You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Open content’ tag.
Tuesday November 1st media scholar William Merrin will kick off the third series of Research Seminars at Coventry University on ‘Open Media’. The seminar series is accompanied by a blog that provides more information about the speakers, the theme and the seminars. You can find it here.
Underneath the full program for this term. All be welcome!
- OPEN MEDIA -
A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms organized by Coventry University School of Art and Design, Department of Media and Communication. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.
Programme: November-December 2011
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
November 1st:
William Merrin (University of Wales, Swansea) – ‘Open Sourcing Knowledge: Towards a University 2.0′ (Read More)
November 15th:
Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Mediating Agriculture in the Age of “Open-Source”: Potential Contributions from Cultural Studies’
November 22th:
Living Books about Life launch (Coventry University, Goldsmiths, the University of Kent, and Open Humanities Press) – Talks by Clare Birchall (University of Kent), Gary Hall (Coventry University), Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London), Peter Woodbridge (Coventry University), and Janneke Adema (Coventry University).
December 6th:
Isis Hjorth (Oxford Internet Institute) – ‘Peer-production of culture: Independent film making in the Wreckamovie community’
December 13th 3:00-5:00 (at Meter Room - 58-64 Corporation Street, Coventry, West Midlands, CV11GF)
Round table on ‘Open Art, or What could Open Art mean?‘
Participants: Elly Clarke (Coventry University), Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins (Independent artists), Ruth Catlow(Furtherfield) and James Wallbank (Access Space Sheffield)
————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
When: 1:45-2:45 on selected Tuesdays in November and December (except the final round table, which will be held from 3:00-5:00)
Where: ICE, The Screening Room (except the final round table, which will be held at Meter Room)
Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE)
Coventry University Enterprises
Puma Way, Coventry
CV1 2TT
All seminars are free to attend and open to all
For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx
How to get to ICE, see:
http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=&daddr=52.403937,-1.505545
All enquiries please contact:
Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk|
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections
In two weeks the second series will commence of the Research Seminars I have been organizing at Coventry University in this term and the previous on ‘Open Media’. The seminar series is accompanied by a blog that provides more information about the speakers, the theme and the seminars. You can find it here.
On his Media Gifts website, cultural and media theorist Gary Hall has been (and is) writing a series of writings on ‘the limits of openness’, which, if you are interested in open media, are definitely worth a read and nicely dovetail the theme of the seminar series.
- OPEN MEDIA -
A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms organized by Coventry University School of Art and Design, Department of Media and Communication. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.
http://coventryopenmedia.wordpress.com/
Programme: January-March 2011
———————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Tuesday 25th January
Jussi Parikka (Anglia Ruskin University) – ‘Zombie Media: Media Archaeology as Circuit Bending’ (read more)
Tuesday 1st February
David Campbell - ‘The new ecology of information: how social media challenges the university’ (read more) Note: in ETG10 (Ellen Terry Building)
Tuesday 8th February
María Mencía (Kingston University) – ‘Open Meaning in Digital Writing’ (read more)
Tuesday 15th February
Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Errors in Things and the “Friendly Medium”’ (read more)
Tuesday 1st March
Clare Birchall (University of Kent) – ‘”If a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space”: Why WikiLeaks might not be as radical as it thinks’ (read more)
————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
All seminars are free to attend and open to all
Time: 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Venue: ET 130 (Ellen Terry Building) Jordan Well, Coventry CV1 5FB (unless otherwise stated)
For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx
All enquiries please contact:
Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk |
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections
I have been organizing a Research Seminar Series, taking place at Coventry University in this term and the next, on ‘Open Media’. Last Tuesday the first lecture was given by Federica Frabetti from Oxford Brooks University entitled ‘DIGITAL AGAIN? The Humanities Between the Computational Turn and Originary Technicity’. You can find more information about the lectures in the first term at the end of this post.
The series will be podcasted and will be made available via iTunesU and this blog.
Related to the series, let me draw your attention to some other recent material that challenges the concept of openness in a more fundamental way. HASTAC, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, has for instance been drawing attention to the concept of openness via a few blog posts, including this one, (do also check out the extensive forum comments underneath) and it has been hosting the Storming the Academy event at the Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona a few weeks ago. There is also a wiki related to this event where you can find more information.
Furthermore, I came across this fascinating presentation today by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, in which she, amongst others, critiques the notion of content as being object-based.
Coventry School of Art and Design and the Department of Media and
Communication invite you to
- OPEN MEDIA -
A year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.
OPEN MEDIA
Digital Media have today become ubiquitous and all pervasive. Our lives and experiences are being mediated non-stop by a host of mobile and web-based devices which offer the possibility of merging, mixing, and mashing-up texts, images, sound and other data formats. In the digital age we are no longer confined by the boundaries that once governed traditional media. Notions of authorship, expertise, authority, stability, ownership and control from above are all being challenged by the prosuming multi-user and crowd-sourced use of borderless multimedia applications. People can produce and publish their own books via Lulu.com, promote their art on online gallery sites, and advertise their music via Myspace and Youtube. They can educate themselves via iTunesU, call friends abroad for free via Skype, connect and update the world via Facebook and Twitter, and fund projects via Kickstarter.
These developments have led many to claim that the web and digital media offer unprecedented democratizing possibilities for media producers, consumers and critics. However, reality is of course more complicated than that. A lot of (public and tax-funded) media are still behind pay-walls. Our private data are hosted and distributed by commercial social media platforms. Blogs are still not taken seriously in the academic world. Google is digitizing our books. Many makers of music mash-ups are being sued for copyright infringement and fears regarding ebook piracy continue to rule the literary world.
The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It is variously used to urge for the right to transparency, the ethics of sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting. But openness also has its drawbacks. If cultural products are freely available, who then pays the producers of those products? Does open data pose security risks? And who gets to control the data? Who governs our creative outputs? In what way can we control and keep a check on the media we use? Is there still a place for authority and expertise in open media, or are these notions being explicitly challenged? In what ways can media be open, and can they ever really be truly open? What are the limits of openness? Where does openness end? Or should we perhaps just focus on degrees and aspects of openness? How can we compose a media critique when media – including our critique itself – are constantly in the process of being upgraded, updated, merged, mixed and changed?
This series of research seminars will explore various aspects of openness. Special attention will be given to the benefits and drawbacks of openness, and to the many possibilities openness offers for the future of media production, use and critique.
Programme: November-December 2010
Tuesday 9th November
Federica Frabetti (Westminster Institute of Education) – ‘Digital again? The Humanities Between the Computational Turn and Originary Technicity’
Mafalda Stasi (Coventry University) – ‘Transmedia and fan cultures’
Shaun Hides and Peter Woodbridge (Coventry University) – ‘Open Source Education: A radical case for the Arts and Humanities’
Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘Errors in Things and the ”Friendly Medium’
Note: in ET 130 (Ellen Terry Building) Jordan Well, Coventry CV1 5FB
All seminars are free to attend and open to all
Time: 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Venue: RCG25 (Richard Crossman Building) 44 Jordan Well Coventry CV1 2,
UK (unless otherwise stated)
For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx
All enquiries please contact:
Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk |
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections
Two updates on things I wrote about in previous posts. First of all, The New York Times picked up the discussion on the use of You Tube as a search engine, or better yet, as the NYT calls it, as a reference tool. They wrote a very nice article (published in print on January 18th) which summarizes the different things that were already mentioned about this phenomenon in the blogosphere. The article also mentions Blinkx, a video search engine, which is actually very cool and indexes various online video platforms (YouTube, MySpace, Google Video etc.) so check it out. Funny though, how an established (print) medium like The New York Times uses the blogosphere to retrieve its content on current issues….
The second update is on some new evidence for the, what I have now rebaptised as, NIN-model (sorry Radiohead), based on the new digital Maecenic (now community based) culture, or as an article in Techdirt calls it, the turning-your-fans-into-promoters model. At the Monty Python’s YouTube channel, videos from Britains best comedy show ever, are streamed online, in High Quality versions. From the site:
“No more of those crap quality videos you’ve been posting. We’re giving you the real thing – HQ videos delivered straight from our vault. What’s more, we’re taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new HQ versions. And what’s even more, we’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.”
They have of course linked to Amazon, where you can buy their DVD’s directly, and yes, it worked again, helping them climb to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list.
Way to go Pythons!
The last couple of days I have started thinking about what the concept of free knowledge exactly entails. I want to dedicate a few future posts to this subject, in order to explore the idea to its fullest and to give it a proper categorization (at least I will try to). This can be seen as a first outline for a series on free.
A few thoughts come to mind when thinking about freedom if information:
- What does free exactly mean? What distinguishes free knowledge from or relates it to other concepts such as open science or open access, libre or gratis knowledge and ideas like creative commons, open content and copyleft?
- Is there a fundamental difference between freedom of information and freedom of knowledge?
- Is freedom of knowledge possible? And if so, what are the pros and cons of such a development; do we really want our knowledge to be free?
- Where does the idea of ‘information wants to be free’ originate form, and what is its historical context?
- What kind of different economic, political, social and philosophical issues play a role when we talk about free knowledge?
- Can we develop an economy of free, or a business model that revolves around free access? If so, what kind of possibilities or models are there (and which are sustainable?) and what are their pros and cons?
Recent Comments