Search

Digital technologies are creating new ways for visitors to engage with cemeteries. This article presents research into the development of digital cemetery technologies, or cemtech, to understand how they are reimagining memorial spaces. Through a systematic review of examples of cemtech in online records, academic literature, patents, and trade publications, we developed a typology of cemtech according to four characteristics: application type, technical components, target users, and development status. Analysis of the application types resulted in five higher-level themes of functionality or operation-Wayfinding, Narrativizing, Presencing, Emplacing, and Repurposing-which we discuss. This typology and thematic analysis help to identify and understand the development of cemetery technology design trajectories and how they reimagine possibilities for cemetery use and experience.

Spotify offers users powerful algorithmic recommendations and hybrid “algo-torial” curation at scale. In this paper we argue that juxtaposed within this data-driven platform, is the power of human stories and networking. We investigate the experiences of 10 Australian musicians through semi-structured interviews, asking how they navigate the Spotify for Artists interface. By attending to the experiences of the artists themselves, and their use of the Spotify for Artists platform, we explore the human stories that flow within this socio-technical music streaming network, arguing that stories, like data, have an important role and value in this context.

The consumption of music is increasingly reliant on the personalisation, recommendation, and automated curation features of music streaming services. Using algorithm experience (AX) as a lens, we investigated the user experience of the algorithmic recommendation and automated curation features of several popular music streaming services. We conducted interviews and participant-observation with 15 daily users of music streaming services, followed by a design workshop. We found that despite the utility of increasingly algorithmic personalisation, listeners experienced these algorithmic and recommendation features as impersonal in determining their background listening, music discovery, and playlist curation. While listener desire for more control over recommendation settings is not new, we offer a number of novel insights about music listening to nuance this understanding, particularly through the notion of vibe.

Within the last decade, Let’s Plays, recordings of gameplay with commentary by the person playing, have grown in popularity and attention. The current research examining Let’s Plays has focused on the contemporary popularity of the phenomenon on YouTube. However, the origins of Let’s Plays as an influential media practice have not been fully investigated. In order to address this gap, we conducted a series of interviews with 34 creators from the Something Awful LP subforum—commonly identified to have originated the media form. Transcripts of these interviews were analyzed using concepts of serious leisure studies and cultural/subcultural capital. As a form of serious leisure culture, the members of the Something Awful LP community displayed motivations related to extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, such as increased sense of self-worth and recognition. The analysis of this Serious leisure culture highlights how this subculture was subsequently adopted by larger YouTube communities.

The Something Awful Let’s Play subforum is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of the Let’s Play (LP) media phenomenon. LPs typically involve people recording themselves playing games while providing commentary. LPs are an important media form in themselves as well as being an important antecedent to many contemporary and popular media forms such as live streaming, esports and speed-running. An examination of the Something Awful LP subforum can contribute to an understanding of the origins of LPs and the community that created them. In this paper, we report on a study of the Something Awful LP subforum and describe the kinds of engagement the community participates in the top threads, as well as looking to see if there are specific individuals responsible for guiding the subforum overall. We collected data from the thousands of public threads posted in the LP subforum, from its inception in 2007 to the end of 2020. The analysis of these postings presented in this paper draws on previous understandings of the behavioral roles, forms of engagement, and policing of practices that often occur on internet forums as part of the regulation and organization of associated online communities. Our results show that the LP subforum was not dominated by a small minority of users that dictated the community’s LP posting, recording and commentary practices, and that the content of the specific threads was much more important in determining what forms of LPs became popular.

Working at the intersection of death studies and media studies, this article examines what we can learn from the death of media technologies designed for the deceased, what we refer to as necro-technologies. Media deaths illuminate a tension between the promise of persistence and realities of precariousness embodied in all media. This tension is, however, more visibly strained by the mortality of technologies designed to mediate and memorialise the human dead by making explicit the limitations of digital eternity implied by products in the funeral industry. In this article, we historicise and define necro-technologies within broader discussions of media obsolescence and death. Drawing from our funeral industry fieldwork, we then provide four examples of recently deceased necro-technologies that are presented in the form of eulogies. These eulogies offer a stylised but culturally significant format of remembrance to create an historical record of the deceased and their life. These necro-technologies are the funeral attendance robot CARL, the in-coffin sound system CataCombo, the posthumous messaging service DeadSocial and the digital avatar service Virtual Eternity. We consider what is at stake when technologies designed to enliven the human deceased – often in perpetuity – are themselves subject to mortality. We suggest a number of entangled economic, cultural and technical reasons for the failure of necro-technologies within the specific contexts of the death care industry, which may also help to highlight broader forces of mortality affecting all media technologies. These are described as misplaced commercial imaginaries, cultural reticence and material impermanence. In thinking about the deaths of necro-technologies, and their causes, we propose a new form of death, a ‘material death’ that extends beyond biological, social and memorial forms of human death already established to account for the finitude of media materiality and memory.

To determine the role of environmental and host genetic factors in shaping fungal endophyte communities we used culturing and metabarcoding techniques to quantify fungal taxa within healthy Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) needles in a 7-y old provenance-progeny trial replicated at three sites. Both methods revealed a community of ascomycete and basidiomycete taxa dominated by the needle pathogen Lophodermium seditiosum. Differences in fungal endophyte taxon composition and diversity indices were highly significant among trial sites. Within two sites, fungal endophyte communities varied significantly among provenances. Furthermore, the communities differed significantly among maternal families within provenances in 11/15 and 7/15 comparisons involving culture and metabarcoding data respectively. We conclude that both environmental and host genetic variation shape the fungal endophyte community of P. sylvestris needles.

Given access to huge online collections of music on streaming platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music, users have become increasingly reliant on algorithmic recommender systems and automated curation and discovery features to find and curate music. Based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 15 active users of music streaming services, this article critically examines the user experience of music recommendation and streaming, seeking to understand how listeners interact with and experience these systems, and asking how recommendation and curation features define their use in a new and changing landscape of music consumption and discovery. This paper argues that through daily interactions with algorithmic features and curation, listeners build complex socio-technical relationships with these algorithmic systems, involving human-like factors such as trust, betrayal and intimacy. This article is significant as it positions music recommender systems as active agents in shaping music listening habits and the individual tastes of users.

Studying digitally mediated play presents challenges in terms of how to view and record both the on-screen action and player’s bodies in physical space. Carrying out this research in a socially and technologically diverse range of family households poses further challenges, common to ethnographic media research in general. In this paper, we describe a method for generating richly detailed views of 6–8 year old children’s digital play with the game Minecraft, on a range of devices and in a range of household configurations. We explain the process undertaken in our own research, highlighting the need for flexibility and a collaborative approach between participants and researchers. We argue that collecting multi-perspectival recordings of digital play provides data that has the potential to greatly aid understanding of digital playworlds.

While coral reefs in Australia have historically been a showcase of conventional management informed by research, recent declines in coral cover have triggered efforts to innovate and integrate intervention and restoration actions into management frameworks. Here we outline the multi-faceted intervention approaches that have developed in Australia since 2017, from newly implemented in-water programs, research to enhance coral resilience and investigations into socio-economic perspectives on restoration goals. We describe in-water projects using coral gardening, substrate stabilisation, coral repositioning, macro-algae removal, and larval-based restoration techniques. Three areas of research focus are also presented to illustrate the breadth of Australian research on coral restoration, (1) the transdisciplinary Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP), one of the world's largest research and development programs focused on coral reefs, (2) interventions to enhance coral performance under climate change, and (3) research into socio-cultural perspectives. Together, these projects and the recent research focus reflect an increasing urgency for action to confront the coral reef crisis, develop new and additional tools to manage coral reefs, and the consequent increase in funding opportunities and management appetite for implementation. The rapid progress in trialling and deploying coral restoration in Australia builds on decades of overseas experience, and advances in research and development are showing positive signs that coral restoration can be a valuable tool to improve resilience at local scales (i.e., high early survival rates across a variety of methods and coral species, strong community engagement with local stakeholders). RRAP is focused on creating interventions to help coral reefs at multiple scales, from micro scales (i.e., interventions targeting small areas within a specific reef site) to large scales (i.e., interventions targeting core ecosystem fu

Game industry professionals are frequently implementing new methods of addressing ethical issues related to in-game toxicity and disruptive player behaviours associated with online multiplayer games. However, academic work on these behaviours tends to focus on the perspectives of players rather than the industry. To fully understand the ethics of multiplayer games and promote ethical design, we must examine the challenges facing those designing multiplayer games through an ethical lens. To this end, this paper presents a reflexive thematic analysis of 21 in-depth interviews with games industry professionals on their ethical views and experiences in game design and community management. We identify a number of tensions involved in making ethics-related design decisions for divided player communities alongside current game design practices that are concerned with functionality, revenue and entertainment. We then put forward a set of design considerations for integrating ethics into multiplayer game design.

The question of how the dead “live on” by maintaining a presence and connecting to the living within social networks has garnered the attention of users, entrepreneurs, platforms, and researchers alike. In this chapter we investigate the increasingly ambiguous terrain of posthumous connection and disconnection by focusing on a diverse set of practices implemented by users and offered by commercial services to plan for and manage social media communication, connection, and presence after life. Drawing on theories of self-presentation (Goffman) and technological forms of life (Lash), we argue that moderated and automated performances of posthumous digital presence cannot be understood as a continuation of personal identity or self-presentation. Rather, as forms of mediated human (after)life, posthumous social media presence materializes ambiguities of connection/disconnection and self/identity.

Across the globe, human experiences of death, dying, and grief are now shaped by digital technologies and, increasingly, by robotic technologies. This article explores how practices of care for the dead are transformed by the participation of non-human, mechanised agents. We ask what makes a particular robot engagement with death a breach or an affirmation of care for the dead by examining recent entanglements between humans, death, and robotics. In particular, we consider telepresence robots for remote attendance of funerals; semi-humanoid robots officiating in a religious capacity at memorial services; and the conduct of memorial services by robots, for robots. Using the activities of robots to ground our discussion, this article speaks to broader cultural anxieties emerging in an era of high-tech life and high-tech death, which involve tensions between human affect and technological effect, machinic work and artisanal work, humans and non-humans, and subjects and objects.

On 22 December 2019, the world of fisheries science and whale conservation lost one of its most ardent champions with the passing of Sidney J. Holt. His career began in 1947 at the age of 21. Ten years later, he and his colleague Ray Beverton published their authoritative monograph on quantitative fish population dynamics. In 1953, he joined the Fisheries Division of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and soon became heavily involved in assessing whale stocks under the auspices of the International Whaling Commission, a role that eventually led to advocating for animal rights and the cessation of commercial whaling. Later in life, he returned to fisheries assessment and management, particularly issues pertaining to the Common Fisheries Policy of the European Union, where he advocated for fishing mortality less than that associated with maximum sustainable yield. This themed set consists of articles written by authors who knew and collaborated with Sidney, who may have met him once or twice at an international meeting, and who only knew of him via his reputation and massive and influential list of publications. Their articles address a wide range of topics relating to his work throughout his career and reflect, in part, the influence that his work has had on thinking about quantitative modelling of animal populations.