I'm Lecturer in Future Media in the School of Media, Music and Performance at the university of Salford. Trained to be a sociologist who largely uses qualitative research methodologies and methods and experienced in interdisciplinary research, my main work has investigated user participatory cultures and community-based innovation, especially the socio-technical dynamics in those communities that develop open source technologies and services (hardware and/or software). Membership of these open innovation communities is usually loosely defined, such that whoever share the same interest or a constellation of practices (in the sense of “a community of practice”) can be part of the community. Interactions in these communities are often socio-technical: members not only interact with each other but also with technologies (software, source code, infrastructures, computers, hardware). Also, members of these communities usually are not constrained by geographical locations. As such, inventing, adopting and learning to manipulate new information and communication technologies to facilitate collaboration and communication between members is key to the success of community building. Time is an interesting element in these communities in several aspects and through this workshop I am hoping to develop methodologies and conceptual frameworks for understanding the role of time in this body of work.

Dr Greenhill is a Senior Lecturer at the Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. Dr Greenhill has an extensive research and publication list exploring cultural practices of online communities. Dr Greenhill along with Dr Gary Graham is currently researching the changing role of the city, local communities and their use of community news media in the digital age. Both time and space play a major role in the preliminary findings of their research. Thurman (2010) has argued that the advance of the social media/Web 2.0 is eroding away the timeliness, relevance and utility of the local news product. However our research indicates that community news media firms are not a dying breed as predicted by Meyer (2004; 2008), but are evolving over time from product supplier into a multimedia content service provider. In response to the challenges of the internet, many media firms are retaining their community connectivity and therefore influence - for being trusted sources of locally produced news, analysis and investigative reporting about public affairs. However, there are concerns that news media organizations are moving online into the (virtual) community space rather than creating their own space. This is potentially detrimental to community connectivity and temporal belonging and raises questions over whether consumers (local community groups) will be willing over time to interact in these spaces or whether they will wish to create/find their own spaces. This paper presents the preliminary findings of research exploring time and the changing role of local communities and their use of community news media in the digital age.

I am an independent researcher whose academic training has primarily been in the area of Literary Studies and Critical Theory. In 2007 I began volunteering at a people’s history museum in Cardiff called the Butetown History & Arts Centre, where I learnt about life stories, oral history and the possibility of using museums as a vehicle for social change. Since then I have pursued an interest in public history and have recently curated an exhibition about feminism in Bristol called Sistershow Revisited. At present I am very interested in creating on and offline spaces where people and historical information can collide. My approach to this workshop will draw on these concerns, specifically exploring the issue of time within researching, documenting and disseminating vulnerable forms of material culture. As a case study I will draw on the Women’s Liberation Music Archive, a recently launched web archive of music from the UK feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s. I shall be exploring how the creative actions produced by women in these communities, when digitised, has the capacity to transform the temporality of contemporary cultural memory.