Our paper for TA3 in London in a couple of weeks has taken bit of a different direction than what was stated in the original abstract due to the limitations imposed by TwapperKeeper last spring. Instead of analysing activist tweets, which actually (I realised) would have been hard due to my lacking knowledge of the languages in which much of the most interesting stuff was posted, we will look at news and blog discourse. I started this week with preliminary analyses based on some 20,000 newspaper articles on the Arab Spring collected via Retriever. The sample includes the five major Swedish papers and ranges from December 2010 to June of 2011.

Using Textometrica and Gephi, I was able to get a first overview of the news discourse on the events in North Africa and the Middle East during the first half of this year. The above graph roughly illustrates that five different thematic clusters can be identified. These revolve around governments and leaders (top left), geographic locations (top right), politics and protest (centre), physical manifestations (bottom right), and social media (bottom left). As the focus of the continued analysis will be on notions of new types of audience behaviours, I then chose to look closer at the conceptual relations within the bottom left cluster.

Employing one of the clustering algorithms in Gephi, I ended up with the above colour coded tag cloud. Concepts of the same colour are more closely related (co-occurring more often) in the 20,000 newspaper articles. This has been looking at how the Arab Spring has been discursively constructed by the news media. The next step will be to look at actual activist practices through digital media, by analysing blogs.

In an attempt to post more frequently here, I have started using BlogJet. It is a client for WordPress et al that will hopefully serve the function of lowering the threshold to writing and posting. It also links to flickr and YouTube in a convenient way. First day back at the office for me today. Looking forward to TA3 in London at the end of this month and will now start working on the paper to be presented there. A bit worried though, that the analyses I outlined in the abstract (below) will be hard to carry out since TwapperKeeper disabled the option of downloading and exporting archives.

Twitter Revolutions and Digital Uprisings
Mapping the protocols of emerging cultures of resistance on Twitter

This paper uses Twitter postings under a set of recent “revolution hashtags” (Egypt #jan25, Bahrain/Iran #feb14, Libya #feb17, Algeria #feb19, Morocco #feb20, Cameroon #feb23, Kuwait #Mar8) to analyze digital grassroots uprisings. The aim is to analyze the potential of elusive web spaces as sites of mobilization. Looking at linguistic and social aspects, the main questions are: Is there a common discursive code?; is there a social structure?; and is there commitment over time? With tools from semantic, social network, and discourse analysis I have been able to show that common codes, networks of connections and mobilization do exist in these contexts. These patterns can be seen as part of the elaboration of a “cognitive praxis”. In order to organize and mobilize, any movement needs to speak a common language, agree on the definition of the situation, and formulate a shared vision. Even though it is global and loosely-knit, Twitter discourse is a space where such processes of meaning-production take place. This however is not without friction, and the paper will also take contradictions, pitfalls and conflicts into account.

By Melina Nilsson-Nikopoulos and Victor Bjerselius (camera) of YBC. Interview is in Swedish.

Got my complimentary copy of Interactive Media Use and Youth in the mail today. My chapter in this book, is about collective problem-solving and informal learning in networked publics. I am writing about the case of vlogging, and the overarching question of the chapter has to do with cooperation dynamics in social networks on YouTube. I focus on community aspects of video blogging and suggest that networked publics and participatory cultures offer valuable opportunities to the educational system.

Livescribe (audio + notes) of my talk, by Mattias Davidsson.

Slideshow of photos from the first day of the conference, by DiU.

Video blog entry (Swedish) about my talk.

I am giving a keynote address at the #framlar conference in Stockholm today. The audience will be 1,500 teachers and other practitioners in the field of learning, media and education. I will devote my talk to remix culture and fan practices and end in some questions regarding challenges posed to traditional teaching institutions by the fact that pop culture affinity spaces seem to be more attractive and more efficient.

I will use a number of videoclips in my presentation that span the spectrum of Donkey Kong, goth makeup and Harry Potter. The conference space of the Factory in Nacka Strand is great with many large screens and overall smooth technology.

I’m attending the ESF Exploratory Workshop Consuming the Illegal in Leuven this week. The workshop seeks to develop innovative theoretical and methodological frameworks which explore piracy through work on the socio-economics of consumption, media research and cultural policy in a manner thus far underexplored in broadening our understanding of piracy whether from a empirical, theoretical or policy relevant perspective. By bringing developed approaches from a range of social science disciplines, assumptions and country specific contexts benefits can be explored to further highlight potential for further research avenues for investigating consumption, users and piracy.

There has been a tendency in academic work on piracy to view piracy as a product of existing contexts (e.g. legislative, criminal, behavioural, business and so forth) rather than focusing on piracy as a practice and adopting a bottom up approach. Little work has yet approached piracy from an ethically neutral perspective and explored it through established literatures on routine consumption, everyday practice, and consumer engagement with cultural media. Instead it has adopted a priori assumptions that consumers of pirated goods are „deviant‟, „unethical‟ or demonstrate consumer „misbehaviour‟. Such approaches symbolically link counterfeiting and deviance with the trio of assumptions: That consumption of pirated material is always and essentially wrong; That consumers who engage with pirated goods are a predisposed minority; That extracting a singular practice from its situated context is scientifically warranted.

Quantitative research on piracy has demonstrated that demand for cultural goods – such as music, videogames and films – parallels that of consumption of legal versions of those goods. Moreover, research has shown that consumers of illicit downloads are also the very same people who purchase legitimate digital goods in significant quantities. In other words, piracy is profoundly linked to the ‘doing’ and ‘experiencing’ of other forms of (legitimate) consumption, rather than standing apart from it.

The event is being tweeted with the #esfleuven hashtag.

I have been working a bit on a paper for our DVIS project about the role of the internet for victims of domestic violence. The paper will include social network analyses of relationships between givers and takers of support in a specific forum. It will also have an analysis of network relations between words and topics used in the forum discourse. This video is a preview of that analysis. (use HD mode and full screen)

My paper on Fight Club, originally intended for an edited volume that never happened, finally made it out of the drawer and into a journal.

Ten years have passed since 1999, the year that cinemas were hit by a number of influential, now modern cult classics on the state of reality and its representation: The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, Magnolia and eXistenZ. Perhaps most famously, if we are dealing with novel ways of articulating the realities of gender subjectivities, 1999 brought us David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club. This movie in many ways marks the culmination of the tendency during the 1990s towards depicting masculinity on film in new ways (cf. Jeffords, 1994: 197). During the last decade, these changes have awakened a widespread academic interest, and Fight Club is clearly one of the films that are most often addressed by researchers and cultural critics wanting to probe the relationship between sexuality, politics and popular culture. The aim of this article is to use the existing body of work on Fight Club to develop a critique of academic approaches to screen textuality that attempt to fix readings in the terrain of gender studies. [more]

Position One:
The Faculty of Humanities at Umeå University is seeking a Postdoctoral Researcher to be placed at the Department of Culture and Media Studies. The researcher will conduct studies relating to the continuities between participatory culture and civic engagement. As such, qualified candidates should be aware of current research trends in digital culture, new media, online activism, web and citizen journalism, and fan studies, and should be ready to apply that knowledge to case study research.

The media landscape of today is characterized by active audiences that increasingly take control over the flows of communication characterize the media landscape of today. New spaces for engagement and user-created content are formed through social media. Audiences now respond more and more via media to the content that is presented to them from traditional institutions in politics, journalism and culture. Hybrid media places become the springboard for new forms of social movement, as well as more or less individualized expressions that challenge the previously established boundaries and cultural contracts of the public sphere.

The postdoctoral researcher will have earned an advanced degree and should have conducted previous qualitative research in one or more of the above-mentioned areas. Successful candidates must be able to work independently and apply knowledge of domestic and international participatory cultures and civic action to the development of innovative analyses and models of civic learning and identity.

The position will also be affiliated with the Media Places research program at HUMlab (Umeå University) and particularly to the research theme Media Places as Hybrid Practice and Representation. Within this theme, analyses are carried out of how physical, digital and symbolic properties of our lived experience come together in rich media places, and how hybrid practices and representations develop. The research carried out by this postdoctoral researcher, in the field of participatory media and activism, will function as part of this wider framework, and the researcher will also be able to gain from collaboration and exchange with other researchers within the program.

For further information about the position, please contact Simon Lindgren, simon.lindgren@soc.umu.se, phone number +46 90 786 95 19. Official announcement (in Swedish and English) available here.

Reference number 315-150-11.

Position Two:
Humanities and cultural studies, their objects of study and practices are profoundly affected  by information technology and the digital. HUMlab is an internationally recognized hub for the humanities, culture and information technology, resting on a humanist foundation with a high degree of openess and the will to experiment. Information technology and the digital can constitute tools, study objects, medium of laboratory. Examples of possible areas for postdoctoral projects include (but are not restricted to): Computer games studies, visualization of humanities materials, Fan Fiction, online practices, digital humanities as a research area, embodiment and the digital, gender and information technology, digital art, digitally mediated language and communication, academic activism, humanities infrastuctures, interactive architecture, aesthetic theory, digital creative industries and new digital means of publication for the humanities. Applicant’s research background may be in a humanities subject or from another relevant area.

For further information about the digital humanities position, please contact Patrik Svensson, patrik.svensson@humlab.umu.se Visit the website (Swedish language): http://www.humfak.umu.se/forskning/humaniora-och-it/. Official announcement (in Swedish) is available here.

Reference number 315-127-11.

Applying

Applications shall include

• A complete curriculum vitae (CV)
• A list of publications
• A research plan of 5-8 pages

Applicants must have obtained their doctorate within the last three years and not held a postdoctoral position before.

Documents sent electronically should be in MS Word or PDF format. Your complete application, marked with the reference number should be sent to jobb@umu.se (state the reference number as subject) or to the Registrar, Umeå University, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden to arrive March 21, 2011 at the latest.

Union information is available from SACO, +46-(0)90-786 53 65, SEKO, +46-(0)90-786 52 96 and ST, +46-(0)90-786 54 31.

We look forward to receiving your application!