[dac conference]

DAC09 will be held on the campus of the University of California Irvine,for three and a half days in mid-December 2009.

The Themes for this iteration of DAC:

* Embodiment and performativity
* Mobile/locative/situated/wearable practices
* Software/platform studies
* Environment/ sustainability/ climate change
* Interdisciplinary pedagogy
* Cognition and Creativity
* Sex and sexuality

More information can be found at the conference website: http://dac09.uci.edu

DAC09 is now accepting paper proposals, and inviting offers of participation in other aspects of the conference.

The site and the conference are at this point a work in progress.

New and updated material will be added regularly.

[gender and literacy]

Sure women and men are different and sure our brains work differently but I didn't realise how drastically different. In a presentation on boys' writing and ict that I found at the Nottinghamshire Primary ICT Framework site there is a really interesting image of a girl's brain *at rest* and a boy's brain *at rest*:



"In the resting female brain, we find just as much neural activity as in the male brain that is solving problems."

[MEDS 2009 lecture: new media new identities]

Questions posed to the class during the lecture to be answered in the comments:

Search YouTube for the tag "Leicester" - How many videos appear?
Find an image on Flickr that reflects an aspect of your identity and post the url of the image in the comments
Tweet your answer to this question: "what do you think of using Twitter in this class?"

Watch: Social Networking for Parents

UPDATE: Thanks to all the MEDS 2009 students for your participation...even in the terribly hot lab!

[where's feminism now?]

Ok. So I suppose I should begin by acknowledging what a long way the U.S. has come. I mean, a woman and a non-white guy (omg) are in the running for president. However, watching the debate on CNN this morning just highlighted that we *still* need to be aware of gender bias. Perhaps Edwards and Obama didn't mean to divert the debate from important issues like abortion, immigration, education, health care, Iraq, same-sex marriages to personal attacks causing Clinton to respond (she must have practised after the Oct. 30th *debate*)

"I've just been personally attacked again. I don't mind taking hits on my record on issues, but when somebody starts throwing mud at least we can hope it's accurate and not right out of the Republican playbook."

Though Clinton didn't want voters to see gender as the issue: "She added they were not attacking her because she was a woman but because she was ahead. It was a good line, even if sounded well-rehearsed, aimed at women."

Hrm...after that reponse the debate seemed to refocus on presidential issues and I was feeling optimistic. That wasn't to be long-lived as during question time an audience member, a young woman, decided to invoke her right to query the system. She looked straight at Clinton and asked whether pearls or diamonds were her favourite. What?! That seems such an odd question and I wonder whether it was a plant to remind the voting public that at the end of the day Clinton is *just* a woman and should be relegated to the private sphere where concerns over which accouterment to employ reign supreme (or at least parallel with getting dinner ready).

I didn't catch the remainder of the question session so not sure if the male candidates were asked whether they preferred boxers or briefs...

[machinima = storytelling]

After welcomes and introductions to the event, Paul Marino, Executive Director of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, shared with us his presentation, "commemorating the first ten years of the use of game engines in real-time for the creation of Machinima." For me, this was an excellent presentation as it really gave me a sense of how machinima began and the stages through which it has been evolving. What I found most exciting about Marino's presentation was his recurring statement that machinima is about telling stories (woo hoo go narrative!):



Watching Marino's chronology of machinima not only reflected the development of technology and skill but also the greater expertise or craft of storytelling. (here is a list of his machinima selections) Marino, as well as other speakers on the day, reminded us that *anyone* can create machinima stories but then I wondered if that were true why are so few women (seemingly and please let me know if this is way off) are involved? Judging from the audience not many women are interested in machinima. Judging from the entries DMU received, not many women are making machinima. Judging from the films viewed at the festival, not many women are playing parts in machinima in terms of characters (there were a couple but not exactly positing *contemporary* views of women...) or production. Is this really the case or are women presenting their machinima work in other arenas and following different avenues? (perhaps Sims99.com might be such a place) The seeming lack of women was highlighted for me during an afternoon panel which included Ricard Gras, Xavier Lardy, Friedrich Kirschner and Klaus Neumann. Interesting as it was to hear the speakers' thoughts on distributing and promoting machinima as well as the variety of links Friedrich and Klaus zoomed through, I was left a bit surprised - given the perceived accessibility of machinima - that no women were represented in that session. I wonder if this gender imbalance grows out of the fact that machinima originated with gaming? How many women play Quake and Halo etc...? However, maybe this is changing already with Sims and SL game engines?





Food for thought I think.



~~~~~

"When a guy can show a machinima vid and proudly announce 1996 as the date of origin for that art form, he’s eliding decades of female vidding history. And that’s very, very wrong. (Harvard 2005)"

~~~~~

[apparently, i blog like a man]

Ok, so I've read studies that suggest women use more passive verbs than men and, in conversation (f2f and electronic) women are more likely to employ superlatives as well as apologise (i know, crazy eh?!)


Well, now you can check whether you're more "man" or "woman" blogger.


Enter a portion of your blog post over at the gender genie on the book blog and be suprised or at least entertained. According to scientific algorithms I blog like a man...so what's that mean, I'm a proactive, energetic, active blogger and I like to make decisions...must be!

Everything is perception...

['net gender stats]

So, in the US it seems women outnumber men in terms of online use:
"eMarketer estimates that there will be an estimated 97.2 million female Internet users ages 3 and older in 2007, or 51.7% of the total online population. In 2011, 109.7 million US females will go online, amounting to 51.9% of the total online population."



The University of Southern California's Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future reported that in 2006 the percentage of females who went online had, for the first time in the six years the center has conducted the survey, surpassed males. It reported that 78.4% of the female population ages 12 and older go online, vs. 76.7% of males.

However, from the CBC, "women don't appear to be as enamoured of online video as their male counterparts, the study found. Only 66 per cent of the estimated 97.2 million females online watch videos, compared with 78 per cent of the 90.9 million men."

"A Statistics Canada study of adults conducted in 2005 found a minuscule difference in usage between the sexes, with 68 per cent of men versus 67.8 per cent of women counting as internet users" (CBC).


Links from Slashdot.

[cyberbullying or so this is what you get for being a woman?]

BlogHer asked where the women bloggers were - and found them.

We know gender diversity at techy conferences "still sucks." Jason Kotte collected these statistics:

"Future of Web Apps - San Francisco September 13-14, 20060 women, 13 men. 0% women speakers.
Tokion Magazine's 4th Annual Creativity Now Conference October 14-15, 20066 women, 30 men. 17% women speakers.
PopTech 2006 October 18-21, 20068 women, 30 men. 21% women speakers.
Web Directions North February 7-10, 20075 women, 16 men. 24% women speakers.
LIFTFebruary 7-9, 200710 women, 33 men. 23% women speakers.
Future of Web Apps - London February 20-22, 20071 woman, 26 men. 4% women speakers.
TED 2007 March 7-10, 200712 women, 41 men. 23% women speakers.
SXSW Interactive 2007 March 9-13, 2007147 women, 378 men. 28% women speakers.164 women, 373 men. 31% women speakers. (updated 2/22/2007)
BlogHer Business '07 March 22-23, 200743 women, 0 men. 100% women speakers.
An Event Apart Boston 2007 March 26-27, 20071 woman, 8 men. 11% women speakers.
O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference March 26-29, 20079 women, 44 men. 17% women speakers.
Web 2.0 Expo 2007 April 15-18, 200717 women, 91 men. 16% women speakers.
Future of Web Design April 18, 20072 women, 12 men. 14% women speakers.
GEL 2007 April 19-20, 20072 women, 11 men. 15% women speakers.
MIX07 April 30 - May 2, 2007 0 women (UPDATE: now 8 women, see comment below from Beth - thanks!), 4 men. 0% women speakers.
The New Yorker Conference 2007 May 6-7, 20073 women, 21 men. 13% women speakers. (updated 2/28/2007)
Dx3 Conference 2007 May 15-18, 20075 women, 48 men. 9% women speakers. (updated 3/2/2007)
An Event Apart Seattle 2007 June 21-22, 20070 women, 9 men. 0% women speakers.

Dori Smith responds to Kotte and adds this: "great list of women speakers for your conference:
here

An InfoWorld Special Report on "Why are women exiting IT professions?". That's a good question; sadly, the articles don't even attempt to answer it. But I suspect that there's a correlation between the lack of women at these conferences and the declining numbers of women in tech.

And finally, just because it's a great article and I felt like I was looking in a mirror when I read it: Why some women just can't fit in. Go read it. And yes, again, I think that it's related to the bigger picture here."

BlogHer just held the BlogHer Business Summit: "How to Succeed in a Social Media World"

NLab is holding a conference with the focus on women, business & blogging where all speakers will be women (although men are invited to attend).

But then a few bloggers have to go and ruin it.

Scobel weighs in: "It’s this culture of attacking women that has especially got to stop. I really don’t care if you attack me. I take those attacks in stride. But, whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn’t happen if the interviewee were a man.

It makes me realize just how ascerbic this industry and culture are toward women. This just makes me ill."

----- but is silence really the best answer?