New Media, New Theories, New Methods
PhD.-Course, Kalundborg Vandrehjem, Denmark.
14-17 November. 2010.
Organised by Niels Ole Finnemann and Per Jauert for NordForsk and FMKJ
Senior lecturers (for speaker profiles and abstracts, see below)
Professor Knut Lundby, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo
Associate professor Lars Nyre, Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen
Prof. dr. Richard Rogers, New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam
Associate professor Niels Brügger, Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University
Prof. dr.phil. Niels Ole Finnemann, Director of The Center for Internet Research, Department for Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University
Associate professor Per Jauert, Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University
Course content
While the notion “new media” is increasingly inadequate, digital media play a still more significant role both in their own right vis-a-vis old media and as initiating fundamental changes in the overall matrix of media. On the theoretical level these processes have been dealt with in theories of replacement, of supplementation, of mediatization, of evolution and of co-evolution and so forth.
On the methodological level questions are raised whether existing methods are sufficient, whether and eventually how they should be modified and how they might be supplemented, replaced or combined with new methods such as methods based on the use of new media as research tools.
Since digital media are both used in ways interfering with existing media and opens new trajectories beyond the reach of these, media studies are also confronted with the issue of how to delimit the very notion of media and the field of media studies.
The PhD course will address these changing borderlines and new interfaces, including questions such as what do we count as media? How it is possible to analyse the contemporary changes in media usage? What is the cultural and political role of social networks, of blogging, and what is the role of digital media for civil society, companies and public institutions?
The course will include 6 lectures, presentations of participant’s projects, and one hands-on workshop with Richard Rogers.
ECTS points
Participation with paper: 3 ECTS. Participation without paper: 1,5 ECTS
Costs and practical matters
The Danish Research School FMKJ covers all participation expenses (travel, meals, accommodation) for doctoral students who are enrolled members of FMKJ and for doctoral students from the Nordic countries (NordForsk grant). The tickets and receipts must be collected and sent to Per Jauert, Aarhus University, for reimbursement.
Doctoral students from other, international institutions are encouraged to participate. While the course itself is offered free of charge, they will have to pay their own travel and accommodation costs, and a fee of app. DKK 3000 (app. Eur. 400) to cover meals, coffee during intervals, texts, etc. during the course. Prior to the course, FMKJ will send an invoice for this amount to those who have enrolled on a self-paying basis.
Course enrolment and application deadline
The course application, including a one-page project outline, must be sent by email no later than October 1, 2010 to the FMKJ Secretary at fmkj@ruc.dk.
Participants who want to present a paper (10-12 pages) for feedback must submit the paper by October 29, 2010 to the FMKJ Secretary at fmkj@ruc.dk
Registration form available at http://fmkj.dk/?page_id=12 (‘Kursustilmelding’)
For questions about practical arrangements, please contact the FMKJ secretary Chris Holmsted Larsen at fmkj@ruc.dk
For questions about course content and organization, please contact Associate Professor Per Jauert, Aarhus University, at pjauert@imv.au.dk
Location and how to get there
Kalundborg Youth Hostel (1 hour train ride west of Copenhagen)
How to get from Copenhagen Airport to Kalundborg Youth Hotel:
- Train from Copenhagen Airport to Copenhagen Central Train station (Københavns Hovedbanegård)
- Change train at Copenhagen Central Train station (ask information for details on arrival – this can be also be done at the Airport)
- How to get from Kalundborg Train station to Kalundborg Youth Hotel here
- You can also plan your journey online here (see english version – lower part of the webpage)
Course readings
Course readings will be made available 1 month before the course, with required reading and suggested literature for the Ph.D. course. Students are expected to have read the literature before the beginning of the course.
Program
Sunday
04.00-06.00 pm Arrival
06.30 pm Dinner
08.00-9.30 pm Welcome and social gathering
Monday
08.00-09.00 am Breakfast
09.00-10.30 am Niels Ole Finnemann: New Media, New Theories, New Methods?
10.30-11.00 am Coffee
11.00-12.30 am Knut Lundby: Digital Storytelling: A Story of Small Scale Personal Digital Stories.
12.30-01.30 pm Lunch
01.30-02.30 pm Presentations
02.30-03.00 pm Coffee
03.00-04.30 pm Niels Brügger: Web History
05.00-06.30 pm Presentations
06.30- Dinner
08.00-09.30 pm Social event // master class
Tuesday
08.00-09.00 am Breakfast
09.00-10.15 pm Per Jauert: Cross Media Interactions – Theoretical and Methodological challenges.
10.15-10.45 am coffee
10.45-12.00 am Lars Nyre: Materiality Up Front
12.00-01.00 am/pm Lunch
01.00-03.00 pm Presentations
03.00-03.30 pm Coffee
03.30-04.00 pm Presentations
05.00-06.15 pm Richard Rogers: The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods
06.30-07.30 pm Dinner
08.00-9.30 pm Workshop with Richard Rogers: Mapping & Clouding: using Digital Methods
Wednesday
08.00-09.00 am Breakfast
09.00-12.00 am Presentations
12.00-01.00 pm Lunch
01.00-02.00 pm Closing Remarks (2 lecturers+ 2 participants)
02.00 pm Departure
Lecturers CV:
Associate professor Niels Brügger: media studies at the Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University. Co-founder and board member of the Centre for Internet Research. His primary research interests are website history, web archiving, and media theory. In 2007 he started writing a history of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s website entitled “The History of dr.dk, 1996-2006.” (funded for three years by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities). In addition, Brügger has launched the research project “Theories of Media and Communication — Histories and Relevance” (2003-2006), he has participated in other major research projects such as MODINET (Media and Democracy in the Network Society, 2002-05) and netarkivet.dk (2001-02), all supported by national funding, and he is now participating in a national research infrastructure project LARM about the auditive national cultural heritage. He has published a number of articles, monographs, and edited books within this research field.
Prof. Dr.phil. Niels Ole Finnemann, Director of Center for Internet Research since 2000 at the Department for Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University. He has participated in EU-COST actions and is currently heading the research project ”Changing borderlines. Mediatization and citizenship” funded by the National Danish Research Council for the Humanities and participates in a national research infrastructure project LARM. He is the author of numerous articles and books on digital media, the internet and culture.
Associate professor Per Jauert, media studies at the Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University. His research interests include
media sociology, public service media, radio history, community media, political communication, and the new digital platforms for radio production, distribution and reception. He is currently taking part in the research project: ” Changing Borderlines. Mediatization and Citizenship” with a sub project: ”From Broadcast to Podcast – Digitalisation and Differentiation of Radio”. He is a member of the research group Digital Radio Cultures in Europe (www.drace.org). Jauert is now participating in a national research infrastructure project LARM about the auditive national cultural heritage.
Recent publications:
O’Neill, B., Ala-Fossi, M., Jauert, P., Lax, S., Shaw, H. (eds.) (2010) Digital Radio Cultures in Europe. Technologies, Industries and Cultures. London: Intellect.
Jauert, P., Ala-Fossi, M., Lax, S., Shaw, H. (2008) “DAB: The Future of Radio”, Media, Culture & Society, vol. 30 nr. 2, pp. 151-166.
Jauert, P. 2008, “Fra broadcast til podcast – digital radio i Danmark”, in: Mortensen, F. (red.) Public service i netværkssamfundet, Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur, pp. 103-148.
Professor Knut Lundby, media studies at the Department of Media
and Communication, University of Oslo www.media.uio.no/ominstituttet/ ansatte/vit/knutl.xml . He was the founding director of InterMedia, University of Oslo (1998-2004) researching communication, design and learning in digital environments www.intermedia.uio.no
Recent publications:
Lundby, Knut (ed.) (2008) Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories.
Self-representations in New Media. New York: Peter Lang
Hartley, John and Kelly McWilliam (eds.) (2009) Story Circle.
Digital Storytelling Around the World. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Associate professor Lars Nyre, the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. He uses experimental and qualitative methods to investigate the potential for journalism in new media, especially sound media and the mobile phone. Nyre’s doctoral dissertation was published on Routledge in 2008 with the title “Sound Media. From Live Journalism to Music Recording”. He is a member of the research group Digital Radio Cultures in Europe (www.drace.org <https://kalender.uib.no/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.drace.org> ). Nyre is also the editor of the Norwegian Journal of Media Studies.
Prof. dr. Richard Rogers holds the Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is Director of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative, reworking method for Internet research. Among other works, Rogers is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004), awarded the 2005 best book of the year by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T).
ABSTRACTS
Niels Brügger: Web History – An Emerging Field within Internet Studies.
If we want to know why the web of today is as it is we have to know its past. Historical studies of the web have been made, but the number is very limited compared to Internet studies in general, and web history has not yet been constituted as a field of study in its own right. However, within the last couple of years a growing interest in the field has slowly emerged. This presentation will address a number of general questions which need to be debated in the future with a view to constituting web history as a scholarly field, some of which will revolve around the following two clusters. First, it should be debated what a history of the web should be about: What do we understand by ‘web’, and how to focus a historical study? Second, we are facing a number of methodological issues caused by the nature of the archived web material, since the problems involved in finding, collecting, and preserving web material differ in many ways from those characterizing the archiving of other media types.
Recent publications
Web Archiving — between Past, Present and Future, The Handbook of Internet
Studies (ed. R. Burnett, M. Consalvo & C. Ess), Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford 2009 (in
press), 24-42.
Web History (ed.). New York: Peter Lang 2010.
Website history and the website as an object of study, New Media & Society, 11(1-2),
2009, 127-144.
Niels Ole Finnemann: New Media, New Theories, New Methods?
The lecture will discuss whether we need to develop new theories and methods to study digital media and their interrelations to digitized and analoque media. The point of departure will be taken in current theories of mediatization (Schultz, 2004, Lundby, Krotz and Rothenbuhler in Lundby 2009) focusssing on the current transformations of the matrix of media. It will be argued that the incorporation in society of digital media such as the internet and mobile devices opens for new trajectories in the human history of memory and communication, and that there is a need for a new (inter-) national research infrastructure for the study of heterogenous digital corpora. The lecture will conclude with a short discussion on the use of websphere analysis (Foot and Schneider) in the study of the internet.
Per Jauert: Cross media interactions – theoretical and methodological challenges.
The lecture will discuss how transformation and interaction processes between analogue broadcast and print media and digital media can be studied. From a presentation and discussion of the relation between media technology and the social uses of media (SST – Social Shaping of Technology – i.e. Liewroouw 2006; MacKenzie & Wajcman 1999. Winston 2002) the lecture will present and discuss the methodological opportunities and challenges in combining quantitative and qualitative methods in empirical studies of cross media relationships. The examples will be taken from a study of political communication in a municipal context from 2005-2008 and from the current project about radio on different distribution platforms.
Knut Lundby: Digital storytelling: A story of small-scale media entering
media studies.
Digital tools that became available with personal computers and multimedia software in the 1990s triggered a movement for small- scale personal digital stories. This kind of “digital storytelling” was developed with workshops e.g. at the Center for Digital Storytelling www.storycenter.org and in the Capture Wales project that was run in cooperation with BBC
www.bbc.co.uk/wales/arts/yourvideo/queries/capturewales.shtml
The advent of “social media” later expanded the digital opportunites for such self-representation. This lecture will examine how the small-scale media of digital storytelling came to challenge media studies theoretically, methodo-logically as well as in university teaching and dissemination. Examples will be taken mainly from the international project on “Mediatized Stories. Mediation perspectives on digital storytelling among youth” www.intermedia.uio.no/mediatized that the lecturer is directing.
Lars Nyre : Materiality Up Front
The lecture argues that material features of communication are primary. Nyre investigates materiality in theoretical terms by presenting ‘medium theory’ which is an amalgamation of insights about technology from the Toronto school and insights about perception from French phenomenology. Nyre also presents a method of analysis called auditory rhetoric.
Theory: Medium theory offers a systematic explanation of what a medium consists of, and Nyre presents the fundamentals of this theory using both new and old sound media as examples. The focus is on contemporary sound media like webradio/streaming and mp3- filesharing, while AM radio and gramophone recording will serve as parallels from the 1920s and 1930s. Medium theory shows that there is a strong continuity of production and listening practices in the sound media because the primary interfaces of microphones and loudspeakers have hardly changed at all, even though the storage and distribution platforms have been reinvented several times. Implications of this basic stability will be discussed.
Method: How do you analyze the sound of sound media? Auditory rhetoric
proposes that there are four material features of sound that will be manipulated in production and experienced during reception. They are 1) Time (duration, chronology, causes and effects), 2) Space (directions, shapes, volumes distances), 3) Personality (emotions, moods, etc), and 4) Coded messages (news, love songs, etc). Nyre will demonstrate this analytic approach with several examples from new and old sound media.
Richard Rogers: The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods
There is an ontological distinction between the natively digital and the digitized, that is, the objects, content, devices and environments that are “born” in the new medium, as opposed to those that have “migrated” to it. Should the current methods of study change, however slightly or wholesale, given the focus on objects and content of the medium? The research program put forward here thereby engages with “virtual methods” that import standard methods from the social sciences and the humanities. That is, the distinction between the natively digital and the digitized also could apply to current research methods. What kind of Internet research may be performed with methods that have been digitized (such as online surveys and directories) vis-à-vis those that are natively digital (such as recommendation systems and folksonomy)? Second, I propose that Internet research may be put to new uses, given an emphasis on natively digital methods as opposed to the digitized. I will strive to shift the attention from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits, and instead inquire into how research with the Internet may move beyond the study of online culture only. How to capture and analyze hyperlinks, tags, search engine results, archived Websites, and other digital objects? How may one learn from how online devices (e.g., engines and recommendation systems) make use of the objects, and how may such uses be repurposed for social and cultural research? Ultimately, I propose a research practice that grounds claims about cultural change and societal conditions in online dynamics, introducing the term “online groundedness.” The overall aim is to rework method for Internet research, developing a novel strand of study, digital methods.
Publication available: R. Rogers (2009): The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods, Amsterdam University Press, http://tinyurl.com/yb8vwlc
Workshop abstract
(Richard Rogers: Mapping & Clouding: Using Digital Methods
The workshop in Digital Methods concentrates on using and interpreting the Lippmannian Device, the tool developed by Rogers and colleagues in the context of the Mapping Controversies project, led by Bruno Latour. The Device is named after Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), the American writer and columnist, and author of Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1927). In particular the device takes up Lippmann’s call for equipment to ‘test’ in a coarse means an actor’s partisanship. At the workshop, Rogers will present (at least) four ways to use the Lipp-mannian Device, and also facilitate use by the workshop partici-pants. If time permits Rogers will introduce additional devices and tools (some 30), developed to date by the Digital Methods Initiative and the Govcom.org Foundation.
Mapping Controversies (EU) Project, http://www.mappingcontroversies.net/
Lippmannian Device,http://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolLippmannianDevice
Digital Methods Initiative, http://www.digitalmethods.net/
Govcom.org Foundation, http://www.govcom.org/
Course-readings
Niels Brügger:
Website history and the website as an object of study
Per Jauert:
Media in the community – communities in the media
New Media Design (Liewrouw)
Citizen-consumer’s constellations of news media (Schroeder)
Knut Lundby:
Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories
Mediatization or mediation? (Nick Couldry)
The matrices of digital storytelling (Hartley and McWilliam)
Niels Ole Finnemann:
Mediatization theory and digital media
Lars Nyre:
Design science in information systems research (Hevner and more)
Experimenting with New Media for Journalism
Sound Media
Richard Rogers:
The Googlization Question, and the Inculpable Engine
The Question of Method
Post-demographic Machines
Papers
Irina Khaldarova: Do opinion leaders exist in the blogosphere?
Panu Uotila: Changing news formats in online newspapers and in the print media
Soley Rasmussen: News and Information Media Business Models in the Networked economy
Jaakko Nousiainen: Understanding mediatized music theatre: Case Omnivore (NEW VERSION)
Ylva Rancken-Lutz: First-Time Parents’ Online Social Arenas – Work in progress
Anders Olof Larsson: ”Politics 2.0” or ”Business as usual”? Two ongoing studies on the 2010 Swedish election
Marco van Kerkhoven: The Reader is Always Right; regional news media, newsrooms and convergence
Olga Kazaka: Internet social media in corporate communication: theoretical aspects and actual tendencies in Latvia
Elisabeth Muth Andersen: “Well something suggests the Girl01 doesn’t want to reply”
Patrick Prax: The Teron Gorefiend Simulator: A Perspective on the Gaming Community
Maria Konow Lund: Implementation of commercial ‘flexible organization’ in production of moving news online
Ates Gürsimsek: Co-Creating Innovation in Virtual Worlds
Christina Neumayer: The negotiations of Us and Them in anti-fascist protests on Twitter