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Post by Liz Dowthwaite (Doctoral Researcher at CREATe & Horizon, University of Nottingham)

Figure 1 Internet culture as portrayed by the webcomic ‘Nedroid’ on Tumblr [2]

Webcomics are comics that an independent creator posts on the Internet for free [3]. There are thousands on the Internet at any one time. Some artists are able to support themselves full-time through their comics, and many make at least some form of income. The importance of the relationship between creators and readers in comics has been recognized and talked about for many years [6], with webcomics able to embrace Web 2.0 technologies for this purpose: “One of the greatest things about Webcomics is the immediacy, frequency and intensity of your interactions with readers. You can talk to them, and they can talk back” (p.104) [4]. Artists develop meaningful relationships with readers over time, forming extremely dedicated communities that are willing to spend time and money supporting them [1,4,5,7,8,9]. Alongside these critical relationships, artists must also manage the use of their work online, ensuring that their rights are maintained. We all know that illegal hosting of content is a massive problem on the internet, and whilst most creators accept that this is somewhat inevitable, webcomics communities have been known to take to the social networks in great numbers to protest when work is copied or re-posted without attribution. My PhD is concerned with how creators use social media sites to build these communities in order to support themselves, both in terms of their rights and in the sense of making money, and my research so far shows that they do make extensive use of sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. The example of such a niche group as ‘webcomics’, who have been extremely successful and are only going from strength to strength, may be used to aid other groups and individuals who more and more are turning to the Internet to help them succeed in the creative industries.

Post by Tom Phillips (CREATe Research Associate, University of Edinburgh) This won’t be readily apparent to all visitors to this…

Post by Tom Phillips (CREATe Research Associate, University of Edinburgh) If you’ve been around a smartphone in the last few…

Image from Hugh Hancock’s new film ‘Death Knight Love Story’

One of the Hot Topics in the big media / tech crossover world recently has been data-driven storytelling. Wired breathlessly reported that Hollywood gurus have reverse-engineered a “formula for success” from audience data. Netflix has revealed its ability to data-mine genres that they already know their audience will like.

This article is a reproduction of a post originally featured at The Conversation.

By Emily Laidlaw, University of East Anglia

More than 500 high-profile names, including authors, musicians and five Nobel laureates, have signed a petition to the United Nations calling for a bill of digital rights to be developed in the wake of this year’s revelations about state surveillance.

The petition, signed by Margaret Atwood, Tom Stoppard and Günter Grass, among others, condemns the mass surveillance that has been revealed over the last few months, starting with the NSA secrets revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Titled A Stand for Democracy in a Digital Age, the petition says mass surveillance is an affront on human rights and treats every citizen as a suspect.

Down the road, it seems likely that Snowden’s revelations will be seen as the tipping point in the digital human rights debate.

Post by Mr. Dominic Price, Horizon Research Fellow, contributing to CREATe’s WP2A.

Online social networking is now in its second decade.  Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are enormously popular: Facebook claims over 1 billion active accounts and an average of 58 million unique messages (Tweets) pass through Twitter every day.  The recent explosion in smart-phone ownership with their associated ‘app’ cultures has also fuelled the growth of mobile social networking with the introduction of apps such as Whatsapp and Snapchat.  We can see from this that online social networking is a popular and central activity to a large proportion of the global population.  This is not surprising: we humans are social animals with a need to communicate with each other.  Social networking augments our existing ‘offline social networks’, allowing us to keep in touch with people over great distances, share our experiences and associated content (e.g., photos, videos, soundtracks and reports), organise our social lives and discover new social networks that were previously beyond our reach.

Post by Prof. Dr. Leonhard Dobusch, first published here.

Dobusch speaking on Open Access at a CREATe event in Glasgow / October 2013

Creative Commons licenses are essential to virtually all of the different “open movements”, which have emerged over the past two decades beyond open source software. In the realm of open education, open science and open access, Creative Commons licenses are the standard way to make content open to the wider public. Also in fields such as open data and open government Creative Commons licenses are widely used to make it easier for third parties to re-use publicly funded content.