School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemIan Fairweather: Artist At Large(Commercial Press, 2019)
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ItemTHE AFTERLIVES OF MEMORIAL MATERIALS: DATA, HOAX, BOT(University of Illinois Libraries, 2019)The study of death online has often intersected with questions of trust, though such questions have evolved over time to not only include relations of trust between individuals and within online communities, but also issues of trust emerging through entanglements and interactions with the afterlives of memorial materials. Papers in this panel attend to the growing significance of the afterlives of digital data, the circulation of fake deaths, the care attached to memorial bots, and the intersection of robots and funerals. Over the last twenty years the study of death online developed into a diverse field of enquiry. Early literature addressed the emergence of webpages created as online memorials and focused on their function to commemorate individuals by extending memorial artefacts from physical to digital spaces for the bereaved to gather (De Vries and Rutherford, 2004; Roberts, 2004; Roberts and Vidal, 2000; Veale, 2004). The emergence of platforms for social networking in the mid-2000s broadened the scope of research to include increasingly knotted questions around the ethics, politics and economics of death online. Scholars began investigating issues like the performance of public mourning, our obligations to and management of the digital remains of the deceased, the affordances of platforms for sharing or trolling the dead, the extraction of value from the data of the deceased, and the ontology of entities that digitally persist (e.g. Brubaker and Callison-Burch, 2016; Gibbs et al., 2015; Karppi, 2013; Marwick and Ellison, 2012; Phillips, 2011; Stokes, 2012). Scaffolding this scholarship are a number of research networks, including the Death Online Research Network and the DeathTech Research Network, who encourage international collaboration and conversation around the study of death and digital media, including supporting this AoIR panel. This panel contributes to the growing field of research on death and digital media, and in particular poses challenges to focus on the commemoration of humans to encompass broader issues around the data and materiality of digital death. Digital residues of the deceased persist within and circulate through online spaces, enrolling users into new configurations of posthumous dependence on platforms, whilst at the same time digital afterlives now intersect with new technologies to create emergent forms of agency such as chatbots and robots that extend beyond the human, demanding to be considered within the sphere of digital memorialisation. Questions of trust emerge in this panel through various kinds of relationality formed with and through digital remains. These extend from relations of trust in the digital legacies now archived within platform architectures and how we might curate conversations differently around our personal data; to the breaking of trust in the internet when creating or sharing a hoax death; to the trust involved in making and caring for a posthumous bot; to the trust granted to robots to perform funerary rites. It is anticipated that this panel will not only appeal to scholars interested in the area of death and digital media, but also engage with broader scholarly communities in which questions of death now arise in larger debates around data, materiality, and governance on and of the internet. References Brubaker, J. R. and Callison-Burch, V. (2016) Legacy Contact: Designing and Implementing Post-mortem Stewardship at Facebook. Paper presented at CHI Workshop on Human Factors in Computer Systems, San Jose California. de Vries, B. and Rutherford, J. (2004) Memorializing Loved Ones on the World Wide Web. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 5-26. Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., and Carter, M. (2015) #Funeral and Instagram: Death, Social Media and Platform Vernacular. Information Communication and Society, 18(3): 255-268. Karppi, T. (2013) Death proof: on the biopolitics and noopolitics of memorializing dead Facebook users. Culture Machine, 14, 1-20. Marwick, A. and Ellison, N. (2012) “There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!” Negotiating Visibility on Facebook Memorial Pages. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56(3), 378–400. Phillips, W. (2011) LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online. First Monday 16(12). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org Roberts, P. (2004) The Living and the Dead: Community in the Virtual Cemetery. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 57-76. Stokes, P. (2012) Ghosts in the Machine: Do the Dead Live on in Facebook? Philosophy and Technology, 25(3), 363-379. Veale, K. (2004) Online Memorialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead. The Fibreculture Journal, 3. Retrieved from http://three.fibreculturejournal.org
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ItemStitching together lacquer cabinets(The Commercial Press, 2019)
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ItemPrivatising East Germany: Re-unification and the Politics of Real Estate(Ex-Embassy, 2018)‘In our time,’ Fredric Jameson wrote in a 2015 essay, ‘all politics is about real estate.’ Jameson’s clear-eyed conclusion makes immediate sense, read from within the embassy – a patch handed to the Australian state, then back to the GDR, then to the Federal Republic of Germany (via the Treuhand, as explained below), then to private owners, real estate developers and jobbing artists. Jameson goes on to list the varieties of this politics of real estate, which reaches ‘from the loftiest statecraft to the most petty manoeuvring around local advantage. Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as global scale. Whether you think of … Palestine or of gentrification and zoning in American small towns, it is that peculiar and imaginary thing called private property in land … at stake.’ Within capitalism, he continues, ‘the land is not only an object of struggle between the classes, between rich and poor; it defines their very existence and the separation between them. Capitalism began with enclosure and with the occupation of the Aztec and Inca empires; and it is ending with foreclosure and dispossession, with homelessness on the individual as well as the collective level, and with the unemployment dictated by austerity and outsourcing, the abandonment of factories and rustbelts.’
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ItemToy Unboxing Videos and the Mimetic Production of Play(the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), 2017)The paper analyses the role of young children in YouTube toy unboxing videos, where children and adults unbox various commercial toys and discuss, play, or perform narratives with them. Drawing on a content analysis approach, the paper shows how child “amateur” unboxers mimic the production and branding strategies of more “professional” channels, whilst in turn “professional” channels seek to produce a semblance of playful amateur authenticity. The paper approaches these practices through the lens of mimesis as it is understood in the critical literature around children’s play and participatory digital culture.
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ItemYoung Children’s Touchscreen Media Habitus(Association of Internet Researchers, 2016-10-31)The increasing prevalence of touchscreen and mobile devices in homes has brought computing and the internet into the lives of toddlers and babies. Not only are such devices mobile and liable to enter toddlers’ reach, but their natural user interfaces provide avenues for gestural manipulation and navigation. Drawing from ongoing qualitative research with families and children aged from 0 to 5 in their domestic media settings in Melbourne, Australia, this paper reports on young children’s embodiment and enculturation of dispositions towards touchscreen media by developing the concept of a touchscreen or haptic media ‘habitus’.
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ItemWhat is ‘Value’ When Aesthetics Meets Ethics Inside and Outside of The Academy(Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS), 2017)As a ‘new’ research discipline, the creative arts challenges ethics understandings with emergent research practices. In this paper we focus on a current learning and teaching project that attends to ethical know-how in creative practice research in order to address the gaps between institutional research know-how and the practices of creative practitioners in the world. Graduate creative practice researchers working in the university are required to observe the University’s Code of Conduct for Research and adhere to the guidelines provided by the National Statement, however practicing artists working in the community are not similarly constrained. Once creative practice PhD graduates leave the university, they are no longer required to gain ethics clearance for their work but use their own developed sense of ethics to make “judgment calls.” Ethical know-how is situated, contextual, and a mainstay of all professional practices in action. The aim of this paper is to examine the notion of value as it is perceived by academics, practitioners and PAR researchers in and beyond the university as this relates ethical know-how. Through an examination of a survey of PAR supervisors and RHD candidates this paper will discuss issues specific to the creative practice disciplines. This analysis enables us to raise issues specific to the creative arts disciplines and will help us prepare our graduate researchers to become ethical and innovative practitioners in the real world.
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ItemThose LED-Lit Water-Kooled Multi-Screen Streamline Battlestations(Association of Internet Researchers, 2017-10-19)Battlestations are customized desktop computers, typically devoted to gaming. In this paper we present analysis of the all-time top 50 up-voted battlestations on the /r/battlestations subreddit. Through an examination of these highly commended battlestations and the community criteria defining a “good” battlestation we provide insights into the material culture of computer customization and its significance within an internet gaming sub-culture.
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ItemEthical and social challenges with developing automated methods to detect and warn potential victims of mass-marketing fraud (MMF)(International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 2017)Mass-marketing frauds (MMFs) are on the increase. Given the amount of monies lost and the psychological impact of MMFs there is an urgent need to develop new and effective methods to prevent more of these crimes. This paper reports the early planning of automated methods our interdisciplinary team are developing to prevent and detect MMF. Importantly, the paper presents the ethical and social constraints involved in such a model and suggests concerns others might also consider when developing automated systems.
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ItemProxy Users, Use By Proxy: Mapping Forms of Intermediary Interaction(ACM, 2015-12-17)