Youth media production and technology skills acquisition : opportunities for agency

This chapter explores youth media production involving video games within a formal media education context. It investigates the possibilities for agency in student production contexts where emphasis is on the acquisition of technological skills. It explores alternatives to the well-established approach to media education that aims to develop students’ critical reading capacities as a means to agency. The chapter discusses some of the implications of the differences between youth production with ‘older’ technologies like video and new forms like multimedia production. It also discusses theories of agency as they relate to media education and the challenges of considering agency in relation to new media production. Post structuralist concepts are introduced and used as the basis to explore opportunities for agency in the context of students designing and producing aspects of video games. The chapter argues that the creative and experimental work students undertake while using software to make games artefacts opens up possibilities for agency.

How to tell the difference between production and consumption : a case study in Doctor Who fandom

A television series is tagged with the label "cult" by the media, advertisers, and network executives when it is considered edgy or offbeat, when it appeals to nostalgia, or when it is considered emblematic of a particular subculture. By these criteria, almost any series could be described as cult. Yet certain programs exert an uncanny power over their fans, encouraging them to immerse themselves within a fictional world.In Cult Television leading scholars examine such shows as The X-Files; The Avengers; Doctor Who, Babylon Five; Star Trek; Xena, Warrior Princess; and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to determine the defining characteristics of cult television and map the contours of this phenomenon within the larger scope of popular culture.Contributors: Karen Backstein; David A. Black, Seton Hall U; Mary Hammond, Open U; Nathan Hunt, U of Nottingham; Mark Jancovich; Petra Kuppers, Bryant College; Philippe Le Guern, U of Angers, France; Alan McKee; Toby Miller, New York U; Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern U; Eva ViethSara Gwenllian-Jones is a lecturer in television and digital media at Cardiff University and co-editor of Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media.Roberta E. Pearson is a reader in media and cultural studies at Cardiff University. She is the author of the forthcoming book Small Screen, Big Universe: Star Trek and Television.

Economics of non-market innovation and digital literacy

This article is an abbreviated version of a debate between two economists holding somewhat different perspectives on the nature of non-market production in the space of new digital media. While the ostensible focus here is on the role of markets in the innovation of new technologies to create new economic value, this context also serves to highlight the private and public value of digital literacy.

Copyright, digital media literacies and preservice teacher education

This article considers copyright knowledge and skills as a new literacy that can be developed through the application of digital media literacy pedagogies. Digital media literacy is emerging from more established forms of media literacy that have existed in schools for several decades and have continued to change as the social and cultural practices around media technologies have changed. Changing requirements of copyright law present specific new challenges for media literacy education because the digitisation of media materials provides individuals with opportunities to appropriate and circulate culture in ways that were previously impossible. This article discusses a project in which a group of preservice media literacy educators were introduced to knowledge and skills required for the productive and informed use of different copyrights frameworks. The students’ written reflections and video production responses to a series of workshops about copyright are discussed, as are the opportunities and challenges provided by copyright education in preservice teacher education.

Mediatisation and institutions of public memory : digital storytelling and the apology

Institutions of public memory are increasingly undertaking co-creative media initiatives in which community members create content with the support of institutional expertise and resources. This paper discusses one such initiative: the State Library of Queensland’s ‘Responses to the Apology’, which used a collaborative digital storytelling methodology to co-produce seven short videos capturing individual responses to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’. In examining this program, we are interested not only in the juxtaposition of ‘ordinary’ responses to an ‘official’ event, but also in how the production and display of these stories might also demonstrate a larger mediatisation of public memory.

Digital rights management

Digital rights management allows information owners to control the use and dissemination of electronic documents via a machine-readable licence. Documents are distributed in a protected form such that they may only be used with trusted environments, and only in accordance with terms and conditions stated in the licence. Digital rights management has found uses in protecting copyrighted audio-visual productions, private personal information, and companies' trade secrets and intellectual property. This chapter describes a general model of digital rights management together with the technologies used to implement each component of a digital rights management system, and desribes how digital rights management can be applied to secure the distribution of electronic information in a variety of contexts.

China's Creative Industries : Copyright, Social Network Markets and the Business of Culture in a Digital Age

China’s Creative Industries explores the role of new technologies, globalization and higher levels of connectivity in re-defining relationships between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ in 21st century China. The evolution of new business models, the impact of state regulation, the rise of entrepreneurial consumers and the role of intellectual property rights are traced through China’s film, music and fashion industries. The book argues that social network markets, consumer entrepreneurship and business model evolution are driving forces in the production and commercialization of cultural commodities. In doing so it raises important questions about copyright’s role in the business of culture, particularly in a digital age.

Visualizing digital media interactions : providing feedback on jam2jam AV performances

Instrumental music performance is a well-established case of real-time interaction with technology and, when extended to ensembles, of interaction with others. However, these interactions are fleeting and the opportunities to reflect on action is limited, even though audio and video recording has recently provided important opportunities in this regard. In this paper we report on research to further extend these reflective opportunities through the capture and visualization of gestural data collected during collaborative virtual performances; specifically using the digital media instrument Jam2jam AV and the specifically-developed visualization software Jam2jam AV Visualize. We discusses how such visualization may assist performance development and understanding. The discussion engages with issues of representation, authenticity of virtual experiences, intersubjectivity and wordless collaboration, and creativity support. Two usage scenarios are described showing that collaborative intent is evident in the data visualizations more clearly than in audio-visual recordings alone, indicating that the visualization of performance gestures can be an efficient way of identifying deliberate and co-operative performance behaviours.

QUT Digital Repository: Integrating the University’s IR with other digital collections

Queensland University of Technology’s Institutional Repository, QUT ePrints (http://eprints.qut.edu.au/), was established in 2003. With the help of an institutional mandate (endorsed in 2004) the repository now holds over 11,000 open access publications. The repository’s success is celebrated within the University and acknowledged nationally and internationally. QUT ePrints was built on GNU EPrints open source repository software (currently running v.3.1.3) and was originally configured to accommodate open access versions of the traditional range of research publications (journal articles, conference papers, books, book chapters and working papers). However, in 2009, the repository’s scope, content and systems were broadened and the ‘QUT Digital repository’ is now a service encompassing a range of digital collections, services and systems. For a work to be accepted in to the institutional repository, at least one of the authors/creators must have a current affiliation with QUT. However, the success of QUT ePrints in terms of its capacity to increase the visibility and accessibility of our researchers' scholarly works resulted in requests to accept digital collections of works which were out of scope. To address this need, a number of parallel digital collections have been developed. These collections include, OZcase, a collection of legal research materials and ‘The Sugar Industry Collection’; a digitsed collection of books and articles on sugar cane production and processing. Additionally, the Library has responded to requests from academics for a service to support the publication of new, and existing, peer reviewed open access journals. A project is currently underway to help a group of senior QUT academics publish a new international peer reviewed journal. The QUT Digital Repository website will be a portal for access to a range of resources to support copyright management. It is likely that it will provide an access point for the institution’s data repository. The data repository, provisionally named the ‘QUT Data Commons’, is currently a work-in-progress. The metadata for some QUT datasets will also be harvested by and discoverable via ‘Research Data Australia’, the dataset discovery service managed by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). QUT Digital repository will integrate a range of technologies and services related to scholarly communication. This paper will discuss the development of the QUT Digital Repository, its strategic functions, the stakeholders involved and lessons learned.

Trans digital storytelling : everyday activism, mutable identity and the problem of visibility

Mainstream representations of trans people typically run the gamut from victim to mentally ill and are almost always articulated by non-trans voices. The era of user-generated digital content and participatory culture has heralded unprecedented opportunities for trans people who wish to speak their own stories in public spaces. Digital Storytelling, as an easy accessible autobiographic audio-visual form, offers scope to play with multi-dimensional and ambiguous representations of identity that contest mainstream assumptions of what it is to be ‘male’ or ‘female’. Also, unlike mainstream media forms, online and viral distribution of Digital Stories offer potential to reach a wide range of audiences, which is appealing to activist oriented storytellers who wish to confront social prejudices. However, with these newfound possibilities come concerns regarding visibility and privacy, especially for storytellers who are all too aware of the risks of being ‘out’ as trans. This paper explores these issues from the perspective of three trans storytellers, with reference to the Digital Stories they have created and shared online and on DVD. These examplars are contextualised with some popular and scholarly perspectives on trans representation, in particular embodied and performed identity. It is contended that trans Digital Stories, while appearing in some ways to be quite conventional, actually challenge common notions of gender identity in ways that are both radical and transformative.