourced reviews to usher us to new finds? Will the older authors potential lack of technical skill prevent them from effectively engaging in the digital revolution? We think that this has opened up the market place for all yet Hargittai and Walejko establish in their 2008 study ‘The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age’ that there is still inequality in this perceived freedom according to socio-economic class and gender, does this just mean we are getting much more of the same?

the 3 of us — Three of the Creative Conversations team. From left: Miriam Sorrentino, Gauti Sigthorsson, Rosamund Davies wielding the microphone.

Photos: Panagiotis Balalas

Research

New Directions in Film and Television Production Studies

23rd April 2015 Rosamund Davies Leave a comment

The New Directions in Film and Television Production Studies Conference last week put the focus firmly on collaborations between academics and media industry workers and addressed some of the questions that arise from such research. These include questions about confidentiality and ownership, about who funds the research and whose interests it serves. In a particularly interesting panel about research methodologies, Hanne Bruun examined some of the issues faced by researchers using qualitative interviews in their research. She raised questions of access and power and also the difficulties involved in researching problems and failures in media industries. Since people are understandably more willing to be interviewed about successes than problems or failures, the range of research that a researcher might carry out using this method is potentially threatened. Eva van Passel discussed some of the challenges involved in a project in Flanders to analyse remuneration for screenwriters, directors and actors, using both qualitative and quantitative research methods. What existing data is useful and how can it best be used to establish such a variable and context dependent measure as what constitutes ‘fair’ remuneration? Van Passel suggested that the best way to proceed might be to start from establishing what is definitely ‘not fair’.

In another panel on Changing Technologies and Practices, discussion centred on the breaking down of boundaries between marketing and core content, focussing on Channel 4 as a case study.

In an industry panel discussion on research, Kate Ogborn of Fly Films said that she would be most interested in research into what makes an independent production company successful. Laura Marshall of Icon Films agreed.

Final Keynote John Caldwell returned to the themes of concealment and disclosure, official, informal and unauthorised (such as the Sony hack) and their role within production studies research. He explained how he has examined both the information exposed by the Sony hack and the reaction to the hack, as well as social media presence and other data sources and what they might reveal about the media industries. He pointed out that academia was part of, not separate to, the same corporate culture and neoliberal political economy in which media industries exist and stressed the importance of academic researchers clearly defining their relationship with media industry workers and organisations within any research project. Are they discussants, investigators, collaborators or co-authors? However he also gave examples of ways that these roles can in fact shift and collapse and highlighted the number of researchers in this area whose personal background and identity straddle the boundaries between academia and production.

Caldwell also elaborated on his concept of para-industries (the ‘subterranean levels’ of media production that go into producing pitches and other development and promotional materials, such as ‘look books’ and ‘pre-script novels’, in order to get a project into production). He pointed out that it was important to recognise what is not being researched and aspects of production that remain invisible. He said he was particular interested in the way that every media production was a link in various chains of individual and organisation brand production and how creative labour on any particular production, rather than being supplied simply in exchange for financial compensation, was therefore often part of complicated deals and exchanges that exceeded the context of that particular production. Caldwell proposed collective creativity and consensus building and opposing forces such as dissensus, downsizing and outsourcing, as fertile areas of research, suggesting that studies of incoherence, as well as coherence, are potentially of great use to media organisations, as well as of interest to academics.