Cultural Science

Progress in 2010
Following the completion of John Hartley’s Federation Fellowship during the second half of the year, the Cultural Science initiative is in process of being transferred to the CCI as a full project. Meanwhile, research and publication activities continued, culminating in a co-hosted international research workshop on Cultural Science, held at the Centre for the Co-Evolution of Biology and Culture at Durham University in the UK. CCI researchers Hartley, Potts, Banks and Montgomery attended, along with scholars from Durham (Alex Bentley, Pierpaolo Andriani, Bob Layton), Frankfurt School of Finance & Management (Carsten Herrmann-Pillath), Queen Mary University of London (Alex Mesoudi), University of Missouri (Mike O’Brien), University of Rotterdam (Christian Handke), plus the economist Paul Ormerod, marketing entrepreneur Mark Earls, and Gary Grubb from the AHRC. Papers from this event are published in the Cultural Science Journal, and plans are advancing for a joint application for AHRC/EU funding.

Hartley, Potts and Banks have been commissioned by Bloomsbury Academic, London, to complete a book provisionally entitled: Curiously Parallel: Evolution and Cultural Science. Lucy Montgomery won a prestigious QUT VC’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2010. Her sole-authored book, China's Creative Industries: Copyright, Social Network Markets and the Business of Culture in a Digital Age, was published by Edward Elgar UK. Jason Potts completed his book Evolutionary Economics of Creative Industries, also for Edward Elgar, which is due to be published in 2011. John Banks secured a contract from Bloomsbury Academic for his book on the ethnography of games firms, Co-creating Videogames.

International links were intensively cultivated during the year, with team members making strategic visits to China, Thailand, Singapore, the UK, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Estonia and Scandinavia for both conference presentations and research collaborations, including high-level consultancy work with government and UN agencies, and research funding councils.

Plans for 2011
Work towards completion of various publishing projects will proceed. The program will appoint ECR researchers to develop its international linkage with China and the EU. Planning for an open ‘Cultural Science’ international conference will be advanced. Collaborations will be continued with international partners in the UK (Durham; AHRC; London-Metropolitan University), EU (Hans-Bredow-Institut Hamburg; WZB Berlin; East-West Centre for Business Studies & Cultural Science Frankfurt), and China (Beijing Research centre for the Science of Science; Communications University of China).

Impact
Books, papers and special issues of journals have been produced, contracted and planned. Work has begun on policy applications for cultural science approaches, as for instance in ‘creative cities’ indices, collaboratively with partners in China (Beijing Research Centre for the Science of Science), Thailand (TICEF), UK (Greater London Authority) and others. Banks & Potts contributed an evolutionary analysis of games to New Media & Society. Hartley’s collaborations with agencies in Estonia, China, Turkey and Thailand were all reported in the local media, including the People’s Daily in China.

Research from this program contributed to the development of two successful ARC Linkage applications: Banks’ Innovation sources and processes in Australian Interactive Entertainment companies; and Hartley’s Digital storytelling and co-creative media: the role of community arts and media in propagating and coordinating population-wide creative practice (1st CI: Dr C Spurgeon).

New Knowledge Generated
The two major themes of the Cultural Science program are (1) to develop an evolutionary conceptual approach to culture; and (2) to develop new analytical approaches to creative industries and creative economy based on this approach. Progress has been made in both directions in 2010, which will lead to (1) new scholarly publications and collaborations; and (2) new cultural-economic analysis of the creative economy and creative innovation in 2011.