Digital Media @ CoLab » sharon

Craig Watkins’ new book The Young and the Digital

sharon — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:16:35 +0000

Professor Craig Watkins’ new book on social media explores the digital world that children and youth inhabit. Using a mix of research methods, Dr. Watkins offers a nuanced picture of “digital natives.” The Chronicle of Higher Education recently interviewed Watkins on his research.

Summer Institute Classes Winding Up

sharon — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:49:17 +0000

We have had a very busy summer so far. The Summer Institute once again conducted classes in Lisbon and Porto for enrolled graduate students, individuals associated with our industrial affiliates, or interested individuals meeting the course qualifications. We offered two-week, intensive courses in the areas of Online Journalism (Rosental Alves), Screenwriting (Richard Lewis), Convergent Hollywood (Bryan Sebok), Technology and Culture (Craig Watkins), and Digital Documentary Production (Nancy Schiesari). This blend of production and theoretical course topics provided people with a broad range of instruction and research opportunities.

The Summer Institute courses in Porto are still ongoing. Subjects have included Online Journalism (Rosental Alves again), Advanced Animation (Geoff Marslett), Collaborative Documentary (Karen Kocher), Film Preservation and Historiography (Caroline Frick), Sound for Picture: Production and Post (Andy Garrison), Screenwriting for New Media (Stuart Kelban), and Creating and Designing Interactive Media (Bruce Pennycook). We anticipate that this training will lead to interesting projects and establish the foundation for some longer and more complex content creation and research investigations.

Application deadline for the International School of Digital Transformation is Approaching!

sharon — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:02:12 +0000

Our deadline for people to apply to the ISDT is April 30. If you are interested in this unique experience and want an intense week of thinking about nothing other than new digital tools to improve governance, democracy, and communication, please apply now. This program is available to students as well as nonstudents. Please see this blog’s material (under the International School tab) to learn more.

Upcoming 2009 Online Journalism Symposium

sharon — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 01:02:54 +0000

The next international Online Journalism Symposium is coming in April. Organized by Professor Rosental Alves at UT-Austin, this symposium is renown for its cutting edge analysis and research regarding the status of online journalism. For more information see http://online.journalism.utexas.edu.

Digital Media Research Projects Underway

sharon — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:45:26 +0000

Two Digital Media research projects have been funded by FCT for the coming two years, one dealing with the Portuguese population’s experiences with computers and the Internet and another directly developing new DM applications. Dr. Cristina Ponte (UNL) and Dr. Carlos Guedes (INESC-Porto) are Principal Investigators for the respective projects.

Kinetic controller driven adaptive and dynamic music composition systems is a joint research project led by INESC-Porto (Dr. Carlos Guedes, Dr. Fabien Gouyon) with partners UT Austin (Dr. Bruce Pennycook), Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Tomas Henriques), YDreams, and Casa da Música. The outcome of the project will be the creation of a modular toolbox for real-time dynamic music generation that will allow for easy creation of software applications for music, dance, theatre, installation artists, interactive kiosks, computer games, and internet/web information systems.

The applications to be developed are aimed both at highly specialized users striving for standard professional quality in digital media applications and non-specialized users including people with disabilities, children and the elderly for use in sound-based interactive games. The toolbox will be implemented in YDream’s YVision framework for developing interactive installations and it will be freely available through project Digitopia, a platform for the development of digital music communities at Casa da Música.

More information will be coming on Dr. Ponte’s research plans.

Zon multimedia prize awarded

sharon — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:34:48 +0000

Congratulations to Nuno Rocha, winner of the national ZON-sponsored multimedia competition in Portugal. The prize includes the opportunity to spend time at the University of Texas as part of the UT-Portugal program and also carries a 100,000 Euros award and the opportunity to air his work on television and movie theatres.

Nuno Rocha accepts the Zon multimedia prize.

Nuno Rocha at the ZON award ceremony

Nuno Rocha is interested in becoming a director, and he completed a degree in Porto last year from the Polytechnic of Porto (ESMAE). The work was done inexpensively with the support of friends and inexperienced actors, but you wouldn’t know it from watching this charming film. You can see a trailer here, and the full film should be available publicly soon. We hope Nuno will visit Austin for the upcoming SXSW interactive and film festival in March.

3×3 trailer from Nuno Rocha on Vimeo.

New energy for broadband deployment?

sharon — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 20:55:30 +0000

A lot of people are talking about President-Elect Obama’s plan to employ people to rebuild some of the U.S. infrastructure, and many have wondered whether this might include rebuilding the telecommunications infrastructure as well as roads and bridges. This raises a fundamental point about the U.S. telecommunications structure: its private ownership has sharply limited the ability of the citizens to get the sorts of services they desire, and also limits the ability of governments to require that networks be operated to achieve certain goals. When it comes to broadband, citizens want ubiquitous, high speed access at affordable prices, but individual companies control end users’ access to services, and true competition for residential broadband access is generally limited. Yochai Benkler’s recent comments Two (Radical?) Thoughts on Infrastructure on retooling the U.S. infrastructure reminds us that many countries have a much more enlightened policy regarding open access to use these telecommunications-equivalents of roads and rail tracks. In many countries, no single company controls the routes of access; rather, providers offer specific services on the basic backbone networks that are shared by many services. That way, one high capacity network supports numerous choices, and the citizenry don’t need to have multiple networks creating havoc in terms of trenching or stringing fiber.

Ubiquity or broadband?

sharon — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:17:03 +0000

I’ve started to analyze our latest data from a few rural regions in the U.S., where small communities recently obtained broadband services. This is a five-year, USDA-funded study that should provide us with some insights about what difference broadband makes in rural areas, a topic that I’ve been writing on over the last five years or so. When I talked about this subject with our newly minted Ph.D., Seung-Hwun Mun (who just started his new job in Chicago), he remarked that in Korea, the term “broadband” has really fallen off the map now – because it is taken for granted. The new word is “ubiquity”: access all the time, everywhere, from many platforms.

I was thinking about this in light of all the press that came out last week around Verizon’s FiOS service, its high speed fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service that is creeping across some cities these days (New York City being one of the latest service areas). The company is spending $23 billion (yes, billion) on the infrastructure upgrade, and it is the most fundamental infrastructure investment any telecom company has made in some time. FiOS is readying its network for faster delivery of television; its network offers speeds of around 50 mpbs, compared to a “normal” cable service speed of 6-12 mbps.

Fiber-based services will be reliable, fast, and no doubt useful, and many of us rejoice that there will be solid competition to cable companies in the Internet domain. But ubiquity – that’s not FiOS. It’s broadband with a gold star, but it’s (relatively) expensive, and will only be in cities for the near term. Ubiquity doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s list of network goals for the near term.

I think the U.S. will continue to sink on those international broadband ratings from the ITU that politicians hate to see.

Wrap up on the Lisbon workshops

sharon — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:27:07 +0000

Our four weeks of workshops are now over: UT faculty are back in Austin, faculty colleagues in Portugal are breathing a well-earned sigh of relief, and all agree that the Summer Institute was a success. Four public lectures, one week-long cinema series at the Cinemateca, and six intensive workshops (most of them two weeks in duration) comprised the program. Every workshop was filled, and the film series on “Technology and Innovation in Film” curated by Professor Tom Schatz reached a large and varied audience. There were many more applicants for the workshops than we could accommodate – a good sign of interest in digital media throughout the region. The program included:

Richard Lewis teaching collaborative screenwriting
Karen Kocher teaching digital documentary
Bryan Sebok teaching Convergent Hollywood
Bruce Pennycook teaching Sound Design for Video Games and Film
Rosental Alves teaching Online Journalism
Arie Stavchansky teaching Photorealistic 3D Graphics Rendering

(As well, Arie had just finished up a semester-long Rich Web Design class in Porto, where Stuart Kelban was also teaching Screenwriting. The U of Porto summer courses end with Gary Chapman’s seminar next week on the Internet and Organizations.)

The Institute condensed a number of related media fields into a series of very intensive experiences and projects, stimulating new ideas for teaching both in Portugal and in Austin. We hope to air the great work growing out of the workshops at the Digital Media Festival in October, and also will arrange a screening/installation in Lisbon soon.

Research call is out!

sharon — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:01:39 +0000

The research call for the Digital Media program (as well as other programs) was released last week, and we now have an English version. This is a great opportunity for UT researchers to team with our Portuguese colleagues on some of the research ideas in which they might share interests. I know some people are thinking about a media and science education project, and another team is coming up with something in the music arena. Still other researchers are thinking about a social science project examining how people use the Internet. The deadline is in September. Contact anyone on the team for more details.