Research Roundtables

Digital methods and ethics in researching transnational cultures

(Chair, Elaine Jing Zhao, UNSW)

The proliferation of online data and digital tools afford new opportunities to advance our understanding of transnational cultures. While a growing range of digital methods such as data mining, web scraping, network analysis, and data visualisation have been employed to study platforms with near-global reach such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the parallel universe of digital and social media platforms in non-western contexts is comparatively less studied. Yet, they raise important questions around media, culture and society in the transnational context, and complicate models of 'the West and the Rest’.

The panel features presentations on research projects in Australasia which employ a range of methodological approaches. These include research on transnational consumption of South Korean films in China, PRC business migrants’use of Chinese social media, and transnational performance of entertainers in Asia and Australia in the 1950s. This is followed by facilitated discussions on the opportunities, challenges and limitations in employing digital methods to research transnational flows and networks. It will respond to questions such as:

• What are the emerging digital methods and tools that can be employed to study digital cultures in the context of the increasing transnational flows of people, culture, and knowledge?
• What are methodological challenges and ethical implications of researching digital cultures on social media platforms in non-western contexts, considering platform and cultural specificities?
• Apart from researching cultural and communicative practices on digital and social media platforms, what other digital methods are useful in researching transnational cultures, including those pre-date the Internet? 
• How digital methods and ‘conventional’methods can be integrated to address new questions in researching transnational media cultures?

Panelists:
Brian Yecies is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong. He teaches on popular culture, and transnational film and digital media content that emphasises cultural globalisation, policy, and convergence in Asia. His research focuses on screen culture in colonial and contemporary Korea, and Korean-Chinese-Australian film and digital media collaboration. He is a past Korea Foundation Research Fellow and a recipient of grants from the Academy of Korean Studies, Asia Research Fund, and Australia-Korea Foundation. He is author of Korea’s Occupied Cinemas, 1893-1948 (2011), and The Changing Face of Korean Cinema, 1960-2015 (2016) –both with Ae-Gyung Shim, and he is a member of the 2014-16 ARC Discovery Project titled “Willing collaborators: Negotiating Change in East Asian Media Production”.

Susan Leong is an Early Career Research Fellow with Curtin University. She is the author of New Media and the Nation in Malaysia: Malaysianet (2014). Susan’s research interests are transdisciplinary and especially concerned with the questions of transnational connectivity, migration and belonging. She has published in Critical Asian Studies, Continuum and New Media & Society on the online representations of the Malaysian Indian minority, the future of nations, Singaporean identity and the notion of internet time. Her latest publication includes a chapter in Media and Communication in the Chinese Diaspora (2015) entitled Provisional Business Migrants to Western Australia, Social Media and Conditional Belonging. Other publications include chapters on virtual diasporas, satellite television and the Chinese community in Perth and Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor mega project.
  
Jonathan Bollen is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of New South Wales. He trained in performance studies at the University of Sydney and earned his doctorate on queer kinaesthesia at the University of Western Sydney. He has held research fellowships from the Australian Research Council and the National Film and Sound Archive, and taught previously at Flinders University, Monash University and the University of New England. He is co-author of Men at Play: Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s, published by Rodopi in the Australian Playwrights series, and A Global Doll's House: Ibsen and Distant Visions, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. He also has experience in the digital humanities, developing new methodologies for theatre research and collaborating internationally to visualise production data in world theatre. He is currently working on a history of entertainment in Australia between 1946 and 1975, tracking entertainers' movements between theatre, television and night clubs, and charting the emergence of a touring circuit linking cities across Australia and Asia.

Facilitator/chair
Elaine Jing Zhao is Lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at  University of New South Wales. She has been researching and publishing on digital media and cultures, user co-creation, informal media economies, and their social, cultural and economic implications in a transitional China. Her publications can be found in International Journal of Cultural Studies, Media, Culture & Society, Global Media and Communication and Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.

Internet historiographies

(Chair, Emma Jane, UNSW)

The digital footprints left by individual web users have become a topic of great interest and concern. But what of the histories of the internet itself? Having turned 25 in 2014, the web now has its own set of complex histories that scholars are beginning to investigate via the emerging field of internet and web historiography. It is interesting, however, that alongside this historical turn in internet studies, we are seeing a turn to anonymity, invisibility and untrackability in internet use. This panel acknowledges both the persuasive case in favour of engaging in more internet historiography work, as well as the many difficulties associated with this enterprise. It will respond to questions such as:

• What methods and approaches from traditional historiography are best suited to writing internet histories?
• What is the usefulness and feasibility of writing histories of the deep web and the dark web?
• What internet historiography methods are proving most fruitful for which mediums and which projects?

Selfie studies: researching digital self-representation

(Chair, Kath Albury, UNSW) 

Digital cultures have become increasingly ‘visual’ (and visible) to researchers via social networking sites and other networked publics. How does this challenge professional boundaries of public and private? What kinds of legal and ethical considerations arise for researchers who use (and re-use) images beyond their original context? Where user data is made public via APIs, what are the responsibilities of researchers seeking to scrape and reuse data for the purposes of research? What kinds of frameworks are available to support and guide researchers in this space (for example, Australian laws, university Human Ethics Committees and relevant professional associations)? This panel discussion involves introductory presentations from Australian researchers examining digital self-portraits or selfies via a range of methodological approaches; followed by a facilitated discussion.

Recommended Links and pre-reading:
Senft, T. and Baym, N (2015). ‘What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon’, International Journal of Communication 9(2015), Feature 1588–1606 http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4067/1387

The Association of Internet Researchers Ethics Guide: http://ethics.aoir.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

The Selfie Researchers Network http://www.selfieresearchers.com/

Highfield, T. and Leaver, T (2015) ‘A methodology for mapping Instagram hashtags’ First Monday: peer-reviewed journal on the Internet http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5563/4195


Panelists:
Fiona Andreallo is a PhD candidate in Communications at the University of Technology in Sydney (UTS), Australia. Her current PhD research is located in a visual culture paradigm and focuses on vernacular photographic practices of social media. She has been awarded an MA (Photo-media digital design), as well as a BFA in creative practice from UNSW Arts and Design. Prior to undertaking her PhD, Fiona worked in a number of areas of digital media design specialising in artistic, medical, and publishing fields of digital photographic practice.

Matt Hart is a PhD Candidate at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. His research is supported by the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre in Melbourne. Matt's PhD involves investigating how and why young people who share Not-safe-for-work (NSFW) selfies on Tumblr experience wellbeing and belonging online.

Michele Zappavigna is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. Her major research interest is the discourse of social media and she has published two books in this area: Discourse of Twitter and Social Media (Bloomsbury, 2012) and, with Ruth Page, Johann Unger and David Barton, Researching the Language of Social Media (Routledge, 2014). Her work also engages with the practical concerns of applied linguistics. Michele’s ‘Selfies, subjectification, and social photography’ project explores the visual structures used in social media images that inscribe, infer, or imply the presence of the photographer within the image.

Facilitator/chair:
Kath Albury is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Media at UNSW. Her current research focuses on young people’s practices of digital self-representation, and the role of user-generated media (including social networking platforms) in young people’s formal and informal sexual learning. Kath is a co-author of The Selfie Course, a Creative Commons syllabus for learning and teaching with selfies (http://www.selfieresearchers.com/the-selfie-course/selfie-syllabus/).