School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications

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    The disposition of the destitute
    Arnold, M ; Nansen, B ; Kohn, T ; Gibbs, M ; Harewood Gould, H (Council to Homeless Persons, 2019)
    The final disposition is a term used by people in the funeral industry to refer to the burial or cremation of a dead person. The final disposition is a profoundly important event, not simply a pragmatic or material process, and its significance is expressed through ritualised performances. The disposition and its rituals are shared and communal, involving ceremonies attended by the deceased’s family, friends, and community, whilst less indirectly the disposition is shared by wider social norms and values around the proper treatment of the deceased body. Although the disposition is common to us all, then, it is also a personalised event in which the particularity of the life lived is recognised. Similarly, the place of interment, whether body or ashes, is named and marked to recognise the individual life of the deceased. Places of interment are thus not only identified, but are also accessible to family, friends and community, for the purpose of ongoing visitation and remembrance.
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    ‘Death by Twitter’: Understanding false death announcements on social media and the performance of platform cultural capital
    Nansen, B ; O'Donnell, D ; Arnold, M ; Kohn, T ; Gibbs, M (University of Illinois Libraries, 2019)
    In this paper, we analyse false death announcements of public figures on social media and public responses to them. The analysis draws from a range of public sources to collect and categorise the volume of false death announcements on Twitter and undertakes a case study analysis of representative examples. We classify false death announcements according to five overarching types: accidental; misreported; misunderstood; hacked; and hoaxed. We identify patterns of user responses, which cycle through the sharing of the news, to personal grief, to a sense of uncertainty or disbelief. But we also identify more critical and cultural responses to such death announcements in relation to misinformation and the quality of digital news, or cultures of hoax and disinformation on social media. Here we see the performance of online identity through a form that we describe, following Bourdieu as ‘platform cultural capital’.
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    Digital housekeepers and domestic expertise in the networked home
    Kennedy, J ; Nansen, B ; Arnold, M ; Wilken, R ; Gibbs, M (Sage Publications, 2015-11-01)
    This article examines the distribution of expertise in the performance of ‘digital housekeeping’ required to maintain a networked home. It considers the labours required to maintain a networked home, the forms of digital expertise that are available and valued in digital housekeeping, and ways in which expertise is gendered in distribution amongst household members. As part of this discussion, we consider how digital housekeeping implicitly situates technology work within the home in the role of the ‘housekeeper’, a term that is complicated by gendered sensitivities. Digital housework, like other forms of domestic labour, contributes to identity and self-worth. The concept of housework also affords visibility of the digital housekeeper’s enrolment in the project of maintaining the household. This article therefore asks, what is at stake in the gendered distribution of digital housekeeping?
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    Death and the Internet: Consumer issues for planning and managing digital legacies (2nd edition)
    Nansen, B ; van der Nagel, E ; Kohn, T ; Arnold, M ; Gibbs, M (Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, 2017-12-01)
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    Methodological and ethical concerns associated with digital ethnography in domestic environments: participation burden and burdensome technologies
    Nansen, B ; Wilken, R ; Kennedy, J ; Arnold, M ; Gibbs, M ; Warr, D ; Waycott, J ; Guillemin, M ; Cox, S (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
    This chapter reflects on methodological and ethical issues arising in a digital ethnography project conducted in domestic environments. The participatory aims of the methodological approach required participants to produce a series of videos exploring domestic digital environments. The videos were then uploaded using an ethnographic software application. Early in the project it became evident that researchers had limited control over important aspects of the technology, and that the technology itself was having disruptive effects in households. Further, although the study was designed to be engaging and playful for participants, the tasks of producing the videos was perceived by some participants as requiring onerous levels of creativity and digital media literacy. The chapter discusses these methodological and ethical issues, and how they were largely resolved.
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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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    Social Media in the Funeral Industry: On the Digitization of Grief
    NANSEN, B ; Kohn, ; Arnold, ; van Ryn, ; Gibbs, (Broadcast Education Association, 2017)
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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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    Proxy Users, Use By Proxy: Mapping Forms of Intermediary Interaction
    Nansen, B ; Wilken, R ; Kennedy, J ; Arnold, M ; Carter, M ; Gibbs, M ; Ploderer, B ; Carter, M ; Gibbs, M ; Smith, W ; Vetere, F (ACM, 2015-12-17)