Christian Pentzold

Imagining the Wikipedia community: What do Wikipedia authors mean when they write about their ‘community’?

This article examines the way Wikipedia authors write their ‘community’ into being. Mobilizing concepts regarding the communicative constitution of communities, the computer-mediated conversation between editors were investigated using Grounded Theory procedures. The analysis yielded an empirically grounded theory of the users’ self-understanding of the Wikipedia community as ethos-action community. Hence, this study contributes to research on online community-building as it shifts the focus from structural criteria for communities to the discursive level of community formation.

Making mediated memory work: Cuban-Americans, Miami media and the doings of diaspora memories

How are mediated memories brought into being? In other words, how can we understand the ways personal and public memories are enacted in environments that have become increasingly digitally networked? Following this fundamental question for current interrogations of the entanglement of media and memory, we first develop a concept of mediated memory work. Instituting experiences and senses of the past, these time- and space-bound efforts interweave with arrangements of people and their social relations, cultural discourses, objects and media environments. Capitalizing on such an understanding of mediated memory work, the article demonstrates how and to what ends the enactment of memories can be empirically studied by using the example of the Cuban-American community in Miami. In particular, building on participant observation, in-depth interviews and media ethnography, we outline practices, cultural artefacts, communal bonds, compassionate relations and a media manifold that have been employed by different segments of a diasporic collective in shaping how the country of origin and the exile is to be remembered.

In search of internet governance: Performing order in digitally networked environments

Internet governance is a difficult horse to catch. Far from being a coherent field of study, it presents itself as scattered across a range of disciplinary approaches that come with distinct theoretical, methodological and analytical preoccupations. In this paper, we critically review existing literatures on governance of, on and through the internet and draw attention to the ways in which they help perform the worlds in which they have their place. Retelling the case of the ‘Twitter Joke Trial’, we highlight the contingent and at times conflicting roles attributed to people, technologies and institutions, as well as the concerns that come with these. Rather than striving for a coherent definition of ‘internet governance’, we draw on recent work in science and technology studies to show that acknowledging the performativity and multiplicity of different modes of governance can open up a productive line of inquiry into the recursive relationship between governance research and practice.

Digging Wikipedia: The Online Encyclopedia as a Digital Cultural Heritage Gateway and Site

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is both a cultural reference to store, refer to, and organize digitized and digital information, as well as a key contemporary digital heritage endeavor in itself. Capitalizing on this dual nature of the project, this article introduces Wikipedia as a digital gateway to and site of an active engagement with cultural heritage. We have developed the open source and freely available analysis architecture Contropedia to examine already existing volunteer user-generated participation around cultural heritage and to promote further engagement with it. Conceptually, we employ the notion of memory work, as it helps to treat Wikipedias articles, edit histories, and discussion pages as a rich resource to study how cultural heritage is received and (re)worked in and across languages and cultures. Contropedias architecture allows for the study of the negotiations around and appreciation of cultural heritage without assuming an unchallenged and universal understanding of cultural heritage. The analysis facilitated by Contropedia thus sheds light on the contentious articulation of perspectives on tangible and intangible heritage grounded by conflicting conceptions of events, ideas, places, or persons. Technologically, Contropedia combines techniques based on mining article edit histories and analyzing discussion patterns in talk pages to identify and visualize heritage-related disputes within an article, and to compare these across language versions. In terms of digital heritage, Contropedia presents a powerful tool that opens up a core resource to cultural heritage studies. Moreover, it can form part of a conceptually grounded, technically advanced, and practically enrolled infrastructure for public education that opens up the dynamic formation of both knowledge about cultural heritage and new forms of digital cultural heritage that show a considerable amount of friction.

Modes of Governance in Digitally Networked Environments: A Workshop Report

Over the past decade, researchers have become increasingly interested in the theoretical and practical issue of governance as it relates to information and communication technologies. However, while the field has grown with the proliferation and use of such technologies, its scope and focus are far from clear: what counts as governance in settings, in which people increasingly interact through networked digital media? How can we think about interaction, coordination and control in these environments? What is the role of technologies in creating and maintaining regimes of governance? And what methodologies and methods are appropriate for understanding them? This paper draws on an interdisciplinary workshop held at Oxford University to have a closer look at some of these issues. It suggests that a key to understanding the heterogeneity of workshop contributions is to attend to the performativity of governance and governance research, the analytic status of ‘technology’ and the conceptual and methodological devices we use to research

Between moments and millennia: temporalising mediatisation

If mediatisation, as some argue, aptly describes the systemic impact of media innovations on the transformation of sociocultural practices and institutions, then we should be able to trace how it is manifested in the organisation and regulation of time. This commentary assumes that these fundamental time-based societal changes, which are interwoven with the development and spread of communication and information technologies, should leave their mark on the ways we process and arrange the pace, sequence, rhythms and seasons of social life (Adam, 2003). After all, calendars and clocks are an important variety of ‘logistical media’, Peters (2013: 33) reminds us, which create and maintain the temporal regimes of societies. Consequently, innovations in media should influence how people organise, evaluate and perceive time as they seek to create and order the kind of world they live in. At present, the changing ways of mediating time are commonly studied as large-scale phenomena that span extensive diachronic distances and follow the logic of an increasing acceleration. In effect, many important inquiries into the historical dimension of mediatisation envisage extensive metaprocesses that span anything from decades to millennia (Lunt and Livingstone, 2016). However, when describing the temporal implications of the current state of mediatisation, the analytical interest in time is limited to a fascination with the ‘culture of speed’ (Tomlinson, 2007) and the perpetual present of an assumed global synchronicity. Therefore, these attempts to ground mediatisation in time exhibit two distinct temporal orientations whose view is either quite far-sighted or shortsighted. In one direction, there are indispensable studies on the historicity of mediatisation processes. They examine long-term transformations that are inextricably linked to the cumulative volume of information and communication technologies. In the opposite direction, media are treated as agents of social acceleration that hasten the collapse of time–space distanciations.

Theoriearbeit in der Kommunikationswissenschaft zwischen Komplexitätssteigerung und Komplexitätsreduzierung

Der Artikel erfasst kommunikationswissenschaftliche Theoriearbeit zwischen Komplexitätssteigerung und Komplexitätsreduzierung. Zunächst wird die Dynamik theoretischer Entwicklungen in der Kommunikationswissenschaft auf das Zusammenspiel interdisziplinärer und innerdisziplinärer konzeptueller Tendenzen sowie der Transformation empirischer Gegenstandsbereiche zurückgeführt. Dann werden einschlägige Ansätze diskutiert, die Bedingungen, Vorgänge oder Konsequenzen von Kommunikationsprozessen und Mediensystemen in ihrer Komplexität erfassen wollen. Im Ergebnis werden die Beschäftigung mit Komplexität als Bezugspunkt kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Theoriebildung, die begrifflich substanzielle Fassung von Komplexität und die Beschäftigung mit den Ambivalenzen von Komplexität erörtert. Damit trägt der Überblicksbeitrag zur weiteren theoretischen Fundierung der Kommunikationswissenschaft als sich ausdifferenzierendes Fach, zu seiner Anbindung an Debatten anderer Disziplinen und zur Reflexion der Veränderungen seiner Gegenstände bei.

Diskursanalyse in der Kommunikationswissenschaft

Der Beitrag gibt einen Uberblick uber die Verwendung diskursanalytischer Begriffe und Methoden in der Kommunikationswissenschaft und uber Vorgehensweisen und Leistungen sozial- und sprachwissenschaftlicher Diskursforschung. Dazu werden diskurstheoretische Perspektiven und diskursanalytische Verfahren in der Kommunikationswissenschaft erlautert und im interdisziplinaren Forschungsfeld der sozialwissenschaftlichen Diskursanalyse und der Diskurslinguistik verortet, um methodische Orientierung zu gewinnen und fachubergreifende Anschlussmoglichkeiten aufzuzeigen.

Introduction: Remembering and Reviving in States of Flux

‘We will remember’ is the exclamatory pledge given by those who are moving on from troubled times. It is intoned, for example, in Laurence Binyon’s Ode of Remembrance, which honours the British war dead of World War I. In its Hebrew version it gives the name to Nizkor, a web- based project that counters Holocaust denial. It is casted in plaques and chiselled into memorials meant to last forever. Moreover, the solemn promise never to forget collective experiences of trauma and pain in times to come dictates many other forms and rituals of commemoration. There, the words are uttered in order to bring together the past, the present and the future, and thus to repeatedly connect the bygone time that is to be recalled, the current time in which the pledge is given and the forthcoming time when the promise will avowedly be kept. The call and the assertion to remember are, therefore, not only backwards-looking undertakings: rather, they carry the agents, objects and circumstances of remembering along the temporal continuum between yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Big Data vs. Slow Understanding

Abstract The paper looks into the practice of a computer-assisted discourse analysis. Centring on the decisions and procedures that go into reconstructing multimodal frames from transmedia discourse, the paper has two aims. For one, it discusses the chances and challenges automatic text analysis has to address in facing the vast amounts of multimodal discourse that emerge in convergent media. Building on that, the paper explains the methodological premises and methodical procedures of a discourse analysis employing the computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software Atlas.ti. As such, it presents an investigation that does not answer the current prevalence of available ‘big data’ with computer power but explores the interplay between an interpretative analysis and technological support. It does so by using material from the discourse on the so-called Handygate affair. There, state authorities collected mobile phone data during the commemorative events of the Dresden bombings in February 2011. They thus created a big data collection which became the subject of public attention and was either framed as illegal and extensive instrument of state surveillance or as an efficient and accurate tool for law enforcement and targeted prosecution.