<videovortex> youtube research (jean burgess)

[Geert Lovink]

http://creativitymachine.net/2007/06/15/youtube-research-gazette/

YouTube Research Gazette
15062007

Many thanks to all the people who responded via email to my request for 
information about current YouTube research projects relevant to content 
and genre analysis. I still have a few more leads to chase up, but 
vaguely in the spirit of FLOSS (where the second “S” is for 
scholarship, not software), I thought I’d share a summary of the 
results so far. I hope none of the respondents minds - please let me 
know if you do and I’ll do a swift edit.

Just bear in mind this isn’t an exhaustive list - you’ll have to do 
your own strenuous legwork at Google and/or Google Scholar for that…

At the Infoscape Research Lab there is some serious data crunching 
going on behind the scenes, including some work on categorising 
content. There are already some preliminary reports on how the federal 
political parties in Canada and their supporters have been using 
YouTube for campaigning up on the website.

USC Annenberg Center Postdoctoral Fellow Patricia Lange has done a 
hefty amount of ethnographic work on YouTube, looking at issues such as 
“YouTube community, participation, and different responses to haters, 
especially in specific genres such as video blogging and youth 
production videos”. She has a conference paper on users’ understandings 
and responses to YouTube haters here (pdf).

There are quite a few theses in the works as well: Trine Bjørkmann 
Berry (University of Sussex) is some way through a doctoral thesis on 
vlogging, using an ethnographic approach informed by cultural and 
critical theory; Janice Leung (York University, Canada) is completing 
an MA thesis on YouTube and music fandom, specifically fan-produced 
concert videos and the performance of cultural capital; Jeff Scheible 
(UCSB) is beginning a project on Hurricane Katrina footage at YouTube; 
Dominic Yeo (social psychology, Cambridge) is doing a PhD on the 
psychological dimensions involved in user-generated videos in Web 2.0 
environments.

At just about the same time as my request went out, Flow published a 
couple of articles about YouTube - one by Chuck Tyron on YouTube and 
Anti-War Street Theater and one by Alex Munt on the implications for 
Hollywood of YouTube’s “clip culture” and associated narrative model. 
Also published at Flow recently: Hector Amaya’s provocative piece on 
the ‘docublogging’ via YouTube of detention centres - Hutto’s Children: 
Maddening Structures of Absence.

And finally, a little bird tells me it might be a good idea to keep an 
eye on the Pew Internet & American Life Project for a report on online 
video over the next few weeks.

I know there must be more, or will be very soon, so feel free to let me 
know what I’m missing.

Speaking of YouTube, I have added a new entry about older people’s use 
of ‘playful technologies’ and informal learning over at Propagating 
Media.

Jean Burgess
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (cci)
Queensland University of Technology

Blogs:
http://creativitymachine.net
http://propagatingmedia.com