Remix Practices Research Articles

Educational materials as collaborative design space?

The study presented constitutes the first step in a research project aiming at gaining more insight into the processes of creating educational materials through a collaborative design space. Additionally, it focuses on the possibilities of and challenges involved in creating valuable and meaningful educational materials drawing on teachers’ remix practices. The purpose of the study is to investigate how teachers' collaborative interaction with educational tools may influence ongoing improvement of the courses and materials included in design of contextualized learning paths. By taking our point of departure in existing theories and knowledge, we designed a triangulated methodology using a combination of questionnaires, interviews and user behaviour data focusing on the use of the CourseBuilder as a collaborative space. The article focuses on the possibilities and barriers of developing a collaborative design space that enables a (re)design of digital educational materials which looks at teachers’ interest in: 1) designing their own teaching materials, 2) working professionally with the redesign and remixing of materials from many different sources, and 3) adapting them to the many contexts in which materials of this type are included. This article should be seen as a step towards a deeper understanding of opportunities and challenges within teachers' cooperation on designing, sharing, redesigning and resharing teaching materials. It shows that there is a high degree of acceptance of digital teaching materials among teachers of upper secondary schools in Denmark. Furthermore, there seems to be a collaborative culture, where the majority of teachers indicate that they already collaborate professionally regarding course planning and they see advantages connected with these practises. In prior research, factors promoting the adaptation of virtual collaboration are mentioned. These include teachers’ digital skills, professional development through courses, allocated time and integration of tools that allow teachers to enter into re-design networks with colleagues. All the institutions participating in our study show a supportive environment regarding the use of CourseBuilder. However, several factors were identified indicating that CourseBuilder is not the ideal version of a design collaborator. Although the necessary factors for a successful collaborative environment are present, somehow there seems to be a missing link in the fulfilment of CourseBuilder as collaborative design space. Put differently, there are collaborative supportive environments at the specific institutions - but the productive remix practices are not facilitated by CourseBuilder, despite the design intentions and layout.

We Want Your Tools! Or Do We? On Digitized Cultural Heritage Archives And Commercial Content Identification Tools

This article reflects on the technical gap that exists between academic and corporate capacities to study how digitized cultural heritage is reused online. In the context of tracing how audiovisual archival content is remixed and reinserted into new cultural contexts, the article asks what it would mean for humanistic researchers—and cultural heritage institutions more broadly—to utilize content identification tools provided by actors such as Google. How could commercial techniques for policing copyrights and tracing the whereabouts of online content be re-purposed to assist in research concerning remix practices and transformed culturalmemories? What technical and legal consequences would such partnerships yield? And would such collaborations be ethical and scientifically defendable in the first place? Ultimately, the article reflects on the legal and technical discrepancies that exist between academic and commercial actors when it comes to monitoring how cultural content moves online. It also asks questions about what it means to care for digitized heritage collections in the 21st century.

Remixing News: Appropriation and Authorship in Finnish Counter-Media

This article outlines a first attempt at analysing counter-media publishing through the lens of remix theory. We concentrate on two key concepts—appropriation and authorship—which have a permanent standing in the remix research literature. To support our theoretical analysis, we investigate the coverage of two cases in the Finnish right-wing counter-media online publication <em>MV-lehti</em>. Our findings enable new readings on the nature of both counter-media work and remix culture. In fact, counter-media publishing leans more in the direction of remix culture—which is based on the act of using pre-existing materials to produce something new—than towards traditional journalistic convention, with its rules and ethical guidelines. <em>MV-lehti</em>’s practice of combining and layering different material is discernibly political, often resembling media activism. Our study provides the argument that counter to the utopian democratising assumptions of remix culture, the proliferation of remix practices has also given antidemocratic actors the means to challenge collectively and institutionally supported ideas of knowledge and justice. Counter-media publishing is perhaps democratising in that it offers the means to participate, but these antagonistic actors also remix news to undermine liberal-democratic ideals and social justice. Evidently, remix practices can be co-opted for a reactionary agenda.

Remix and Reproduction in the Post-Internet Age: A Contemporary Art + Design Pedagogy

Having taught many university-level studio art courses, I have noticed in my students a surprising investment in the notion of originality and authorship in their own creative practices, even as they freely participated in the exchange, reuse, and remixing of visual languages on social media and the internet. This paper focuses on techniques to incorporate remix practices into studio art and design classrooms, arguing that students benefit significantly from a focus on what I term “remix pedagogy,” meaning a method and practice of teaching that brings together both the concepts and the creative use of remix tactics. I argue that remix pedagogy offers four key benefits to visual arts pedagogy. First, it productively reconfigures outmoded notions of originality and authenticity, freeing students from the high-pressure myth of the artist as a lone genius. In doing so, remix pedagogy offers a second benefit: it introduces students to new modes of making that promote ideation, design thinking, and creative production, including the support of collaborative frameworks in artistic processes. Thirdly—and crucially—these new modes of making teach visual art students how to use artistic practice as social commentary with a cultural fluidity previously unavailable to them. Finally, remix pedagogy familiarizes art and design students with the principles of fair use, promoting complex critical reasoning by forcing them to reason through what makes a work “transformative” and to distinguish fair use from plagiarism. This paper provides examples from my own teaching in Copy Culture, a course I developed at the University of San Francisco.

The Originality of Copies: Cover Versions and Versioning in Remix Practice

Abstract In this article I analyze the cover version as a specific form of copying in music recording and performance, and then evaluate it as a cultural variable that is part of the creative process in remix practice. This analysis demonstrates that cover versions, versioning, editing, sampling, and remixing are dependent on copying and, for this reason, my eventual focus is on the relation of copies to originals and copies to copies. Another important element examined throughout the essay is the role of selectivity in the creative process as a foundational principle of communication and how it shapes varying popular and individualized assumptions about definitions of originals and copies.

Remix, literacy and creativity: An analytic review of the research literature

Creativity is often identified as a key factor contributing to national economic growth and as an important life skill for personal and group wellbeing. Therefore, it is worth taking a close look at "creativity" as a concept and a practice, and to examine what might be at stake when grouping them together, especially in relation to schooling. The situation at schools is in marked contrast to a sizeable body of out-of-school research which shows how people are being creative and imaginative in their meaning making practices, especially within remix practices. The purpose of the paper is to survey existing English language research on digital remix and literacy with a view to identifying patterns across these studies that speak of the ways in which ordinary, everyday people have been practicing creativity. In the course of conducting this analytic review empirical publications published in English over the past two decades were examined and an overview of scientific literature on remix and literacy in out-of-school spaces was drawn up, identifying interesting patterns regarding creative endeavor and meaning making that might usefully inform classroom pedagogy. A related aim was to identify patterns concerning how digital remix and literacy have been studied to date. All of the 36 reviewed studies emphasise how approaching creativity as a thoroughly social phenomenon helps to confront instrumental approaches. The remix work documented in these studies show how committed people are to deliberately work at "being creative" and how that may help people to creatively engage with, or respond to, the rapid pace of change, with existing and emerging social, governmental and environmental problems, as well as to establish and maintain relationships across distance and differences.

Remixing Creativity in Learning and Learning of Creativity: A Case Study of Audio Remix Practice with Undergraduate Students

Testing creativity in tertiary learning activities is a young field of research, and current assessment methods are difficult to apply within the diverse context of media production education, where disciplines range from journalism through to video game production. However, the concept of remix is common across this wide range of media, and offers practitioners ‘endless hybridizations in language, genre, content, technique and the like’ (Knobel & Lankshear, 2008, p. 22). The conceptual commonality of remix indicates that the study conclusions will have useful implications across a range of media production disciplines. This study aims to consider new methods for testing creativity in media production learning activities and to provide better assessments for learning design. This study focused upon a learner cohort of music technology students that were undertaking a work-integrated learning programme with a record label. To make the students more work-ready and inspire greater creativity, they remixed tracks recorded by professional music artists as part of a unit assessment. Subsequent self-report surveys ( N = 29) found that the process of creating a ‘remix’ enhanced their creativity and provided suggested improvements to the design of the learning experience. Importantly, we found no relationship between the survey responses and objective assessments, indicating that the self-reported improvements in creativity were not simply a measure of how well the students performed the formally assessed tasks. Although more research is needed to establish effective measures of creativity, these findings demonstrate that self-report survey tools can be a powerful tool for measuring creativity and supporting improved iterative learning design.

Concepts of the database in contemporary media practice

Abstract Contemporary remix practices in online video have flourished, due to the unprecedented access to our shared media culture that has been made possible by the databases underpinning online space. The technological and functional specificities of the database intercede our experiences in digital culture and influence how we understand our culture that increasingly occupies the database. They also influence how we express ideas about that culture through creative practices. The technological and, correspondingly, cultural significances of the database are articulated in the digitally specific remix video sub-genre, YouTube Poop. YouTube Poop relies on the database for the existing media content that it appropriates. Moreover, it narratively and aesthetically responds to the database by articulating the concepts of technological error, ahistoricism, multi-temporality, media abundance, the constant availability and the achronological, non-hierarchical, unclassified nature of media that the database has introduced to contemporary culture. In this article, the audio-visual narratives of three recent YouTube Poop videos are analysed in order to establish how they articulate the conceptual implications of the database in contemporary digital culture.

Performance and interaction on Soundcloud: Social remix and the fundamental techniques of conversation

This paper applies the analytic practices of conversation analysis (CA) to the visible activities on the music sharing site Soundcloud. Rather than ask whether Soundcloud interaction is like talk, it is understood to be premised upon the combination of different ‘fundamental techniques’ (Manovich, 2007) of technology use and of conversational structuring practice. Audio presentation and textual comment are skilfully combined in the interface to form meaningful interaction through what Goffman (1974) terms layerings or laminations. A parallel is drawn between these ‘asynchronous’ activities and the practices of musical remix, or what is called social remix.In the case of Soundcloud, one fundamental technique is the technology-afforded creation of textual comments, which function in the interface as temporally and spatially positioned, sequentially relevant, next turns in relation to the musical performance. Here the working methods of naturalistic conversational interaction are transferred into the domain of online practices in a knowing way. Social remix speaks to opportunities for mundane, or lay, analytics afforded by playback control and repeated listening, and the knowing production and strategic deployment of conversational methods of sense-making for all practical purposes (Garfinkel, 1967).The analysis shows textual turns that function indexically as ‘single word assessments’, situated within the Soundcloud visualisation and act as immediate and spontaneous responses to the music, and ‘second assessments’ in which a second textual comment is sequentially linked to an earlier one without the need for temporal proximity. The ‘sequential integrity’ (Reed, 2001) of these textual activities are actively achieved. Both ‘techniques’ are used to show up the skilled production of meaningful layered action and interaction. In addition, these activities rest on the technological affordances of the Soundcloud application which allow for play, replay, and the layering of textual comments. Layering is one more ‘fundamental technique’; this time of remix practice, and hence this amounts to an additional transference of ‘fundamental techniques’ to online interaction.

A remix-oriented approach to promoting student engagement in a long-term participatory learning program

Researchers and educators continuously remark on the importance of integrating creativity into the learning process. This study proposes a creativity approach to facilitating participatory learning for the sustained engagement of young learners based on the principle of remix practice, which consists of learning to generate online artefacts, endless hybridization and scaffolding. This study investigated students' engagement in and perceptions of the creative learning process during a two-year participatory learning program. Data collected included students’ flow perceptions during a 39-week activity, their motivation and creative self-efficacy before and after the intervention, as well as their creative products. The findings indicated that the remix-oriented approach led to a higher level of intrinsic motivation and sustained flow compared to a model-based approach, especially interest and curiosity, in this participatory learning program. The approach also helped the students to perceive a significant increase in their level of creative self-efficacy associated with strategies to generate creative ideas. The results of this study suggest that the principle of remix practice is helpful for leveraging knowledge acquisition and the creative nature of participatory learning activities to sustain student engagement in participatory learning programs.

Remix Culture and English Language Teaching: The Expression of Learner Voice in Digital Multimodal Compositions

A number of scholars maintain that the affordances of digital media to easily copy, edit, and share digital content has led to the development of aremix culturein which the amateur creation of cultural artifacts—often remixes, mashups, or parodies based on the creative works of others—has proliferated. At the same time, inTESOLthere is increasing interest in engaging students with processes of digital multimodal composition, focusing not only on language proficiency as it is traditionally conceived but also on the strategic use of multimodal resources and collaborative tools to reach a wide authentic audience on the Internet. One issue which such approaches must face is the tendency for some students to draw upon and remix existing creative works in their digital compositions. In particular, the issue is whether this practice of remix promotes or compromises the expression of learner voice. This article considers these questions by examining the multimodal compositions of students in a course in English for science at a Hong Kong university. The analysis generates a theoretical model of remix practices, which can be applied to the teaching and evaluation of multimodal compositions in English language courses.

Producing a meaningful difference: The significance of small creative acts in composing within online participatory remix practices

Abstract Online remix competitions focus strongly on community interaction, creative production and sharing, and can be seen as manifestations of an emergent musical participatory culture within which participants collectively generate and rework cultural content. This article engages in a theoretical exploration of the ways in which participants of online remix contests collectively discuss and exchange different takes on a single song, and how they appraise small similarities and differences in these derivative works. The concept of the small creative act offers a heuristic lens through which to investigate online participatory remix practices. Examples from a recent ethnographic study of the international IndabaMusic.com online remix platform illustrate how online remix contests enable the development of aural discernment through novel forms of access to the field of musical works, encourage growth into expertise through a collective and participatory form of appropriation and provide the means for making meaningful differences through the constant repositioning of oneself relative to others in the remix community. Finally, the article discusses the implications that practices based on the idea of the small creative act have for learning to compose in online remix communities.

MİZAH İÇERİKLİ INSTAGRAM POSTLARININ BİR REMİKS PRATİĞİ OLARAK TANIMLANMASI VE ANALİZİ

This paper investigates remix practice which is a popular method for creating content on the digital ecosystem. Within the scope of the paper, the remix has been analyzed in three dimensions: 1. as a way of building new meanings out of existing sources 2. as a way of generating user content 3. as for being in endless mobility. The history and applications of remix practices particularly the humoristic instances have been put under investigation. Throughout a month, all posts from three Instagram accounts have been collected afterwards the remix applications in these posts were identified. These findings were classified under three subtitles: 1. the remix implemented by the admin of the Instagram account, 2. the remix implemented by the followers of the account, 3. the remix which develops due to the mobility of the posts between social media environments. Frequency analysis has been conducted on 504 Instagram posts. In conclusion, these posts have been identified as humoristic, mobile, interactive, and multi-dimensional remix content.

Sampling as Political Practice

This article seeks to put in perspective Gilberto Gil’s Brazilian cultural policy from 2003 to 2008 as a pioneer attempt to institutionally legitimate musical cultures involving sampling and remix. Mutations brought about by the digital age call for strong reflections upon the concept of “digital culture” enacted for instance in sampling and remix practices, and incarnated in a complex manner by the cultural “glocal” laboratories of underground musical cultures in Brazil. The study of Gil’s policy involves a multifaceted approach mixing music sociology, ethnology, cultural studies, the study of law, policies and of the music industry, in order to clarify the redefinition of musical authorship and intellectual property brought about by musical digital culture along with identifying some challenges for scholars and actors of the musical world for the years to come.

Don Quixote, intermediality and remix: Translational shifts in the semiotics of culture

In Yuri Lotman’s terms intertextual relationships as active dialogues among texts and cultures should be the starting point for an analysis of the concepts of intermediality, cross-mediality and transmediality. This article considers adaptations and remakes as intermedial processes and remix practices as transmedial ones. The article demonstrates how the processes of transposition, remake and remix may sometimes be only partial, or in other instances they may shift towards entirely different textual systems/levels. At metasemiotic levels, the strategies that build the narrative worlds may either conceal or emphasize the interdependent relations between source and target texts, as well as between their cultural semiotic systems and their emergent ‘metatexts’ of self-description. In the second half of the article brief semiotic analyses will be presented in order to investigate mechanisms of the intermedial and transmedial networks that start from a literary text, Don Quixote by Cervantes, and continue to cinema and new digital media.

The Cultural Impact of Institutional Remix: The Formalisation of Textual Reappropriation within the ABC

In 2009, Mark Deuze proposed an updated approach to media studies to incorporate ‘media life’, a concept he suggests addresses the invisibleness of ubiquitous media. Media life provides a useful lens for researchers to understand the human condition in media and not with media. At a similar time, public service media (PSM) strategies have aligned audience participation with the so‐called Reithian trinity which suggest the PSB should inform, educate and entertain while performing its core values of public service broadcasting (Enli 2008). Remix within the PSM institution relies on audience participation, employing ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen 2006) as cultural artifact producers, and draws on their experience from within the media. Remix as a practice then enables us to examine the shift of the core PSM values by understanding how audience participation, informed by a human condition mobilised from our existence of being in media and not merely with media. However, remix within PSM challenges the once elitist construction of meaning models with an egalitarian approach towards socially reappropriated texts, questioning its affect on the cultural landscape. This paper draws on three years of ethnographic data from within the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), exploring the remix culture of ABC Pool. ABC Pool operates under a Creative Commons licensing regime to enable remix practice under the auspices of the ABC. ABC Pool users provide a useful group of remix practitioners to examine as they had access to a vast ABC archival collection and were invited to remix those cultural artefacts, often adding cultural and fiscal value. This paper maintains a focus on the audience participation within PSM through remix culture by applying media dependency theory to remix as cultural practice and calls to expand and update the societal representation within the ABC.

Double Quote Unquote: Scholarly Attribution as (a) Speculative Play in the Remix Academy

Double Quote Unquote: Scholarly Attribution as (a) Speculative Play in the Remix Academy

Musical Chameleons: Fluency and Flexibility in Online Remix Contests

Musical Chameleons: Fluency and Flexibility in Online Remix Contests

Remixing the Spring!: Connective leadership and read‐write practices in the 2011 Arab uprisings

AbstractThis article discusses the connections between the unfolding of the 2011 Arab uprisings and the “culture of the net.” Being far from overestimating the role that Internet has played in the uprisings, we propose to look at it not as an ensemble of tools, applications and technologies; but as a specific set of values, behaviors, skills and strategies that define the cultural dimension of the web. The article shows how linking, sharing and remixing have been among the core cultural practices behind the social movements that were successful in confronting Egypt and Tunisia's regimes. We also discuss how, despite the fact that the Syrian uprising has not achieved its political goal, yet it shares a similar cultural framework based on participation, peer-production, remix practices.

Youth identities as remixers in an online community of storytellers: Attitudes, strategies, and values

AbstractIn today's media‐rich world, youths are not merely consumers, but also active creators of information. Digital tools allow authors to more easily remix and copy previous works. These new media practices have brought issues of appropriation, copyright, privacy, information behavior, and information literacy to the forefront. In this paper, we present a case study of a hybrid online and offline community of middle school students designed to help them develop identities as scientists through storytelling. The case illuminates the complex issues of appropriation and remix that arise when youths create, share, copy, and adapt their peers' media artifacts. Our analysis then highlights how youths, who are evolving as information literate individuals, identify with (a) attitudes towards information appropriation, (b) strategies of remix, and (c) the underlying values that motivate their ideas about remix practices.