“Prosuming” across cultures : youth creating digital media across borders

The Scratch Online Community is a space that enables young people to share their creative digital projects internationally with a level of ease that was impossible only a few years ago. Like all creative communities, Scratch is not just a space for sharing products, work, techniques and tips and tricks, but also a space for social interaction. Media literacy educators have unprecedented challenges and opportunities in digital environments like Scratch to harness the vast amount of knowledge in the community to enhance students’ learning. They also have challenges and opportunities in terms of implementing a form of digital media literacy education that is responsive to social and cultural representation. One role of digital media literacy is to help young people to challenge unfair and derogatory portrayals of people and to break down processes of social and cultural ‘othering’ so that all community members feel included and safe to express themselves. This article considers how online community spaces might draw on social interaction to enhance cross-cultural understandings and learning through dialogue and creative practice. The article uses statistics to indicate the amount of international interaction in the Scratch community. It then uses qualitative analysis of forum discussions and creative digital work to analyse the types of cross cultural interaction that occurs.

Developing an Agriculture-Related Digital Project

With the increasing expectation of information searchers for all information to be available online, digital projects are growing in number and importance. These projects allow libraries to become producers, if not of content, then of new accessibility options for their patrons. One librarian’s experience in the development and coordination of a digital project in an academic setting is presented, in order to demonstrate potential best practices for similar projects. Selection, coordination, standards, outsourcing, and funding of projects are all discussed. It is possible relatively quickly and inexpensively to produce a useful, quality digital project.

Digital repository implementation: a toolbox for streamlined success

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the tools and strategies that were employed by C/W MARS to successfully develop and implement the Digital Treasures digital repository. Design/methodology/approach – This paper outlines the planning and subsequent technical issues that arise when implementing a digitization project on the scale of the large, multi-type, automated library network. Workflow solutions addressed include synchronous online metadata record submissions from multiple library sources and the delivery of collection-level use statistics to participating library administrators. The importance of standards-based descriptive metadata and the role of project collaboration are also discussed. Findings – From the time of its initial planning, the Digital Treasures repository was fully implemented in six months. The discernable and statistically quantified online discovery and access of actual digital objects greatly assisted libraries unsure of their own staffing costs/benefits to join the repository. Originality/value – This case study may serve as a possible example of initial planning, workflow and final implementation strategies for new repositories in both the general and library consortium environment. Keywords – Digital repositories, Library networks, Data management. Paper type – Case study

Disaster strikes, then what? Using evaluation in narrative driven (oral history & digital storytelling) community-based projects

In 2011 Queensland suffered both floods and cyclones, leaving residents without homes and their communities in ruins (2011). This paper presents how researchers from QUT, who are also members of the Oral History Association of Australia (OHAA) Queensland’s chapter, are using oral history, photographs, videography and digital storytelling to help heal and empower rural communities around the state and how evaluation has become a key element of our research. QUT researchers ran storytelling workshops in the capital city of Brisbane i early 2011, after the city suffered sever flooding. Cyclone Yasi then struck the town of Cardwell (in February 2011) destroying their historical museum and recording equipment. We delivered an 'emergency workshop', offering participants hands on use of the equipment, ethical and interviewing theory, so that the community could start to build a new collection. We included oral history workshops as well as sessions on how best to use a video camera, digital camera and creative writing sessions, so the community would also know how to make 'products' or exhibition pieces out of the interviews they were recording. We returned six months later to conduct follow-up workshops and the material produced by and with the community had been amazing. More funding has now been secured to replicate audio/visual/writing workshops in other remote rural Queensland communities including Townsville, Mackay and Cunnamulla and Toowoomba in 2012, highlighting the need for a multi media approach, to leverage the most out of OH interviews as a mechanism to restore and promote community resilience and pride.

Inscribing value on business model innovations: Insights from industrial projects commercializing disruptive digital innovations

In this paper we seek to show how marketing activities inscribe value on business model innovation, representative of an act, or sequence of socially interconnecting acts. Theoretically we ask two interlinked questions: (1) how can value inscriptions contribute to business model innovations? (2) how can marketing activities support the inscription of value on business model innovations? Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with the thirty-seven members from across four industrial projects commercializing disruptive digital innovations. Various individuals from a diverse range of firms are shown to cast relevant components of their agency and knowledge on business model innovations through negotiation as an ongoing social process. Value inscription is mutually constituted from the marketing activities, interactions and negotiations of multiple project members across firms and functions to counter destabilizing forces and tensions arising from the commercialization of disruptive digital innovations. This contributes to recent conceptual thinking in the industrial marketing literature, which views business models as situated within dynamic business networks and a context-led evolutionary process. A contribution is also made to debate in the marketing literature around marketing's boundary-spanning role, with marketing activities shown to span and navigate across functions and firms in supporting value inscriptions on business model innovations.

Gold, power, protest: Digital and social media and protests against large-scale mining projects in Colombia

Colombia’s Internet connectivity has increased immensely. Colombia has also ‘opened for business’, leading to an influx of extractive projects to which social movements object heavily. Studies on the role of digital media in political mobilisation in developing countries are still scarce. Using surveys, interviews, and reviews of literature, policy papers, website and social media content, this study examines the role of digital and social media in social movement organisations and asks how increased digital connectivity can help spread knowledge and mobilise mining protests. Results show that the use of new media in Colombia is hindered by socioeconomic constraints, fear of oppression, the constraints of keyboard activism and strong hierarchical power structures within social movements. Hence, effects on political mobilisation are still limited. Social media do not spontaneously produce non-hierarchical knowledge structures. Attention to both internal and external knowledge sharing is therefore conditional to optimising digital and social media use.

Auto ID-Bridging the physical and the digital on construction projects

This book looks at how auto-ID has evolved and how it can be used in the construction industry and across projects from the perspective of all the stakeholders, from owners to design consultants, contractors and the supply chain. It could help to improve efficiency, reduce costs, ensure quality, protect the environment, and enhance safety.

Educational projects for a digital logic laboratory /

Thesis (M. S.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Linked Data in the Digital Humanities: Examples, Projects, and Tools

Harnessing the potential of semantic web technologies to support and diversify scholarship is gaining popularity in the digital humanities. This talk describes a number of projects utilising Linked Data ranging from musicology and library metadata, to the representation of the narrative structure, philological, bibliographical, and museological data of ancient Mesopotamian literary compositions.

Using digital storytelling to capture responses to the Apology

This article discusses a pilot project that adapted the methods of digital storytelling and oral history to capture a range of personal responses to the official Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples delivered by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on 13 February 2008. The project was an initiative of State Library of Queensland and resulted in a small collection of multimedia stories, incorporating a variety of personal and political perspectives. The article describes how the traditional digital storytelling workshop method was adapted for use in the project, and then proceeds to reflect on the outcomes and continuing life of the project. The article concludes by suggesting that aspects of the resultant model might be applied to other projects carried out by cultural institutions and community-based media organizations.

Ipswich stories : using digital storytelling to research intergenerational sharing of heritage, history, place, identity and community connection : a pilot study

Co-creative media production practices offer important new modes and opportunities for social participation and engagement. In mid-2009 Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation researchers at QUT adapted a specific model of co-creative media production, known as ‘digital storytelling’ and piloted it as an action research platform for facilitating and researching knowledge production based on intergenerational dialogue and exchange. Nine stories were produced and important insights were generated into this particular use of digital storytelling, as well as the impact of institutional constraints and opportunities on the possibilities and outcomes co-creative media practices and processes.

Monopoly, monopsony, and the value of culture in a digital age: An axiology of two multimedia resource repositories

Broadly speaking, axiology is the study of values. Axiologies are expressed materially in patterns of choices that are both culture-bound and definitive of different cultures. They are expressed in the language we use; in the friends we keep; in the clothes we wear; in what we read, write, and watch; in the technologies we use; in the gods we believe in and pray to; in the music we make and listen to—indeed, in every kind of activity that can be counted as a definitive element of culture. In what follows, I describe the axiological underpinnings of two closely related multimedia repository projects— Australian Creative Resources Online (ACRO) and The Canadian Centre for Cultural Innovation (CCCI)—and how these are oriented towards a potentially liberating role for digital repositories.