Events

Shakespeare and statistics is not an obvious pairing, but digital texts of his plays and poems are now widely available, and scholars are getting used to analysing them with computers.

This presentation considers book blogs as shared expressions of readers' aesthetic conduct across print and digital formats, connected to the publishing industry (including through self-publishing) while also aligned with recreation and pleasure. To tease out some of the distinctions within book blogging, I describe two contrasting networks: highbrow literary blogs, and romance fiction blogs. While new media enables increased participation of readers in book culture, this participation is stratified into taste-based groups, which are themselves further stratified by hierarchy as bloggers accumulate a specific kind of ‘readerly capital’. Presenter: Beth Driscoll.
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Despite being of utmost importance for interpreting speech, most commercial conversation bots and speech analysis systems ignore the wider pragmatics of talk. Pitch, pause, intensity, gaze, and other important modalities are discarded by bots, which also refrain from interrupting or talking over their human counterpart, despite its equally important role in natural conversation. In this talk I will look at recent trends towards the inclusion of pragmatics in bot technology, including some of our own original analytic tools for analysis of pitch, pause and intensity in conversation. Presenter: Dan Angus.
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Two studies on relationship among acculturation orientations of Chinese Hongkongers, their perceptions toward South/South-East Asian minority members, and Chinese cultural value orientations as well as intercultural communication competence.

This workshop stresses the important ways in which contemporary Platform Media and their associated economic forms are connected with, extensions and modifications of previous arrangements in communication and media infrastructures, logistics and legal treatment. The workshop will trace the ways in which various aspects of platformisation are part of longer histories and connected to previous attempts to shape media as infrastructures under varying degrees of corporate control. Presenters: Vibodh Parthasarathi, Julian Thomas, Ramon Lobato, Dan Angus, Nic Carah, Tom O’Regan, Allison Fish, Barbora Jedlickova, and Andrew Ventimiglia.

This one day symposium will examine the ways in which the growing platformisation of not just the media but business and governmental operations are occurring in India. With India the second largest country in the world by population and likely to overtake China as the largest in the next twenty years India’s experience of and development of its platform economy is likely to become increasingly central to the global digital economy. Presenters: Vibodh Parthasarathi, Shishir Jha, Scott Fitzgerald, Pradip Thomas, and Adrian Athique.

In this roundtable, presenter Angela Wu will step participants through a number of her Platform media projects and the mixed methods she deployed in them. Her methodologies draw from media studies, science and technology studies, cultural sociology, and network science. She has deployed these with respect to research on (1) data analytics and algorithmic cultures, (2) web use and digital infrastructures, and (3) information technology, politics, in post-reform China.

Using Google’s face match as a case study it argues that the extension of cultural access to media architectures while opening a new space for sharing can obscure the embedding of objects within digital economies and logics. It puts forward the notion of algorithmic cultural recommendation and argues the need to reimage the outsourcing of curatorial practices to new forms of algorithmic mediation. Presenter: Caroline Wilson-Barnao.
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It is common to talk of Media Platforms, the Platform Press, and the Platform Economy. We see processes of platformisation extending beyond media platforms to include retail, tourism, accommodation, taxi services, agriculture, and the home. We are seeing not only the transformation of our media system, advertising and marketing, but the thoroughgoing platformisation of much of our economic and social life. This workshop is designed to illuminate and sort through these various issues. Presenters: Vibodh Parthasarathi, Ramon Lobato, Adrian Athique and Nic Carah.

This presentation examines how the idea, creation, screen manifestation and cultural reception of digital human faces has evolved over the past four decades. It traces some of the factors that have shaped, and continue to shape, these human-like designs. This paper asks: how have these things changed over time, and what kinds of understandings about technology, scientific knowledge, acting, and humanness have emerged over the digital actor’s evolution? Presenter: Lisa Bode.

This roundtable with presenter Vibodh Parthasarathi will address key questions in the field of journalism in the era of platformisation. How is the Platform Press evolving internationally? What parallels and lessons are there to be drawn from Indian social media use and its intersection with Australian news and social media use? How are the powerful multinational social media platforms that are reforming media and communication globally doing so in the world’s largest democracy?

In this presentation Tom O’Regan ponders the remarkable continuity of thinking connecting Paul Lazarsfeld and Mark Zuckerberg observing how each was centrally concerned not with the media providers nor indeed with media users but with establishing “audience measurement” and “metrics”—the pivotal middle bit between media providers and their audiences.
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