Social Media Fellowship – s a r a i http://sarai.net The Sarai Programme, CSDS Wed, 14 Feb 2018 04:53:44 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Short Term Research Projects in Social Media: Selected Proposals 2016 http://sarai.net/short-term-research-projects-in-social-media-selected-proposals-2016/ http://sarai.net/short-term-research-projects-in-social-media-selected-proposals-2016/#respond Mon, 04 Apr 2016 12:56:29 +0000 http://sarai.net/?p=2642 Read More]]> The Sarai Programme is committed to developing a public architecture for creating knowledge and creative communities. In keeping with this commitment, we seek to develop a community of scholars, writers and practitioners who are motivated to make the materials and outcome of research available for public access and circulation, with the understanding that an imaginative engagement with social experience will be best fostered by a sharing of information, ideas, research materials and resources. We see our system of Short Term Research Projects as a resource that will be built on by many people working whether individually or in groups, but with a sense of collective endeavour and public purpose.

The Call for Proposals for the Short Term Research Projects in Social and Digital Media attracted over 90 applications from all over the country, and it took a careful scrutiny of all the applications to reach our decision. We received applications from scholars as well as practitioners, young researchers and older, and proposals looked at a wide range of themes. The applications testify to an emerging research interest in developments in the last decade, as researchers and practitioners strive to reflect on the contemporary histories and techno-material practices opened by social media in India. Due to limited resources, we were unable to support many interesting proposals. We encourage those interested in the field to keep track of lectures and workshops and other work Sarai is planning to develop in the area of social media.

Please see below excerpts from selected proposals for this year’s Short Term Research Projects in Social Media.

Digital Identities: The Online Circulation of Bodo VCD films and Music Videos

Ankush Bhuyan

This project aims to capture the current moment where social media intersects with VCD films and music videos, in their entirety or in the form of clips available online, and questions of Bodo identity. What is it to be Bodo? How does social media play a role in the formation and the consolidation of identities? Can the use of technology and aesthetics in the VCD films and music videos provide some insight on the above questions? Through this study I hope to shed some light on the use of social media that may link to larger questions from the region regarding identity, culture and circulation of mediatised images within a political movement.

Media and Mobilization: Digital Media and the Shia Public Sphere in West Bengal

Epsita Halder

I look at how the multifarious ways of consumption, reception and re-enactment of digitized texts open up various possibilities to contextualize Shia communities on how to become a community, shattering monolithic assumptions. My project tries to locate digital culture in Shia districts of Bengal to understand identity formation of the community after the advent of new media. Engaging with this new visual-aural piety of these diverse modalities of transmission and reception, I locate, trace and analyse the new efforts to identify contemporary Shia communities.

A Practice Perspective on Technologies used in Transportation Studies

Onkar Hoysala

In this project I consider one area of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) research – modelling and simulation. The questions that will guide my research include: How are transportation modelling and simulation (M&S) software, which are often developed for contexts outside of India, shaping the practice of model and simulation designers in India? How do the structures embedded in the technologies by design, shaping the outcome of the M&S work being carried out? How are the social structures around the use of these technologies (the context) shaping the practice? What structuring resources (such as vocabularies, for example) are emerging around the use of these technologies, and how? Do these resources get reified in daily practice? What is the nature of the reflexive relationship between practice of the M&S designers, and the M&S technologies? How is the practice of the M&S designers shaping the technologies? How is the contextualised practice of the M&S designers in Indian contexts shaping the domain of ITS itself? How is the practice shaping the social structures?

Broadcast to Broadband: Televisual experiences in the Age of the Digital

Ritika Pant

With the Indian audiences being constantly exposed to transnational television content in the form of popular TV series like Game of Thrones, House of Cards or even Zindgai Gulzar Hai and Humsafar, they have found newer ways to watch, post, distribute and react to this content through the online medium. Television content is no more limited to a television screen but expands to multiple screen formats including mobile phones, laptops or tablets. The viewing also takes place in mobile environments as opposed to the fixed space of a living room. Moreover, the content that is originally produced for television audiences, when consumed via the online/digital medium, transmutes televisual aesthetics and produces a new kind of aural and visual experience that is specific to contemporary convergence culture. This project, thus, seeks to engage with the interactions between an older medium of broadcast (television) with a newer means of distribution (internet) and explore how this new interface is introducing us to the “post-broadcast” moment.

‘Culture of Downloading’ in Khandesh region and the Story of Transfer of Media: An Auto-Ethnographic Study

Shiva Thorat

The small business of ‘copy-paste’ and transferring media material into memory cards of mobile phones is common to small towns like Shirpur and in larger cities like Pune, Mumbai. Today you can find boards of ‘yaha pe gaane, movies download kiye jate hai’. (we download songs movies into the memory cards) in Shirpur. The current study seeks to explain what kind of equations and notions of society associated with these ‘downloading workers’ and their consumers.

Incrementality in Digital Consumption within Informal Urban Settlements: Tracing Purchasing Patterns of Mobile Technology through Mobile Recharge Kiosks

Swati Janu

The research aims to analyze the patterns of mobile technology purchases – data recharge and offline media download on phones – through phone recharge kiosks in informal settlements. These kiosks dot every major junction and main street in most informal settlements, much like kirana or neighborhood stores. Acting as community hubs, many of them provide other services such as mobile repairs or cylinder gas refills. Connecting this network of local entrepreneurs are the middlemen who are the sales agents of different service provider companies. Through research on the mobile recharge kiosk owners, the sales agents and the customers who frequent the kiosks – the research aims to present the network of pre-paid mobile technology spread out in informal settlements. The analysis of this network is important to delve deeper into the incremental nature of its consumption.

The Returned: The Rise of B-movie Cinephilia

Vibhushan Subba

More often than not B-movies have been discarded as ‘trash’, ‘sleaze’, ‘porn’ and put down for their ‘bad taste’ and ‘horrifying’ content. It has existed in the shadow of the Bombay mainstream film as a marginalized figure, eking out an existence in the obscure recesses of cinematic ecology. However, the transformation of the visual culture from analog to digital has given birth to a new breed of cinephilia centered on a love for the obscure, the disreputable, the discarded and the forgotten. Born completely on the internet this cinephilia lives through fan pages, YouTube channels, Facebook and Twitter pages, blogs and underground screenings. This project seeks to track the creation, nature and evolution of this cinephilia -which has produced a mobile and alternative archive- in order to understand the altered relationship between the producers of content and digital technology and stage a debate around censorship, ownership and alternative histories.


 

 

 

 

 

 

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Short Term Research Projects in Social Media: Selected Proposals 2015 http://sarai.net/short-term-research-projects-in-social-media-selected-proposals-2015/ http://sarai.net/short-term-research-projects-in-social-media-selected-proposals-2015/#comments Fri, 01 May 2015 07:14:53 +0000 http://sarai.net/?p=2072 The Sarai Programme is committed to developing a public architecture for creating knowledge and creative communities. In keeping with this commitment, we seek to develop a community of scholars, writers and practitioners who are motivated to make the materials and outcome of research available for public access and circulation, with the understanding that an imaginative engagement with social experience will be best fostered by a sharing of information, ideas, research materials and resources. We see our system of Short Term Research Projects as a resource that will be built on by many people working whether individually or in groups, but with a sense of collective endeavour and public purpose.

The Call for Proposals for the Short Term Research Projects in Social and Digital Media attracted over 75 applications from all over the country, and it took a careful scrutiny of all the applications to reach our decision. We received applications from scholars as well as practitioners, young researchers and older, and proposals looked at a wide range of themes. The applications testify to an emerging research interest in developments in the last decade, as researchers and practitioners strive to reflect on the contemporary histories and techno-material practices opened by social media in India. Due to limited resources, we were unable to support many interesting proposals. We encourage those interested in the field to keep track of lectures and workshops and other work Sarai is planning to develop in the area of social media.

Please see below excerpts from selected proposals for this year’s Short Term Research Projects in Social Media.

Circulation, Consumption and Construction of the Nineties Romantic Imagination: Afterlife of the Nineties Romantic Film Song in the Virtual Public Sphere

Abhija Ghosh

In this project, I am interested in observing the popularity of nineties romantic cinema and music across several internet media streams such as video sharing platforms, online radio music channels, nineties fan sites and lists in order to map the registers of popular memory, affect and pleasure that mark an emerging cultural afterlife of this decade of Hindi cinema.

Imago Aevitas: Engagement with Net Art Projects

Charu Maithani

Imago Aevitas is a research project aimed at understanding the changing implications of web- based artistic projects. The research will analyse (inter)net art projects to draw together the changing image aesthetics in digital technology as well the participatory nature of these projects. The intention of the research is to be able to analyse the contemporary net art projects in order to bring into focus the conditions of living in the post-digital age.

Khabar Lahariya: Rural Empowerment Goes Digital

Mrinalika Roy

In May 2002, a New Delhi-based NGO ‘Nirantar’ began India’s first-of-its’s-kind, rural newspaper ‘Khabar Lahariya’ from Bundelkhand district of Uttar Pradesh. Their self- proclaimed aim is to bring rural women into the sphere of journalism, information and technology. In this project, I intend to look into the transformative impact the internet has had on the rural landscape. As my case study I would look into the working of ‘Khabar Lahariya’ and how internet helped to further its cause. This includes exploring the use of media in the region and the news gathering process of the newspaper prior to the introduction of internet. I also aim to document the personal stories of its reporters, most of who come from underprivileged backgrounds, changes in their lives and the way they report. Since the stories by the newspaper have created an impact and helped raise and solve issues concerning villagers, the perception of the villagers towards the newspaper is worth exploring and so is the attitude and views of the administration. It is also interesting to note what men of the region think about an all-women newspaper. Lastly, I will explore the possibilities of similar initiatives in other rural areas of India.

Forensics and Truth Labs

Pallavi Paul

Other than being a platform of internet mediated community experiences, social media today has become the site of fierce battles over consumer data, intellectual property rights and private records. Even as the terms of these debates are still forming, websites like Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Youtube and Web 2.0 have become repositories of evidence in criminal proceedings involving individual users, corporations and governments. Further, there is a worldwide proliferation of litigation where these social networking sites are themselves infringing the privacy of their own users. This project will unpack the questions of crime and evidence via cyber forensics. It will look at two major sites-A government helmed agency, The Central Forensic Science Laboratory and a conglomerate of private forensic labs, ‘The Truth Labs’- with the aim of tracing the methodologies through which digital data and information from internet based media is surveyed and presented as evidence.

Lovely* Interfaces: The Many Lives of the Item Number in Social and Digital Media

Silpa Mukherjee

I propose to trace the life of the item number through social and digital media and the affective landscape transmitted through multiple interfaces (Galloways, 2012). Item numbers travel through an intricate media network of ringtones, digital star posters as wallpapers on personal gadgets, live shows telecast on television and recorded and sold on DVDs or buffered on YouTube, iTunes, apps and the online portals as the item number effect. In the process, digital and social media’s interaction with the item creates a haptic sensorium for the spectator/user producing a feedback loop between the production economy of the film industry and the fan community

Law’s Role in Development of the Internet

Smarika Kumar

I propose to study the relationship between law and the development of internet as a technology. Early pioneers like John Perry Barlow saw the internet as the beginning of a new world, away from the power of States and something whose very architecture resists the application of legal and regulatory frameworks to the medium. Since those heady days, the understanding that internet like any other media, can be shaped and governed by law has made an incursion into popular minds thanks to the work of scholars like Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain and many others. Today as jurisdictions around the world deliberate governance frameworks for this new media, it is well understood that there is nothing “inherently ungovernable” about the internet, as was thought earlier. My proposal hopes to add to this understanding by analysing the mechanisms through which law understands the internet.

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Call for Proposals: Short Term Research Projects in Social and Digital Media http://sarai.net/cfp-research-projects-in-social-and-digital-media-2015/ http://sarai.net/cfp-research-projects-in-social-and-digital-media-2015/#respond Wed, 11 Mar 2015 15:58:36 +0000 http://sarai.net/?p=2038 Read More]]> The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, invites proposals from individuals for research projects on contemporary social and digital media, its ecologies and histories. Selected research proposals will be supported with a short-term grant for six months, and the researchers will present their studies in a workshop at Sarai-CSDS at the end of the period.

Themes

We are interested in the following themes:

  • Unpacking Obscenity
  • Memes, ‘Selfies’, Lists, and Viral Content
  • New media effects and violence
  • Digital Money
  • The legal archive of new media
  • Platform: Design, participation, revenue, alternatives
  • Media streams: Delivery and distribution of media (cinema, news, music, images)
  • Censorship, government and commercial regulations and public campaigns.
  • Intermedia junctions: screen cultures, interface design, data streams
  • Memory: Storage, databases, retrieval, devices
  • Online media as archive
  • Issues of privacy/disclosure
  • Social media campaigns: Organized politics, petitions, performance, and activism
  • Practice-based research on software and multimedia platforms
  • Mobile phone culture and effects
  • Rural Landscapes after New Media.

In select cases, applications from themes beyond the above list will be considered.

This research project takes inspiration from the pioneering Sarai Independent Fellowship programme that initiated and supported a host of individual researchers working on contemporary culture.

Conditions

Like the previous programme, we propose to mobilise collaborative models of research: we expect selected researchers to interact both with Sarai’s in-house research group and a larger community, and deposit their materials in the Sarai archive for public access and use.

  • Researchers can be based anywhere in India, but will contribute regular research updates through postings on the online forum at the Sarai website. There will be a final paper and presentation in a workshop at Sarai/CSDS, Delhi.
  • Applicants should have an Indian Bank Account and Income Tax PAN in her/his name.
  • The research project will be available for up to six months and for a maximum amount of Rs. 1,00,000/-.
  • The research projects will run from May 1, 2015 to October 31, 2015.

Application Details

Applicants need to send:

  • Research proposal of maximum of 1,000 words
  • Brief Work-plan
  • Comprehensive CV
  • Two work samples (can include writing samples or practice-based media)

Please email the documents mentioned above as separate PDF files to dak@sarai.net with “Application for Short Term Research Project” as the subject header.

Last date for applications: April 12, 2015

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Short Term Research Projects in Social Media: Selected Proposals http://sarai.net/social-media-short-term-projects-selected-proposals/ Fri, 06 Jun 2014 07:55:17 +0000 http://sarai.net/?p=817 The Sarai Programme is committed to developing a public architecture for creating knowledge and creative communities. In keeping with this commitment, we seek to develop a community of scholars, writers and practitioners who are motivated to make the materials and outcome of research available for public access and circulation, with the understanding that an imaginative engagement with social experience will be best fostered by a sharing of information, ideas, research materials and resources. We see our system of Short Term Research Projects as a resource that will be built on by many people working whether individually or in groups, but with a sense of collective endeavour and public purpose.

The Call for Proposals for the Short Term Research Projects in Social and Digital Media attracted over 80 applications from all over the country, and it took a careful scrutiny of all the applications to reach our decision. We got applications from scholars as well as practitioners, young researchers and older, and proposals looked at a wide range of themes. The applications testify to an emerging research interest in developments in the last decade, as researchers and practitioners strive to reflect on the contemporary histories and techno-material practices opened by social media in India.

Working with limited resources, we could not support many exciting proposals that were submittted, and keenly look forward to organise another similar Call for Proposals next year, which we hope will attract event more numerous and diverse proposals. Meanwhile, please take a look at the excerpts from selected proposals for this year’s Short Term Research Projects in Social Media.

Shooting with the Interface

Anand Kumar Jha

This project will study the notions of image making in an interface which, by design carries the same technological bias as that of camera (becoming the eye of the viewer). The nature of a modern day interface to distort the complexity of an event/ action and present a simplistic view of a system to the viewer/ user, with an interesting exception that the person shooting from an interface and making the interface (the camera man and the camera manufacturer) are the same, and are jointly controlling/serving/ curating the image for the end user.

Digital Divide, Online Offense: Malayalee House, ‘Pandit Phenomenon’ and the Morality Debates in Contemporary Kerala

Darshana Sreedhar

My project will look at two contemporary phenomena in the Kerala mediascape — the emergence of the ‘internet celebrity’ Santhosh Pandit, and the recent reality TV show, Malayalee House, both of which have amplified the digital-social media’s potential to unsettle intended trajectories and uses of media circulation… These two instances are interconnected on many levels, albeit in different ways. First and foremost, the discussions triggered off by these phenomena through platforms like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter took unexpected turns, when bitter critics and their conflicting views became partially responsible for the immense popularity they have managed to gather. Again, both these instances triggered off the memory of the Malayalam ‘soft porn’ boom of the late 1990s. In fact, these events were seen as an extension of and an alleged return of “mulyachyuti” or immoral excess that soft porn ostensibly signified.

E–Revolution: Aims and Faces behind Kashmir’s Alternative Media

Gowhar Farooq

I aim to capture the causes that led to rise of the alternative (online) media in Kashmir, its evolution, impact (social and political) and significance through stories and conversations – and research – with people who gave birth to it, how they made it happen and their aims –– bound in a text-cum-picture book/ paper. This will be done through research, analysis of the situation(s), personal involvement and elaborate interviews. Further, important events and cases (both individual and public) that involved/boosted the alternative media will be featured. The book/ paper will also have a series of images (portraits and a photo essay). I would love to share with you the images and audio of the interviews that I would gather during the research but which won’t be a part of the final book/paper due to space constraint. The same can be a part of your archives if feasible/practical for you.

Digital Histories of Partition: Memory, Archives and the Narration of a ‘South Asian’ Identity Online

Kalathmika Natarajan

This research project seeks to study the reconstruction and archiving of memories of Partition and a South Asian past in the transnational space of the internet as a discourse on the production of a ‘South Asian’ identity online. By critically analysing the growing number of South Asian digital archives (particularly the 1947 Partition Archive, The South Asian American Digital Archives, Indian Memory Project, Panjab Digital Library, The Indian Subcontinent Partition Documentation Project, among others) and the memorialisation and discussion of Partition on social media, my research will focus on these websites as digital spaces that reiterate multiple narratives of Partition and reify a South Asian historical and civilizational past.

Mobile Phones and User-networks of Sharing: Mapping Consumption and Circulation of Media Content among Users of Limited Technological Means

Rashmi M

The proposed research project will study user-driven consumption, circulation and production of content through mobile phones and peripheral technologies in the Indian context. The research focus will be on users and user groups with limited technological means and access such as security guards, auto drivers and vegetable vendors. The overall aim is to understand how mobile phones have changed the socio dynamics of access to media content in India and investigate what such access mean to users and user groups of limited technological means. It also intends to trace formations of new techno-social networks of users in the processes of sharing content.

Ethnography of Social Media in Rural Rajasthan

Sandeep Mertia

The main aim of my project is to answer two simple questions – why rural people, especially youth, are attracted to social media and how do they use it. While I would reflexively modify these questions based on the field work, I am reasonably sure about the validity of the framework of these questions, based on my previous fieldwork experiences. I believe, these questions are situated in larger themes of urbanization and cultural studies of technology, and can help us significantly in understanding the socio-technical changes in rural India. I wish to conduct ethnographic research in the villages and towns of Rajasthan where I’ve already done some fieldwork… My overall approach would be to – first grasp the intricacies of digital media ecosystems in the field sites and then analyze the cultural change happening in those field sites in relation to access and use of digital media.

Hashtag #StingOp: Truth, Low-Resolution and Post Social-Media Transparency

Shaunak Sen

I’m interested in closely tracing the various anxieties and tendencies that animate the production of the sting. This would include an examination of the various novel scopic devices mobilized to administer the sting and the newer layers of visibilities they enable – different journalistic outfits today come equipped with variations of hidden cameras that often comprise of Google glasses, notebook spy-cams, pen-drive spy-cam, ear-plug spy-cam, shirt spy-cams, wristwatch audio recorders and various such innovations. I am also interested in the careful technical packaging of the sting video – these include meticulous breakdown of the stock footage that is to be used (shots of parliament, police forces, bureaucracy etc), text/supers used, the subtitles, filters used, title music commissioned etc during the whole sting assemblage… I hope dissecting the sting video in its disaggregated form might lend newer perspectives in understanding how inscrutability, occult and transparency work often together, especially in the era where MMS videos and YouTube act as the chief public archive of different brands of revelation footage.

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Call for Proposals: Short Term Research Projects in Social and Digital Media http://sarai.net/cfp-research-projects-in-social-media/ Wed, 12 Mar 2014 03:25:58 +0000 http://sarai.net/?p=507 The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, invites proposals from individuals for research projects on contemporary social and digital media, its ecologies and histories. Research is supported by a project grant from the Indian Council of Social Science Research.

Themes

We are interested in the following themes:

  • Legal research: Cases related to circulation of images and messages
  • Platform: Design, participation, revenue, alternatives
  • Media streams: Delivery and distribution of media (cinema, news, music,
    images)
  • Governance, media infrastructures, censorship and leakage
  • Censorship, government and commercial regulations and public campaigns
  • Intermedia junctions: screen cultures, interface design, data streams
  • Memory: Storage, databases, retrieval, devices
  • Online media as archive
  • Financial flows and social media
  • Issues of privacy/disclosure
  • Social media campaigns: Organized politics, petitions, activism
  • Practice-based research on software and multimedia platforms
  • Mobile phone culture and effects

In select cases, applications from themes beyond the above list will be considered.

This research project takes inspiration from the pioneering Sarai Independent Fellowship programme that initiated and supported a host of individual researchers working on contemporary culture.

Sarai seeks once again to support a diverse community of researchers: academics, practitioners (filmmakers, software programmers, artists, journalists etc), and independent scholars. See here the list of previous Independent Fellowship projects.

Conditions:

  • Like the previous programme, we propose to mobilise collaborative models of research: we expect selected researchers to interact both with Sarai’s in-house research group and a larger community, and deposit their materials in the Sarai archive for public access and use.
  • Researchers do not have to be resident in Delhi, but will contribute regularly with postings on their research in online platforms. There will be a final paper and presentation in a workshop at Delhi.
  • Applicants should be resident in India, and should have an Indian Bank Account and Income Tax PAN in her/his name.
  • The research project will be available for up to six months and for a maximum amount of Rs. 1,00,000/-.
  • The research projects will run from May 1, 2014 to October 31, 2014.

Application Details

You need to send:

  • A proposal (max 1000 words)
  • A two page work-plan
  • An updated CV
  • Two work samples

Please email these as PDF file(s) to dak@sarai.net with “Application for Short Term Research Project” in the subject header.

Last date for applications: April 10, 2014

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