The CCI's 13th Symposium, 12-13 November, is rapidly approaching. Our first Perth-based Symposium, hosted by our partners ECU and Curtin, promises to be an exciting one, showcasing the diverse range of CCI's research capabilities and interests. We are delighted to welcome Edith Cowan University VC, Kerry Cox, and Curtin DVC (Academic), Colin Stirling, who will give opening/welcoming addresses, as well as colleagues and collaborators from many of our (now nine!) partner institutions. CCI looks forward to engaging with industry, government and other agenda-setters as well as with academics for this two-day event, and with the next generation of CCI researchers at our Emerging Scholars Workshop on 14-15 November. Registration for the Symposium is now open.
New partners
The Centre has recently formalised partnerships with Curtin University and the Australian Catholic University, bringing to nine the number of CCI partner institutions. We are delighted to welcome these two new members into the CCI fold and to continue supporting the groundbreaking work of John Hartley and his team on the CCI’s ‘Cultural Science’ project and of Brian Fitzgerald and his team’s seminal research on Creative Commons and other open content systems.
New publications
The CCI’s third survey of internet use in Australia, CCI Digital Futures 2012, has recently been published and is available to download. As the only survey of its type conducted in Australia, it generates a large amount of new knowledge as part of the World Internet Project, a 32-country partnership in which CCI is the Australian partner.
Sage is slated to publish Key Concepts in Creative Industries, co-authored by John Hartley, Jason Potts, Stuart Cunningham, Terry Flew, Michael Keane and John Banks, in October. The book is the first to present an organized study of the key concepts that underlie and motivate the field of creative industries. It presents readers with compact accounts of the history of terms, the debates and tensions associated with their usage, and examples of how they apply to the creative industries around the world.
Eleanor Hogan’s Alice Springs has been published by New South Books as part of its prestigious Cities Series. The book reveals the texture of everyday life in this town through the passage of the local seasons. Eleanor is a CCI Research Fellow at Swinburne University, and a member of the ‘Home Internet for Remote Indigenous Communities’ project research team.
New appointments
Stuart Cunningham has been appointed a member of the Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) Committee for five years. The Committee makes a major contribution to the Australian Government's innovation agenda and plays a key role in the management of the CRC program. The objective of the CRC program is to deliver significant economic, environmental and social benefits to Australia by supporting end-user driven research partnerships. Find out more about the CRC program.
Industry and community engagement
Researchers from CCI at Swinburne recently participated in the ‘Broadband for the Bush’ event in Alice Springs, with Ellie Rennie and Julian Thomas both giving presentations. CCI hosted a researchers’ breakfast after the event, which was attended by 14 researchers in the field from universities and Indigenous organisations. The event has resulted in a productive ongoing research discussion, as well as forming alliances across organisations to develop trials and policy strategies.
CCI is partner to the Interactive Skills Integration Scheme (ISIS) program which aimed to show the value of interactive media skills to different sectors such as mining, health and education, and has realised some real commercial outcomes. This has been a model project of multi-stakeholder collaboration, with CCI, Creative Industries Innovation Centre; QUT Creative Enterprise Australia, and the University of Technology Sydney as program partners. ISIS will be featured at the November symposium. Read more
In July, four CCI scholars—Sandra Hanchard, Jonathon Hutchinson, Pip Shea and Darryl Woodford—attended the Oxford Internet Institute's Summer Doctoral Program in the UK. Presentations from international scholars, crossed a number of domains including big data, psychology, political science, community management, video games and policy; all brought together by the artefact of the ‘internet’. Highlights of the program included presentations from Bill Dutton highlighting the growth of internet studies, Ralph Schroeder discussing virtual environments, Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon for social network analysis, and Mark Graham for introducing us to geography studies on the internet, highlighting digital divides.
The OII presented a great opportunity for CCI scholars to engage and form lasting collaborations and friendships with scholars and established academics. There was a busy social calendar, taking in culinary delights and sightseeing. (We even managed to ‘punt’ without falling in — though some of us got further than others)...
Overall the OII was an exceptional experience for all involved, which we expect will lead to lasting collaborations and the development of an international research agenda.
(Jonathon Hutchinson and Darryl Woodford)
Planning is already underway for the next CCI Winter School, and we expect to announce dates soon. News of a successful 2012 event is spreading around the globe so we look forward to welcoming another highly talented cohort of emerging scholars in mid-2013. Students from this year’s Winter School are currently collaborating on an exciting project which we’ll announce soon.
Stuart Cunningham
21 September 2012