Search

This article offers a comparative take on the ways audiovisual versus verbal digital archives model our understanding of the past. We focus on content metadata schemas and their role in modeling histories and framing the uses of audiovisual databases. Our empirical corpus includes verbal and audiovisual objects from the five-year period just before the World War II (1935-1939) as presented in two digital databases – the Analytic Bibliography of Estonian Journalism and the Estonian Film Database. The article compares how the different metadata schemas for newspaper articles and newsreels model their objects. As a consequence, metadata schemas shape contemporary perceptions of historical realities in different ways.

This article investigates the process of collaboration between Digiciti Networks, a private company, and the public sector in Estonia, in their experiment of building a decentralized copyright registry for the music industry. Drawing upon existing research in national innovation policy and music industry studies, we examine our case as an endeavour for collaborative public value creation. We demonstrate that while the Estonian government has established innovation policy hubs capable of driving and coordinating challenge-oriented policies, other parts of the national innovation system lack the capacities and dynamic capabilities that could organically host ambitious visions of future infrastructures for the creative industries. Nonetheless, we also show how the developing regulatory and policy frameworks of the European Union influenced the development of the case and provided opportunities to advance it, especially with regard to the 'public' or 'common' nature of future data infrastructures as part of the European data and blockchain strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchains have inspired imaginaries of a new iteration of the internet, hailed as Web3, where the power of centralized platform companies would be limited and the ownership of personal data and content could be retained by their individual owners and creators. Web3 is expected to facilitate the emergence of novel protocols and platforms that enable decentralized coordination of data and digital assets. This article examines critically the experiences and imaginaries of creators working on two blockchain-based video-sharing platforms: Theta.tv and Odysee. Building on the studies of creator culture and institutionalist blockchain economics and based on open-ended interviews with the early adopters of these platforms, the paper investigates how the creators experience these decentralized social media applications in terms of their processes of governance, community creation, and career development. We show how the affordances of blockchains and creator expectations can result in further convergence of community management and career-building functions potentially benefiting creators. We also show that the new wave of decentralization, against optimistic blockchain visions, has not yet led to the distributed 'ownership' of social media networks. Rather, while blockchains seem to have increased creator autonomy and added career opportunities, novel forms of platform governance and power have also introduced new perceptions of precarity among creators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a renewed interest in how public service media (PSM) generate public value has emerged emphasizing how such value may express itself in multidimensional and nonlinear ways. However, little has been achieved in systematically studying these ways and providing evidence to policy makers. In this article, we propose that content diversity in TV programs and the extent to which PSM collaborates with external partners could serve as quantifiable markers that enable the measurement of multidimensional public value creation. We also propose the utilization of an untapped resource for this purpose--data from broadcast management systems. Based on a comprehensive case study--Estonia's public broadcaster, ERR--we demonstrate a set of approaches to facilitate such analysis. This article suggests further ways for developing the approach with a longer-term goal of turning the multidimensional public value generation into an automated and systematic study in the service of policy interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how music-specific communities on Facebook self-organize in and respond to the digital music ecosystem dominated by streaming platforms such as Spotify and their algorithmic restructuring of music. By building on earlier work on digital platforms as archives, we differentiate between the "old" and "new" orders of music cultures. We also utilize Juri Lotman's cultural semiotics and his concepts of semiosphere and auto-communication to make sense of communicative self-ordering and memory work by music-related communities on Facebook in Estonia. Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with local music experts, we demonstrate how communities focused on record collecting, specific music genres or music quizzing work auto-communicatively, build shared memories, identities, and self-organize in order to resist the "new musical order" that has resulted from the datafication and platformization of music markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much writing on, first, analogue and, later, digital archives has focused on related power-dynamics and the structuring effects of archives and their technologies on discursive freedom and cultural dynamics. In recent years, however, work within the media archaeology domain, especially by Wolfgang Ernst, has addressed how the specific materialities of digital archives, and the nature of their algorithms and particular functions, could be seen to facilitate dynamics in cultures. This article sets this work in dialogue with the cultural semiotics of Juri Lotman, whose late work focused on how communicative processes between and within different subsystems of culture facilitate their dynamic change and the production of new forms and cultural systems. The article suggests further interdisciplinary dialogue between media archaeology and cultural semiotics in order to understand the role of archives in facilitating communicative processes and interlinking in culture and the emergence of novelties – that is, for understanding the 'creativity' of archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]