Exploring Produsage

A Special Issue of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

Call for papers

The concept of produsage points to the shift away from conventional
producer/consumer relationships, and highlights the more fluid roles
of users and contributors within social media environments.
Participants in open source projects, in Wikipedia, in YouTube and
Second Life are no longer merely consuming or using preproduced
material, but neither are they at all times acting as fully
self-determined producers of fully formed new works; rather, they
occupy a hybrid position as produsers of content.

Produsage processes are now evident across a wide range of activities
- mainly online, but increasingly also extending to the offline world
- from citizen journalism and communal knowledge management through to
collaborative artistic activities, from learner-led education models
to citizen engagement in political processes. As such models establish
themselves, what does an examination through the lens of the produsage
framework reveal about their internal operations? How do they affect
the existing institutional, industrial, social, and cultural
environments within which they operate? How may they be guarded
against cooptation and exploitation by corporate interests? What
possible futures do they foreshadow?

Potential contributions to this special issue could include, but are
not limited to, areas such as:

* Conceptualising produsage: theoretical frameworks for examining
produsage activities, practical examples of produsage projects, ...

* Historical and comparative perspectives: produsage and other forms
of collaborative and commons-based work, precedents of produsage, ...

* Technologies and practices of produsage: collaborative dynamics of
leading produsage spaces, impact of the technological foundations of
produsage, ...

* Empirical perspectives on produsage: case studies of produsage and
its effects, ethnographic research into produsage communities, ...

* Methodology: research approaches to the study of produsage, tracking
and evaluating produser activitities, ...

* Critical perspectives: economic, legal, pedagogic, sociological
perspectives on produsage, ...

For this special issue of NRHM, we invite contributions on these and
other topics related to produsage. Full papers should be around 7,000
words; shorter papers (around 3,000 words) for technical notes,
industry perspectives or opinion pieces are also welcome. More
detailed instructions for authors can be found online:
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/nrhm. Queries should be directed to
the Guest Editors.

Authors should submit their papers online via the New Review of
Hypermedia and Multimedia Manuscript Central site:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tham

Important dates

16 July 2010 - paper submission deadline

24 September 2010 - author notification

15 October 2010 - final copy due

Northern Spring 2011 - publication

Guest Editors

Axel Bruns, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and
Innovation (Brisbane), a.bruns@qut.edu.au

Jan Schmidt, Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media Research (Hamburg),
j.schmidt@hans-bredow-institut.de

--
Dr Axel Bruns http://snurb.info/ - http://produsage.org/
ARC Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation http://cci.edu.au/
Associate Professor, Media & Communication a.bruns@qut.edu.au
Creative Industries Faculty, Z1-515, CIP Twitter: @snurb_dot_info
Queensland University of Technology +61 7 31385548
Musk Ave, Kelvin Grove, Qld. 4059, Australia CRICOS No.: 00213J