Theorising and analysing digital labour: from global value chains to modes of production

This paper considers the following question—where do computers, laptops and mobile phones come from and who produced them? Specific cases of digital labour are examined—the extraction of minerals in African mines under slave-like conditions; ICT manufacturing and assemblage in China (Foxconn); software engineering in India; call centre service work; software engineering at Google within Silicon Valley; and the digital labour of internet prosumers/users. Empirical data and empirical studies concerning these cases are systematically analysed and theoretically interpreted. The theoretical interpretations are grounded in Marxist political economy. The term ‘global value chain’ is criticised in favour of a complex and multidimensional understanding of Marx’s ‘mode of production’ for the purposes of conceptualizing digital labour. This kind of labour is transnational and involves various modes of production, relations of production and organisational forms (in the context of the productive forces). There is a complex global division of digital labour that connects and articulates various forms of productive forces, exploitation, modes of production, and variations within the dominant capitalist mode of production.

Artrage

A humorous, hard hitting series of 6 programmes about burning Art Issues. Written & Presented by Malcolm Bennett.

Just noticeable differences in perceived image contrast with changes in displayed image size

An evaluation of the change in perceived image contrast with changes in displayed image size was carried out. This was achieved using data from four psychophysical investigations, which employed techniques to match the perceived contrast of displayed images of five different sizes. A total of twenty-four S-shape polynomial functions were created and applied to every original test image to produce images with different contrast levels. The objective contrast related to each function was evaluated from the gradient of the mid-section of the curve (gamma). The manipulation technique took into account published gamma differences that produced a just-noticeable-difference (JND) in perceived contrast. The filters were designed to achieve approximately half a JND, whilst keeping the mean image luminance unaltered. The processed images were then used as test series in a contrast matching experiment. Sixty-four natural scenes, with varying scene content acquired under various illumination conditions, were selected from a larger set captured for the purpose. Results showed that the degree of change in contrast between images of different sizes varied with scene content but was not as important as equivalent perceived changes in sharpness.

Defining the nation, defining public television: discourses of publics on public service television in post-communist Latvia

Institutional and political economy approaches have long dominated the study of post-Communist public broadcasting, as well as the entire body of post-Communist media transformations research, and the enquiry into publics of public broadcasting has traditionally been neglected. Though media scholars like to talk about a deep crisis in the relationship between public broadcasters and their publics in former Communist bloc countries across Central and Eastern Europe, little has been done to understand the relationship between public broadcasters and their publics in these societies drawing on qualitative audience research tradition. Building on Hirschman’s influential theory of ‘exit, voice and loyalty’, which made it possible to see viewing choices audiences make as an act of agency, in combination with theoretical tools developed within the framework of social constructionist approaches to national imagination and broadcasting, my study focuses on the investigation of responses publics of the Latvian public television LTV have developed vis-à-vis its role as contributing to the nation-building project in this ex-Soviet Baltic country. With the help of focus groups methodology and family ethnography, the thesis aims to explore the relationship between the way members of the ethno-linguistic majority of Latvian-speakers and the sizeable ethno-linguistic minority of Russian-speakers conceptualize the public broadcaster LTV, as well as understand the concept of public broadcasting more generally, and the way they define the national ‘we’. The study concludes that what I call publics of LTV employ Hirschman’s described exit mechanism as a voice-type response. Through their rejection of public television which, for a number of complex reasons they consider to be a state broadcaster serving the interests of those in power they voice their protest against the country’s political establishment and in the case of its Russian-speaking publics also against the government’s ethno-nationalistic conception of the national ‘we’. I also find that though having exited from the public broadcaster LTV, its publics have not abandoned the idea of public broadcasting as such. At least at a normative level the public broadcasting ideals are recognized, accepted and valued, though they are not necessarily associated with the country’s de jure institutional embodiment of public broadcasting LTV. Rejection of the public television has also not made its non-loyal publics ‘less citizens’. The commercial rivals of LTV, be they national or, in the case of Russian-speaking audiences, localized transnational Russian television, have allowed their viewers to exercise citizenship and be loyal nationals day in day out in a way that is more liberal and flexible than the hegemonic form of citizenship and national imagination of the public television LTV can offer.

A case study in identifying acceptable bitrates for human face recognition tasks

Face recognition from images or video footage requires a certain level of recorded image quality. This paper derives acceptable bitrates (relating to levels of compression and consequently quality) of footage with human faces, using an industry implementation of the standard H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and the Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) recording systems on London buses. The London buses application is utilized as a case study for setting up a methodology and implementing suitable data analysis for face recognition from recorded footage, which has been degraded by compression. The majority of CCTV recorders on buses use a proprietary format based on the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard, exploiting both spatial and temporal redundancy. Low bitrates are favored in the CCTV industry for saving storage and transmission bandwidth, but they compromise the image usefulness of the recorded imagery. In this context, usefulness is determined by the presence of enough facial information remaining in the compressed image to allow a specialist to recognize a person. The investigation includes four steps: (1) Development of a video dataset representative of typical CCTV bus scenarios. (2) Selection and grouping of video scenes based on local (facial) and global (entire scene) content properties. (3) Psychophysical investigations to identify the key scenes, which are most affected by compression, using an industry implementation of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. (4) Testing of CCTV recording systems on buses with the key scenes and further psychophysical investigations. The results showed a dependency upon scene content properties. Very dark scenes and scenes with high levels of spatial–temporal busyness were the most challenging to compress, requiring higher bitrates to maintain useful information.

(un)childhood: performing the voices and times of childhood through relational video-making

This practice-based PhD is comprised of two interrelated elements: (i) ‘(un)childhood’, a 53’ video-essay shown on two screens; and (ii) a 58286 word written thesis. The project, which is contextualised within the tradition of artists working with their own children on time-based art projects, explores a new approach to timebased artistic work about childhood. While Stan Brakhage (1933-2003), Ernie Gher (1943-), Erik Bullot (1963-) and Mary Kelly (1941-) all documented, photographed and filmed their children over a period of years to produce art projects (experimental films and a time-based installation), these projects were implicitly underpinned by a construction of childhood in which children, shown as they grow, represent the abstract primitive subject. The current project challenges the convention of representing children entirely from the adult’s point of view, as aesthetic objects without a voice, as well as through the artist’s chronological approach to time. Instead, this project focuses on the relational joining of the child’s and adult’s points of view. The artist worked on a video project with her own son over a four-and-a-half year period (between the ages of 5 and 10) through which she developed her ‘relational video-making’ methodology. The video-essay (un)childhood performs the relational voices of childhood as resulting from the verbal interactions of both children and adults. The non-chronological nature of(un)childhood offers an alternative to the linear-temporal approach to the representation of childhood. Through montage and a number of literal allusions to time in its dialogue, (un)childhood performs the relational times of childhood by combining children’s lives in the present with the temporal dimensions that have traditionally constructed childhood: past, future and timeless.