We have now turned in the manuscript of The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, and can release the Table of Contents. The reader is due for release around December 14, 2014. The TOC is below:

Introduction Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, xtine burrough

Part I: History
1. “Remix and the Dialogic Engine of Culture: A Model for Generative Combinatoriality” Martin Irvine
2. “A Rhetoric of Remix” Scott H. Church
3. “Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal: Reflections on Cut-Copy-Paste Culture” Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss
4. “Toward a Remix Culture: An Existential Perspective” Vito Campanelli
5. “An Oral History of Sampling: From Turntables to Mashups” Kembrew McLeod
6. “Can I Borrow Your Proper Name? Remixing Signatures and the Contemporary Author” Cicero da Silva
7. The Extended Remix: Rhetoric and history Margie Borschke
8. “Culture and Remix: A Theory on Cultural Sublation” Eduardo Navas

Part II: Aesthetics
9. “Remix Strategies in Social Media” Lev Manovich
10. “Remixing Movies and Trailers Before and After the Digital Age” Nicola Maria Dusi
11. “Remixing the Plague of Images: Video Art from Latin America in a Transnational Context” Erandy Vergara
12. “Race & Remix: The Aesthetics of Race in the Visual & Performing Arts” Tashima Thomas
13. “Digital Poetics and Remix Culture: From the Artisanal Image to the Immaterial Image” Monica Tavares
14. “The End of an Aura: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Haunting of Hip-hop” Roy Christopher
15. “Appropriation is Activism” Byron Russell

Part III: Ethics
16. “The Emerging Ethics of Networked Culture” Aram Sinnreich
17. “The Panopticon of Ethical Video Remix Practice” Mette Birk
18. “Cutting Scholarship Together/Apart: Rethinking the Political-Economy of Scholarly Book Publishing” Janneke Adema
19. “Copyright and Fair Use in Remix: From Alarmism to Action” Patricia Aufderheide
20. “I Thought I Made A Vid, But Then You Told Me That I Didn’t: Aesthetics and Boundary Work in the Fan Vidding Community” Katharina Freund
21. “Peeling The Layers of the Onion: Authorship in Mashup and Remix Cultures” John Logie
22. “remixthecontext (a theoretical fiction)” Mark Amerika

Part IV: Politics
23. “A Capital Remix” Rachel O’Dwyer
24. “Remix Practices and Activism: A Semiotic Analysis of Creative Dissent” Paolo Peverini
25. “Political Remix Video as a Vernacular Discourse” Olivia Conti
26. “Locative Media as Remix” Conor McGarrigle
27. “The Politics of John Lennon’s “Imagine”: Contextualizing the Roles of Mashups and New Media in Political Protest” J. Meryl Krieger
28. “Détournement as a Premise of the Remix from Political, Aesthetic, and Technical Perspectives” Nadine Wanono
29. “The New Polymath (Remixing Knowledge)” Rachel Falconer

Part V: Practice
30. “Crises of Meaning in Communities of Creative Appropriation: A Case Study of the 2010 RE/Mixed Media Festival” Tom Tenney
31. “Of ‘REAPPROPRIATIONS'” Gustavo Romano
32. “Aesthetics of Remix: Networked Interactive Objects and Interface Design” Jonah Brucker-Cohen
33. “Reflections on the Amen Break: A Continued History, an Unsettled Ethics” Nate Harrison
34. “Going Crazy with Remix: A Classroom Study by Practice via Lenz v. Universal” xtine burrough and Dr. Emily Erickson
35. “A Remix Artist and Advocate” Desiree D’Alessandro
36. “Occupy / Band Aid Mashup: ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?'” Owen Gallagher
37. “Remixing the Remix” Elisa Kreisinger
38. “A Fair(y) Use Tale” Eric Faden
39. “An Aesthetics of Deception in Political Remix Video” Diran Lyons
40. “Radical Remix: Manifestoon” Jesse Drew
41. “In Two Minds” Kevin Atherton

Image source: Alianzo

I recently wrote about the use of social media for real change in Egypt.  I explained in that entry that it is up to people to use social media critically–to appropriate it for issues that go beyond entertainment.  As I also explained in that entry as well as a text I released online previously, titled After the Blogger as Producer, the problem with micro-blogging (and Twitter) is that it encourages its users to write in a way that is not viable for critical thinking.

Surely enough, the New York Times on February 20, 2011 published the story, Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter, in which Verne Kopytoff explains that the new generation is no longer using blogs as much, but mainly Twitter and Facebook to communicate and share things of interest buy augmentin online with their friends.  Some of these users don’t event write, but simply share photos or brief statements, casually.

It appears that we have entered a stage in which people are quite aware of the different ways in which social media can be used. Evidence of this is Tweet4Action, an artwork by Les Liens Invisibles, recently released and supported by Turbulence.org. The art project was developed as critical commentary on the use of social media in revolutions.  Art usually fuels and spearheads change, but this artwork, unfortunately, lags.  It may be due to a certain degree of sarcasm that one may sense, which in this case can be read as a weakness of the work.  Tweet4Action does not make one question the role of social media.  It makes me say, “so, and…”

Image and text source: Wired

Originally published: March 26, 2006

A women named “Paiges” recalls hearing the band Portishead for the first time at a spot in New York’s Upper West Side, while she was meeting a man with whom she was having a torrid affair. “I was in NYC, your wife was out of town,” she writes. “We were in the bathroom and Portishead was playing. I remember being terrified that we would get caught.” She bought the album on her way home, and 12 years later still associates it with seeing her lover in that place.

That intimate memory isn’t locked in a diary or shared on a blog. It’s pinned to a spot near the intersection of West End Avenue and 104th Street on a new and growing community site called Platial that’s spreading a decidedly personal layer of geographic data atop the familiar terrain of online mapping.

Read the entire article at Wired

Image and text source: O’Reilly Radar

Posted on September 11. 2007

I’ve been a fan of Ask’s Maps product, Ask City, since it launched (Radar post). Now Ask has made its web app viral by adding embeddable maps.

Much like Google’s embedded maps (Radar post), this only requires a simple cut-n-paste to utilize the feature. You can use all of Ask’s mapping tools, including drawing tools and movie searches on an embeddable map.

I am surprised that Ask is the first of the major mapping portals to add this feature after Google. I don’t see this as a copy or a me-too feature. I see embeddable maps as one of the fundamental features that a user is going to expect from their mapping portal — just like one does a video or photo sharing site.

More types of websites are going to become easily, anonymously embeddable in the future. When users put work into customizing or upoading content, they are going to want to be able to put it on their own sites. Google has been experimenting with embeddable Ajax search widgets, but those widgets still exist under the Google Code umbrella. I bet that many of these search pages (multimedia, web and local) will soon have their own embed links.

Charles Leadbeater in Action at Providence New Commons

Image by Christopher Reyes

Image and text source: CEOs for Cities

Originally posted on 5-24-07

We are being hosted by CEOs for Cities member Doug Kridler at The Columbus Foundation this afternoon. Thirty locals from business, health care, nonprofits, government, and philanthropy have gathered to work through Charlie’s ideas using their own experiences.

Charlie has gone right to the point: How do you orchestrate contributions by large numbers of people to solve problems? Is it possible to attack the opportunities and challenges the way Google or
eBay would attack them?

Think of an egg. For any issue area, there is a small core of that egg that represents the institution, such as police, schools, hospitals, performing arts centers. But the rest of that egg is outside the institution – learning, safety, health, culture. While the institution is fixed cost and hierarchical with budgets and
buildings, the rest of the egg is fuzzy and distributed and complex.

(more…)

Image and text source: BBC News

29 June 2007
Working out how people use a city’s roads and planning for it, can be difficult, but research into mobile phone use may hold the key to preventing traffic jams in the future.

A map showing real-time data of mobile phone use
Mobile phone data can help planners see how people use a city
If you do not like crowds, congestion, chaos – and few do – then you might want to avoid Rome’s rush-hour. But congestion in the city might be about to ease a little as researchers use Italy’s passion for mobiles to combat Rome’s daily war on wheels.

Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are using data from mobile-phone networks to create real time maps of people moving around the city.

Read the entire article at  BBC News

Image source: Youtube
Text source: The News Hour

Originally Aired: April 18, 2007

JEFFREY BROWN: As events in Blacksburg, Va., unfolded Monday, the world saw this: video shot with a cell phone, taken by Virginia Tech student Jamal Albarghouti. The footage, run repeatedly on CNN, allowed the audience to hear the gunshots from Norris Hall, where 31 people, including the gunman, died.

CNN anchors then interviewed Albarghouti, referring to him as “our I-reporter,” part of a project encouraging viewers to submit what’s known as citizen journalism.

JAMAL ALBARGHOUTI, Virginia Tech Student and Reporter: I knew this was something way more serious. It was then when I decided to use my camera.

JEFFREY BROWN: In recent big stories from the 2004 tsunami, to the 2005 London subway bombings, TV news organizations have relied more and more on contributions from nonprofessional eyewitnesses.

In Blacksburg, ABC broadcast these cell phone images taken inside Norris Hall. Martin Clancy is senior producer for ABC News Digital.

MARTIN CLANCY, ABC News Digital: Well, reporting has gone beyond shoe leather and phone calls. This is a much more efficient way to reach a lot of people, to gather a lot of information. Granted, it’s a lot more work to verify it, to bring it up to broadcast or publishing standards.

But this is a really much more efficient way to gather information and to get input and to discover perspectives you didn’t even know existed. I think there’s no end to this. We used to play with getting e-mails from viewers. What started as a trickle of e-mails has become a flood. What is now a trickle of video is going to become, I predict, a flood of video.

‘Everybody is a storyteller’

(more…)

(Source: First Monday)

Abstract When the mobile phone was first introduced into Italy, it was considered an arrogant and vulgar technology used only by those at the top of society. Today, however, the mobile phone is used across all Italian social classes and is considered highly fashionable. This transformation in perceptions of this technology — and, therefore, its uses — can usefully be understood as, simultaneously, the democratization of the mobile telephone. One of the most important factors that made this technology more acceptable in Italian society was its redesign as a material object, undertaken in response to the actual needs and practices of users. Once individual users found their own identities and desires reflected in the mobile telephone, they were far more likely to incorporate this technology into their personal ecologies. Even though mobile telephones are very much the product of large industrial organizations, this case also demonstrates the contribution of users to design of the technological environment that then in turn governs their own behaviors.

Read the entire article at First Monday