The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

I’ve been attending the Australian Academy of the Humanities Annual Symposium on “Humanities Futures” and the place of eResearch in the Humanities. It’s really interesting stuff, and many of the papers move beyond the standard call to digitise the archive, and on to considerations of archival formats, meta-tagging, and standardisation. It a timely call, as the digitisation project is gathering pace, and more and more public and private archives are being made available online.

What worries me however…

OK, it has been quite a while since “Memes” has had a substantive posting. There is a reason for this: Pownce, j’accuse!

The main contributers to “Memes,” as well as many of its most frequent commenters, have found ourselves enjoying the ease of communicating within a semi-private forum, based on shared values, ideas, and experiences. It seems easier to throw an observation or insight into a known space, than into the dark where who-knows-who will pick it up (“Memes” has been mercifully free of flames, but it is curious to see who will sometimes drop by with an objection). Exchanges have also been more casual and funny than you would expect on a blog (well, our sort of blog), as is natural to this sort medium.

Sometime colleague, blogger, and Pownce-buddy Catherine offers some insights into the Pownce interface. She’s right: there are still problems with the interface, particularly the thread handling capabilities, but the developers are working on it, and as a group, we are starting to develop our own conventions. The publicity talks about Pownce as the “Twitter Killer”, or as the IM that lets you send files. Many of the people in our little Pownce group have used it for purposes across this range, but on the whole, we tend more to the threaded discussion-cum-IM capabilities, and I for one can’t see Twitter going anywhere very soon.

So, as an experiment in IM on steroids, I’m finding Pownce flawed, but valuable. I just wish that I could have shared some of the discussions on “Memes”: makes of car named after mythological figures was a particular highlight!

Anyway, expect some real content here soon: I promise!

One for the “grumpy old curmudgeon” file…

July Nielsen NetRating figures show that Australian MySpace users spent a 4.5 million hours on the social networking site last month resulting from an average of 1 hour and thirty three minutes per user. MySpace has continued its growth with unique visitors increasing to 2.9 million in July and total registered Australian users now at 3.87 million.

People: get a life. A real one.

From Crikey’s editorial comment.

This a very poorly edited quotation and I suspect there might be a phrase missing, but this very clearly says 1 hour 33 minutes per user per month. That’s three minutes a day! But even if they mean 1 hour 33 minutes per user, per day, it’s still a lot less than most people spend watching TV, or I spend answering email!

Way to try and drum up a moral panic about them young people and that internet thingy!

This is pretty interesting, and I wish it had been around when I was an undergraduate with a habit of returning books before I’d copied out the bibliographic details: an online bibliography generator.

Apparently designed as a semester project by students at Carnegie Mellon, it draws on data from Amazon, LookSmart FindArticles, Yahoo! News, and CiteULike Academic Papers, displays the results in MLA, APA, or Chicago style, and allows you to download them as RTF.

It’s not perfect: on my test run of the four academic titles that happened to be on my desk, it found all four but didn’t know the author of one of them, and apparently doesn’t have a way of distinguishing between an edited collection and a monograph. It also put a space in the wrong place for MLA.

I don’t know that it will take over from Endnote, and similar applications, but it’s pretty bloody impressive all the same.

Dear valued readers, commentators, and writers. We’ve discovered that some heretofore undetected configuration of the security software that protects this website from spam and other attacks is causing the server to reject some comments. You’ll know that this has happened to you if you post a comment and a “412 Precondition Failed” error is returned. Please contact me if your comment is rejected with this error.

For the technically minded, the error and its cause is discussed at the Textdrive help site. It looks like some re-configuration is in my future.

I’ve been inspired by Mel’s post about academic blogs to broaden the Memes blog-roll. So I call on our readership for help! What cultural studies blogs are out there? Or are you thinking of starting one and want advice? Ask away!

Via Creativity/Machine, news that Henry Jenkins is now blogging. And yes, he’s also posting about Snakes on a Plane. I feel strangely vindicated.

(testing, please ignore)

A quick primer on useful research tools and webby jargon for academics who want to look cool.