Media and Power After Stuart Hall

In commemorating Stuart Hall, I wish to pay particular attention to the importance of his work for understanding one of the great topics of contemporary culture— media.There is a long discussion to be had of Stuart Hall’s making and use of media, in various forms, from his early days of political activism, to television and film productions, videos and interviews. But his contribution to how we think about the media, to media theory and cultural theory of media, remains especially rich. What Hall has to teach us, and provoke us with, concerning media, is centrally about powe

Reimagining Digital Citizenship via Disability

In recent times, disability has gained prominence as an important arena of social justice, politics, and citizenship. This applies also to digital technologies and cultures, where “acts of citizenship” are increasingly generated. Slowly, disability has become recognized as integral and generative part of social life and relations, especially in digital societies. In this chapter I argue that there are various ways in which disability could be explicitly recognized as core to digital citizenship. However, to do this, we need to confront significant cultural baggage.Australian Research Counci

Afterword: Why Digital Inclusion Now?

Two decades or so after the first wave of interest in digital divide, and over a decade since benchmark research, research, policy, and initiative continues. In the present scene, it is striking that the longstanding term "inclusion" has come to the fore (not for the first time) as a widely referenced way to address new forms of inequality, exclusion, injustice, and lack of diversity. So: why digital inclusion, now? What are its uses, why is it becoming the handy ready reckoner or moniker for the new frontiers and struggles over social justice and inequality in relation to emerging technology? This is the high-stakes scene that this "Afterword" to an edited collection on "Digital Inclusion: Be on the Right Side of the Digital Divide" addresses.Australian Research Counci

The Surprising Value of Regional Journals in International Media and Communication Research and Publishing

What are the current issues facing academic journals, especially those with regional and national identities and bases? This paper reflects on how the opportunities, issues, and challenges for regional journals to make consequential, quality, and widely received contributions to media and communication research and debates. Offering an Australian perspective, this paper discusses the tensions and imperatives of regionally located journals, subtended by situated research cultures, histories, and institutions, as they seek to engage with and publish for an increasingly distributed, networked, and stratified international field of media and communications. If managed successfully, such regional locations offer resources and models for a genuinely cosmopolitan, widely and fairly available academic publishing ecology

No Excuses: Reading for All, Including People with Disabilities. Foreword to Paul Harpur’s Discrimination, Copyright and Equality: Law Opening the eBook for the Print Disabled.

This article is the foreword to Dr Paul Harpur's 'Discrimination, Copyright and Equality: Law Opening the eBook for the Print Disabled' (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Given that copyright is one of the most widely debated, researched, and legislated public concerns in digital culture –– as evidenced in the commons debates, the furious arguments about illegal downloading, or the affirmative policy in favour of open access publishing –– that the issues of copyright and the print disabled are not widely known. Why are these issues not routinely raised, in the mainstream, when we talk about the opportunities and discontents of digital technology for society and culture? The continuing oppression of print disabled readers, and their exclusion from the world of books, can no longer continue –– and it is something that should be an integral part of our university courses, research, public debates, and public policy discussion on digital technology. A very important addition to this indispensable Cambridge University Press series, this is a book that must be widely read. Harpur’s study deserves an engaged reception across a range of disciplines, not just law and policy studies –– but also disability studies, sociology, media and communication studies, literary studies, and elsewhere in the humanities, social sciences, as well as engineering and technology sciences. Equipped with Dr Harpur’s fine book, we are equipped with the resources to take these issues mainstream, and secure proper action, so that everyone in the world, by 2030, or sooner, can indeed be a reader

Locating Mobile Media Audiences: In Plain View With Pokémon Go

Mobile media audiences are a central part of understanding audiences in a digital world. In this chapter, I approach the apparently new development of Pokémon GO via a broader thinking of what mobile means in relation to digital audiences. To provide a context for understanding Pokémon GO, I discuss the emergence of mobile media audiences, and the increasingly prominent role location has played in these formations. I trace the emergence of Pokémon GO, placing into the recent history of mapping, locative media, and augmented reality (AR) technology, and discuss the case of Pokémon GO against the histories of mobile gaming. I conclude with some remarks on the discursive, business, technology, and design strategies evident in Niantic’s effort to configure and sustain the phenomenal success of its Pokémon GO launch.Australian Research Counci

Re-Orienting Global Digital Cultures

This chapter reflects on the Asian perspectives on digital culture offered in this volume. It provides a context for understanding this latest “Asian” turn in theorizing and researching digital cultures. It argues that the implications of the studies anthologized are highly significant, not just for our understanding of Asian communication — but for rethinking global communication in a general sense.Australian Research Counci

Disability and Digital Inequalities: Rethinking Digital Divides with Disability Theory

Disability has had a chequered career, when it comes to discussions, policies, and practices addressing digital divides and digital inequalities. Over time disability has become an acknowledged element in digital inequality approaches, yet still it is often passed over briefly, and not well understood. In this chapter, I argue that we need better theory of disability and digital divides. However, I also contend that this cuts two-ways: that we cannot have an adequate understanding of digital inequality and divides unless we engage with, and draw upon, critical theories of disability. To make this case, the chapter reviews how disability has been regarded in digital divide and associated digital inequality and inclusion literature. With some exceptions, I suggest digital divide research is fissured by a theoretical awareness of contemporary disability research and, especially, theories of disability. To redress this, I look at what an adequate critical theory of disability and technology can tell us. I also propose key elements of an ideal approach to digital inequality that are evident when we do rethink the digital divide via disability theory.Australian Research Counci

"Getting a Life": a collaborative project in the digitisation of the Mary Shelley manuscript biography of William Godwin

In 2001 a research and editorial project at the Department of English and Fisher Library SETIS at the University of Sydney is approaching completion. This collaborative project, funded in 1992 and in 2000 by ARC Small Grants, is an electronic edition from the manuscripts in the Abinger Collection of Shelley-Godwin papers deposited at the Bodleian Library , Oxford, of Mary Shelley's 'Life of William Godwin', a biography of her late father written between 1836 and 1840, and never published. Only the nucleus of Abinger manuscripts labelled 'Mary Shelley', 'William Godwin', or 'Miscellaneous', is in Mary Shelley's holograph, or in that of her collaborator and stepmother, Mary Jane Godwin. This indicates (a) Shelley's biographical technique of collage, borrowed by her with due acknowledgments, from Hazlitt's Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft (1816), which gives the man and author Holcroft "in his own words" and in those of his contemporaries, as far as possible; and (b) the vicissitudes of the Shelley-Godwin papers since Mary Shelley's death in 1851. Letters and documents in Godwin's and other hands, copied and quoted by Mary Shelley in her holograph script, or attached to it by pins, have at some past time been removed to other Bodleian folders, often with original signatures cut off, and what the material wanderings of sheets of paper began, prevailing Victorian notions of censorship compounded. In successive visits to Oxford from 1992 to 1998 Dr Judith Barbour transcribed the Bodleian manuscripts and from 1992 to 1995, Dr Clara Tuite, then a research assistant to the project, transcribed microfilm reels in the Duke University, Durham N.C. collection of Abinger Shelley-Godwin MSS. Until 1995, ongoing negotiations with Oxford University Press envisaged publishing a hardback printed edition of the wordprocessor script but (as the characteristics of Mary Shelley's 'Life of Godwin' outlined in our first paragraph will readily confirm) print publication of such an informal and layered text proved "uncommercial". The establishment of Fisher Library's SETIS, with its expertise in research, digital coding and scholarly editing, offered to resolve these editorial and publication difficulties at one hit. The wordprocessor script had presented the text page by manuscript page, indicating Bodleian shelf-number in the Abinger Shelley-Godwin MS archive, and distinguishing Mary Shelley's holograph, autograph, marginalia, and numbering systems typographically, while the endnotes contained a conventional set of reference information and bibliographical data, as for a printed edition. In 2001 the editorial team proceeded to the systematic coding of data, watermarks, paper types, handwritings, reel and shelf numbers, page numbers and numbered page sequences, cancellations, interpolations, marginalia, Bodleian rubrics and cataloguing. In this culminating phase of our project, Judith Barbour, Creagh Cole, Margaret Harris, and Clara Tuite have invited Gerard Goggin to present our project to the September Conference of "Computing Arts".Hosted by the Scholarly Text and Imaging Service (SETIS), the University of Sydney Library, and the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS), the University of Sydney