Together with Axel Bruns, I will guest-edit an issue of the Online-Journal „New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia“ dealing with „produsage“ – a term coined by Axel, but a phenomenon visible all over the Internet. Below is the call for papers, we are looking forward to your submissions.

Exploring Produsage

A Special Issue of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

Call for papers

The concept of produsage points to the shift away from conventional producer/consumer relationships, and highlights the more fluid roles of users and contributors within social media environments. Participants in open source projects, in Wikipedia, in YouTube and Second Life are no longer merely consuming or using preproduced material, but neither are they at all times acting as fully self-determined producers of fully formed new works; rather, they occupy a hybrid position as produsers of content.

Produsage processes are now evident across a wide range of activities – mainly online, but increasingly also extending to the offline world – from citizen journalism and communal knowledge management through to collaborative artistic activities, from learner-led education models to citizen engagement in political processes. As such models establish themselves, what does an examination through the lens of the produsage framework reveal about their internal operations? How do they affect the existing institutional, industrial, social, and cultural environments within which they operate? How may they be guarded against cooptation and exploitation by corporate interests? What possible futures do they foreshadow?

Potential contributions to this special issue could include, but are not limited to, areas such as:

• Conceptualising produsage: theoretical frameworks for examining produsage activities, practical examples of produsage projects, …
• Historical and comparative perspectives: produsage and other forms of collaborative and commons-based work, precedents of produsage, …
• Technologies and practices of produsage: collaborative dynamics of leading produsage spaces, impact of the technological foundations of produsage, …
• Empirical perspectives on produsage: case studies of produsage and its effects, ethnographic research into produsage communities, …
• Methodology: research approaches to the study of produsage, tracking and evaluating produser activitities, …
• Critical perspectives: economic, legal, pedagogic, sociological perspectives on produsage, …

For this special issue of NRHM, we invite contributions on these and other topics related to produsage. Full papers should be around 7,000 words; shorter papers (around 3,000 words) for technical notes, industry perspectives or opinion pieces are also welcome. More detailed instructions for authors can be found online: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/nrhm. Queries should be directed to the Guest Editors.

Authors should submit their papers online via the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia Manuscript Central site: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tham

Important dates

• 16 July 2010 – paper submission deadline
• 24 September 2010 – author notification
• 15 October 2010 – final copy due
• Northern Spring 2011 – publication

Guest Editors

Axel Bruns, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (Brisbane), a.bruns@qut.edu.au
Jan Schmidt, Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media Research (Hamburg), j.schmidt@hans-bredow-institut.de