Digital Culture Industry: Writing a Digital History with Digital Documents (Part 1 of 2)
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WRITING A DIGITAL HISTORY WITH DIGITAL DOCUMENTS
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Digital Culture Industry: A History of Digital Distribution was the result of a three-year research project into the history of digital piracy. The project attempted to understand how media retail went from discs to downloads, accounting for individual agency, software design and the wider social changes. This lecture will provide an overview of the project and examine how the research method topic and structure all influenced each other within a social research project. For Part 2 see http://www.slideshare.net/minyall/wk-25-digital-documents-lecture-slides This lecture was delivered as part of the BA in Sociology at the University of Essex, Spring 2014. http://www.essex.ac.uk/sociology/
Transcript of Digital Culture Industry: Writing a Digital History with Digital Documents (Part 1 of 2)
WRITING A DIGITAL HISTORY WITH DIGITAL DOCUMENTS
THIS WEEK
NEXT WEEK
1. About the Project2. About the Method
1. What is a Document?2. Issues with Digital Documents
1. About the Project
THE PROJECT• Focus: How piracy drove social change.
• A detailed contemporary history of discs to downloads, 1996 - 2010
• Told via interlinking stories of key actors.
• Each story is told within a context of wider social changes.
• Stories are used to demonstrate how macro social change happened at a micro-level.
KEY ACTORS
THE STRUCTURE
1996
MP3.com
Napster
20001998 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010
GNUtella
Kazaa & Grokster
BitTorrent
The Pirate Bay
CH.3
CH.4
CH.5
CH.6
EACH STORY...• Individual actors
• Background biography• Values• Motivations
• Software Design• Affected legal interpretation• Affected user behaviour• Affected design of laws• Affected success
• Wider Social Context• Law• Technology• Consumption Habits• Business mergers
Contained Demonstrated
• The appropriation of outsider innovation.
• Conflict between illicit and legitimate spheres of society.
• Conflict over conceptualisations of property.
• Difficulties of law making• Software as a conduit for values
and ideology.• Piracy as an economic matter• Piracy as a political matter• Piracy and a cultural matter
}
ACROSS STORIES...
• Overlapping narratives
• Recurring characters
• A single overall story of disruption and stabilisation in the creative industries.
1996 20001998 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010
CH.3
CH.4
CH.5
CH.6
1. Conflict between piracy and the media industries drove legitimate adoption of digital distribution.
2. Illicit outsider innovation has been appropriated into legitimate businesses.
3. The capacities and standards of these services were defined by the values of hacker subcultures.
4. This has resulted in greater media engagement, but also greater control over that engagement.
5. The conflict led to the politicisation of piracy, feeding into issues of surveillance, privacy and cultural freedom.
THE FINDINGS
2. About the Method
Digital Documentary Analysis
Detail☑is important
Follow the Story
Illicit Activities
Rarely covered by ‘authoritative’ sources
Poor understanding by those outside the community
History enacted primarily online
THE DOCUMENTS OF THE INTERNET ARCHIVES
Blogs
Software Release Notes
Social Media CommentsPodcasts
Forums
Podcasts
Court Documents
Business Registrars
Newspaper ArchivesVideos
Detail☑is important
...but it was necessary to [frame] it
Identifying the topicWhat is the story you want to trace?
Collecting the dataStoring
taggingkeywords
Analysing the datanames dates
connectionsassociations
Plotting the data timelinesdiagrams
interactingoverlapping
narratives
or
Visualisation of Evernote Data
• Shown: Notes tagged ‘Pirate Bay’ - 295
• Total Database for project - 1385
Justin Frankel
Shawn Fanning
Michael Robertson
MP3.com My.MP3.com
PressPlay
Vivendi
Napster Napster MK II
Skype
Gnutella
Niklas Zennsstrom
+Janus Friis
Anthony Rose
Kazaa
FastTrack
Gene Kan
Wayne Rosso
Grokster
Roxio
Roxio
Sharman Networks
http://digitalcultureindustry.com/resources/
...but it was necessary to [frame] it
Identifying the topicWhat is the story you want to trace?
Collecting the dataStoring
taggingkeywords
Analysing the datanames dates
connectionsassociations
Plotting the data timelinesdiagrams
interactingoverlapping
narratives
or
you produce...
A Storydescriptive, empirically grounded
aboutChangeAgencyPower
DisruptionStructures
Instead of beginning with a grand statement about how social change unfolds, I sought to describe it, and in doing so inadvertently revealed the larger process of social change…
[M]icro descriptive histories can reveal the complexity of social change: The messy inelegance, the ungraspable mass.
“
”(Allen-Robertson, 2013:195)
HOW TOPIC INFORMSRESEARCH DESIGN
• History played out online, therefore look for documents online.
• Internet as ‘Archive of Archives’ – Facilitates a focus on specific detail and pinpointing of time periods.
• Linking and connectivity – facilitates browsing, find your own path through the narrative.
• Accessible – high density of data • Illicit = purposeful obfuscation• Real-Time History – Blogs, Twitter• Specialist coverage from amateur
reporters – professional reporters unfamiliar with the technical intricacies.
• No Looking Back – interviews written at the time captured the sentiment and atmosphere of the time. Wanted viewpoints from then, not re-written histories from ‘now’.
• Many types of document not kept offline – software release notes, comments in forums.
• Follow the History - flexible framework of what constitutes a document.
• All digital = easier cross-type document management in a single database.Assisted in the writing style and the interlinking narrative structure – actors turn up in strange places.
Topic
Method Structure
