An exercise in distancing

Last week I had my final review for my PhD, which is the formal meeting at my University to ensure I am on track and ready to submit by this September. At that meeting I presented my research in five minutes, and I wondered how on earth I could condense my thesis into such a

The Most Famous Artist

Thanks to my colleague Annette Naudin for tweeting this video, which raises a lot of questions for me about art, expertise and social media. This is a short documentary-style video by Buzzfeed which focuses on an artist on Instagram called ‘The Most Famous Artist’, whose real name is Matty. Buzzfeed follow him going to flea markets to

Gender and expertise

Lately I have noticed a particular theme in my social media analysis of artists, most notably among my female participants. A lot of my thinking around this also coincides with a paper I recently co-wrote with my colleague Annette Naudin on female cultural entrepreneurs. Before that I hadn’t read much around gender even though it is

Presentation at RESCON15

Last week (11 December) I presented at Birmingham City University’s annual research conference, RESCON15. I was a part of an Ethnography panel organised by Jerome Turner of BCMCR so the focus here was on methods. I talked about social media methods and argued for the value of more qualitative methods in social media research. I

Research update

Whilst presenting at conferences and co-writing a paper with my colleague Annette, I’ve also been carrying out interviews with participants. I’m conducting interviews to find out about the role of social media in artistic practice and cultural labour, which is one focus of my PhD (the other being the performance of expertise on social media). So far I

Creative and cultural work, cultural ecologies

So far in my PhD I’ve been referring to my potential participants as creative and cultural workers. This has been a ‘catch all’ way for me to give a rough indication of who I’m looking at, without committing to either creative or cultural workers. This is because, as I’ll discuss in this post, of the

PhD Research outline September-October 2015

At the beginning of year two of my PhD, my research questions and focus have been refined since the outline I provided a year ago, so here is an up to date description of my research. PhD title: The social media use of creative and cultural workers Primary research questions: What is the role of

Methodology

I’ve completed a full first draft of the literature review, and now my attention is on methodology and the actual fieldwork for this thesis. I do talk about method in my literature review – I have a chapter dedicated to social media methods and in this post I’ll talk a little bit about that, and

Social media practice

For my PhD I’ve spent much of this first year focusing on the performance of expertise on social media, and drawing from my pilot study which has resulted in a draft paper. Now I’m focusing on literature around my other question: What is the role of social media use in the everyday lives of creative and

Expertise in the creative industries and reputation

Since the last post I’ve been focusing much more on literature on expertise in the creative industries. Before I proceed with that however I should restate why I am looking at expertise. One of the main research questions for my PhD is How is expertise performed on social media? Expertise, as I will demonstrate in my