We went on a nice but all-too-short post-V-day getaway to North Stradbroke Island last weekend, but I'm afraid any sense of relaxation went out the window quickly when I saw on Monday that numbers in my Creative Industries unit had risen to nearly 370 students by Monday morning. This meant quickly adding a couple more tutors and giving them an induction to the material, and elsewhere too I've been playing catchup all week already - not because I've been slack in the lead-up to the semester, but because there's just so much to do at the moment.
Today was taken up mainly with work on the edgeX project, and the AoIR conference. Paper proposal submissions for Internet Research 7.0 close today (even though enterprising souls might still find the paper submission system open for a few more days to catch any last stragglers - there's little need for us to be draconian about this), and we look to have a strong set of submissions here. Slightly fewer than in previous years, to be sure - and this was always to be expected given the AoIR executive's courageous decision to step out of the well-worn Euro-American conference circuit and discover other parts of the world - but a strong field none the less. Now we're continuing to shore up conference sponsors and keynote speakers - we have two speakers confirmed and another possibility in train.
I've submitted papers to two online journalism-related panels - Ted Coopman's "Byte Me! Digital Media as an Activist Critique and Parallel Mediasphere", exploring how the story for activist media might continue now that gatewatching processes are well established in what in my proposal I call the post-Gansian mediasphere (which moves beyond the two-tier mainstream/alternative news media setup Herbert Gans describes in Democracy and the News); and Terry Flew's "Online News Media and Citizen Journalism", for which I'm looking to examine citizen journalism as a form of produsage (as a first step towards developing a broader theory of produsage). Additionally, I also helped develop two paper proposals by the ACID Press team, on developing a refereeing and publishing system for creative practice as research. Let's see how they do...
And speaking of research - my colleague Mark Deuze today alerted me to the winter issue of the Political Communication Report, featuring a collection of articles on the future of news. Another one for my growing pile of articles to read, then - and I look forward particularly to Mark's piece on what he calls "liquid journalism". I really need to block out a day in my diary for nothing but reading...
