Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications

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    "Adapt or Die": The funeral trade show as a site of institutional anxiety
    Van Ryn, L ; Nansen, B ; Gibbs, M ; Kohn, T ; Gibbs, M ; Nansen, B ; van Ryn, L (Routledge, 2019-06-11)
    Funeral directors shot themselves in the foot over cremation, and cemeteries got splattered with the blood.
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    Automating Digital Afterlives
    Fordyce, R ; Nansen, B ; Arnold, M ; Kohn, T ; Gibbs, M ; Jansson, A ; Adams, PC (Oxford University Press, 2021-08-26)
    The question of how the dead “live on” by maintaining a presence and connecting to the living within social networks has garnered the attention of users, entrepreneurs, platforms, and researchers alike. In this chapter we investigate the increasingly ambiguous terrain of posthumous connection and disconnection by focusing on a diverse set of practices implemented by users and offered by commercial services to plan for and manage social media communication, connection, and presence after life. Drawing on theories of self-presentation (Goffman) and technological forms of life (Lash), we argue that moderated and automated performances of posthumous digital presence cannot be understood as a continuation of personal identity or self-presentation. Rather, as forms of mediated human (after)life, posthumous social media presence materializes ambiguities of connection/disconnection and self/identity.
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    Researching Death Online
    van Ryn, L ; KOHN, T ; Nansen, B ; Arnold, M ; Gibbs, M ; Hjorth, L ; Horst, H ; Galloway, A ; Bell, G (Routledge, 2017)
    Death now knocks in a digital age. When the time is nigh, whether from natural causes at a ripe age, or from accidents or illness when young, the word goes out through a range of technologies and then various communities gather offline and online. Digital ethnography in this “death” sphere has been growing in form and possibility over the past two decades as various platforms are designed and become occupied with the desires of the living and dying. Online funerals and commemorative activities are now often arranged alongside the perhaps more somber rites of burial or cremation (Boellstorff 2008, 128). Services such as LivesOn promise that we shall be able to “tweet” beyond the grave; members of online communities encounter each other on commemorative online sites where they grieve for a shared friend but never meet each other “in person”; and it is predicted that soon there will be more Facebook profiles of the dead than of the living.
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    Facebook and the Other: Administering to and Caring for the Dead Online
    Kohn, T ; Nansen, B ; Arnold, MV ; Gibbs, MR ; Hage, G ; Eckerlsey, R (Melbourne University Press, 2012)
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    Remembering Zyzz - Distributed Memories on Distributed Networks
    Nansen, B ; ARNOLD, M ; Gibbs, M ; Kohn, T ; Meese, J ; Hajek, A ; Lohmeier, C ; Pentzold, C (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
    In times when public and private spheres are mediated more than ever, this volume looks at the way personal and collective memories are employed to revise and reconstruct old and new forms of individual and social life.
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    The Restless Dead in the Digital Cemetery
    Nansen, B ; Arnold, M ; GIBBS, MR ; Kohn, T ; Moreman, CM ; Lewis, AD (Praeger Publishers, 2014)