Culture Digitally would like to thank all of the contributors to this blog.
Adam Fish is a cultural anthropologist and media studies scholar currently lecturing in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. He investigates the interface of economic and political power, cultural discourses and practices, and networked communication technologies. These interests coalesce into critical and ethnographic investigations into digital culture, media policy, television and internet convergence, and network activism. @mediacultures
Adrienne Shaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production/School of Media and Communication, at Temple University. Her research and teaching focus on popular culture, the politics of representation, technology, cultural production and qualitative audience research. Her primary areas of interest are video games, gaming culture, and gender and sexuality studies. In addition to authoring several book chapters, her research has been published in Ada, New Media and Society, Critical Studies in Media and Communication, Games and Culture, among others. Her forthcoming book is tentatively titled Playing at the Edge: Gender, race, and sexuality in video games.
Alison Harvey is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. She recently received her PhD from the Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities, where she studied gender- and age-based exclusion related to domesticated gameplay technologies. Her research interests include youth media, inclusion in digital culture, ludic technologies and practices, and feminist research methods. Her work has been published in a range of venues, including Information, Communication & Society, The International Journal of Gender, Science, and Technology, and Loading… A Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association.
Brooke Erin Duffy is an Assistant Professor in Temple University’s School of Communications and Theater’s Department of Advertising and a faculty member in the Mass Media and Communication Doctoral Program.
Burcu S. Bakioglu received her Ph.D. in 2009 from the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. She examines the interaction between media environments, uses of media technologies, and cultural effects of technology in the convergence era. Focusing on the tactical and disruptive uses of media, she researches Internet message boards, griefing groups in virtual worlds, hacktivism, ARGs, and transmedia storytelling. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in New Media at Lawrence University
Christina Dunbar-Hester is assistant professor of Journalism & Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. Her research centers around politics in activist technical communities, and has appeared in such venues as Social Studies of Science,New Media & Society, and the Journal of Communication Inquiry. She is developing a book manuscript on low-power radio activism and conducting NSF-supported ethnographic research on efforts to promote diversity in FLOSS. She has also written on technology and culture in The Atlantic‘s Technology Channel.
Christopher Boulton’s primary research areas are the critical study of advertising and consumer culture, media literacy, and documentary. He is finishing a dissertation on race inequality inside the U.S. advertising industry and will be Assistant Professor of Broadcast/Convergence Media in the Department of Communication at the University of Tampa come fall.
C.W. Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island (CUNY) and Director of Research at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His first book, “Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age,” chronicles the evolution of the Philadelphia media ecosystem from 1997 to 2012. His current research focus on the materialities of journalistic evidence; in particular, the manner by which cultural understandings of documents and data have intersected with shifting newsroom epistemologies.
Dawn Nafus is an anthropologist with Intel Labs, where she conducts ethnographic research to inform new product development and strategy. She holds a PhD from University of Cambridge and has research interests in various aspects of the anthropology of technology, including experiences of temporality, notions of development, gender, and numeracies as material and cultural forms.
Rayvon Fouché is an associate professor of history and an associate professor at the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Fouché’s current book project examines the relationships between sport, science, and technology with an eye toward understanding what is at stake for sporting cultures when they define themselves by and against new and emerging scientific knowledge and technological artifacts.
Daniel Kreiss is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kreiss’s research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice. In a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press — “Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama” — he presents the untold history of new media and Democratic political campaigning over the last decade. The book follows the work of a group of young internet staffers who came together on the Dean campaign and created a number of innovations in online campaigning. After the elections, Dean’s former staffers launched prominent political consulting firms that carried their innovations to many other campaigns, including Obama’s bid for the presidency. In addition to this work, Kreiss’s research on new media and democratic practice has appeared in “New Media & Society,” “Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change,” “Critical Studies in Media Communication,” the “Journal of Information Technology and Politics,” and the “International Journal of Communication,” among other academic journals. Kreiss is an affiliate fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University.
Daren C. Brabham is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication and a faculty fellow in the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among the first to publish research on the crowdsourcing model, his work on online communities and new media has appeared in Convergence; First Monday; Information, Communication & Society; Planning Theory; and The Participatory Cultures Handbook. He is the founding editor of Case Studies in Strategic Communication, and he teaches courses in new media, public relations, and writing at UNC.
Finn Brunton (finnb.net) is a scholar of the relationships between society, culture and information technology — how we make technological decisions, and deal with their consequences. He focuses on the adoption, adaptation, modification and misuse of digital media and hardware; privacy, information security, and encryption; network subcultures; hardware literacy; and obsolete and experimental media platforms. He is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT, 2013), along with numerous articles and talks. Brunton received an MA from the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee, Switzerland) and a PhD from the University of Aberdeen’s Centre for Modern Thought. Prior to his NYU appointment, he was an Assistant Professor of Information at the University of Michigan’s School of Information.
Gabriella Coleman researches and teaches on computer hackers and digital activism. Her forthcoming book, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, is out this fall with Princeton University Press. She holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, at McGill University in the Department of Art History & Communication Studies.
Greg Lastowka teaches and researches in the field of intellectual property. He is an expert on technology and law and his opinions have been quoted in publications such as Nature, The Economist, Scientific American, and the New York Times. He is a co-director of the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 2004, Professor Lastowka clerked for Judge Walter K. Stapleton on the Third Circuit and practiced intellectual property and technology litigation at Dechert LLP.
Ilana Gershon is an Assistant Professor, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University.
Jan Fernback is an associate professor of Media Studies at Temple University’s School of Media and Communication. Professor Fernback consults on various web-related projects and has published studies and commentary on cybercommunity and new technology. Current work examines the impact of information/communication technologies in urban revitalization efforts; issues of privacy and surveillance online and in mobile technologies; institutional uses of ICTs; the meaning of online community in contemporary culture.
Jennifer Lena is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Barnard College and author of Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music (Princeton 2012). She regularly blogs at http://whatisthewhat.wordpress.com/ and has guest blogged at http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/.
Jessica L. Beyer received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington. She is currently a postdoc in the Center for Global Studies at the University of Washington’s Jackson School for International Studies. Her research uses ethnographic methods to understand online communities and recent work has focused on sustained political action arising from highly populated social websites.
Laura Forlano is an Assistant Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology and she was a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2012-2103. Her research is on emergent forms of organizing and urbanism enabled by mobile, wireless and ubiquitous computing technologies with an emphasis on the socio-technical practices and spaces of innovation. She is co-editor with Marcus Foth, Christine Satchell and Martin Gibbs of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement, which was published by MIT Press in 2011. Forlano’s research and writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals including First Monday, The Information Society, Journal of Community Informatics, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Design Issues and Science and Public Policy. She has published chapters for books including editor Mark Shepard’s Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space (MIT Press 2011) and The Architecture League of New York’s Situated Technologies pamphlet series and is a regular contributor to their Urban Omnibus blog. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.
Lisa Nakamura is a professor in the Department of American Cultures and the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has been writing about digital media since 1994.
Lonny J Avi Brooks is assistant professor in the Communication Department at California State University, East Bay. His current manuscript is Playing@Work:Performing Future Scenarios of 21st Century life at the Institute For The Future (in review at MIT Press). His research of IFTF is part of a larger study of futurist think tanks worldwide to investigate the metaphors employed in future scenarios of computing as they interact with historical, sociocultural memories, and present-day realities. As part of his research on emergent trends in social computing and user experience research, he investigates how online gaming is being implemented in higher education and as a platform for understanding how gaming can provide students with immersive experiences in learning about media theory and practice.Professor Brooks received his PhD in Communication at UC San Diego and an MA in Library and Information Science at UCLA. He is currently Chair of the Communication And The Future (CATF) division of the National Communication Association. He advises students in advertising, public relations and organizational communication and is Chair of the Jewish Culture & Society Committee at Cal State East Bay.
Mark Chen is a postdoc at the University of Washington in the LIFE Center and the Center for Game Science looking at player learning with science and math games such as Foldit and Refraction. He is also helping the Educurious project by integrating games and gameplay into the redesign of high school biology, English, and algebra. He has a new book out based on his dissertation work on learning in online games titled Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft. Prior to doctoral work, Mark was the webmaster and a web game developer for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.
Mark Deuze is an academic, interested in media and social theory, creative industries, and extreme metal. Hailing from Holland, Mark lives and works in Indiana.
Matt Crain is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and adjunct instructor at DePaul University. His work examines the transformation of media and advertising systems in the digital age with an emphasis on economics, politics, and technology.
Matt Ratto is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and Director of the Semaphore research cluster on Inclusive Design, Mobile and Pervasive Computing. Matt’s research examines how hands-on productive work – making – can supplement and extend critical reflection on the relations between digital technologies and society. His work builds upon the new possibilities offered by open source software and hardware, as well as the developing technologies of 3D printing and rapid prototyping. He coined the term ‘critical making’ to refer generally to pedagogical and research practices that blend technical and conceptual work. He is the co-editor (with Megan Boler) of DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media, (forthcoming Jan 2014), MIT Press.
Mélanie Millette has a PhD from UQAM in Montreal, Canada. She is a member of the research team at LabCMO and a Fellow at the Foundation Trudeau.
Mél Hogan is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Curation in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research explores the failures of the (promise of the) archive, feminist media archaeologies, and the environmental politics of storage and memory. As a practitioner, aspects of these same issues are addressed through media arts interventions and research design projects. Hogan is also the Editor of online and p.o.d. journal of artsand politics, nomorepotlucks.org; on the advisory board of the Fembot collective; a Faculty Fellow for the Media Archaeology Lab, and a Research Design Consultant for archinodes.com. She just completed a 6-year mandate on the administrative board of Studio XX.
Mel Stanfill is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Stanfill’s work examines the changing relationship between media companies and their fans in the Internet era, considering both cult media fans and sports fans through representations of fans, the design of official websites for media properties (television shows, sports franchises, etc.), and interviews with media industry practitioners.
Neal Thomas is an assistant professor of communication studies at UNC Chapel Hill. With interests that lie at the intersection of social computing and social theory, his recent work focuses on web 2.0 techniques and their capacity to produce discursive rationality, reading the computer user as both experiential and ideological subject in this light.
Sara Kingsley is a Master’s of Science candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a multi-disciplinarian by trade and a technologist by choice. Her primary academic curiosities range from labor and behavioral economics to communication networking technologies. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked for the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy and served as a political appointee in the Administration of President Barack H. Obama. In her spare time, she likes to write poetry, learn foreign languages, and laugh.
Ted Striphas is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication & Culture, Indiana University. In 2009 he published a book called The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. His latest book project focuses on algorithmic culture.
Torin Monahan is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on institutional transformations with new technologies, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which surveillance and security programs tend to reproduce social inequalities. Currently, he is overseeing an NSF-funded collaborative research project on the data-sharing practices of Department of Homeland Security “fusion centers.”
Zachary McDowell’s research focuses on cultural production in digital space, often brushing up against questions of access and use. A Wikipedia Teaching Fellow, he not only researches digitally mediated collaboration but also strives to critically engage students through it. Zach is currently working on his dissertation, a media archaeology of the mashup, a case study on the role of digital sharing in cultural production.