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This paper presents historical data from 19th century shore whaling stations along the Western Australian coast, complementing data already presented in an earlier 1985 analysis. In particular, catch records of the Castle Rock whaling station, Geographe Bay, Western Australia, for the period 1846–53 together with other contemporary records indicate that humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) comprised the majority of the colonial shore whalers’ catch. It is suggested that this could have been a result of a significant presence of American whale ships in the region in the early 1840s, which had presumably already reduced southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) numbers by the time these detailed colonial records were kept.

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.

Despite increasing interest in the use of digital tools in boardgames for both commercial and research purposes, little research has to date explored how and why these tools are used. We interviewed 18 professionals working in the boardgame industry to explore the combination of digital tools and tabletop play, which affords new experiences and opportunities for both players and designers. We generated five key themes from the interview data. Participants engaged with ontological questions about the fundamental nature of games; they showed strong opinions about the use of digital tools; they discussed the impacts of digital tools for game design as well as in their design practice; they raised concerns about the costs to develop and maintain such tools; and they considered how they affect the in-game player experience. From these themes, we generate five design principles for digital tools for boardgame play: traceability, completeness, integration, privacy, and materiality. Grounded in empirical data, these design principles guide game designers and researchers seeking to explore this novel design space. Our research focuses attention on the role of digital components in play and on the need for thoughtful implementation that considers the entire lifecycle of the game, from development through publication and, ultimately, archival access.

Pitcairn Island, settled in 1790 by nine mutineers of the British naval vessel Bounty and 19 settlers from Tupua‘i, Huahine, Ra‘iātea and Tahiti, has long maintained an ambiguous status in Pacific scholarship. On the one hand, its attachment to a storied moment in British history and its supposedly remote geographic location have granted it outsized attention. On the other, it has sometimes suffered a concomitant neglect, treated as peripheral to the primary concerns of Pacific studies. In this joint article, seven scholars of Pitcairn Island argue that the island’s seemingly contradictory status as both central and marginal can be read as the result of disciplinary attentions and forgettings, a series of oublifications and focalisations. Moreover, metacritical attention to the ways the island has been made marginal or central to historical, sociocultural, political or regional discourses in turn reveals some of the structures and assumptions undergirding the disciplines engaged in the study of Oceania. Though Pitcairn Island, founded on mutiny and murder, is sometimes described as a space of derangement, we argue it is our own disciplines that are deranged through their study and use of an island that sits uneasily in the categories to which we have subjected it. Thus, we critique surprisingly recurrent notions that islands such as Pitcairn should ever be framed as pristine laboratory spaces or ready-made model systems. We conclude by positing the relevance of an alternative oceanic historicity that looks beyond the colonial archive to de-range supposed margins like Pitcairn Island.

Spectatorship is a core element of esports. Short for “electronic sports,” esports encompasses organized, professional competitive videogaming practices produced and consumed as a spectator sport. Esports’ computerized nature grants it a placeless quality, which creates ambiguities around what authentic esports spectatorship ought to be. Notably, some notions theorized prior to the emergence of contemporary esports imply that authenticity and placelessness are incompatible. We address this conundrum by presenting an ethnographic study conducted at an esports bar; a venue designed for the spectatorship of esports alongside other fans and alcohol consumption. While embodying seemingly placeless qualities, esports spectatorship nevertheless takes place in situated places. We found spectators at the bar worked to authenticate their spectatorship by drawing on conventions of legitimacy, professionalism, and spectacle from elsewhere, particularly spectator sports. Through their spectatorship, those at the bar constructed and affirmed a convention of authenticity for esports.

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.

The archaeological study of maritime industries can potentially encompass a bewildering array of artefacts, sites, structures, landscapes, vessels, mechanisms, processes, and communities on land, in intertidal zones, on and in the water, and on submerged land surfaces. This chapter presents whaling as a case study, focusing on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During this period whaling emerged as a global industry operating at different scales from pelagic fleets roaming the oceans of the world, to small seasonal shore stations. In particular this section reviews recent work by Australian archaeologists towards a systematic approach to studying whaling at a national level.

This study introduces the ludic ethics approach for understanding the moral deliberations of players of online multiplayer games. Informed by a constructivist paradigm that places players’ everyday ethical negotiations at the forefront of the analysis, this study utilises a novel set of game-related moral vignettes in a series of 20 in-depth interviews with players. Reflexive thematic analysis of these interviews produced four key themes by which participants considered the ethics of in-game actions: (1) game boundaries, (2) consequences for play, (3) player sensibilities, and (4) virtuality. These results support the conceptualisation of games as complex ethical sites in which players negotiate in-game ethics by referring extensively – although not exclusively – to a framework of ‘ludomorality’ that draws from the interpreted meanings associated with the ludic digital context.

The British colonisation of Australia was made possible by its co-option of unfree labour. Unwillingly placed at the leading edge of the colonising wave, the convict provided the labour power and s...

In the British colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania, Australia) the period 1839-53 witnessed an irrevocable change in the way in which prisoners (convicts) were managed. Known as the “probation system”, its introduction saw convicts newly transported from the corners of the Empire sequestered in government-run stations across the colony’s length and breadth. At these places, rigorous and uncompromising discipline, classificatory regimes, religious inculcation and trades-training would see the convict molded into working stock for the colony. In reality, such ideologies were to be undone by reactive planning, miscommunication and chronic under-resourcing, as well as helplessly undermined by unforeseen economic and political circumstances. Condemned as a failure, probation has nonetheless left an indelible mark on Tasmania’s landscape. A system only implemented in Van Diemen’s Land and Norfolk Island, it can rightfully claim a significance that extends well beyond these islands’ shores, playing a critical role in Britain’s globe-spanning penological enterprise. In this paper, we chart the course of probation, simultaneously outlining a framework for engaging with these landscapes where penology and labor was so closely intertwined. It will be illustrated with two examples drawn from the Tasman Peninsula: the Port Arthur penal station (1830-77) and Cascades probation station (1842-55). Using archeological and historical enquiry, the different impacts that probation had upon the penological and labor management of these places are examined, providing examples of how the significant landscapes of the probation-era can be examined.

The probation system was a form of convict management unique to the colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). In operation between 1839 and 1853, it has been derided by contemporary and moder...

The use of LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) in archaeological prospection is not a new phenomenon; its capacity to enhance fieldwork processes is well proven. Use of the technology makes it poss...

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.

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.

For over half-a-century (1803–54), the Australian colony of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), played a key part in Britain's globe-spanning unfree diaspora. Today, a rich built and archaeological landscape, augmented by an exhaustive and relatively intact documentary archive, stand as eloquent markers to this convict legacy. As historical archaeologists, we have spent countless hours querying the physical and documentary residues in a bid to understand how the penological, social and economic imperatives of Britain and the colony shaped the management of convict labour. In particular, our task has centred upon the recovery of individual narratives – of both gaoler and gaoled – from such residues, moving away from a traditional focus on the broader outlines of the convict system. This paper illustrates how spatial history methodological processes have been used to relocate individual historic lives back into the convict industrial landscape of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania). Focusing on the male-only penal station of Port Arthur (1830–77), we will illustrate how we have reunited the physicality of past spaces and places, with the lives and labours of those who created and navigated them. Simple methodologies have been used to achieve this, designed with onward applicability in mind. A complex series of documents, convict conduct records, have been mined for spatial markers, allowing events and people to be relocated back into space. Through these processes of linkage and visualisation, we have been encouraged to ask further questions about the management of the unfree labour force and how this came to create the landscape we see today.

© 2019, © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. A growing number of companies are offering digital products and services for use in funerals. Drawing on interdisciplinary research in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, we explore how funeral directors operate as intermediaries for these digital products and services. We critically examine the popular framing of the funeral industry as a “conservative” business and examine how funeral directors actively mediate between their clients and the companies offering innovative products and services. This study provides an account of current developments in the funeral economy as well as a broader narrative about how funeral industry professionals have engaged with technology.

Domestic Buddhist altars have long provided symbolically and materially rich media for venerating the dead in Japan. However, as Japanese household structures and funerary rites are unsettled in the contemporary era, Buddhist altars (butsudan) are rapidly being reinvented and digitalized. In this article, we describe the new technologies harnessed in butsudan production, the sensory experiences they offer, and their abilities to both reform and reinforce traditional networks of ancestral obligation. Despite promising death rituals that are more personal, secular, and affordable, the development of digitally enhanced material memorialization is still very much a work in progress in Japan.

The colonial industries of whaling and sealing dominated the first decades of nineteenth-century Australia. This article considers the archaeology of these maritime industries, particularly Aboriginal employment and labour. Examining both historical and precontact archaeology, we argue that the involvement of Aboriginal men and women was an extension of traditional hunting and ritual engagements. Whales and seals were sought out for food, rituals and other uses, and their harvesting involved both men and women. Although archaeological research into whaling and sealing in Australia has been relatively limited, it will prove a fruitful and revealing area, promising a nuanced understanding of Indigenous agency and colonial maritime expansion.

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.

This book, Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality, and Home Life, is concerned with the home, but it is not bounded by the home. While the home provides a necessary anchor point for our empirical and theoretical work, we are well aware that the home is not self-contained but is a node in multiple commercial, cultural, and technical networks, all of which interact, and all of which have local implications and global reach. The home’s socio-technical ecology operates in recursive relations with these much larger ecologies, none of which can be ignored if the home is to be understood. This book unearths this digital domesticity through accounts of evolving socio-technical relations as they unfold in processes of adopting and adapting to innovations; using, maintaining, and neglecting the complex of technologies in the home; and confronting the obsolescence of particular technologies and failure of systems of consumer technologies.

Between 1788 and 1868 some 165,000 men and women were transported from throughout the British Empire to the Australian colonies. For many, this act of enforced removal was to be their only experience of social displacement. For others, often condemned as the recidivist elements of the convict population, a secondary form of transportation occurred, sequestered by the system’s administrators in isolated, secure, and controllable pockets of the colonies. Prevalent from the 1820s, these penal stations have today come to embody the more brutal aspects of the Australian convict experience. This paper presents the results of recent suite of research being undertaken as part of a multi-disciplinary project “Landscapes of Production and Punishment.” As part of this research we have sought to challenge preconceived perceptions about Australia’s convict system, examining the archaeological and historical residues of the convict past in terms of the convict as worker and the administrator as manager. In this paper we examine the formative years of the Port Arthur penal station, located in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), applying prevailing colonization models to understand how the station evolved in response to multi-scalar influences.

In this paper, we analyse false death announcements of public figures on social media and public responses to them. The analysis draws from a range of public sources to collect and categorise the volume of false death announcements on Twitter and undertakes a case study analysis of representative examples. We classify false death announcements according to five overarching types: accidental; misreported; misunderstood; hacked; and hoaxed. We identify patterns of user responses, which cycle through the sharing of the news, to personal grief, to a sense of uncertainty or disbelief. But we also identify more critical and cultural responses to such death announcements in relation to misinformation and the quality of digital news, or cultures of hoax and disinformation on social media. Here we see the performance of online identity through a form that we describe, following Bourdieu as ‘platform cultural capital’.

Players are sometimes understood to hold an 'amoral' stance in games, morally disengaging from game content and in-game player behaviours because 'it's just a game'. This amorality is often seen as problematic and in need of refuting or amendment, particularly if we wish to encourage more ethical play online. However, few studies have approached a theory of player amorality from the player's perspective in multiplayer games. This study aims to address this gap by conducting 20 in-depth interviews with a wide range of multiplayer game-players, exploring players' ethical views towards problematic or disruptive in-game behaviours. Preliminary results show that while players do exhibit a certain amorality regarding in-game actions, players express, justify and explain this amorality in a variety of considered ways that go beyond notions of 'it's just a game' and the 'sociopathic griefer', and step outside the framework of moral disengagement. This paper puts forward a preliminary framework of player amorality termed 'Apathetic Villager Theory', encapsulated by six key attitudes/themes that highlight the nuances involved in the (un)ethical standpoints of a range of players. It is hoped that this framework will be useful in approaching and responding to player amorality in a way that gives due recognition of the various voices and understandings involved in multiplayer digital gameplay.

This paper presents an interdisciplinary project that uses archaeological and historical sources to explore the formation of a penal landscape in the Australian colonial context. The project focuses on the convict-period legacy of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania, Australia), in particular the former penal station of Port Arthur (1830–1877). The research utilises three exceptional data series to examine the impact of convict labour on landscape and the convict body: the archaeological record of the Tasman Peninsula, the life course data of the convicts and the administrative record generated by decades of convict labour management. Through these, the research seeks to demonstrate how changing ideologies affected the processes and outcomes of convict labour and its products, as well as how the landscapes we see today were formed and developed in response to a complex interplay of multi-scalar penological and economic influences. Areas of inquiry: Australian convict archaeology and history. The archaeology and history of Australian convict labour management. The archaeology and history of the Tasman Peninsula.

Digital games such as Minecraft currently hold a position of significance in the media diets of many children. However, little is known explicitly about just who plays, with whom and how. This article presents the quantitative results of a survey of 753 parents of children aged 3–12 years about their child’s engagement with Minecraft. Our results establish Minecraft as the dominant digital game title played by this age group, particularly on tablet devices. We provide evidence of a marked early gendering of children’s Minecraft play and engagement with meta-game material. This research gives particular impetus to efforts aimed at ensuring gender equity in digital game–related cultural spaces inhabited by children. It also highlights the importance of collecting game-specific descriptive information, rather than limiting studies to aggregate measures of ‘screen time’.

The use of voice interaction in digital games has a long and varied history of experimentation but has never achieved sustained, widespread success. In this article, we review the history of voice interaction in digital games from a media archaeology perspective. Through detailed examination of publicly available information, we have identified and classified all games that feature some form of voice interaction and have received a public release. Our analysis shows that the use of voice interaction in digital games has followed a tidal pattern: rising and falling in seven distinct phases in response to new platforms and enabling technologies. We note characteristic differences in the way Japanese and Western game developers have used voice interaction to create different types of relationships between players and in-game characters. Finally, we discuss the implications for game design and scholarship in light of the increasing ubiquity of voice interaction systems.

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.

The name ‘Norfolk Island’ has long been synonymous with its use between 1825 and 1855 as a harsh punishment station for recidivist British convicts. Much of its previous archaeological investigatio...

Children’s use of screen-based digital media is presently a topic of intense public debate. In this paper we present the results of a discourse analysis of Facebook comments responding to the proposal that iPads be used by children in early years education. We found that respondents typically drew upon one of three core stances to talk about children and screen-based media use. Of these, the most dominant stance posited that children’s “screen time” was problematic. This popular discourse is out of alignment with government discourses promoting the use of screen-based devices in education. By illuminating the discord between different constructions of childhood, the role of education, and screen-based media this paper contributes to an ecologically valid understanding of the role of digital media in contemporary childhoods.

This article explores how innovations in the funeral industry borrow from the technological affordances, commercial logics, cultural norms, and affective registers of social media platforms. Based on ethnographic research of funeral industry conventions, we analyze examples of funeral planning tools, funeral service mediation, and digital memorialization products. We consider how these products aim to capture forms of data, affect, and value as part of the funeral industry’s efforts to shore up their historically intermediary relevance in the face of potential “disruption” from technological innovation, and threats of marginalization posed by shifting norms of networked grieving and commemoration in digital culture

Oxaliplatin is one of the most commonly used drugs for patients with colorectal cancer. It has rarely been associated with disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) with only 3 previously reported cases. In all those instances, the patients had started receiving oxaliplatin, developed evidence of DIC during the course of planned treatment, and recovered with supportive care. We report a case of a 71-year-old man with colorectal cancer treated successfully with an oxaliplatin-based regimen who had disease relapse after 3 years. When treated again with oxaliplatin, he developed signs of an acute hypersensitivity reaction, and eventually had signs and symptoms consistent with DIC despite appropriate management. This case is unique in that a DIC reaction evolving from a hypersensitivity reaction occurred after the patient had already tolerated the drug years earlier. It suggests a possible immune-mediated etiology to this rare occurrence that should be kept in mind while utilizing this commonly employed drug.

This chapter attempts to understand the tensions between the discourse of ''disruptive technology'' as practiced by contemporary start-ups, and the funeral industry's self-identity. It describes the industry convention and trade show as a key space where the industry both rehearses anxiety about its future and presents solutions from influencers and pundits. The chapter shows that the management and self-help discourses about the state of the funeral industry, their authority for diagnosing change and the remedies they propose. It presents an account of the anxieties that are expressed, constructed and soothed at these industry expos. The chapter deals with the technological innovations that are most often identified as the threat to the industry. It explores the funeral expo as a space of problematisation, in which the industry constructs the challenges facing it, tests norms and evaluates new products.

This book provides a critical overview of the changing ways people mourn, commemorate and interact with the remains of the dead, including bodies, materials and digital artefacts. It focuses on how residues of death persist and circulate through different spaces, materials, data and mediated memories, refiguring how the disposal of the dead is understood, enacted and contested across the globe. The volume contains contributions by scholars from a number of disciplines and includes a diverse range of case studies drawn from Asia, Europe and North America. Together they reveal how rapidly changing practices, industries and experiences around death’s remains involve the entwining of digital technologies with other material and ritualised forms of commemoration, as well as with shifting boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the institutional and the vernacular, the public and the private.

Voice control is an increasingly common feature of digital games, but the experience of playing with voice control is often hampered by feelings of embarrassment and dissonance. Past research has recognised these tensions, but has not offered a general model of how they arise and how players respond to them. In this study, we use Erving Goffman's frame analysis, as adapted to the study of games by Conway and Trevillian, to understand the social experience of playing games by voice. Based on 24 interviews with participants who played voice-controlled games in a social setting, we put forward a frame analytic model of gameplay as a social event, along with seven themes that describe how voice interaction enhances or disrupts the player experience. Our results demonstrate the utility of frame analysis for understanding social dissonance in voice interaction gameplay, and point to practical considerations for designers to improve engagement with voice-controlled games.

The 2018 Digital Games Research Association International Conference (DIGRA 2018), The Game is the Message was held at the Campus Luigi Einaudi of Turin University, Italy, 25-28 July 2018. Since it was first held in 2003, the DiGRA International Conference series provides a venue for the presentation and discussion of games-related research from multiple and diverse research disciplines.

The 2017 Digital Games Research Association International Conference (DiGRA 2017) was held in Melbourne, 3-6 July 2017. Swinburne University of Technology, RMIT University and The University of Melbourne joined together to host the conference.The DiGRA International Conference series offers a venue for research from all disciplines to present and discuss games-related research. Founded in 2003, DiGRA is the premiere non-profit international association for academics and professionals who research both digital and analogue games and associated phenomena. Since its beginnings, it has encouraged high-quality research on games, and promotes collaboration and dissemination of work by its members.