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Cultural Science Journal is delighted to announce our successful migration to the Ubiquity Press platform. We are now ready to publish submissions received during 2018, which will comprise Volume 10 of the journal. We begin with several papers on the theme of ‘open knowledge’ and will add new papers on all topics as they are accepted. Each volume of the relaunched Cultural Science Journal will be cumulative over the year, so that work will be published in a timely manner once it is reviewed, revised and accepted, without having to wait for an issue. We are planning for 12 articles per annum to begin with, and are also open to reviews and commentary as well as research. Initially, the costs of publishing Open Access are borne by the Centre for Culture &amp; Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. In later volumes, we will encourage authors to seek funding from their own institutions to support publication of their articles. We hope to support the journal through events such as research workshops and conferences.</abstract>

Editorial: Relaunching Cultural Science

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Audio description continues to be unavailable on broadcast television in Australia, despite the technological capabilities to provide it and the existence of a federally funded back catalogue or ‘secret library’ of audio described television content. This paper reveals findings into both the amount of audio described content that has been created but not made available to television audiences, while also reviewing existing innovative platforms for audio description, such as the app BAM-Describe. It contextualises these findings in an overview of the history of audio description in and outside of Australia, highlighting key technological and policy changes. Evoking theories of the preferred user and how this understanding of television audiences addresses disability, we argue that different interpretations of how audio description can be delivered, determined through a process of interpretive flexibility (and continued industry creativity and innovation) may finally shift the stagnating discussions around audio description provision, and thus ultimately change the accessibility of television for the blind and vision impaired.</abstract>

The Preferred User: How Audio Description could Change Understandings of Australian Television Audiences and Media Technology

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This paper examines the development of open knowledge in China through two case studies: the development of Chinese open access (OA) journals, and national-level OA repositories. Open access and open knowledge are emerging as a site of both grass-roots activism, and top-down intervention in the practices of scholarship and scholarly publishing in China. Although the language, vision and strategies of the global open knowledge movement are undoubtedly present, so too are the messy realities of open access and open knowledge innovation in a local context. In attempting to position open access developments in China within a diverse and contested global landscape of open knowledge innovation we draw on <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_csci.106_ref_027">Moore’s (2017</xref>) conception of open access as a boundary object: an object that is understood differently within individual communities but which maintains enough structure to be understood between communities (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_csci.106_ref_027">Moore 2017</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_csci.106_ref_036">Star and Griesemer 1989</xref>). Viewed as a boundary object, the concept of open knowledge is making it possible for China to engage with the global open knowledge movement, as a beneficiary of the innovation of others, and as an open knowledge innovator in its own right.</abstract>

Understanding Open Knowledge in China: A Chinese Approach to Openness?

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The paper distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge, productive or armed knowledge and connective or tribal knowledge, which it traces back to pre-modern antagonisms. It argues that open knowledge depends on a new ‘agonistic’ synthesis of these types. The aim is partly to show that culture is primary in determining what knowledge means and who gets to share it; and partly to compare formal knowledge institutions (especially universities) with informal knowledge systems (language and social media). Can knowledge ever be open if it is either armed or wild? If so, then how should we model openness? I suggest that situating knowledge in language, performance and play, rather than property and productivity, offers a way forward.</abstract>

What Hope for Open Knowledge? Productive (Armed) <italic>vs</italic>. Connective (Tribal) Knowledge and Staged Conflict

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This paper explores the relevance of Dilthey’s conceptualisation of the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ (human sciences) for Cultural Science. In a nutshell, I argue that Cultural Science is Dilthey plus Darwin. In this effort, I define the Geisteswissenschaften as ‘performative sciences’: Taking economics as an example, I show that the Geisteswissenschaften are sciences which are ontologically productive in creating and performing the object of their research. That means, they are inherently normative since they entail critical reflexivity as a major mode of research. Following Dilthey, Geisteswissenschaften are deeply historical, which implies that their disciplinary structure is evolving together with their objects. Therefore, I argue that the 19th century division of disciplines needs to be thoroughly overhauled in the 21st century, including the division between economics and sociology, which is a left-over from 19th century nation-state development. New disciplines, with Cultural Science and Technosphere Science as prime examples, must be established to cope with the challenges of our times: where human agency, culture and technology have blurred long-established boundaries separating nature, culture and society; where identity and meaning have become global, fluid, contested and reflexive phenomena; and where nature (the environment) and culture (cities) are inextricably interrelated in the dynamics of the emergent Anthropocene system.</abstract>

Dilthey and Darwin Combined? 19th Century <italic>Geisteswissenschaft</italic> for 21st Century Cultural Science

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Two potential forms of mutation in cultural evolution have been identified: ‘copying error’, where learners make random modifications to a behaviour and ‘guided variation’ where learners makes non-random modifications. While copying error is directly analogous to genetic mutation, guided variation is a specifically cultural process that does not have a close parallel in biological evolution. It has been suggested that the decision-making processes underlying intentional guided variation may produce similar results to cultural transmission as both are likely to be influenced by cognitive biases. This study uses a unique linear transmission chain design, without any influence of recall, to examine intentional guided variation. Participants were asked to alter news stories however they wished in order to make them more interesting, the product of their modification was then passed to the next participant and so on down the chain. The products of the chains were then compared with the original material so as to assess any underlying biases in the changed content. Through this process of guided variation, original material which scored low for bias-exploiting content significantly increased in at least one known content bias, whereas original material which scored high for bias-exploiting content was not significantly altered in this respect.</abstract>

Faking the News: Intentional Guided Variation Reflects Cognitive Biases in Transmission Chains Without Recall

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. 

Cultural Science

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

Editorial

Editorial: Relaunching Cultural Science

Research

The Preferred User: How Audio Description could Change Understandings of Australian Television Audiences and Media Technology

Understanding Open Knowledge in China: A Chinese Approach to Openness?

What Hope for Open Knowledge? Productive (Armed) vs. Connective (Tribal) Knowledge and Staged Conflict

Dilthey and Darwin Combined? 19th Century Geisteswissenschaft for 21st Century Cultural Science

Faking the News: Intentional Guided Variation Reflects Cognitive Biases in Transmission Chains Without Recall

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