2019 Calendar of Events

The increased availability of online digital data has coincided with a surge of interest in social network analysis (SNA). SNA offers a powerful range of tools, methods and theory that enables researchers to map, visualise, and analyse sociocultural phenomena as complex networks. In particular, SNA has a natural alignment with the analysis of social media data. For example, ‘nodes’ can represent user accounts and the links or ‘edges’ between nodes represent relationships between users, such as retweeting on Twitter or replying on Reddit. This workshop introduces participants to analysing digital data using the Gephi network visualisation/analysis software. Participants will learn how to import and construct networks from social media data (datasets will be provided), perform node-level and network-level analysis. There will be a strong focus on network visualisation and producing publication-ready graphics.

Creative Industries Faculty Research Office presents:

‘Waxing lyrical on the creative economy agenda’

A seminar on creative industries and their futures,

with the launch of Stuart Cunningham and Terry Flew’s edited volume

A Research Agenda for Creative Industries (Edward Elgar, 2019).

Please RSVP for catering purposes by 25 November to Nicki Hall (noting any allergies if necessary) nicki.hall@qut.edu.au.

Over the past 20 years, the concept of creative industries has become a widely recognised policy paradigm adopted in numerous countries, agencies and educational institutions round the world. QUT has been a world leader in the field, having established the world’s first Creative Industries Faculty in 2001.

But what of the future of creative industries?

This seminar takes on the challenge of considering preferred futures for the creative industries

Venue: The Coomera/Southbank Room, level 5 of 88 Musk Ave

Start time: 12pm on 3 December with a light lunch

The seminar opens at 12:30 with a scene setting keynote by acting CEO of the AFTRS, Georgie Mclean, who will discuss the opportunities for developing and maintaining an active policy and educational agenda nationally.

This is followed by a panel led off by Executive Dean of the Creative Industries Faculty, Professor Mandy Thomas, and including Stuart Cunningham, Terry Flew and Assistant Dean Teaching and Learning Gavin Sade. There will be ample time for Q&A.

Georgie Mclean will then launch A Research Agenda for Creative Industries.

Everyone who attends will be in the raffle for a copy of the book and Mandy Thomas will (randomly) select the lucky winners!

Learn how to use powerful digital tools to analyse conversations on Twitter.

Click here for more information or to register for this online training 

What topics will you cover?

• The role and structures of social media conversations
• Methods for and implications of gathering data
• Key metrics used for analysing Twitter
• Methods for identifying trends in social data
• The theory of social networks
• Methods for creating and interpreting data visualisations

VISITING SCHOLAR PRESENTATIONS

Friday 15 November, 1.00 – 2.30PM

KG X Block (88 Musk Ave) – The Noosa Room (Level 5)

Political Social Bots: How to Detect and Evaluate them on Twitter

Social bots are computer programs that (semi-)automatically tweet, like, retweet, or reply to other content on Twitter. Some of them enter political discourses, sometimes even disguised as humans. They have the potential to influence the popularity of (political) actors, their statements and possibly public opinion in general. However, social bot research is still in its infancy and has to overcome several challenges to assess the prevalence, activity, and influence of social bots on political discussions on Twitter. I thus focus on two questions: how to detect them and evaluate their impact on political discussions?

Dr Tobias Keller is a SNSF visiting postdoc at the DMRC at QUT. He studies political communication on social media platforms with a focus on social bots in election campaigns.

How the revenue share model of music streaming services incentivizes fraud

One of the major areas of conflict in the streaming era has been artist payment and revenue share models. The paper discusses recent scandals and shows how the revenue distribution in DSPs has been exploited to benefit some artists over the rest. An alternative user-centric model (Maasø, 2014) is also presented, a model streaming service Deezer just announced it is piloting in 2020. The paper argues for the need of transparency and accountability in the streaming business, and the need to build and manage trust for the model to be sustainable.

Assoc Prof Arnt Maasø is Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. He is a Visiting Fellow at DMRC. Arnt is currently involved in two research projects studying contemporary media and music: Music on demand: Economy and copyright in a digitised cultural sector (MUSEC) and Streaming the culture industries (STREAM), following up his related project Clouds and Concerts: Mediation and Mobility in Contemporary Music Culture (2011 to 2016).

Humanising the Future is a public event being staged by the Australian Academy of the Humanities in South Brisbane on 13-15 November. It will see humanities experts from around Australia, the United States, France, The Netherlands, The UK and elsewhere gather to discuss the ramifications of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.

Organisers aim to explore themes that go beyond the usual framework of ‘existential threat’ and ‘revolutionary transformation’ to drill deep into how the world can created a humanised future. They will address topics including how to create culturally smart cities, the intersection of cultural practice and technological development and how to enhance workforce development to meet technological challenges.

Artwork: Jon Cattapan, The Group Discusses (2002)

Speakers include Professor Jean Burgess (below right), director of QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), who will present a talk as part of a panel chaired by QUT Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham on Friday 15 November.

“Automation and AI are already playing a major role in our everyday lives and our public institutions, across health, social services, transport, and the media,” said Professor Burgess who last month was named Associate Director of and a Chief Investigator at the new $31.8 million ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.

“So the digital future is already here; it’s already being shaped by and deeply affecting humans, and it is increasingly urgent that the humanities play a greater role in helping to influence it around values such as inclusivity and fairness.

“But we need to get beyond critiquing such developments from the sidelines. To date, there have been very few large-scale, well-resourced initiatives to address how this shift is playing out in the real world, beyond abstract ‘AI and ethics’ efforts, which are often driven and funded by technologists rather than humanists.

“With the new ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, we will have the opportunity to work with other disciplines and with a range of industry and civil society partners at scale and over time, to help create a more responsible, inclusive and fair digital society.

“This is a future that we can play a role in shaping, but we have to be proactive, and we have to collaborate.”

QUT Professor of Urban Informatics Marcus Foth also features as a speaker on the topic of the role of community and cultural sectors in responding to future challenges at a session on Thursday 14 November. Other highlights of the Academy’s 50th anniversary symposium include:

What does the future have in store for the humanities, and what can the humanities offer the future? A presentation by former Academy president Lesley Johnson on ‘The Humanities Cause: Reflections on the history of the Australian Academy of the Humanities’, a discussion panel with the Vice-Chancellors of Griffith University, QUT and the University of Queensland and closing comments by award-winning early career humanities researcher Professor Ronika Power from Macquarie University.

There are also two free public lectures:

Wednesday 13 November: The 9th Hancock Lecture, 5:00pm Griffith University Art Museum, South Bank – Maaya Waabiny: Mobilising Song Archives to Nourish an Endangered Language by early career researcher Clint Bracknell.

Thursday 14 November: The 50th Academy Lecture, 4:30pm The Edge, State Library of Queensland – Being Humane: A Contested History by Academy President Joy Damousi.

For more information, and to book into sessions, check out the program online.

In addition to volumetric and temporal patterns, social media datasets often also describe networks: for instance, of relationships between different terms or issues; or of interactions between different communicative partners. These require a different approach for analysis, involving network visualisation and the calculation of various metrics that highlight key nodes in the network. Using sample data from TrISMA’s Australian Twitter Collection, this workshop utilises the open-source software Gephi to provide an introduction to network mapping. This workshop follows on from the workshop “Accessing and Analysing Twitter Data” (held on 6 August), but you do not have to have attended that workshop to participate.

Conference registration is available here.

The #AoIR2019 Conference Program is available here. 

The Association of Internet Researchers is pleased to announce Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia as the site of #AoIR2019. For only the second time in its history, the AoIR conference will cross the equator and be held in the southern hemisphere, returning to Brisbane and QUT where it was hosted in 2006. The conference takes place on 2-5 October 2019.

Conference Theme: Trust in the System

Trust is one of the most critical issues of our time: trust in our fellow Internet users; trust in the information we encounter in our online environments; trust in the data we produce and in the data that are continuously produced about us; trust in the algorithms that process and evaluate these data; trust in those who create the digital content we consume; trust in platforms and intermediaries that maintain our online spaces and that manage and trade in these data; trust in our national and regional governments that engage citizens over the Internet; trust in grassroots, social welfare and non-government organisations; trust in the regulatory bodies and political systems that are in charge of governing these systems of exchange. At every level, and spurred on by a rise in extremism and increased suspicion of others, our trust in the system is being challenged, presenting challenges for existing institutions and the opportunity to imagine new ones. The 2019 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers addresses these questions of trust. The full Call for Proposals is here.

We invite you to attend the 4th Annual Meeting of the Young Creative Connected (YCC) Research Network Seminar at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Queensland, September 30-October 1, 2019. We have scheduled this event to take place just before the 2019 Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) meetings to be held at QUT in Brisbane, in the hope that this will enable some to attend the YCC Research Seminar as part of participating in AoIR.

Our YCC seminar theme is also linked to the AoIR conference theme to enable connections to be made between the two events for those attending both.

Download the program.

Register to attend 

About this Event

We are pleased to provide details about the DMRC Fridays Seminar Series, Event 3. This is the third in our regular series of seminars in which DMRC researchers, HDR students and longer-term visitors may share their work with the DMRC community. These events are complemented by other ‘DMRC Fridays’ events including one-off seminar events, visitor presentations and so on.

In addition, we are very pleased to be ‘launching’ three news books from DMRC members, as outlined below.

Please come along on September 13 to share in the wealth of knowledge being generated within the Centre.

The book launches will be followed by afternoon tea.

—

Technological Ethics and Virtual Humans

This analysis of digital imaging and cinematic imagining of virtual actors and synthetic humans examines the ethical implications of digital embodiment technologies and cybernetics. I argue that it is necessary to bring together science and the arts to advance understandings of embodiment and technology. In doing so, I explore commonalities between ethical concerns about technobiological bodies in cultural and scientific discourse and developments such as the creation of virtual humans and deepfake digital doubles in screen media.

Jane Stadler is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Head of the School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology. She is author of Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film and Ethics (2008) and co-author of Screen Media (2009), Imagined Landscapes: Geovisualizing Australian Spatial Narratives (2016), and Media and Society (2016).

—

Reclaiming Policy in the Myanmar Popular Music Industry

This presentation considers music policy developments in the Myanmar popular music industry following rapid technological and political transformations from 2010-2015. Previous research has identified cultural policies designed to promote the former military government’s nationalistic cultural ideals, while repressing popular music. The military’s abdication of power in 2011, the liberalisation of the telecom sector, and the democratic elections in 2015 have created a policy void that is being filled by piecemeal policy that only indirectly impacts popular music. Using qualitative interview data with music stakeholders, this article argues for the inclusion of marginalized voices in the Myanmar popular music industry in developing de novo cultural policy.

Bondy Valdovinos Kaye is a PhD student in the DMRC, editorial assistant for Media Industries Journal, and an avid musician.

Zin Mar Myint is a PhD student at QUT and president of the QUT Myanmar Student Society.

—

Museum Management, Digital Business Model Migration and Internationalization

Museums need to find new ways to earn revenue and boost their sustainability in the age of the digital economy. Globalized tourism has pushed museum visitors to record highs in the last 15 years, according to the world tourism organization. However, museums work with the perception of economic uncertainty, also affected by the progressive reduction in state funding, forcing them to diversify their sources of revenue on the one hand and on the other to adopt more effective management and marketing practices oriented to a market logic. This context means that museum business models must adapt to the new age of the digital economy, leading to a new commercial involvement with museum visitors. This requires identifying and developing new models of digital economy in museums: for example, dynamic prices for exhibition ticket sales; rent spaces, use of monthly subscriptions similar to streaming services; rethink the value proposition of free entries, among other services that can be leveraged using digital platforms. In this sense, this communication, which is the result of a pilot research work integrated in the European Museum Sector Alliance / MUSA project, aims to analyse some of the best practices in museum management and business models, based on case studies in Europe and other geographies with strategies that can prove exemplary in their ability to reconcile business models based on the traditional and digital approach to museum economic activity.

Professor Paulo Faustino has joint appointments at Porto University and the Polytechnic University of Lisbon. His teaching and research have been focused upon Cultural Marketing, Tourism Marketing, Media and Creative Industries Marketing, Management and Business Models in Creative Industries, and Media and Creative Industries Studies generally, including Ownership Concentration, Public Policies, Economics, Entrepreneurships, Management and Marketing in Creative Industries and Media Business. He is Chair of of the International Media Management Academic Association

—

Book launches:

Are Filter Bubbles Real (Polity Press) – Axel Bruns

There has been much concern over the impact of partisan echo chambers and filter bubbles on public debate. Is this concern justified, or is it distracting us from more serious issues? Axel Bruns argues that the influence of echo chambers and filter bubbles has been severely overstated, and results from a broader moral panic about the role of online and social media in society. Our focus on these concepts, and the widespread tendency to blame platforms and their algorithms for political disruptions, obscure far more serious issues pertaining to the rise of populism and hyperpolarisation in democracies. Evaluating the evidence for and against echo chambers and filter bubbles, Bruns offers a persuasive argument for why we should shift our focus to more important problems.

Reviews:

‘Flaws in popular conceptions of echo chambers and filter bubbles are exposed by Axel Bruns’s analytical perspective on the actual uses and impact of the Internet in politics, which raises new and even more troubling questions.’ William H. Dutton, University of Southern California and University of Oxford

‘This is precisely the wake-up call we need: a book that blows up myths about “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers”, showing how misleading these concepts have become. Bruns offers smarter ways of thinking about the issues and explains the real concerns that need our attention at a critical moment for media, politics, and public life.’ Seth C. Lewis, University of Oregon

Minor Platforms in Videogame History (Amsterdam University Press) – Benjamin Nicoll

In Minor Platforms in Videogame History, Benjamin Nicoll argues that ‘minor’ videogame histories are anything but insignificant. Through an analysis of transitional, decolonial, imaginary, residual, and minor videogame platforms, Nicoll highlights moments of difference and discontinuity in videogame history. From the domestication of vector graphics in the early years of videogame consoles to the ‘cloning’ of Japanese computer games in South Korea in the 1980s, this book explores case studies that challenge taken-for-granted approaches to videogames, platforms, and their histories.

Review:

Benjamin Nicoll sets up his epistemic (work)shop for an inspiring minor game history that aims to make game studies strange again. From cultural studies to media analysis, the book’s contribution is not only about past game platforms but it also offers strong methodological insights. The result is a magnificent contribution both to game studies and media archaeology. Professor Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton, author of What is Media Archaeology?

Lawless: The Secret Rules That Govern our Digital Lives (Cambridge University Press) – Nic Suzor

Rampant abuse, hate speech, censorship, bias, and disinformation – our Internet has problems. It is governed by technology companies – search engines, social media platforms, and infrastructure providers – whose hidden rules influence what we are allowed to see and say. In Lawless, Nicolas P. Suzor presents gripping examples of exactly how tech companies govern our digital environment and how they bend to pressure from governments and other powerful actors to censor and control the flow of information online. We are at a constitutional moment – an opportunity to rethink the basic rules of how the Internet is governed. Suzor offers a vision of a vibrant, diverse, and flourishing internet that can protect our fundamental rights from the lawless rule of tech. The culmination of more than ten years of original research, this groundbreaking work should be read by anyone who cares about the internet and the future of our shared social spaces.

Reviews:

‘In Lawless, Nicolas P. Suzor doesn’t just raise questions about the power tech companies wield, he sets out to answer them, with urgency and care. He offers a lucid, ambitious, wide-ranging, and cautiously hopeful analysis of how platforms govern – and how they should – that comes at just the right moment.’ Tarleton Gillespie, Microsoft Research New England and author of Custodians of the Internet.

‘Suzor’s book is a truly thorough look at one of today’s most pressing issues and provides real guidance on how we can move forward, together.’ Jillian York, Director for International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Much of the existing research on digital media platforms focuses either on the use of ‘big data’, political economy, or ethnographic approaches to the experiences of platform users in the present. When historical work is undertaken, it meets with significant obstacles with regard to accessing materials, and can too easily privilege dominant voices and narratives. In this workshop, we highlight the value and methodological challenges of exploring the histories of both mainstream and ‘minor’ platforms, including especially the need to draw on diverse perspectives and materials in platform historiography.

We begin with the ‘platform biography’ approach, which draws on archival material and user experience to study the emergence, embedding, and contestation of key platform-specific features and the social norms associated with them. Using Twitter as a case study, we use the @, #hashtag, and Retweet to tell the larger story of how Twitter has evolved amid ongoing uncertainty and contestation about its purpose and meaning. We then look at historiographical approaches to ‘minor platforms’ as a means of questioning how grassroots, oppositional, and even ‘failed’ platforms can help orient us toward alternative ways of ‘knowing’ and ‘feeling’ the media historical present. This involves exploring the discursive and affective archives of platforms by utilizing resources such as archive.org. In a structured group activity, participants will then apply these ideas to different platform case studies with relevance to their own research.

Learn how to use powerful digital tools to analyse conversations on Twitter.

What topics will you cover?

• The role and structures of social media conversations
• Methods for and implications of gathering data
• Key metrics used for analysing Twitter
• Methods for identifying trends in social data
• The theory of social networks
• Methods for creating and interpreting data visualisations

Particularly when working with large social media datasets, quantitative and mixed-methods approaches that draw especially on visual representations of ‘big data’ are now an indispensable part of the scholarly research and publication process. This data analytics and visualisation module focuses on a number of emerging standard tools and methods for large-scale data analytics, using Twitter data to illustrate these approaches. The module introduces participants to the open-source Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit (TCAT) as a capable and reliable tool for data gathering from the Twitter API, and to the high-end data analytics software Tableau as a powerful means of processing and visualising large datasets. The skills gained in the module are also transferrable to working with other large datasets from social media and other sources.

Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash

The second of our DMRC Fridays seminars for 2019 will take place on Friday July 12th from 1-3pm in Z9 607 (Kelvin Grove Campus). We hope as many of you as possible will be able to come along.

—

Playing with machines: Using machine learning to understand automated copyright enforcement at scale

We present the results of a study that utilises machine learning to investigate automated copyright enforcement on YouTube. Using a dataset of 76.7 million YouTube videos, we explore how digital and computational methods can be leveraged to better understand content moderation and copyright enforcement at a large scale. We provide a large-scale systematic analysis of removals rates from Content ID’s automated detection system and the largely-automated, text search based, DMCA notice and takedown system. These are complex systems that are often difficult to analyse, and YouTube only makes available data at high levels of abstraction. Our analysis provides a comparison of different types of automation in content moderation, and we show how these different systems play out across different categories of content. We hope that this work provides a methodological base for continued experimentation with the use of digital and computational methods to enable large-scale analysis of the operation of automated systems.

Nicolas Suzor is an Associate Professor at QUT School of Law specialising in the regulation of digital technologies. Joanne Gray is a Lecturer in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT specialising in the regulation of digital media environments.

—

Digital Inoculations: Treatments of Vaccination Controversies in Popular Science Podcasts

Since the medium’s emergence as a vehicle for the creation and dissemination of edutainment, podcasting has held increasing appeal for science communicators attracting even the attention and participation of ‘celebrity scientists’ Brian Cox and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Podcasts provide a useful tool for combating issues that have not been resolved by traditional science communication methods. Using vaccination controversies as a case study, this paper examines how existing science podcasts approach the vexing phenomena of vaccine hesitancy. The analysis reveals some of the possibilities and problems present in science podcasting.

Steven Gil is founding editor of the Journal of Science & Popular Culture. For the past ten years he has undertaken research on the cultural history of science. He is an Industry Fellow at QUT’s School of Communication where he is developing a new science podcast. His publications include Science Wars through the Stargate (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) as well as numerous articles and chapters.

—

The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software

The Unity game engine is a software development tool that enables real-time interactive digital content — primarily videogames — to be created. Game engines are often conceptualised as ‘actors’ that coordinate disciplinary conflict within studio environments. Drawing on interviews with approximately 175 Australian videogame developers, students, and educators, and building on research from a forthcoming co-authored book (Palgrave, 2019), we argue that game engines such as Unity are better understood as ‘cultural software’, and that in order to understand their mediations, we need to look at how they enrol users in ‘circuits of cultural software’.

Benjamin Nicoll is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Communication and a member of the DMRC at QUT. Brendan Keogh is a DECRA fellow and member of the DMRC at QUT.

—

Instagrab is a research tool developed at the DMRC for collecting and processing Instagram posts and media files without access to the Instagram Web API. In this workshop you will experiment with the Instagrab software, and collect data from Instagram (and generate output) that is useful for your own research projects, and we will also have a (brief) critical discussion about issues and risks related to using a research tool such as Instagrab, primarily from an ethical and legal perspective.

Information diffusion and other time-based processes in social media networks are examples of inherently complex phenomena characterized by nonlinear properties such as “tipping points” or “virtuous” (or “vicious”) circles. These properties make them very difficult to capture with our traditional approaches for theory development and we often run the risk of making superficial analyses that are able to explain the observed patterns. This workshop introduces to agent-based modelling (ABM), which is a method that has proven to be a useful alternative for unpacking complex and dynamic phenomena. During the workshop we will explore agent-based models and you learn how to build a simple model and run simulations with NetLogo.

Please join us for this visiting scholar seminar on Friday 17 May at 2.00pm at QUT Kelvin Grove.

Love knows no bounds…except for postcodes and sexual racism: Mapping location-aware mobile dating practices in Sydney

Race matters within contemporary dating and partner seeking, where inequalities of intimacy are now entangled with Smartphone dating applications (apps) such as Tinder, Bumble and Grindr. In theory, digitally-mediated dating promises possibilities for reconfiguring intimacies. In practice, what social encounters are being realised, and what boundaries between people remain and are reinforced?

To visualise mobile dating practices and mobilities across the city, dating app users were asked to indicate where they had been on dates, and where they would and would not use dating apps, on a map of metropolitan Sydney. The maps, and accompanying interviews, reveal how dating apps enable racism, sexism and class discrimination, and become entwined in long standing spatial inequalities within Sydney. The design of dating apps (including their simplistic, hypervisual and gamified user interfaces) interacts with widespread partner seeking discourses of having sexual ‘preferences’, and clouds the prevalence of sexual racism (and associated socio-economic discrimination) within society.

Jenna Condie is a Lecturer in Digital Research and Online Social Analysis at Western Sydney University. With psychology as a base, she researches cyber-urban living and what people and places are becoming with new technologies. At Western, Jenna co-leads Travel in the Digital Age (TinDA), an interdisciplinary group of researchers focused on travel, transport, technology, mobile lives and equitable mobilities. In 2018, Jenna co-edited ‘Doing Research In and On the Digital: Research Methods Across Fields of Inquiry’ (Routledge) and has published on new materialist and scholar-activist approaches to researching with responsibility.

All are welcome to this free event but registration is essential at the Eventbrite site.

As digital technology enables us to move in and out of audio on location, producers and artists are responding to the new ‘storied space’ in a variety of ways. Join Hamish Sewell, independent audio storyteller, podcaster and founder of the geo locative project, Soundtrails (http://soundtrails.com.au/), as he discusses his latest study trip to the UK. Here he explored some leading geo locative projects and met with leaders in the field. From ‘experience designers’ to slow journalism to ambient literature: Hamish will discuss his findings, the current trends, opportunities and roadblocks in this new and exciting field. All are welcome to the seminar on Friday 17 May at 1.00pm at QUT Kelvin Grove. Please register at the Eventbrite site.

Hamish Sewell is a location-based audio storyteller, an international award-winning radio documentary maker, a podcaster and the founder of the geo locative audio project, Soundtrails. The Soundtrails project spans 13 locations in northern NSW, operates on a commercial basis and is now moving into Queensland. Hamish’s website & blog are located here: https://storiedland.com/.

In recent years WhatsApp has emerged as one of the world’s fastest growing platforms. Founded in 2009 by two Yahoo former employees, WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014, and is now the preferred app in more than 100 countries around the world (Sevitt, 2017). Exploration of WhatsApp as an instrumental tool for ordinary citizens, activists, government agencies, businesses, and “bad actors” meets with considerable methodological challenges too. Much current work on WhatsApp employs traditional social science methods to understand its use, for the app cannot be studied using digital methods relying on, for example, the extraction of large-scale data sets via accessing platforms Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In this workshop we will look at and reflect on new methods to know more about what kind of information circulates on this platform, who is responsible of mobilizing its spread, and user practices on the app.

The first of our DMRC Fridays Seminar Series for 2019 takes place on April 12 with four exciting presentations! Join us to hear about the latest research being generated by Centre members and research students. Please register to attend at the Eventbrite site.

April 12: Kelvin Grove Campus: Z9 607: 1-3pm.

Who is Amanda Lotz and what does she do?

Amanda Lotz

This talk introduces my research approach and current projects with a deeper dive into book proposal I’m working on.

—

Data, Digital and Field: Political Parties and 21st Century Campaigning

Glenn Kefford

It is now widely known that political parties in parliamentary democracies are actively investing in digital campaigning and data analytics, thereby replicating developments in the United States. Less is known, however, about how often and the reasons why parties such as these outsource their digital and data requirements to external digital consultants. In this paper, I draw on extensive interview data completed with party officials, campaign staff and digital consultants in Australia and the United Kingdom to answer these questions and consider how these relationships pose challenges for political parties and for liberal democracy.

Glenn is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University and a visitor to the DMRC. His research focusses on political parties, elections and campaigning. He is a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow (2019-21) and his project is investigating how political parties in parliamentary democracies are responding to the digital and field revolutions in campaigning, including the implications of this for political parties and liberal democracy.

—

Digital inclusion in Far North Queensland agricultural communities

Amber Marshall

The Australian Digital Inclusion Index reveals deficiencies in internet access, affordability and digital ability in rural and remote areas. However, we have little insight into the lived experience of digital in/exclusion in rural/remote agricultural Australia. Through interviews and focus groups undertaken at rural events and on properties across the Northern Gulf in Far North Queensland, the research aimed to investigate how digital connectivity (or lack thereof) enables and constrains businesses and lives for cattle farmers. It also aimed to unpack some of the assumptions, knowledge and skills that underpin experiences of bush internet.

—

Peer pedagogies on digital platforms: learning with Minecraft Let’s Players

Michael Dezuanni

This presentation outlines a book project I have been working on for the past eighteen months with a focus on ‘family friendly’ Minecraft Let’s Players. Minecraft remains the world’s most popular digital game, and is one of the most searched for terms on YouTube. ‘Family friendly’ Let’s Players such as DanTDM are amongst the most subscribed YouTube channels and are part of the draw for children moving away from traditional television programming towards YouTube. My project seeks to understand the connections between Minecraft as a platform for the production of social media entertainment, micro-celebrity authenticity, fandom and children’s learning. I introduce the term ‘peer pedagogies’ to describe a particular learning relationship that emerges through interaction with Let’s Play content.

Light refreshments will be served at the LaBoite Theatre Foyer, 6 Musk Avenue, Kelvin Grove from 5.30pm.

Human communication is a dynamic, complex and reciprocal process that relies on interlocutors encoding and decoding communicative acts via multiple modalities. Advances in computational processing in the previous decades have motivated interest in the development of computational techniques and tools for aiding the analysis of conversational exchanges, many belonging to a family of techniques called Computer Assisted Qualitative Data AnalysiS (CAQDAS) (Fielding & Warnes, 2009; Seale, 2010). Most CAQDAS techniques do not seek to replace the need for human judgement or interpretation, rather instead to augment human judgements (Angus, Fitzgerald, Atay, & Wiles, 2015).

In this workshop A/Prof Dan Angus will overview a number of conversation analytic frameworks, using practical examples and public data to reveal their utility for social scientific research. The talk will primarily focus on Discursis (Angus, Smith & Wiles, 2012), a software designed to assist in the analysis of inter-speaker conceptual exchange, but will also include examples from recent work on a new software framework, CalPy, designed to extract qualities from audio data (pitch, pause, intensity) for analysis and interpretation (Angus, Yu, Vrbik, Back & Wiles, 2018). This talk will be of interest to anyone interested in the study of discourse, be it social media, legacy media, interpersonal, or intergroup communication. The workshop will include live demos of these various software and also offer participants the chance to install software and run their own analyses.

Participants will have the opportunity to engage in a number of workshops delivered by DMRC and guest facilitators. The #dmrcss19 workshops page lists the workshops we will be offering this year, and will be progressively updated. Once accepted into the DMRC Summer School program, participants will have the opportunity to indicate their preferences from among these workshops.