DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

The Digital Cultures Research Centre has, from the outset, been guided by a clear vision of where our strengths lie and how our research interests are coordinated. We realised that this has been slightly hidden on this website, so you can now find some information about the mission and focus of the research centre on our 'About' page, launched this week.

DCRC are delighted to promote the Curzon Cinema context-aware heritage project that is being conducted by Dr Charlotte Crofts, and part funded by DCRC. Please check out both the DCRC project page and Charlotte's website for the project.

This week also saw the first brainstorming for DCRC's Pervasive Media Cookbook.  As a part of our Knowledge Transfer Fellowship based in the Pervasive Media Stduio, we are working with the studio community to identify 'recipes' for pervasive media projects - what are the ingredients, how do we combine them, etc. - which will form the basis of a book, to be delivered in 2011.

As a part of DCRC's ongoing critical investigation of the 'attention economy' we have scheduled a seminar at the Department of Culture, Media and Drama (UWE) to reflect on and discuss some of the distilled findings of our very successful conference, Paying Attention, earlier this year.

Our activities have otherwise largely been concerned with quietly and furiously writing grant applications for some really exciting projects, which we hope to be writing more about on this blog in 2011.  All of these projects fall within our key themes, discussed on our About page.

To continue the trend from last week, we're ending this weeknote with some more links we've found interesting this week.

Interesting links

The Architectural Association School of Architecture are holding the Thrilling Wonder Stories event, navigating the real and the imagined futures that offer a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios. "Thrilling Wonder Stories 2 gathers an ensemble of mad scientists, literary astronauts, digital poets, speculative gamers, mavericks, visionaries and luminaries to spin stories of wondrous possibilities or dark cautionary tales" <more>.

Keiichi Matsuda's film 'Augmented City' was recently shown as part of the Bristol Encounters festival. It colourfully imagines a near future of augmented reality integrated into the everyday lives of two people.  It is reminiscent of a short video that appeared on YouTube a while ago with a similar name: 'Augmented (Hyper) Reality', which is also worth watching.

BBC News online looks into the success of M-Pesa, the mobile payment system that works using standard GSM mobile phones.  Over 50% of the adult population in Kenya apparently uses the service <more>.

Wired UK editor David Rowan has recently delivered a report for NESTA on the recent trend of 'gamification' - the integration of 'game mechanics', or the rules and structures of games, into websites and services. Recent examples are, of course, location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla. Rowan's report is tied to the NESTA Serious Games event, earlier this year <more>.

In the most recent issue of the journal Theory and Event, Dean Mathiowetz (UC Santa Cruz) has written a compleeing review of Christian Marazzi's "Capital and language: from the new economy to the war economy". Mathiowetz asserts that for Marazzi: "attention is the key resource of the New Economy, and therefore a crucial source of value. Attention, meaning the time and mental capacity that one can allocate to the consumption of information, is the one thing that retains value in the face of the infinite expansion of information. It is, after all, essentially limited and intrinsically scarce. Without it, information is worthless—hence the Internet economy’s obsession with traffic" <read more> *subscription required.