Social Science Research Council

Digital institutions and mediators are de-bundling culture: products such as film, writing, and music are increasingly being made available for sale or use in small bits or bundles. In her research on bundling, beginning with her economics doctoral dissertation at George Mason University, and continuing with her research in ethics and policy at Duke University, her focus has been on one potential disadvantage: de-bundling may decrease the variation and creativity of cultural products.Her hypothesis is the following: when there is a ratio of high fixed to low marginal selling costs, bundling the sale of culture promotes risk-taking. In order to cover the high-fixed costs of selling, producers have an incentive to make certain parts of the product, or one product in the bundle, more commercially-oriented and targeted to as large a market as possible, thereby making it more inclusive. Inclusiveness tends to push products in the direction of standardization, at least along several dimensions. Low selling costs at the margin, however, mean that an artist can attach a riskier product to the first, more standardized product. These bundled goods will tend to be more varied in their characteristics than the goods to which they are attached.

Akhtar's empirical study of the music industry, which she has summarized in her article in Salon.com, lends support to her hypothesis. As part of the Digital Cultural Institutions Project, she will test the affects that digital vendors such as iTunes have on the variation of music. The results will have implications for the production of and access to other forms of culture such as writing and film. There are corollary concerns to the one about creativity, including whether digital institutions provide a level intellectual playing field between all kinds of ideas, or whether they create a relative disadvantage for some forms of cultural expression, such as more abstract ideas. She will continue to examine each of these concerns as well as propose possible responses or solutions.

This project examines the implications of translating Anyinginyi Manuku Apparr—an indigenous Australian written history—into a DVD. As a book, portable document format (pdf) file, and DVD, Anyinginyi Manuku Apparr exists across platforms and within a matrix of social and political issues concerning intellectual property rights, accessibility, and accountability. DVD technology can account for the multiple concerns involved in reproducing indigenous cultural knowledge: monitoring access, preserving cultural knowledge, reinforcing existing kinship networks. The DVD’s format works off an understood VCR logic—start, play, stop—but allows users to access multiple points of entry producing dynamic routes through the stored data. The DVD compilation tells multiple stories, layered with sound and moving images. Its form invigorates the static logic of collection with persistent notions of innovation, distribution, and reproduction. That Anyinginyi Manuku Apparr can exist in multiple forms and be available to divergent audiences at tourist destinations, university libraries, and community archives demands a reconceptualization of emergent cultural practices in the “digital age.” The promise and the panic—celebration and cynicism—associated with both indigenous traditions and digital technologies alienates both from mundane mobilizations and practical partnerships. This project examines the implications of newly forged relationships between digital technologies and indigenous communities when culture is the interface.

The APPRAISE project explores the relationship between the technological basis of scholarly communication and the structure of scholarly communities and institutions. The project explores how documents provide the context for ideation and other scholarly activities in an environment which is in radical flux. A hypothesis of the research is that there is a reflexive relationship between the nature of documents and the nature of the social-networks in which scholarly activity takes place. By exploring the arXiv e-print archive (arguably the preeminent manifestation of innovative publishing) the project aims to reveal the detailed structure of a hybrid network that includes human and material actors while developing methods for analyzing it. Using quantitative and qualitative research methods (including ethnography, social-network analyses, and citation analysis) this project will inform a larger project at Cornell’s Information Science program that aims to build mechanisms and software that facilitates hybrid networks in information systems’ design. www.shaydavid.info

Greg Elmer's project seeks to build an alternative archive of the web--­ironically one that is analogous to the underlying network structure of the web. At the heart of the project is the production of online toolkits that can render visual maps of networked relationships and content through hyperlinks on the web. To date the issue network mapping project has produced over 100 maps of various issues on the web. The goal of this summer proposal is two fold, first to format the findings into an archive, or Œissue atlas¹, and secondly to begin the process of constructing add-on modules of issue network analysis that benefit from the existing hyperlink crawler server side software. Of particular interest is a web transparency module that will map the exclusionary motivations of web site masters ­ that is determining through the analysis of Œrobot.txt. exclusion commands in web sites ­ the degree to which sites attempt to exclude their content from being archived by the web¹s leading search engines. Thus, the project both seeks to construct an alternative history and archive of web content (the aforementioned issue atlas), in addition to determining the degree to which search engines are systematically directed by Œrobot.txt¹ commands to exclude specific web content.

Tarleton Gillespie's research begins with the recognition that, as the technological matrix in which we live grows ever denser, lawmakers have increasingly, and in various ways, involved themselves in the design of technologies. What are the implications when, rather than legislating individual behavior, or mandating design for some broad public benefit, lawmakers legislate technology so that it specifically regulates individual behavior? With the support of the SSRC award, he will investigate the most recent example of this, the FCC's mandated "broadcast flag" for digital television—a controversy certain to impact the ongoing public discussion of this broader shift, and the co-production of law, digital media, and commercial institutions. Using this case as an example, he will investigate not only this shift in American legal, political, and commercial strategy, and its consequences for legal doctrine, political subjectivity, and technological innovation; but also the shifting relationships between corporate and governing institutions it represents and depends on, and the impact of these institutional shifts for digital culture.

Eszter Hargittai is interested in how online content organization influences what material is most easily accessible to Internet users and in particular what role commercial considerations may play in what information users encounter online. To answer these questions, she uses data about the online information-seeking behavior of one hundred randomly selected Web users that she collected through in-person observations and interviews. For more information, see www.eszter.com/research.html.

Shannon Jackson's "The Digital Public Sphere and Prospects for Participatory Planning in Kansas City" will investigate whether a digitally disseminated Urban Core Housing Survey is fostering the kind of public sphere that builds equitable participation across historically fragmented urban boundaries. Historical boundaries have separated inner city community activists, urban planners and developers, and a University community in Kansas City, Missouri. All three collaborated in 2001 to produce a neighborhood housing survey which has since drawn them into shared efforts to use the Internet and digital data to render the inner city more accessible. This has opened the possibility for urban planning in Kansas City to become a more participatory enterprise. This project will document and analyze the communicative networks that are emerging around the sharing of this digital data base, and will provide an assessment of whether the technology facilitating this public sphere offers a more equitable distribution and creative use of such intellectual capital.