Australian Screen Producers Survey : online interactive

There is growing scholarly interest in the everyday work undertaken by screen producers in part prompted by disciplinary shifts (the ‘material turn’, the rise of creative industries research) and in part by major transformations in the business of media production and consumption in recent years. However, the production cultures and motivations of screen producers, particularly those working in emergent online and convergent media markets, remain poorly understood. The 2012 Australian Screen Producer survey, building upon research undertaken in the Australian Screen Content Producer Survey conducted in 2009, was a nation-wide survey-based study of screen content producers working in four industry segments: film, television, corporate and new media production. The broad objectives of the 2012 Australian Producer Survey study were to: • Provide deeper and more detailed analysis into the nature of digital media producers and their practices and how these findings compare to the practices of established screen media producers; • Interrogate issues around the pace of industry change, industry sentiment and how producers are adapting to a changing marketplace; and • Offer insight into the transitional pathways of established media producers into production for digital media markets. The Australian Screen Producer Survey Online Interactive provides users (principally filmmakers, scholars and policymakers) with direct access to raw survey data through an interactive website that allows them to customise queries according to particular interests. The Online Interactive therefore provides customisable findings – unlike ‘static’ research outputs – delineating the practices, attitudes, strategies, and aspirations of screen producers working in feature film, television and corporate production as well as those operating in an increasingly convergent digital media marketplace. The survey was developed by researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), Queensland University of Technology, Deakin University, the Centre for Screen Business at Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) and was undertaken in association with Bergent Research. The Online Interactive website (http://screenproducersurvey.com/) was developed with support from the Centre for Memory Imagination and Invention (CMII).

The impact of social media features on print media firms’ online business models

Many newspapers and magazines have added “social media features” to their web-based information services in order to allow users to participate in the production of content. This study examines the specific impact of the firm’s investment in social media features on their online business models. We make a comparative case study of four Scandinavian print media firms that have added social media features to their online services. We show how social media features lead to online business model innovation, particularly linked to the firms’ value propositions. The paper discusses the repercussions of this transformation on firms’ relationship with consumers and with traditional content contributors. The modified value proposition also requires firms to acquire new competences in order to reap full benefit of their social media investments. We show that the firms have been unable to do so since they have not allowed the social media features to affect their online revenue models.

On-the-fly web content integrity check boosts users' confidence

Web servers are accessible by anyone who can access the Internet. Although this universal accessibility is attractive for all kinds of Web-based applications, Web servers are exposed to attackers who may want to alter their contents. Alterations range from humorous additions or changes, which are typically easy to spot, to more sinister tampering, such as providing false or damaging information.

The economies within an online social network market : A case study of Ravelry

The capacity of the internet to handle micro-transactions and to cater to niche markets is a boon for some areas of the creative industries, which have always been associated with smallscale micro business activities. This paper looks at the specific case of the specialist Social Networking Site Ravelry: a site for knitters, crocheters, spinners and dyers. It traces the interactions between amateurs and professionals through the emergence of social networking sites. An analytic framework of social network markets (see Potts, Cunningham, Hartley and Omerod, 2008) is employed to allow for the inclusion of amateur, social, semi-professional,professional and institutional actors within a networked sphere of activity, rather than excluding some of these actors as outside of recognised value-production. The reliance on social networks to determine the economic success of design, production and consumption is exemplified in this small scale example. This paper eschews the dichotomy of commercial and non-commercial by bringing to the fore the hybridity of this site where financial and social economies co-exist.

Encounters and content sharing in an urban village : reading texts through an archaeological lens

Archaeology provides a framework of analysis and interpretation that is useful for disentangling the textual layers of a contemporary lived-in urban space. The producers and readers of texts may include those who planned and developed the site and those who now live, visit and work there. Some of the social encounters and content sharing between these people may be artificially produced or manufactured in the hope that certain social situations will occur. Others may be serendipitous. With archaeology’s original focus on places that are no longer inhabited it is often only the remaining artefacts and features of the built environment that form the basis for interpreting the social relationships of past people. Our analysis however, is framed within a contemporary notion of archaeological artefacts in an urban setting. Unlike an excavation, where the past is revealed through digging into the landscape, the application of landscape archaeology within a present day urban context is necessarily more experiential, visual and based on recording and analysing the physical traces of social encounters and relationships between residents and visitors. These physical traces are present within the creative content, and the built and natural elements of the environment. This chapter explores notions of social encounters and content sharing in an urban village by analysing three different types of texts: the design of the built environment; content produced by residents through a geospatial web application; and, print and online media produced in digital storytelling workshops.

Women's participation in the Australian Digital Content Industry : initial case study findings

An exploratory case study which seeks to understand better the problem of low participation rates of women in Information Communication Technology (ICT) is currently being conducted in Queensland, Australia. Contextualised within the Digital Content Industry (DCI) multimedia and games production sectors, the emphasis is on women employed as interactive content creators rather than as users of the technologies. Initial findings provide rich descriptive insights into the perceptions and experiences of female DCI professionals. Influences on participation such as: existing gender ratios, gender and occupational stereotypes, access into the industry and future parental responsibilities have emerged from the data. Bandura’s (1999) Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) is used as a “scaffold” (Walsham, 1995:76) to guide data analysis and assist analytic generalisation of the case study findings. We propose that the lens of human agency and theories such as SCT assist in explaining how influences are manifested and affect women’s agency and ultimately participation in the DCI. The Sphere of Influence conceptual model (Geneve et al, 2008), which emerges from the data and underpinning theory, is proposed as a heuristic framework to further explore influences on women’s participation in the DCI industry context.

Naming trouble in online internationalized education

This paper offers an analysis of cultural politics that emerged around naming practices in an ethnographic study of the interactions within an online MBA unit, offered by an Australian university to both ‘local’ Australian students and international students enrolled through a Malaysian partner institution. It became evident that names were doing important identity, textual and pedagogical work in these interactions and considerable interactive trouble arose over the social practices surrounding names. The analysis uses sociolinguistic concepts to analyse selected slices of the online texts and participants' interview accounts. The analysis shows how ethnocentric default settings in the courseware served to heighten and exacerbate cultural difference as a pedagogical problem. These events are related to the larger problematic of theorising the context of culture in times of globalisation and increasingly entangled educational routes, with implications for the enterprise of online internationalised education.

Investigating customer click through behaviour with integrated sponsored and nonsponsored results

This paper reports findings from a study investigating the effect of integrating sponsored and nonsponsored search engine links into a single web listing. The premise underlying this research is that web searchers are chiefly interested in relevant results. Given the reported negative bias that web searchers have concerning sponsored links, separate listings may be a disservice to web searchers as it might not direct them to relevant websites. Some web meta-search engines integrate sponsored and nonsponsored links into a single listing. Using a web search engine log of over 7 million interactions from hundreds of thousands of users from a major web meta-search engine, we analysed the click-through patterns for both sponsored and nonsponsored links. We also classified web queries as informational, navigational and transactional based on the expected type of content and analysed the click-through patterns of each classification. The findings show that for more than 35% of queries, there are no clicks on any result. More than 80% of web queries are informational in nature and approximately 10% are transactional, and 10% navigational. Sponsored links account for approximately 15% of all clicks. Integrating sponsored and nonsponsored links does not appear to increase the clicks on sponsored listings. We discuss how these research results could enhance future sponsored search platforms.

Trends in online journalism : a case study approach based on euaustralia online

This paper takes stock of current changes affecting journalism, and as a case study brings up to date the record of progress made with an online publishing enterprise, EUAustralia Online, first reported on in 2007. It perceives the development of news publishing on line as being in two sectors: media corporations moving to occupy the online publishing field, through complex business stratagems and product-making, and small publications enjoying low production costs and the ability to strike up relationships with numerous users, even on a mass scale. Recent developments in both major publishing and niche publishing are appraised in a literature review, considering both broad-scale industry trends; and pressure from fresh advances in information and communication technology to produce ever-more sophisticated media artefacts, like multi-platform news coverage. The paper also recounts the pattern of work on EUAustralia Online, showing how such publications, ubiquitous ‘blogs’ or newsletters, may be placed in a prospective online order, where large and small operations might co-exist.

Teachers making connections : online communities as a source of professional learning

The impact of the Internet on our lives has been pervasive. People are increasingly turning to the social interaction available on the Internet to satisfy their needs, whether these are professional or personal. The Internet offers users fast access to social contacts such as online chat groups and discussion lists,helping us to make connections with others. Online communities are being increasingly used by teachers for professional support, guidance and inspiration. These are often organised around subject areas and offer teachers opportunities to develop both personally and professionally. Online communities may present as a source of continuous professional development for teachers as they are able to deliver authentic and personalised opportunities for learning. This paper will present the findings of a study that was conducted on three online communities for teachers. It will explore the nature of online community membership and offer some conclusions regarding their potential as a source of professional learning for teachers.

Redefining the student-teacher relationship through online sharing activities

The student-teacher relationship should be a critical factor for successful teaching and learning in design education. In tradition, the relationship is defined as a master-apprentice, so design teachers’ visual assessment capability and technical standards significantly affect students’ quality of learning and achievements. However, there are some negative aspects of the master-apprentice relationship in design education that it may restrict student experiences to cultural diversity and interdisciplinary learning through various interactions with other students. A visual design subject was designed to adapt a new learning method that is to share students’ work and assessment through an asynchronous communication tool. This method was expected to reduce the negative aspects of the master-apprentice relationship and enhance peer-to-peer interactions and individualistic collaboration. A survey with two types of student groups in terms of their levels of participation was conducted to evaluate student experiences to this method. The outcomes implicate that online peer assessment is helpful to reduce the negative aspects of master-apprentice relation and can be useful for achieving the ultimate purpose of design education.

Ourplace : the convergence of locative media and online participatory culture

The trans-locative potential of the Internet has driven the design of many online applications. Online communities largely cluster around topics of interest, which take precedence over participants’ geographical locations. The site of production is often disregarded when creative content appears online. However, for some, a sense of place is a defining aspect of creativity. Yet environments that focus on the display and sharing of regionally situated content have, so far, been largely overlooked. Recent developments in geo-technologies have precipitated the emergence of a new field of interactive media. Entitled locative media, it emphasizes the geographical context of media. This paper argues that we might combine practices of locative media (experiential mapping and geo-spatial annotation) with aspects of online participatory culture (uploading, file-sharing and search categorization) to produce online applications that support geographically ‘located’ communities. It discusses the design considerations and possibilities of this convergence,making reference to an example, OurPlace 3G to 3D, which has to date been developed as a prototype.1 It goes on to discuss the benefits and potential uses of such convergent applications, including the co-production of spatial- emporal narratives of place.

Recommending best answer in a collaborative question answering system

The World Wide Web has become a medium for people to share information. People use Web-based collaborative tools such as question answering (QA) portals, blogs/forums, email and instant messaging to acquire information and to form online-based communities. In an online QA portal, a user asks a question and other users can provide answers based on their knowledge, with the question usually being answered by many users. It can become overwhelming and/or time/resource consuming for a user to read all of the answers provided for a given question. Thus, there exists a need for a mechanism to rank the provided answers so users can focus on only reading good quality answers. The majority of online QA systems use user feedback to rank users’ answers and the user who asked the question can decide on the best answer. Other users who didn’t participate in answering the question can also vote to determine the best answer. However, ranking the best answer via this collaborative method is time consuming and requires an ongoing continuous involvement of users to provide the needed feedback. The objective of this research is to discover a way to recommend the best answer as part of a ranked list of answers for a posted question automatically, without the need for user feedback. The proposed approach combines both a non-content-based reputation method and a content-based method to solve the problem of recommending the best answer to the user who posted the question. The non-content method assigns a score to each user which reflects the users’ reputation level in using the QA portal system. Each user is assigned two types of non-content-based reputations cores: a local reputation score and a global reputation score. The local reputation score plays an important role in deciding the reputation level of a user for the category in which the question is asked. The global reputation score indicates the prestige of a user across all of the categories in the QA system. Due to the possibility of user cheating, such as awarding the best answer to a friend regardless of the answer quality, a content-based method for determining the quality of a given answer is proposed, alongside the non-content-based reputation method. Answers for a question from different users are compared with an ideal (or expert) answer using traditional Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing techniques. Each answer provided for a question is assigned a content score according to how well it matched the ideal answer. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods, each recommended best answer is compared with the best answer determined by one of the most popular link analysis methods, Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS). The proposed methods are able to yield high accuracy, as shown by correlation scores: Kendall correlation and Spearman correlation. The reputation method outperforms the HITS method in terms of recommending the best answer. The inclusion of the reputation score with the content score improves the overall performance, which is measured through the use of Top-n match scores.

Structuring free-form tagging in online news

Tagging has become one of the key activities in next generation websites which allow users selecting short labels to annotate, manage, and share multimedia information such as photos, videos and bookmarks. Tagging does not require users any prior training before participating in the annotation activities as they can freely choose any terms which best represent the semantic of contents without worrying about any formal structure or ontology. However, the practice of free-form tagging can lead to several problems, such as synonymy, polysemy and ambiguity, which potentially increase the complexity of managing the tags and retrieving information. To solve these problems, this research aims to construct a lightweight indexing scheme to structure tags by identifying and disambiguating the meaning of terms and construct a knowledge base or dictionary. News has been chosen as the primary domain of application to demonstrate the benefits of using structured tags for managing the rapidly changing and dynamic nature of news information. One of the main outcomes of this work is an automatically constructed vocabulary that defines the meaning of each named entity tag, which can be extracted from a news article (including person, location and organisation), based on experts suggestions from major search engines and the knowledge from public database such as Wikipedia. To demonstrate the potential applications of the vocabulary, we have used it to provide more functionalities in an online news website, including topic-based news reading, intuitive tagging, clipping and sharing of interesting news, as well as news filtering or searching based on named entity tags. The evaluation results on the impact of disambiguating tags have shown that the vocabulary can help to significantly improve news searching performance. The preliminary results from our user study have demonstrated that users can benefit from the additional functionalities on the news websites as they are able to retrieve more relevant news, clip and share news with friends and families effectively.