Community Uses of Co-Creative Media: User-Created Citizenship

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This article describes how - in the processes of responding to participatory storytelling practices - community, public service, and to a lesser extent, commercial media institutions are themselves negotiated and changed. Although there are significant variations in the conditions, durability, extent, motivations and quality of these developments and their impacts, they nonetheless increase the possibilities and pathways of participatory media culture. This description first frames digital storytelling as a ‘co-creative’ media practice. It then discusses the role of community arts and cultural development (CACD) practitioners and networks as co-creative media intermediaries, and then considers their influence in Australian broadcast and Internet media. It looks at how participatory storytelling methods are evolving in the Australian context and explores some of the implications for cultural inclusion arising from a shared interest in ‘co-creative’ media methods and approaches.
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The Art of Co-Creative Media: An Australian Survey

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This paper examines co-creative video outputs that have originated from, or relate to, remote Indigenous communities in Australia. Scholarly work on remote media has mostly operated at the interface of media studies and anthropology, seeking to identify how cultural systems shape the production, distribution and reception of media in Aboriginal communities. This paper looks instead at content themes, funding sources and institutions during the 2010-2013 period, and examines the factors that may be determining the quantity of co-creative outputs, as well as the types of stories that get produced. I argue that the focus on culture has obscured important shifts in remote media policy and funding, including a trend towards content designed to address social disadvantage.</abstract>

Co-creative Media in Remote Indigenous Communities

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Forming peer alliances to share and build knowledge is an important aspect of community arts practice, and these co-creation processes are increasingly being mediated by the Internet. This paper offers guidance for practitioners who are interested in better utilising the Internet <fn id="j_csci.55_fn_002" symbol="2">The decision not to capitalise the word ‘internet’ in this paper is based on the consideration that digital networks that use the Internet protocol suite, TCP/IP, have become ubiquitous means of sending and receiving communications.</fn> to connect, share, and make new knowledge. It argues that new approaches are required to foster the organising activities that underpin online co-creation, building from the premise that people have become increasingly networked as individuals rather than in groups (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_csci.55_ref_017">Rainie &amp; Wellman 2012</xref>: 6), and that these new ways of connecting enable new modes of peer-to-peer production and exchange. This position advocates that practitioners move beyond situating the Internet as a platform for dissemination and a tool for co-creating media, to embrace its knowledge collaboration potential.
Drawing on a design experiment I developed to promote online knowledge co-creation, this paper suggests three development phases – <italic>developing connections</italic>, <italic>developing ideas</italic>, and <italic>developing agility</italic> – to ground six methods. They are: <italic>switching and routing</italic>, engaging in small trades of ideas with networked individuals; <italic>organising</italic>, co-ordinating networked individuals and their data; <italic>beta-release</italic>, offering ‘beta’ artifacts as knowledge trades; <italic>beta-testing</italic>, trialing and modifying other peoples ‘beta’ ideas; <italic>adapting</italic>, responding to technological disruption; and, <italic>reconfiguring</italic>, embracing opportunities offered by technological disruption. These approaches position knowledge co-creation as another capability of the community artist, along with co-creating art and media.</abstract>

Co-Creating Knowledge Online: Approaches for Community Artists

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Participatory digital culture presents major challenges to all traditional media outlets, but it presents very direct challenges to the community broadcast sector, which was established from the outset as local, community-driven and participatory. These and other issues were the focus of a recent forum at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (<italic>Co-Creative Communities</italic>, 8–9 November 2012). The forum was part of a national research project, which has been exploring how Australian community arts and media organisations are responding to participatory digital culture, social media and user-led innovation. Focusing on the organisations that presented at the symposium, the paper examines how community-interest media is making the most of new and social media platforms. It considers examples of participatory digital media that have emerged from the community broadcast sector, but it also considers local, collaborative, community-interest media projects developed by public broadcasters and organisations involved in arts, social justice and development. Drawing on forum transcripts and follow-up research the essay describes some of the key trends shaping how community-interest media organisations and independent producers are working with participatory digital culture, and with what success.</abstract>

Community Media 2.0: A Report from the ‘Co-Creative Communities’ Forum

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Networked identity work is the conscious negotiation or co-creation of identity, enacted by speaking and listening across differences among multiple publics, including those real and imagined, familiar and unknown, on and offline, present and future. It is a concept I explore extensively in research with queer Digital Storytellers who share their personal stories in public places to catalyse social change (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_csci.57_ref_012">Vivienne 2013</xref>). In this article I consider distinctions between ‘story’ and ‘identity’; ‘networking’ and ‘networked identity work’ and argue that the two concepts may be usefully employed in development of co-creative community projects. Finally I consider how variable definitions of co-creativity influence project development.</abstract>

Networked Identity Work as Project Development Among Co-Creative Communities

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Digital storytelling is an international movement for self-representation and advocacy, especially in educational, arts, and therapeutic communities. It has begun to attract a significant body of scholarship including publications and conferences. Australia has been an important player in all of these developments. In this presentation I explore some of the issues that have emerged for activists and scholars, including the problem of how to ‘scale up’ from self-expression to communication (i.e. self-marketing), and the question of the role that stories play in constituting ‘we’-communities (or ‘demes’).
The paper pursues the relationship between storytelling and political narrative over the extreme long term (<italic>longue durée</italic>), using well known and lesser-known connections between Australia and Turkey to tell the tale. It considers how digital self-representation intersects with that political process, and what activists need to know in order to intervene more effectively.
The paper is in five parts: (1) Gevinson; (2) Gallipoli; (3) Granddad; (4) Göbekli Tepe; (5) Gotcha? It seeks to place digital storytelling within a larger framework that links storytelling with the evolution of the polity. The analysis ultimately points to a looming problem for the digital storytelling movement – and possibly for human socio-cultural evolution too. In the crisis of ‘we’ communities that arises with the possibility of a globally networked polity, we need new guides to storytelling action, not the old (Trojan) warhorses of mainstream media. Events such as the centenary of World War I present unexpected opportunities for this kind of exploration.</abstract>

A Trojan Horse in the Citadel of Stories?

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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. 