Digital scholarship and pedagogy, the next step : cultural science.

There are two aspects to the problem of digital scholarship and pedagogy. One is to do with scholarship; the other with pedagogy. In scholarship, the association of knowledge with its printed form remains dominant. In pedagogy, the desire to abandon print for ‘new’ media is urgent, at least in some parts of the academy. Film and media studies are thus at the intersection of opposing forces – pulling the field ‘back’ to print and ‘forward’ to digital media. These tensions may be especially painful in a field whose own object of study is another form of communication, neither print nor digital but broadcast. Although print has been overtaken in the popular marketplace by audio-visual forms, this was never achieved in the domain of scholarship. Even when it is digitally distributed, the output of research is still a ‘paper.’ But meanwhile, in the realm of teaching, production- and practice-based pedagogy has become firmly established. Nevertheless a disjunction remains, between high-end scholarship in research universities and vocational training in teaching institutions; but neither is well equipped to deal with the digital challenge.

Concerning the house museum and the picturesque landscape in the work of Sir John Soane : with raw hints for post-heritage museum space

The picturesque aesthetic in the work of Sir John Soane, architect and collector, resonates in the major work of his very personal practice – the development of his house museum, now the Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. Soane was actively involved with the debates, practices and proponents of picturesque and classical practices in architecture and landscape and his lectures reveal these influences in the making of The Soane, which was built to contain and present diverse collections of classical and contemporary art and architecture alongside scavenged curiosities. The Soane Museum has been described as a picturesque landscape, where a pictorial style, together with a carefully defined itinerary, has resulted in the ‘apotheosis of the Picturesque interior’. Soane also experimented with making mock ruinscapes within gardens, which led him to construct faux architectures alluding to archaeological practices based upon the ruin and the fragment. These ideas framed the making of interior landscapes expressed through spatial juxtapositions of room and corridor furnished with the collected object that characterise The Soane Museum. This paper is a personal journey through the Museum which describes and then reviews aspects of Soane’s work in the context of contemporary theories on ‘new’ museology. It describes the underpinning picturesque practices that Soane employed to exceed the boundaries between interior and exterior landscapes and the collection. It then applies particular picturesque principles drawn from visiting The Soane to a speculative project for a house/landscape museum for the Oratunga historic property in outback South Australia, where the often, normalising effects of conservation practices are reviewed using minimal architectural intervention through a celebration of ruinous states.

Cross-cultural consumer/consumption research : dealing with issues emerging from globalization and fragmentation

To understand the effects of globalization and fragmentation, macromarketing scholars need insights about links between individual consumer behavior and societal outcomes. The challenge in this regard is to create a program of macrooriented cross-cultural research. This article offers a crosscultural consumer behavior research framework for this purpose. The framework encompasses four key areas of consumer behavior that are related to the forces of globalization and fragmentation, including the environment, identity, wellbeing,and market structure and policy. A discussion of these substantive areas is followed by a suggested macro-microoriented research agenda and a call for paradigm plurality in pursuing this agenda.

SCOOT CBN

SCOOT is a hybrid event combining the web, mobile devices, public displays and cultural artifacts across multiple public parks and museums in an effort to increase the perceived and actual access to cultural participation by everyday people. The research field is locative game design and the context was the re-invigoration of public sites as a means for exposing the underlying histories of sites and events. The key question was how to use game play technologies and processes within everyday places in ways that best promote playful and culturally meaningful experiences whilst shifting the loci of control away from commercial and governmental powers. The research methodology was primarily practice led underpinned by ethnographic and action research methods. In 2004 SCOOT established itself as a national leader in the field by demonstrating innovative methods for stimulating rich interactions across diverse urban places using technically-augmented game play. Despite creating a sophisticated range of software and communication tools SCOOT most dramatically highlighted the role of the ubiquitous mobile phone in facilitating socially beneficial experiences. Through working closely with the SCOOT team, collaborating organisations developed important new knowledge around the potential of new technologies and processes for motivating, sustaining and reinvigorating public engagement. Since 2004, SCOOT has been awarded $600,00 in competitive and community funding as well as countless in kind support from partner organisations such as Arts Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Museum, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Federation Square, Art Centre of Victoria, The State Library of Victoria, Brisbane River Festival, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane Maritime Museum, Queensland University of Technology, and Victoria University.

Respecting local, cultural contexts for assessment practice in an era of globalization

Dissatisfaction, internationally, with existing educational practices and outcomes since the early 1990s has led to increased educational reform. At the same time, there has also been a worldwide shift in control of education away from teachers toward the state for the purposes of restructuring economies. More bureaucratic forms of curriculum and assessment have resulted, with a return to the use of more techno-rational discourse in assessment and evaluation for purposes of efficiency, accountability, impact, and performance management. There has also been an increase in the use of economic and productivity models to study educational outcomes. These models fail to account for the range of outcomes achieved and fail to identify the factors responsible for such diversity in performance.

The MESH book : landscape / infrastructure

Resulting from a series of student-run 'Edge' conferences that have been held in Australia and New Zealand (beginning at RMIT in 1983), The Mesh Book is a collection of essays grouped into themes of Invisible Infrastructures (systems of belief), Immanent Infrastructures (natural systems) and Present Infrastructures (roads and services). Ranging from esoteric discussions to analytical case studies, the book assembles a broad spectrum of ideas on the landscape within the context of Australia and a contemporary study of place.

Enriching relationships : community engagment toward sustainable coastal futures

Coastal communities face the social, cultural and environmental challenges of managing rapid urban and industrial development, expanding tourism, and sensitive ecological environments. Enriching relationships between communities and universities through a structured engagement process can deliver integrated options towards sustainable coastal futures. This process draws on the embedded knowledge and values of all participants in the relationship, and offers a wide and affordable range of options for the future. This paper reviews lessons learnt from two projects with coastal communities, and discusses their application in a third. Queensland University of Technology has formed collaborative partnerships with industry in Queensland's Wide Bay-Burnett region to undertake a series of planning and design projects with community engagement as a central process. Senior students worked with community and produced design and planning drawings and reports outlining future options for project areas. A reflective approach has been adopted by the authors to assess the engagement process and outcomes of each project to learn lessons to apply in the next. Methods include surveying community and student participants regarding the value they place on process and outcomes respectively in planning for a sustainable future. All project participants surveyed have placed high importance on the process of engagement, emphasising the value of developing relationships between all project partners. The quality of these relationships is central to planning for sustainable futures, and while the outcomes the students deliver are valued, it is as much for their catalytic role as for their contents. Design and planning projects through community engagement have been found to develop innovative responses to the challenges faced by coastal communities seeking direction toward sustainable futures. The enrichment of engagement relationships and processes has an important influence on the quality of these design and planning responses.

Doing cultural heritage using the torque game engine: supporting indigenous storytelling in a 3D virtual environment

Digital Songlines (DSL) is an Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID) project that is developing protocols, methodologies and toolkits to facilitate the collection, education and sharing of indigenous cultural heritage knowledge. This paper outlines the goals achieved over the last three years in the development of the Digital Songlines game engine (DSE) toolkit that is used for Australian Indigenous storytelling. The project explores the sharing of indigenous Australian Aboriginal storytelling in a sensitive manner using a game engine. The use of the game engine in the field of Cultural Heritage is expanding. They are an important tool for the recording and re-presentation of historically, culturally, and sociologically significant places, infrastructure, and artefacts, as well as the stories that are associated with them. The DSL implementation of a game engine to share storytelling provides an educational interface. Where the DSL implementation of a game engine in a CH application differs from others is in the nature of the game environment itself. It is modelled on the 'country' (the 'place' of their heritage which is so important to the clients' collective identity) and authentic fauna and flora that provides a highly contextualised setting for the stories to be told. This paper provides an overview on the development of the DSL game engine.

Cultural selection and its influence on perceptions of reputation within organisations

The capacity to identify, interpret, and prioritise environmental issues is critical in the management of corporate reputation. In spite of the significance of these abilities for corporate reputation management, there has been little effort to document and describe internal organizational influences on these capacities. Contrary to this state of affairs in the discipline of public relations, a long history of ethnographic research in cultural anthropology documents how sets of shared environmental perceptions can influence and moderate environmental factors in cultural populations (see for example, Durham, 1991 ). This study explores how cultural “frames of reference” derived from shared values and assumptions among organizational members influence organizational perceptions, and consequently, organizational actions. Specifically, this study explores how a central attribute of organizational culture--the property of cultural selection-- influences perceptions of organizational reputation held by organizational members. Perceptions of reputation among organizational members are obvious drivers to both the nature of and rationale for organizational communication strategies and responses. These perceptions are the result of collective processes that synthesise (with varying degrees of consensus) member conceptualisations, interpretations, and representations of the environmental realities in which their organization operate. To explore how cultural selection influences member perceptions of organizational reputation, this study employs ethnographic research including 20 depth interviews and six months of organizational observation in the focal organization. We argue that while external indicators of organizational reputation are acknowledged by members as significant, the internal action of cultural selection is a far stronger influence on organizational action.