DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

This post represents the first in the DCRC weeknotes series, with the aim of keeping you informed about the current activities of the research centre.

The Digital Cultures Research Centre is now officially five months into its operational life and already has several successful events, including two symposia and a host of workshops, under its digitally enhanced belt. The Play Research Group event on the import of gestural technologies in gaming practices, 'Gesture, Play, Technology', and the DCRC event 'Access All Areas', focussed on user-generated content, were both well attended and produced rich and rewarding discussions, the influence of which is still percolating through research discussions in the centre and plans for the coming academic year.

This week has been rather busy, a lot like the prior eighteen weeks(!), with a host of interesting people, ideas and technologies to engage with, discuss and problematise. We began the week with an introduction to one of the new graduate residents in the Pervasive Media Studio, which led to an impromptu roundtable discussion about the nature of creative media education with Higher Education. Some of the issues raised mirrored the reasoning behind our MA Media: Practice & Culture students being given briefs to work with studio residents on a range of projects to try and explicitly marry theory and practice in ‘real world’ case studies. Some of the outcomes of this work are being translated into final dissertations and projects over this summer.

As the week progressed we had the good news that Judith Aston’s metholdogical investigations of interrogating anthropological video archives, in concert with her collaborator Paul Matthews, has been published in the open-access journal FQS. As July dawns, we are also delighted to celebrate the publication of a special issue of the journal Cultural Politics concerning the work of Bernard Stiegler, which was guest edited by Patrick Crogan.

The Pervasive Media Studio has been a hive of activity with the formal launch of the Media Sandbox scheme and the first full meeting of the Theatre Sandbox teams. DCRC participated in a user testing session with Tom Bennett, Interactive Places, providing expertise in documentation, participant observation and focus group feedback sessions. This forms a part of DCRC’s knowledge transfer partnership with Tom and other studio residents, which aims to investigate the various ways in which value can be derived from pervasive media.

Finally, one of the world’s digital cognoscenti drew a large crowd to the Watershed on Wednesday evening. Clay Shirky whirled into Bristol on his book tour to deliver an impassioned talk on the central thesis to his new book ‘Cognitive Surplus’. Amongst many other DCRC researchers in the audience, Dan Dixon has reflected on the evening’s discussion and asks some questions that should be born in mind upon reading Shirky’s tome.

Preparation for this autumn’s ‘Paying Attention’ conference is in full swing and we will provide more news and information in the course of the next week.

UPCOMING:

• DCRC have invited Prof. Sue Thomas to speak about Transliteracy at the Pervasive Media Studio on Friday 16th July, this event will be open to the public.
• DCRC are running our first Pervasive Media Creative Producer Summer School between: 19-23 July.