The Digital Cultures Research Centre
Digital technologies are having a profound impact on media cultures.
The established methods for producing and understanding media are undergoing
rapid change. ‘Digital Cultures’ is a precisely chosen name;
we believe that people make culture through their interactions with media
technologies. The centre is not ‘just’ concerned with technologies,
nor ‘just’ in audiences and users. It aims to create new knowledge
about media applications in real world contexts.
The Centre represents and promotes the work of a diverse network of researchers
from the Faculty of Creative Arts and the Bristol Institute of Technology.
Researchers in the DCRC network already do research into mobile and social
gaming, sound navigation, interactivity, authorship, user generated content,
bio feedback based applications, narrative, alternate reality gaming,
democratic media and crowd sourcing, emerging regulatory frameworks, computer
gaming, play, digital cinema, performance, cybernetics, the digital divide,
emergent systems, the body as interface, archaeologies of new media, and
simulation.
The core team for the Centre is Professor
Jonathan Dovey (Director), Emeritus
Professor Martin Lister, Professor
Jane Arthurs, Dr Patrick
Crogan, Dr Seth Giddings,
Helen W. Kennedy,
Dr Judith Aston, Dr
Tom Abba and Dan Dixon from BIT. Publications include two of the first
books in the field in the UK, 'Fractal Dreams, New Media In Social
Context', Dovey (ed), Lawrence And Wishart 1996 and 'The Photographic
Image in Digital Culture' ed Lister Routlege (1995). More recently
we have published the UWE co authored, 'New Media - A Critical Introduction'
Lister M, Dovey J, Giddings S, Grant I and Kelly K. Routledge 2nd Ed 2008
and 'Game Cultures' Dovey & Kennedy McGraw Hill 2006.
  
We pursue research in several modes; critical inquiry, practice led and
applied. The Centre’s current research programme is built around
the themes of Play, User Generated Content, and Pervasive Media. Our current
slate of funding bids is designed to support investigations into Value
in Media Eco-systems; The Language and Aesthetics of Pervasive Media;
Ethics and Trust in the Technics of the Attention Economy; Social Gaming
Practice and Theory. Current projects include:
- A five year Creative Fellowship for Mandy
Rose, Head of New Media BBC Wales and mother of the
BBC’s ‘Video Nation’ Project; Mandy is working
on collaborative online documentary production.
- Network Media Practice is a GWR funded PhD project with partners
Fluffy Logic into the application of evolutionary theory to
media software using Peer to Peer case studies.
The DCRC is based at the Pervasive Media Studio in Central Bristol. The
Pervasive Media Studio, brings together the computing, communication
and creative industries to pioneer new forms of digital media (see http://www.pmstudio.co.uk/).
We will shortly have a PhD bursary available for study from across
the range of the themes above - watch this space.
For further information : 
jonathan.dovey@uwe.ac.uk
The main website for the DCRC is under construction for an Autumn 2009 launch.
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