Digital Culture Industry: A History of Digital Distribution was the result of a three-year research project into the history of digital piracy. The project attempted to understand how media retail went from discs to downloads, accounting for individual agency, software design and the wider social changes. This lecture will provide an overview of the project and examine how the research method topic and structure all influenced each other within a social research project. For Part 2 see http://www.slideshare.net/minyall/wk-25-digital-documents-lecture-slides This lecture was delivered as part of the BA in Sociology at the University of Essex, Spring 2014. http://www.essex.ac.uk/sociology/

1. WRITING A DIGITAL HISTORY WITH
DIGITAL DOCUMENTS

2. THIS WEEK
NEXT WEEK
1.About the Project
2.About the Method
1.What is a Document?
2. Issues with Digital Documents

3. 1.About the Project

4. THE PROJECT
• Focus: How piracy drove social change.
• A detailed contemporary history of
discs to downloads, 1996 - 2010
• Told via interlinking stories of key actors.
• Each story is told within a context of
wider social changes.
• Stories are used to demonstrate how
macro social change happened at a
micro-level.

5. KEY ACTORS

6. THE STRUCTURE
1996
MP3.com
Napster
20001998 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010
GNUtella
Kazaa & Grokster
BitTorrent
The Pirate Bay
CH.3
CH.4
CH.5
CH.6

7. EACH STORY...
• Individual actors
• Background biography
• Values
• Motivations
• Software Design
• Affected legal interpretation
• Affected user behaviour
• Affected design of laws
• Affected success
• Wider Social Context
• Law
• Technology
• Consumption Habits
• Business mergers
Contained Demonstrated
• The appropriation of outsider
innovation.
• Conflict between illicit and
legitimate spheres of society.
• Conflict over conceptualisations of
property.
• Difficulties of law making
• Software as a conduit for values
and ideology.
• Piracy as an economic matter
• Piracy as a political matter
• Piracy and a cultural matter
}

8. ACROSS STORIES...
• Overlapping narratives
• Recurring characters
• A single overall story of disruption
and stabilisation in the creative
industries.
1996 20001998 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010
CH.3
CH.4
CH.5
CH.6

9. 1. Conflict between piracy and the media industries drove legitimate
adoption of digital distribution.
2. Illicit outsider innovation has been appropriated into legitimate
businesses.
3. The capacities and standards of these services were defined by the
values of hacker subcultures.
4. This has resulted in greater media engagement, but also greater control
over that engagement.
5. The conflict led to the politicisation of piracy, feeding into issues of
surveillance, privacy and cultural freedom.
THE FINDINGS

10. 2.About the Method

11. Digital Documentary
Analysis

12. Detail☑is important

13. Follow the
Story
Illicit Activities
Rarely covered by ‘authoritative’ sources
Poor understanding by those
outside the community
History enacted
primarily online

14. THE DOCUMENTS OFTHE
INTERNET ARCHIVES
Blogs
Software Release Notes
Social Media CommentsPodcasts
Forums
Podcasts
Court Documents
Business Registrars
Newspaper Archives
Videos

15. Detail☑is important

16. ...but it was necessary to [frame]it
Identifying the topic
What is the story you want to trace?
Collecting the dataStoring
tagging
keywords
Analysing the data
names
dates
connections
associations
Plotting the data timelines
diagrams
interacting
overlapping
narratives
or

17. Visualisation of Evernote Data
• Shown: Notes tagged ‘Pirate Bay’ - 295
• Total Database for project - 1385

19. Justin
Frankel
Shawn
Fanning
Michael
Robertson
MP3.com My.MP3.com
PressPlay
Vivendi
Napster
Napster
MK II
Skype
Gnutella
Niklas
Zennsstrom
+
Janus Friis
Anthony
Rose
Kazaa
FastTrack
Gene
Kan
Wayne
Rosso
Grokster
Roxio
Roxio
Sharman
Networks
http://digitalcultureindustry.com/resources/

20. ...but it was necessary to [frame]it
Identifying the topic
What is the story you want to trace?
Collecting the dataStoring
tagging
keywords
Analysing the data
names
dates
connections
associations
Plotting the data timelines
diagrams
interacting
overlapping
narratives
or

21. you produce...
A Story
descriptive, empirically grounded
about
Change
Agency
Power
Disruption
Structures

22. Instead of beginning with a grand statement
about how social change unfolds, I sought to
describe it, and in doing so inadvertently
revealed the larger process of social
change…
[M]icro descriptive histories can reveal the
complexity of social change:The messy
inelegance, the ungraspable mass.
“
”(Allen-Robertson, 2013:195)

23. HOWTOPIC INFORMS
RESEARCH DESIGN
• History played out online, therefore look
for documents online.
• Internet as ‘Archive of Archives’ –
Facilitates a focus on specific detail and
pinpointing of time periods.
• Linking and connectivity – facilitates
browsing, find your own path through the
narrative.
• Accessible – high density of data
• Illicit = purposeful obfuscation
• Real-Time History – Blogs,Twitter
• Specialist coverage from amateur
reporters – professional reporters
unfamiliar with the technical intricacies.
• No Looking Back – interviews written at
the time captured the sentiment and
atmosphere of the time.Wanted
viewpoints from then, not re-written
histories from ‘now’.
• Many types of document not kept offline –
software release notes, comments in
forums.
• Follow the History - flexible framework of
what constitutes a document.
• All digital = easier cross-type document
management in a single database.
Assisted in the writing style and the
interlinking narrative structure – actors
turn up in strange places.

24. Topic
Method Structure