<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Departing from a perspective of life as lived in rather than with media, this paper articulates the evolutionary context for people's near-complete immersion in media. Using examples such as the appropriation of the movie "Avatar" by activists around the world it is argued how our orientation to media provides adaptive advantage in contemporary postgeographical society.</abstract>

Survival of the mediated

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

A cross-cultural comparison of social networking friendship between MySpace (in USA) and Wretch (in Taiwan) was conducted utilizing the high- and low-context framework proposed by Edward T. <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_csci.34_ref_015">Hall (1976)</xref>. Three network indicators were used to describe the network structure of both social network sites: size, density, and heterogeneity. Data were drawn from the forum “Jobs, Work, Careers” on MySpace and “Job-Related” on Wretch over a 2-month period from mid-October to mid-December in 2007. For each of the 2 sites, 6 users (3 men and 3 women) were randomly selected as sources or “seeds” from which to crawl the friendship networks. From the 6 seed users, a snowball sample was constructed by crawling 2 degrees out along the networks. The results indicated that Wretch, although it followed the expected direction predicted by Hall’s model, did not have significantly larger and denser networks than MySpace. Finally, no differences in same-sex and cross-sex friendships were found between the 2 sites either. The overall findings are discussed with implications for future studies.</abstract>

Social networking friendships: A cross-cultural comparison of network structure between MySpace and Wretch

Entertainment: An interdisciplinary approach to an object of study

Locating Four Pathways to Internet Scholarship

Reading News Data

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

This paper describes how a weblog was utilized as a major component in a long-term, multi-site ethnography with both “virtual” and physically situated research components. “Ethnographic blogging” describes not only the act of writing on a website and hoping that someone will read it, but the process of regularly maintaining a blog, and the modes of interaction and observation that this process gradually enables. In my own study of self-identified ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds,’ ethnographic blogging involved traversing news sites, forums, and other blogs for relevant content, leading to opportunities for dialogue with other bloggers and readers; establishing a persona online as a researcher, which has encouraged subjects to invite me to public and private discussions about their culture and identities; and bringing together online subjects from multiple physical sites, among other opportunities. My own experience of integrating a blog into ethnographic research was largely experimental, though I offer these reflections to encourage researchers to consider what alternative means of qualitative analysis online may have to offer us.</abstract>

Ethnographic Blogging: Reflections on a Methodological Experiment

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

This article discusses the usefulness of geo-linguistic analysis for Internet studies by presenting two techniques to frame and visualize the linguistic development of the World Wide Web, in particular the geo-linguistic development amongst different language versions of Wikipedia. An emergent research agenda has been set to explore the multilingual aspects of the Internet using, for example, a global perspective on Wikipedia research. And yet, there is a lack of theoretical and methodological tools for understanding the distribution and diffusion of linguistic materials online. The idea of geo-linguistic factors is introduced in this article to address these shortcomings and to respond to the study of a wide range of issues such as linguistic pluralism on the Internet or, more generally, the diffusion of innovation. Cartograms and network analysis are presented as two techniques that showcase the potential uses of geo-linguistic analysis. These two techniques of measurement and visualization indicate certain geographic and linguistic affiliations among languages. It is argued that although certain more developed language versions such as English and German may have central positions in connecting all languages, there exists another pattern that can best be explained by geo-linguistic factors. Finally, the limitations and implications of such findings and techniques are discussed, not only for research on Wikipedia but for Internet studies in general.</abstract>

Analysing Geo-linguistic Dynamics of the World Wide Web: The Use of Cartograms and Network Analysis to Understand Linguistic Development in Wikipedia

Introduction to the special issue

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 14 (2022): Issue 1 (December 2022)

Volume 13 (2021): Issue 1 (December 2021)

Volume 12 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

Volume 11 (2019): Issue 1 (January 2019)

Volume 10 (2018): Issue 1 (January 2018)

Volume 9 (2016): Issue 1 (January 2016)

Volume 8 (2015): Issue 2 (December 2015)

Volume 8 (2015): Issue 1 (January 2015)

Volume 7 (2014): Issue 2 (February 2014)

Volume 7 (2014): Issue 1 (January 2014)

Volume 6 (2013): Issue 1 (January 2013)

Volume 5 (2012): Issue 2 (July 2012)

Volume 5 (2012): Issue 1 (January 2012)

Volume 4 (2011): Issue 1 (January 2011)

Volume 3 (2010): Issue 2 (January 2010)

Volume 3 (2010): Issue 1 (January 2010)

Volume 2 (2009): Issue 1 (January 2009)

Volume 1 (2008): Issue 2 (January 2008)

Volume 1 (2008): Issue 1 (January 2008)

Cultural Science

A hallmark of human civilization has been to see ‘culture’ as a defining feature of humanity, epitomized in approaching the ‘humanities’ as the study of culture. Cultural Science: A multidisciplinary journal for the study of more-than-human culture radically breaks with this tradition and extends the domain of the study of culture beyond the human, both in the dimensions of multi-species and machine culture, and by considering all forms of cultural hybridization in a more-than human world. ‘Cultural Science’ investigates structures, interactions, and processes of cultural systems at all levels of analysis and scales of application. It approaches culture as a semiotic medium integrating creative processes in the biosphere, anthroposphere and technosphere as constitutive layers in the life of planet Earth.  ‘Cultural Science’ promotes inter- and transdisciplinary methodological pluralism, reaching from the classical sciences such as biology or ecology to established approaches in the social sciences and the humanities and beyond, venturing into posthumanist alternatives that investigate more-than-human forms of cultural creativity, diffusion, and tradition. ‘Cultural science’ endorses theoretical innovations that stand in line with coevolutionary theories bridging the natural and the human sciences and with novel views on agency and materiality that pursue ontological unification of human and non-human domains of meaning. It encourages active dialogue with science and technology studies, evolutionary and institutional economics, cultural evolution studies, biosemiotics, complexity science, or network analysis, specifying the ‘uses of culture’ from personal meanings to planetary platforms and systems of meaning. In doing so, we assign a crucial role to culture as medium of more-than-human action meeting the existential challenges of the Anthropocene.  ‘Cultural Science’ looks forward to publishing new work that may be critical, analytical and/or empirical, but is most often dialogical; interested in the production and translation of new ideas and knowledge, especially across perceived and disputed borders between systems, groups, and identities as well as academic disciplines.  Contributions to the journal transcend specialist topical foci while remaining on the firm ground of the respective disciplinary methodologies. Exemplary topical fields include:    The study of non-human cultures in the biosphere and the role of naturecultures in the interactions between humans and non-humans;  The role of digital media in the emergence of naturecultures; Explorations of human cultural creativity mediating biosphere and technosphere. Investigations into the emerging forms of cultural creativity of Artificial Intelligence.  Research on interspecies media of cultural expression, such as interspecies art and play.  New theoretical approaches to coevolution and cocreation of cultural media in the more-than-human world.    Journal history  Cultural Science Journal was launched in 2008 as part of the research program of the ARC (Australian Research Council) Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, and John Hartley’s ARC Federation Fellowship. It published 14 issues between 2008 and 2016, before transferring to Ubiquity Press where it continued until 2021. In 2021, the journal moved on to a new home at the Cultural Data Analytics Open Lab (CUDAN) Tallinn University, Estonia. The editors-in-chief were Indrek Ibrus and Maximilian Schich. The journal is now published on the Sciendo platform, a subsidiary of De Gruyter. In 2023, the journal moved on to its third transformation, while remaining on the Sciendo platform, with new editor-in-chief Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, and a second editorial office at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at Erfurt University, Germany, working in tandem with the Tallinn offfice.  Building on the work of Raymond Williams, ‘Cultural Science 2.0’, as it was framed by founding editor John Hartley, sought advances not only in the micro-contexts of culture, but also in systematic and general processes and the mutually conditioning relationships of micro, meso and macro contexts. Hartley and colleagues (Jason Potts, Lucy Montgomery, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Paul Ormerod and others) launched an effort aimed at conceptualising and studying such relationships systematically. The journal worked towards transdisciplinary frameworks linking the study of culture with evolutionary and institutional economics, complexity science and other evolutionary approaches to creative change.  This work has been pathbreaking, feeding into new approaches and further studies into evolutionary processes in media markets and cultural industries internationally (emergent fields of media innovation studies, cross-innovation systems, open publishing and so on). At the same time, parallel approaches have emerged linking the study of culture with other disciplines especially evolutionary biosciences, but also mathematics, physics, data science and network science, etc., resulting in novel and epoch making approaches such as cultural analytics, cultural evolution studies, computational humanities and social science, etc. ‘Cultural Science’, it can be argued, is evolving into an intensely dialogic, multidisciplinary and an ‘explosively’ (to use a Juri Lotman’s term) evolving domain.With the third transformation, Cultural Science 3.0, the journal further expands its reach, redefining and co-creating cultural science in the Anthropocene, embracing cutting edge developments in the posthumanist movement, while keeping its roots in emphasising the coevolutionary systems-based approach to culture explored since 2008.In this dynamically developing context, Cultural Science: A multidisciplinary journal for the study of more-than human culture wants to provide an arena where the relevant dialogues are held, where centuries of humanities-based knowledge on culture’s forms, languages and systems of meaning can meet the most contemporary scientific methods, where new questions are asked, where novel conceptualisations can meet or emerge from rigorous empirical or analytical work.　  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 