Winners Portable Film Festival

September 2, 2008 at 9:32 am · Filed under art, media, mobile

After a month of deliberation, fandom, and some pretty abject name calling, Portable is proud to announce the winners of its 2008 festival, chosen by the likes of you!

Specially designed robots, working an algorhythm between total views, total ratings, and overall rating for each film, have worked night and day in front of one of those Good Will Hunting-style whiteboards with intimidating looking equations on it to work out the following…

Congratulations (and free stuff) goes out to (link)

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Only one party’s in the game for attention in cyberspace

August 15, 2007 at 8:05 pm · Filed under media, political communication, politics, web2.0

From the Melbourne Age

Kevin Rudd has a genuine presence on the web. The Coalition seems to be lagging, writes Catherine Deveny.

LET’S be honest here, it’s a bit hard to sex up Kevin Rudd. Sure, he’s probably a good bloke. Actually, he must be a good bloke seeing that Howard and his mates have done their best to dig up dirt on him, and all they found out is that he speaks Chinese. The H Team kept opening closets hoping skeletons would fall out and all they found were doilies, neatly folded linen and a tea towel that read “WANDILIGONG! IT’S ABORIGINAL FOR PARTY!” (link)

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From Google to gaggle

August 13, 2007 at 7:12 pm · Filed under deliberation, media, political communication, social media, web2.0

From the Guardian Unlimited.

People quoted in featured stories on Google’s US news site now have the right to reply, marking a fundamental shift in the search engine’s role (link).

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The Portable Film Festival

August 8, 2007 at 7:18 pm · Filed under media, mobile, video, web2.0

A tiny word from the people at Portable.
www.portablefilmfestival.com

Speak to anyone who has attended a free bar event recently and
you’ll find out it is possible to have too much of a good thing.
Especially when that good thing is champagne. But here at Portable
we deal in content not alcohol, and we’re chucking the stuff
around like there’s no tomorrow.

There are over 450 free downloads featuring some of the year’s
best short films, music videos from Willy Mason and The Shins,
and online serials including Lonely Girl 15 and Galacticast.

Log yourself in at www.portablefilmfestival.com and get glugging

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Australian Conservatives give MySpace a wide berth

July 18, 2007 at 9:56 am · Filed under media, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

From the Melbourne Age. And Ironic considering that MySpace is owned by the biggest Australian Conservative of them all.

The Federal Liberal Party appears to be snubbing MySpace, after the social network publicly criticised the Liberals’ response to its new Impact political channel.

The channel - which MySpace says facilitates direct communication between politicians, non-profit organisations and voters - officially launched last Thursday, with profiles for 20 individual politicians.

It is understood the Prime Minister, John Howard, refused to create his own profile page because he did not want to lend his identity to a commercial organisation. (link)

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Virginia Tech Launches April 16 Archive

May 2, 2007 at 7:18 pm · Filed under media

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 30, 2007 - Virginia Tech’s Center for Digital Discourse
and Culture (CDDC) is pleased to announce the launch of the April 16 Archive
(www.april16archive.org). This new online archive assists artists, humanists,
social scientists, and all other scholars who seek, today and in the future, to
develop a better understanding of the violent events of April 16, 2007 at
Virginia Tech. It is also available to the general public of the Commonwealth
of Virginia, the United States of America, and the world at large as we come to
terms with a local, national, and global event that will have ramifications for
years to come. This archive works actively to deploy electronic media for the
collection, interpretation, preservation, and display of stories and digital
objects related to the tragedy of April 16, 2007 and its many effects as text,
image, and sound. Developed in cooperation with George Mason University’s
Center for History and New Media (CHNM), this project is receiving technical,
curatorial and administrative support from Virginia Tech students, faculty, and
staff.

The archive will preserve a diverse record of the events surrounding April 16,
2007 by collecting first-hand observations, photographic images, sound
recordings, media reports, personal writings, official statements, individual
blog postings, and any other documents that can be stored as digital files. In
addition to local reactions, the archive welcomes responses from across the
globe in any language. Through this archive, we aim to leave a positive legacy
for the larger community and contribute to a collective process of healing,
especially as those affected by this tragedy tell their stories in their own
words. The larger trend exemplified by this project is the “digital memory
bank.” Memory banks are being used to preserve the richness of the present as
it transitions to the past, thereby ensuring that the collected records can be
both readily accessible and carefully preserved for future access.

The April 16 Archive welcomes contributions from the Virginia Tech community, as
well as from anyone around the world who wants to share words of support or
reflection following the events of April 16, 2007. The attacks happened in
Blacksburg, Virginia, but they were experienced around the world through mass
media and community ties. The accounts of that day from any site across the
globe are, therefore, very important to the April 16 Archive as it documents
the full impact of this tragic event. For more information, visit
www.april16archive.org or contact admin@april16archive.org. For media
inquiries, contact Brent Jesiek, Manager of the CDDC, at (540) 231-7614 or
cddc@vt.edu.

Established in 1998, Virginia Tech’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture is
one of the world’s first university based digital points-of-publication for new
forms of scholarly communication, academic research, and cultural analysis.
Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences (CLAHS) as well as
the Institute of Distance and Distributed Learning (IDDL) actively support the
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture. The CDDC is also working with
Virginia Tech’s newly established Institute for Society, Culture, and the
Environment (ISCE) to develop new scholarly initiatives, such as the April 16
Archive, tied into the practices of rhetoric, representation and the public
humanities.

This story is also posted on the April 16 Archive website:
http://www.april16archive.org/news/

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BBC and YouTube

March 5, 2007 at 11:22 pm · Filed under media, social media, video, web2.0

The British Broadcasting Corp. began showing excerpts from its news and entertainment programs on the YouTube video-sharing website on Friday, becoming the first international broadcaster to ink a major deal with the Google-owned portal (from the Age, link)

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What is Annodex (hypertextual video)?

February 27, 2007 at 2:28 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, media, social media, software, video, web2.0

This fantastic film annotation (ie. hypertextual video) project is being developed by the CSRIO in Australia and other institutions.

When http, html and URIs were invented, the World Wide Web took its shape. With the technology provided here, we extend the Web to audio-visual data: Annodex, cmml and temporal URIs allow the creation of Webs of Videos. They also enable Web search engines to crawl and index audio-visual content. Just apply anything you know from the Web to audio-visual content - that’s Annodex (link).

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Fast Facts Found Online

February 23, 2007 at 8:41 pm · Filed under education, internet, media, open source, social media, technology, web2.0

This article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald today. There is a small quote from myself on the use of Wikipedia for research.

David Adams talks to four Australians who have helped to build the collaborative online giant that is Wikipedia.

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Vidipedia

February 21, 2007 at 11:37 pm · Filed under media, social media, software, technology, video, web2.0

After 640-802, many professionals think that it is of no use to write 70-290 as well. This is why they skip it and go for 646-204 directly. Although this makes them eligible for 642-901 , but majority flunks the real exam.

_____________________________________________
A wiki for video…check out this research at the the University of Newcastle (UK) in the field of ‘media computing’ within computer science (thanks to Tobias for the Link)

Releasing the hidden value contained in the tens of millions of hours of the world�s media archives is dependent on the widespread of these collections in order to facilitate access. However, archive owners are reluctant to commit to the costs of digitization until two key enablers occur: (a) A cost effective mechanism to annotate the collection such that potential users can search audio/video content to identify items that will satisfy their information need; and (b) A working business model that supports the costs of digitization by demonstrating new revenue streams as a result of making the collection available. The Vidipedia project seeks to address these needs by examining the potential for community based annotation and identifying a business model that supports it. The project will create a tool that will address the challenges of archiving, search and discovery for producers and consumers of multimedia content. Vidipedia will also enable interoperability at the semantic level between services and systems that support inter-enterprise.

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Fidel Castro Search Engine

February 19, 2007 at 7:29 pm · Filed under internet, media, political communication, politics, technology, web2.0

Cuba built an internet search engine that allows users to trawl through speeches by Cuban leader Fidel Castro and other government sites, but does not browse web pages outside the island. The search engine (www.infosoc.cu/buscador) unveiled at a conference last week underscored restrictions on internet access in communist-run Cuba, which the government blames on US trade sanctions (from the Age link)

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What is icommunity.tv

February 15, 2007 at 9:12 pm · Filed under communuity informatics, internet, media, politics, social media, video, web2.0

Thanks to Chris Haller, Director of eParticipation for sending the link.

The concept behind iCommunity.TV originated in a twofold observation: Despite an almost ubiquitous availability of online mapping applications and websites with geo-enabled functionality, no video-sharing website offers the ability to geographically locate content. Secondly, video-sharing is still mostly focused on entertainment and the few video blogs that exist, mainly serve interest groups independent of location.

We believe that people choose the cities and towns they live in not only based on physical but also emotional reasons — the unique heart and soul characteristics of places. Local events, like school events, last week’s hail storm, or an interview with the mayor about the efforts to revitalize downtown, are important events that generate local identity for citizens, but, particularly for small communities or neighborhoods, there are few venues through which these news items are delivered. This means that local news, especially carried over visual channels, has great potential to support and encourage vibrant communities.

Our effort is focused on developing an aggregation platform that ties into video-sharing platforms like Youtube.com, extends their services by letting anyone georeference and sort video clips in news categories, and offers multiple convenient ways to subscribe to and watch these custom channels (e.g. “Politics in Berlin, Germany”).

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AHDH History

February 7, 2007 at 1:19 am · Filed under humanities computing, media, web2.0

The Arts and Humanities Data Service (where I work) has a number of offices throughout the UK that specialise in more disciplanary approaches to digital technology in the humanities. This is one of the reasons that I like Digital Humanities (or ‘Humanities Computing’) in that it respects the body of knowledge and autonomous directions built up over many generations within the disciplines, as apposed to the field of ‘New Media’ where it all tended to turn to soup!

AHDS History’s collection brings together over 600 separate data collections transcribed, scanned or compiled from historical sources. The studies cover a wide range of historical topics, from the seventh century to the twentieth century. Although the primary focus of the collection is on the United Kingdom, it also includes a significant body of cross-national and international data collections. Examples of topics covered include: nineteenth and twentieth century statistics, manuscript census records, state finance data, demographic data, mortality data, community histories, electoral history and economic indicators (link).

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The Sound of One Hand Clapping

November 24, 2006 at 8:32 am · Filed under education, humanities computing, media, web2.0

Within the broader field of media, politics, and society there have been a number of outstanding contributions to the study of the Internet and politics in the past two years. These include The Internet and Politics; Citizens, Voters and Activists by Sarah Oates, Diana Owen and Rachel K Gibson (2006) and The Internet, Democracy and Democratisation by Peter Ferdinand (2005). And to a lesser degree; there is the recently released Reformatting Politics by Jon Anderson et.al (2006). These studies reveal a maturing, less ‘blue sky’ approach to the study of the Internet within politics and the growth of a well-defined, empirically grounded research body of work that can be adapted and tested in a range of political contexts.
Oates and Gibson do argue that ‘…Internet use and its effects needs to be systematic and grounded in empirical evidence’ (2006; p14). And it is possible to progress this argument even further and emphasise that: not only do studies need to be grounded in evidence, but they also need to be grounded in a less invocative and more technically mature understandings of the Internet technologies themselves. And as Lusoli and Ward argue in Oates and Gibson’s volume, large amounts of information online often means that users “…become overloaded and switch off, or avoid it and insulate themselves from alternative opinions by selecting only a narrow range of information sources (Lusoli and Ward; 2006 quoting Shapiro; 1999 and Sunstein; 2001). Likewise, researchers in the humanities are by no means free of this phenomenon and often invest exclusively in the academic codex at the expense of a more fruitful understanding of why and how Internet technologies advance within the humanities or elsewhere.
As we have learned from the field of Humanities Computing, the Internet is far from merely the ‘delivery boy’ of academic knowledge, political communication, or other forms of knowledge (McCarty; 2005). There is an intrinsic message within the medium itself beyond the heuristic offerings to the user that the technical developer provides. Without a developed understanding of this, many studies tend to inadvertently bias reference points that are only useful to advance academic discourses restricted by the technologies of the academic codex. The choices made by programmers and developers to present and order cultural knowledge are also a component of an opinion and without understanding the deliberative choice that constitute this opinion, it leaves a wide gap in our intellectual understanding of new technologies and their effective application and improvement within both the humanities disciplines and broader society. We need to attend equally and symmetrically to the digital tools as well as the academic codex (McCarty; 2006).

The Read/Write Web
Just like the academic codex, the Internet is not only about reading. It is also about writing. Discerning sociotechnical research investments in this highly technical and participatory medium will help to deepen our understanding of the Internet’s changing role in Australian society. We either have the choice to passively observe its progress in our society, or to take the lead and advance it ourselves. Federal and state governments and civil society groups are already investing a great deal of capital and effort into applying the Internet to political objectives, and we need to better understand this and we need to do this quickly. As Nigel Payne, the recent head of Development and Learning at the BBC (one of the world’s biggest broadcasters) claims, the first wave of Internet technologies were relatively easy to absorb; however this next wave (Web2.0) will be much more disruptive (Payne; 2006). This is because there will be literally millions of new entrants making Internet content and as Tim Berners-Lee warns, this information could be driven by ‘misinformation and undemocratic forces’ and ‘bad things’ (and thus we need more social studies to direct the Internet’s development) (Gosh; 2006)

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Born Digital Within Media Studies

November 24, 2006 at 8:29 am · Filed under education, humanities computing, media, web2.0

Most professions, academic disciplines, areas of government, and business have long realised the potential for software and other digital tools to assist them in their decision-making processes. Architects and engineers have used sophisticated Computer Aided Design (CAD) software since the early 1980s to help them design and build complex structures. Accountants and economists have availed of software to help them manage and map financial flows within their organisations and the broader economy. Surgeons have benefited from visualisation software to help them detect diseases within the human body that would be impossible to recognise and analyse otherwise. Governments and political parties have deployed sophisticated actuarial systems to chart the electorate and target resources to support their electoral campaigns. And historians and the broader humanities have relied on computers since they were invented in the 1940s to interrogate text and count empirical historical data that would be difficult to calculate otherwise.
However, the broad field of Media Studies in Australia has been slow in the uptake, despite the exacting body of literature within the field that deals with the rise of all things digital. Although there have been some reasonably successful attempts at online systems to ‘remediate’ older media (Bolter & Grusin; 2000) and systems that offer swift archival retrieval of ‘old’ media for academic analysis (and there are countless research blogs), there have been few serious attempts within Media Studies to engage with the materiality of the Internet in an innovative and scholarly ‘born digital’ way. The interdisciplinary field of Humanities Computing is well established internationally at the uppermost learned levels, and within Australia, History, Archaeology, Linguistics, Philosophy and Sociology have all made commendable contributions to the international field. However, the irony is that the field of Media Studies, which has a certain mandate to engage with and advance new technologies within our disciplinary needs (and does make some of the most strident claims about the effects of new technologies), unduly bears the burden of traditionally tapered approaches.
The study of digital technologies defies traditional approaches in a number of ways: one, digital technologies move so quickly that it is difficult to keep up (Oates, Own, & Gibson, 2006); and two, traditional approaches are often ‘socially determinist’ and fail to neither acknowledge nor understand the intellectual contributions that are being made by attending to the digital tools themselves. Approaches that engage with and advance digital technologies in a sophisticated, scholarly way, help us keep up with the technologies and help us claim our own territory within them on our own terms, free of the all too often intransigent dictates of the market and its merciless drive for obsolescence. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is one such way that the Humanities have addressed the problem of technological obsolescence head-on.
(more to come)

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