Digital Economy USRG

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SMiLE media summary

April 23, 2012
by Graeme Earl

The #caasoton website now has a summary of related materials from the conference on the web. This includes details of the storify, twitter, delicious, slideshare, blog posts and videos. Please contact us via @caasoton if we have missed your content!

Link

CAA2012 On the web

Tweeting Theo is good news for business

April 4, 2012
by Karen Woods

The University of Southampton has so many enterprising and tech-savvy students.

Third year BSc Management student Emilie Prior told me how she put her digital marketing skills to good use by impressing business expert Theo Paphitis with a creative tweet.

Every week, the entrepreneur, best known for appearing on BBC TV’s Dragon’s Den, holds Small Business Sunday on Twitter (#sbs). He invites messages from fledgling companies for two hours, then retweets his six favourites to his 243,000 followers.

Emilie has worked for the Salisbury-based company doodlebystitch.com since the beginning of her time at university. Among its products are bed linen and tablecloths etc that can be ‘doodled’ on with special pens. The innovative textiles can then be washed clean and drawn on again. Emilie’s tweet was a picture of a specially doodled pillowcase dedicated to Theo.

“The reaction was amazing,” says Emilie. “It was great promotion for the company and certainly raised our profile – we quickly got 200 new followers to our account @doodlebystitch”

Emilie has enjoyed learning about cutting edge digital marketing techniques with Dr Lisa Harris and Tom Chapman at the Southampton Management School and plans to pursue her interest in this field after graduation.

PhD Opportunities in Web Science

Avatar photoApril 2, 2012
by Lisa Harris

Offer: A fully funded 4-year MSc/PhD studentship – annual stipend £13,590.00 (tax free) and all fees paid (Equals a monthly pay of £1,130)

Topic: Anything relevant to the Web, Social Networking, Semantic Web, e-commerce, e-learning etc.

We have 10 studentship opportunities to start this October. No need for computer science or programming experience.

The 4-year programme consists of a one year taught MSc course and then a 3-year PhD programme. Currently, we have students from the following disciplines:

* Law * Sociology * Economics * Geography * Electronics * Global Politics

* Psychology * Software Engineering * ITO * Archaeological Science

* History of Art * Criminal Justice * Museum Studies * Management

* International Relations * Philosophy * Multimedia applications

* National Sciences * Archaeology * Physics * Internet Engineering

* Computer Security * Computer Science

“The Web is one of the most disruptive and transformative innovations we have ever witnessed. We must understand the forces that have shaped it, anticipate its evolution and determine its future social and economic impact. But we must also research a next generation of the Web.” Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Research Director, Doctoral Training Centre.

We offer you the chance to be part of this new, exciting and pioneering research area.

Check out the PhD opportunities at the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre:

Application deadline: 31st May 2012

SMiLE: Early Reflections and Next Steps #caasoton

Avatar photoMarch 31, 2012
by Lisa Harris

Last week I posted about our plans for the action research project SMiLE at the CAA2012 conference at Southampton. We tracked the use of a number of social media tools by both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ attendees and interviewed people about the value they got from this activity, in order to explore the dynamics of the relationship between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ communities. Now that the event is over it is time for the team to gather thoughts about next steps.

This post is a initial attempt to summarise what went on during the week in terms of social media and how we might best take the work forward. Feedback and offers of help are most welcome!

1. The sun shone *all week*. We had arranged this :-)

2. Full statistics are still being collated but as a taster there are so far over 13,000 tweets quoting #caasoton,  with more discussions continuing, 435 photos on Flickr and video views from nearly 40 countries:

3. Nearly half of the 450 conference delegates were active on twitter, and there were many new converts, and also old hands describing the significance of this:

4. tweeting during sessions allowed people to make connections and curate the discussions going on in different rooms, in real time:

Some of these discussions could even be considered as defining new online ‘sessions’ or themes:

 

5. there was an active group of ‘virtual’ contributors (over 70 registered as ‘virtual attendees’, with some 20 more beaming in randomly on the Wednesday morning alone)

Overall it was a bit of a result, really:

So what next?

We have *much more* data than we expected, but this is a nice problem to have! Already people are tweeting ideas about how best to archive and reuse it, as well as curating data from various sources such as Foursquare to provide an extra layer of value. We want to try different ways to integrate and visualise the data, and also the possibilities of network analyses and data mining.

We will be checking out our interview and survey data and writing up the early findings over the next few weeks to present at the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Conference in July. Using the principles of crowdsourcing we have requested Session Chairs to gather relevant materials, add their own narrative and Storify each session which can be archived as a permanent record of specific discussions and decisions taken.

We have also spoken with Faculty event managers, the digital media team in comms, and the University’s CITE team about sharing the lessons learned for the benefit of people organising future events. A series of posts charting our progress will follow shortly! We will carry on listening and talking via #caasoton :-)

Fabulous student film crew SUSUtv are recording at #caasoton

Avatar photoMarch 28, 2012
by Lisa Harris

You will recognise the SUSUtv guys from their lovely lime-green shirts!  For the CAA Conference which is running this week they are producing highlights packages of each day’s events, as well as, for example, more specific videos for the Day of Digital Humanities and Personal History conference themes.

The team members are:

Dom Kullander  (Film Studies)

Jamie Chadd (Film and English)

Alastair Mogford (Geography)

Cassie Robinson (Anthropology)

Lauren Baker (Film and French)

Constantin Placking (Erasmus, English Teaching)

 

SUSUtv was set up in 2007. They were the first ever to broadcast live in HD back in in 2010, and in 2011 their broadcasts were viewed by over 10,000 people. They are proud holders of NaSTA awards in comedy and drama. Last October they ran FreshersTV, the largest ever national link up hosting 23 stations across the country in one live show.

According to Dom, SUSUtv’s aims are to win more awards (!) and carry out further recording work for the University. They are currently producing content for the University’s Transitions Project and are open to further offers :-)

In the footsteps of Captain Scott

March 13, 2012
by Karen Woods

A hundred years ago this month, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his band of polar explorers were heading back across the ice after failing to become the first to reach the South Pole.  You can follow his heartbreaking journey on twitter as supplies run low and the end nears. Extracts are taken from Scott’s diaries and posted on the corresponding days.

Management School Colleague Dr Lorraine Warren signed up to follow Captain Scott some weeks ago but found the postings difficult to endure. What do you think? www.twitter.com/CaptainRFScott

Online recruitment – is it working?

March 11, 2012
by Karen Woods

Companies are increasingly using online recruitment – but they are still very much in the minority. Natasha Allden, a graduate of the University of Southampton’s MSc in Digital Marketing, doesn’t expect things to change anytime soon.

She spoke to members of the University’s Digital Economy Strategic Research Group about the topic, which she researched for her dissertation.

Recruiters know there is a war for talent out there but online ads can result in too many unsuitable applications, which they then have to wade through. They tend to regard online jobseekers as passive as many tend to send the same general CV to several companies, impressing no-one.

Many companies fear losing touch of the recruitment process if they get involved with social media. They don’t want people commenting publically on their brand but forget this is already happening on Facebook, Twitter etc.

The monthly Digital Economy lunches feature speakers talking about a wide range of topics, networking opportunities and a few bites to eat.

Is digital technology transforming the humanities?

February 23, 2012
by Karen Woods

Challenges lie ahead for all academics as digital technologies bring innovative ways of working and spreading research findings to the wider world.

Dr Leif Isaksen has joined the Faculty of Humanities at Southampton as Lecturer in Digital Humanities. He is working across the disciplines to highlight potential opportunities, bring people together and support initiatives.

“Digital technology is a broad concept, stretching from blogs and twitter to complex computational structures,” he says. “To succeed, you need a certain willingness to experiment and to explore the unknown with a digital perspective.” But Leif is aware not everyone will be an enthusiast “The Internet has been part of our lives now for around 20 years. While most academics have some degree of familiarity with computers, we recognise they may need specialist knowledge to make their ideas come to life; collaboration could provide the answer.”

A Philosophy graduate from Cambridge, Leif worked as a computer programmer before taking a master’s in Archaeological Computing at Southampton and a job at Oxford Archaeology. He then studied for a PhD in Computer Science at Southampton; he is now an enthusiast for bringing people and technologies together.

Much work is already underway at Southampton. Professor John McGavin’s project to create a searchable database of London theatres before 1642 uses interactive digital technologies to bring academic research to a wider audience. Multi-disciplinary work is also showing promise. David Owen Norris, Professor of Keyboard links with researchers in Health Sciences to show how motion capture cameras can track how a musician plays the piano.

“This is a growing field. Up until the early 2000s, humanities computing was a small specialist community, a niche discipline. Now, people expect to see and interact with research findings online; openness and access are real issues we must consider,” he adds.

The Faculty of Humanities is already well-represented on the University’s Strategic Research Group on the Digital Economy with several projects already in the pipeline.

Workshop on 3D Heritage on the mobile web

February 15, 2012
by Graeme Earl

Angeliki Chrysanthi from the Archaeological Computing Research Group has written three blog posts about a workshop held this month in Brighton:

“The aim of this Workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields of both the production and consumption of 3D content for cultural heritage. Together they will explore the opportunities and challenges offered by the type of experiences that are enabled by mobile technologies and which might be different to those experiences enabled by more traditional devices such as PCs, 3D TVs or large scale installations.” http://culturalinformatics.org.uk/?q=3dmobilewebworkshop

The three posts are available via the sotonDH website:

  • Workshop on 3D Heritage on the mobile web – Part One
  • Workshop on 3D Heritage on the mobile web – Part Two
  • Workshop on 3D Heritage on the mobile web – Part Three

 

 

The human factors in innovation and making choices

Avatar photoFebruary 14, 2012
by Lisa Harris

Current issues in Digital Economy research were discussed as part of the University of Southampton’s Multidisciplinary Research Week initiative.

Dr Lorraine Warren and Dr Luke Greenacre from the Southampton Management School presented their work to an audience which included some members of the public who were interested in finding out more about the work of our University Strategic Research Group.

Lorraine spoke about temporality, emergence and value in the creative industries: questions of theory and methodology. She explains: “It should now be easier than it has ever been for everyone to not only access and use new technologies, but to extend them, customise them, develop new combinations, to improve, radically innovate and disrupt how we live our lives and create new value, new futures. However, the roadmap for inductive thinking that will create value in novel and unforeseen ways in new contexts and settings is not clear; classical models of innovation may be too focused on economic value creation at the expense of wider societal benefit.”

Here is an introduction to Lorraine’s work

Luke joined the University of Southampton in 2011. He has previously worked at the Centre for the Study of Choice and the Marketing Discipline Group at the University of Technology in Sydney; the University of Sydney; the University of Western Sydney; and the Australian Institute of Music.

His presentation outlined the theoretical and methodological basis for a new approach to predicting online referral networks: “Through the integration of choice experiments and agent-based modelling techniques, it is intended to build models of how individuals actually behave in real markets, and then observe how this behaviour aggregates at the network level. This could allow us to understand how small changes in communication decisions by individuals can alter market outcomes.”