Imagining the Ends of Identity: Birth and Death on Instagram
At this year’s Association of Internet Researcher’s Conference (#ir16) in Phoenix, Arizona, Tim Highfield has kindly presented our collaborative work looking at birth and death on Instagram via the #ultrasound and #funeral hashtags.
[slideshare id=54250826&doc=ir16leaverhighfieldimaginingends-151022082459-lva1-app6892]
The (short) paper is available either on the official conference site or on Academia.edu.
A revised and much longer version of this work is currently under review.
M/C journal: ‘beginnings’ issue
The ‘beginnings’ issue of the M/C Journal, edited by Bjorn Nansen (University of Melbourne) and me, has just been published. We’re really pleased with how this issue has turned out: a number of articles engage with the beginnings of life — from pregnancy apps to social media microcelebrity infants to infant media use – but there are also some fantastically creative engagements, from the beginnings of spreadsheets in terms of both history and practice through to the rhetoric beginnings of new technologies such as smart contact lenses. As with all issues of M/C, the content is free and open access.
Here’s the issue contents:
- EDITORIAL: Beginnings – Bjorn Nansen, Tama Leaver
- Playing Pregnancy: The Ludification and Gamification of Expectant Motherhood in Smartphone Apps – Deborah Lupton, Gareth M Thomas
- ‘Getting Personal’: Contemplating Changes in Intersubjectivity, Methodology and Ethnography – Sophia Alice Johnson
- Micromicrocelebrity: Branding Babies on the Internet – Crystal Abidin
- Digitods: Toddlers, Touch Screens and Australian Family Life – Donell Joy Holloway, Lelia Green, Kylie Stevenson
- Accidental, Assisted, Automated: An Emerging Repertoire of Infant Mobile Media Techniques – Bjorn Nansen
- Extra-Planetary Digital Cultures – David Crouch, Katarina Damjanov
- Startling Starts: Smart Contact Lenses and Technogenesis – Isabel Pedersen, Kirsten Ellison
[Image: 4/366: Beginning by Magic Madzik CC BY]
Strategies for Developing a Scholarly Web Presence During a Higher Degree
As part of the Curtin Humanities Research Skills and Careers Workshops 2015 I recently facilitated a workshop entitled Strategies for Developing a Scholarly Web Presence During a Higher Degree. As the workshop received a very positive response and addressed a number of strategies and issues that participants had not addressed previously, I thought I’d share the slides here in case they’re of use to others.
[slideshare id=53024205&doc=leaver-scholarlywebpresence-150921161109-lva1-app6891]
For more context regarding scholarly use of social media in particular, it’s worth checking out Deborah Lupton’s 2014 report ‘Feeling Better Connected’: Academics’ Use of Social Media.
2015 publications & TALKS UPDATE
As I’ve been neglecting the blog, a quick update on new publications so far this year:
- My invited paper ‘Researching the Ends of Identity: Birth and Death on Social Media‘ appears in the inaugural issue of Social Media + Society. The first issue contains more than 50 manifesto pieces from leading social media (and related) researchers from around the globe examining the future(s) of social media research, and well worth looking over for anyone working anywhere near the field. I’m also genuinely delighted to have joined the journal’s editorial board.
- Michele Willson and I have an article ‘Zynga’s FarmVille, social games, and the ethics of big data mining‘ in the second issue of Communication Research and Practice, the new ANZCA journal. I’m also pleased to have joined the journal’s Editorial Advisory Group, helping steer and focus the journal for its first few years. (The article is paywalled, but an open access pre-print is available, too.)
- Also, in a totally different area, my chapter ‘Radically Performing the Borg? Gender Identity and Narratology in Star Trek’ revisits work I did more than a decade ago, and appears in the new collection The Star Trek Universe: Franchising the Final Frontier.
Amongst several recent talks, I gave a presentation for Curtin Alumni at a public event in July. The talk was recorded and is now available on YouTube or embedded below. It gives a fairly decent overview of my Ends of Identity project for anyone interested.
Instagrammatics: Analysing Visual Social Media
At this week’s fantastically engaging CCI Digital Methods Summer School held at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Tim Highfield and I presented a workshop about analysing visual social media, focusing on Instagram data collection and anaylsis. It was based, in part, on our recent First Monday paper, but also looked beyond that at ways of surfacing research questions and approaches. We were pleased with the interest in the workshop, and really positive responses to it, so we’ve shared the slides here:
There will be more on Instagram from us later this year, but if you’re working on Instagram I’d love to hear what you’re doing; either leave a comment here or ping me an email if you want to get in touch.
Artificial Culture Book Giveaway (with one caveat)
Last year Routledge released Artificial Culture, my first book, as a paperback (having only been available as a very expensive hardback before then). Today I received five author copies in the mail which is very exciting – it really exists – but I’ve already given most of the hardback copies away, so I wasn’t quite sure what to do with these. So, naturally, I asked Twitter, and the smart folks there suggested a competition to find good homes for them. So a competition it is. With one caveat: I’d *really* like some feedback about the book, reviews, whatever. There have been a few reviews in scholarly journals, but – weirdly perhaps – I’d love a comments on the book’s Amazon page.
So, here’s the deal: if you’d like a copy of the book, leave a comment below, or on Twitter, or on Facebook, and on Monday (my time) I shall randomly select three people to get copies. If you get one, you agree within one month to write at least two sentences about the book on Amazon.com and give it a star rating. You don’t have to like the book – if you hate it, give it one star if you really want – but you should feel obliged to respond (and therefore have read it).
I should add, that in the unlikely event that I get more interest than books, I’ll prioritise people who can’t easily access one via their university library (or order in for their library, as most fulltime academics can).
Don’t feel the need to leave your details in the comments (privacy and all that): if you win, I’ll email you and ask for mailing details (do make sure you leave me an email address if you’re commenting here).
To get a sense of what the book argues, please read the blurb and make sure you really do want a copy (it’s a bit different to the stuff I’m currently working on; it’s more cultural studies than anything to do with social media).
Update (4 Feb 15): Thanks for all the interest and comments here, on Twitter and on Facebook! It’s greatly appreciated and it’s heartening to see real interest in the book! 
I’ve let the three randomly selected winners know (yes, I did print the names and put them in a box and select randomly!). Hopefully that means there will be a few reviews floating around at some point in the near future!
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