[Nettime-nl] 2 lezingen bij opening van het academisch jaar bij nieuwe media (uva)

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

Festive Opening of the 2011 New Media Season University of Amsterdam
Thursday, 1 September 2011 15.15 hrs (3:15pm)

Universiteitstheater, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

Mapping Online Publics: Researching the Uses of Twitter by Axel Bruns  
(QUT)

As the use of Twitter has become more commonplace throughout many  
nations, its role in public discussion has also increased. This has  
been evident in contexts ranging from political discussion through  
commentary on sporting and entertainment events to the coverage of  
natural disasters. Research into the use of Twitter in such contexts  
has also developed rapidly, aided by substantial advancements in  
quantitative and qualitative methodologies for capturing, processing,  
analysing, and visualising Twitter updates by large groups of users.  
Recent work has especially highlighted the role of the Twitter hashtag  
– a short keyword, prefixed with the hash symbol ‘#’ – as a means of  
coordinating a distributed discussion between more or less large  
groups of users, who do not need to be connected through existing  
‘follower’ networks. For humanities and social sciences researchers  
interested in studying public communication through social media, this  
means that we face the challenge of developing new tools and  
methodologies for processing and analysing these potentially very  
large sets of data derived from Twitter. This talk presents outcomes  
from the Mapping Online Publics research project at Queensland  
University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia (http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ 
).

Bio:

Dr Axel Bruns is an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries  
Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.  
He is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for  
Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi), and has been a Senior  
Researcher in the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre. Bruns is  
the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From  
Production to Produsage (2008) and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online  
News Production (2005), and the editor of Uses of Blogs with Joanne  
Jacobs (2006; all released by Peter Lang, New York). His Website is at http://snurb.info/ 
. Bruns’s current work focusses especially on the development of new  
research methods for the study of social media at scale and in close  
to real time – more information is available at http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ 
.

+++++++

Dissecting Database Cinema: Politics, Methodology, and Media  
Visualization by Elizabeth Losh (UCSD)

Opening lecture of the new media practices course, new media MA  
program, Mediastudies (UvA)

University Library (UB), Doelenzaal, Singel 425, Amsterdam on Monday  
September 5, 2011, 4.00-5.30 PM

Criticism of “database cinema” originally focused on avant-garde video  
art practices generated by creative professionals for gallery  
audiences.  With the rise of user-generated content and social media,  
media studies scholarship came to emphasize the importance of “fan  
remix” and “citizen remix” in the domain of vernacular video.   Often  
these amateur remixes made possible by access to free or inexpensive  
tools for recording, editing, compositing, aggregating, and  
distributing digital video were naively celebrated as examples of  
democratic leveling.  Now that the remix aesthetic has been  
appropriated by the same institutions that deploy one-to-many mass  
media, new theories of remix are needed to explain contemporary  
advertising, government propaganda, and television news.  Elizabeth  
Losh will present media visualizations produced in collaboration with  
Lev Manovich’s Software Studies lab and discuss recent examples of the  
politics of database cinema that range from pop music remixes  
commemorating the Arab Spring to Al Jazeera broadcasts that  
incorporate U.S. “Gov 2.0” public diplomacy campaigns.

Bio:

Elizabeth Losh is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History  
of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster,  
Miscommunication, and Mistakes and the Director of the Culture, Art,  
and Technology program at Sixth College at U.C. San Diego. She writes  
about institutions as digital content-creators, the discourses of the  
"virtual state," the media literacy of policy makers and authority  
figures, and the rhetoric surrounding regulatory attempts to limit  
everyday digital practices. She has published articles about  
videogames for the military and emergency first-responders, government  
websites and YouTube channels, state-funded distance learning efforts,  
national digital libraries, the digital humanities, political  
blogging, and congressional hearings on the Internet.  She is also the  
author of the forthcoming book The War on Learning and co-author of  
the forthcoming Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Composition.

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