Tallinn University and Tallinn University of Technology collaborate with [White Rabbit ](https://www.whiterabbit.one/)on developing new blockchain based Registry of Film RightsTallinn University and Tallinn University of Technology collaborate with on developing new blockchain based Registry of Film Rights

Tallinn University together with Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) collaborate with White Rabbit to study the ways of creating value (including public value) for the wider film industry and the European societies by using blockchain technologies and related open governance methods. The collaboration takes place within the framework of Tallinn University’s research project “Public Value of Open Cultural Data”, funded by Estonian Research Council.

White Rabbit is a start-up company using blockchain technology to build a Registry of Film Rights (RFR) to be used to track the usage of films on the internet, allowing  easier payments by users/customers for watching films and faster and cheaper transactions for the rightsholders. The aim of the solution is to improve the diversity of film circulation, empower the producers with technology, make it feasible for rights owners to distribute their films to a global online audience  directly – improving thereby the diversity of cultural flows in Europe and across the world. 

RFR is designed to deliver revenue to rights holders based on recognizing content streamed anywhere online, accumulating information about each individual film title and its ownership, recorded immutably on the RFR  blockchain. The integrated record of content, rights and other metadata about films is expected to allow the assignment of rights, facilitate transparent mediation of disputes, and ensure producers, investors and institutions can verify rights from the moment a producer acquires intellectual property all the way through financing, production and exploitation of films. All transactions would be performed on blockchain leaving an immutable record and immediate settlement of deals. This includes payments for streaming, cinema tickets and usage across any other media.

With the original chain of rights, documents are stored in one place and encoded into a protocol, which allows for FIAT payments via blockchain-supported transactions, including royalties paid transparently and in real time to all parties involved. By using the above described methods and technologies White Rabbit expects to contribute to a global standard on how film market data is recorded in public blockchains, eliminating the need for centralised control. Yet, a new multi-stakeholder governance model needs to be developed to enable producers, investors and institutions to verify information with creators and their guilds, as well as to allow investors and funders to access information on contracts, transactions and payments.

White Rabbit’s research collaboration with Tallinn University and Tallinn University of Technology involves two closely interrelated sub-studies.

The first sub-study involves a development of a token economy for governance of commercial transactions on the RFR. With regard to media markets governance this is a generally understudied and underdeveloped area. Related solutions that have been developed to date have been applied in the domains of security, privacy, trust management and authentication (see [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]). However, a gap exists in that blockchain technology has not yet been investigated as a means for governing complex intellectual property (IP) rights within the media industry. Until recently, a method for developing blockchain-based governance applications has also been missing [6].

Our collaborative research project fills this general gap by applying a novel blockchain-DApp (distributed application) development method  to develop the governance lifecycle for blockchain-based IP management jointly with White Rabbit. Furthermore, this so-called DAOM methodology [7] lays the foundation for developing a tailored token economy and allows for legal compliance verification of the targeted platform for media content management. To the best of our knowledge, no blockchain-based media IP-management system with a coherent governance lifecycle exists to date. By applying the novel DAOM method, we aim to pioneer a coherent socio-legal technical approach for developing the White Rabbit platform.

The second sub-study on which White Rabbit, Tallinn University and Taltech will be collaborating involves the development of public value for the wider film industry and European societies. Here we define public value in terms of Mazzucato [8] – as a dynamic process in which public investments and labour by multiple parties create and shape a market that then generates different kinds of new value, including again public value – to be used by multiple parties to create new value. Different kinds of stakeholders, both public and private, participate in this system in order to secure a diversity of values produced – potentially useful for broader societies. Our hypothesis is that RFR has a potential to provide public value as, firstly, it turns film market data into a public good and, secondly, allows third parties to build their services on top of it in order to deliver innovation in financing, producing, marketing and distributing films. The system would collect data about film consumption and share it with the broader film industry, potentially undermining data monopolication by the dominant global streaming platforms. To understand how RFR could contribute more public value would be  useful for various kinds of stakeholders and broader European societies. We aim to carry out at least 20 interviews with relevant stakeholders, both public and private. The interviews will focus on expectations of value creation processes and related appropriate governance models for the RFR. The insights from this sub-study will inform the first sub-study on how to design an RFR token economy and the new governance model.

**References**

[1] Shrestha, B., Halgamuge, M.N. and Treiblmaier, H., 2020. Using Blockchain for Online Multimedia Management: Characteristics of Existing Platforms. In Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology Use Cases (pp. 289-303). Springer, Cham.

[2] Jan, M.A., Cai, J., Gao, X.C., Khan, F., Mastorakis, S., Usman, M., Alazab, M. and Watters, P., 2020. Security and blockchain convergence with Internet of Multimedia Things: Current trends, research challenges and future directions. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, p.102918.

[3] Liang, H., Wu, J., Zheng, X., Zhang, M., Li, J. and Jolfaei, A., 2020. Fog-based Secure Service Discovery for Internet of Multimedia Things: A Cross-blockchain Approach. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM), 16(3s), pp.1-23.

[4] Qureshi, A. and Megías Jiménez, D., 2021. Blockchain-Based Multimedia Content Protection: Review and Open Challenges. Applied Sciences, 11(1), p.1.

[5] Ren, Y., Zhu, F., Zhu, K., Sharma, P.K. and Wang, J., 2020. Blockchain-based trust establishment mechanism in the internet of multimedia things. Multimedia Tools and Applications, pp.1-24.

[6] Udokwu, C., Anyanka, H. and Norta, A., 2020, January. Evaluation of Approaches for Designing and Developing Decentralized Applications on Blockchain. In Proceedings of the 2020 4th International Conference on Algorithms, Computing and Systems (pp. 55-62).

[7] Udokwu, C. and Norta, A., 2021. Deriving and Formalizing Requirements of Decentralized Applications for Inter-Organizational Collaborations on Blockchain. Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering, pp.1-18.

[8] Mazzucato, M., 2018. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. Milton Keynes: Allen Lane.

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We are collaborating with White Rabbit

Our team collaborates now also with ERR where we aim to analyse ERR broadcasting data of several decades and develop ways to publish some of it as open data. The aim is to research ways to improve the datasets and prepare them for further analysis by the public. The initiative is based on the idea that public service media could generate public value in new ways. Public value is seen as something that contributes to the functioning of the public sphere and national innovation systems.

We will work with ERR’s archive data, more specifically with the metadata of ERR’s radio and TV shows. TLU’s Cultural Data Analytics (CUDAN) team also takes actively part in this collaboration. Mainly, their contribution will lie in finding potential new ways to use the existing data, to find connections and create visualisations to map the data and its connections. ERR relevant datasets are very rich, including data on production circumstances, makers, guests, topics and other characteristics of the content.

Secondly, as ERR is a public broadcaster and aims to open its data to the public, the process should result in protocols and principles that guide ERR in the future to provide its data to the public in an accessible and comprehensible manner. Relatedly, interactive visualisation options could be developed for users to easily interact with the data. This idea stems from the open knowledge and open governance thinking where there is push to publish information to the public in order to increase transparency and also accountability to the public.

User access to the data can also mean new services that are developed from the published data as it can be easily collected and analysed. For ERR and its partners such open data provision, visualisations it will enable and new knowledge learned could lead to further innovation as data may facilitate new perceptions on media work and value creation motivating changes in the working principles in the broader media industry. It is also a case that could motivate different institutions – public broadcaster, academia, government institutions – to come together and analyse and improve how data is used for the purpose of potential future innovations relying on this type of open data.

The collaboration runs until the end of 2021. In addition to the current project, potential future collaborations and further common interests are being discussed and identified in the process.

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Collaboration with the Estonian Public Broadcaster (ERR) is under way

It is time to announce another collaboration and a case study of our project – [Marché du Film](https://www.marchedufilm.com/), one of the biggest film markets in the world, an essential part of the Cannes Film Festival.

Marché du Film is operating [Cinando](https://cinando.com/), one of the biggest digital platforms for film projects. The platform is designed to facilitate global film industry operations including rights sales and investments. It also operates as a business-to-business VOD platform.

Tallinn University and Marché du Film have agreed to collaborate to analyse the contents of the Cinando database – on how to use its data to make sense of the broader processes in film markets and how could Cinando data be used to generate more public value to filmmakers and societies around the world. 

The researchers part of the “Public Value of Open Cultural Data” project will analyse Cinando data to understand how various cultural policy means in different parts of the world produce public value, how film trade affects global cultural dynamics and how to use and publish Cinando data in publicly beneficial ways. We will consult Marché du Film on improving Cinando and on alternative data publishing strategies to be used in the future. 

To learn more about the project “Public Value of Open Cultural Data” please read the project description here. 

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We are collaborating with Marché du Film

**This research project titled "The Public Value Chains of Cultural Open Data Solutions" is funded by the Estonian Research Council. This is what the abstract of our original application claimed: **

"The project studies the complex ways in which cultural open data solutions could produce 'public value'. In conceptual terms it builds on Moore's and Mazzucato's work on public value, links these to our work on innovation systems in creative industries and investigates how new open data technologies such as the Semantic Web and blockchain could be seen as conditioning the emergence of new innovation systems, how they provide new tools for understanding the functioning of the related public sphere and of industry systems and how public value is produced within these systems. Our work in this project will be both empirical as well as applied, aimed at designing and testing new cultural open data management systems with Estonian Public Broadcasting. The project is highly international (studying multiple case studies across the world) and interdiscplinary (combining network science and data analytics with media and innovation economics, anthropology, information systems design and others)."

**And this is how we justified the whole project: **

The EU sees open data (OD) as its main instrument for public sector reform and is improving its OD provision (European Union, 2017; European Data Portal, 2018). In parallel, EU and its governments are investing in digitising cultural heritage - mainly with an aim of repurposing heritage so that to arrive at new "value propositions", especially in educational services (EU Parliament and Council, 2005; EU Commission, 2011; EU Council, 2012). It is expected that public sector and private industries will work together to achieve this. Yet, what kinds of private firms? While global platforms are interested in data about cultural practices their conduct has been seen as a risk (van Dijck et al., 2018; Ibrus and Rajahonka, 2019). European firms again tend to be too small to risk investing in extensive services and, thus, it is the public sector that needs to make these costly early investments (Ongena et al, 2012). This suggests that the public sector produces complex ensembles of public value - provide free resources for public education and invest in data production and management in ways that would motivate third parties to utilise the data to produce both private assets and further public value. The inherent conflicts and challenges are apparent (see also McBride et al. 2019).

This highlights the central interest of our proposed project – to investigate the complex ‘public value chains’ of cultural open data provision. ‘Public value’ concept has been in recent times mainly studied within the public administration (PA) and innovation economics domains. Within PA this has been based on Mark H. Moore’s work (1995) on 'public value' as an alternative to the ‘new public management’ approach. In his articulation, public value is what the public most values and what adds quality to the public sphere (Benington and Moore, 2011:14). These two dimensions are interdependent – what is most valuable can be sorted out in a well-functioning public sphere. But the contemporary public sphere is fragmented and constituted by different kinds of institutions, including private media and communications platforms. Articulations of value and what may be produced as such may differ significantly. Thus, Moore and Benington (2011:15) have suggested that public value thinking is about the analysis of these interconnections, interdependencies and interactions between heterogeneous sets of parties operating across multiple boundaries. The role of the government therein is increasingly not one of rule-setter or service provider but of a proactive shaper of the public sphere and creator of value.

Within innovation economics Mazzucato has renewed the critique toward neoclassical economics (NCE) according to which value is subjective, supply and demand regulate the price and the latter is a direct measure of value (Mazzucato, 2018a:65). According to her, NCE leads to an economy of rent-seekers dominated by non-productive value extraction. She suggests that in a digital economy, we can no longer reliably say who creates value and who just extracts it, or how, therefore, the income should be distributed (2018a:71). Mazzucato suggests turning to the classical economists (Smith, Ricardo, Polanyi) who worked on the role of labour in conditioning value.

Considerations of labour - i.e. work towards value creation - would need to include the role of public institutions behind the provision of OD and related cultural services. Mazzucato shows that private capital is not leading in the early and most risky stages of innovation and, therefore, the ‘entrepreneurial state’ needs to step in (Mazzucato 2018b:30). Such public contributions should not be understood narrowly as just provision of ‘public goods’ that have ‘use value’ (in terms of Aristotle), but as active creation of public value – public institutions address what is of value in the public sphere and invest in creating relevant new markets (in the vein of Polanyi 2001[1944]:144). They can do so by supplying new services (such as OD) or commissioning other services (that deploy data). This means that governments can ‘crowd in’ private investments – by creating new markets, they stimulate further activity, labouring towards value by multiple parties that otherwise would not have happened. This phenomenon was evidenced as we studied value creation by Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR) in the music sector (Ibrus, Rohn and Nani, 2019).

In the context of government evoking new markets the concept of innovation systems (Chaminade 2018; Cooke 2004; Edquist, 2012; Freeman 1995; Lundvall 1992; Nelson 1993) becomes relevant. We have worked with this concept before (Ibrus, 2015a; 2015b) – the work culminated in a book (Ibrus, 2019) that studied the emergence of convergent innovation systems between audiovisual media and other service sectors. We build on Lundvall’s concept of systems of ‘interactive learning’ (1992; 2010) and on the work by Potts et al. (2008, 2011) on creative industries as ‘social network markets’ – as innovation systems consisting of networks of very small firms or professionals (fluid concept) where system coordination takes place in those professionals networking in complex ways, learning from, adapting, modifying and complementing each other’s work and as a result generating incremental innovations that, as they accumulate, may lead to more radical forms of innovation. In such systems institutional diversity is important (Cohendet and Llerena 1997,
 Johnson 2010, Gregersen 2010, Ibrus 2019) – the inclusion of public institutions such as public service media conditions the diversity of objectives and value propositions that not only secures the system against failures, but creates endogeneous dialogues between alternative views that may eventually produce the most apt solutions – i.e., what the public most values.
 
**To understand value creation in such systems/networks means, therefore, to study the labour contributed by all parties, their interactive learning processes, value articulations, dialogues and system coordination, and how the resulting incremental innovations and their accumulation contribute towards sorting out and producing public value and in which ways, eventually, are the rewards distributed for the production of value.**

**The role of OD provision in this context is twofold: 1) to use linked data to model activities in the network in order to interpret value creation; 2) to improve further public value creation by making data about networked value creation publicly available.**

Aiming to achieve both functions our project focuses on 2 data technologies hailed as the technologies of Web 3.0:

- Semantic Web (SW) – a set of standards (RDF, OWL, SPARQL) driven by W3C;
- Blockchain.

SW technologies establish a machine-readable semantic context for every element in the web. That is, they are designed to identify the meanings of everything online in their cultural and social contexts. The problem with such linked data that connect users and producers to each other and to content and services is that they have been monopolised by the largest platforms. The network effects that the platforms enjoy has consequences for how the created value is shared and measured. The privatisation of social data to serve private profits only produces a new form of inequality – skewed access to the generated data and profits (Mazzucato, 2018a:221). In this context the public provision of open data linking cultural producers, cultural practices and content constitutes an alternative strategy with regard to public value generation. In our recent project on cultural metadata, we experimented with such linking (Ibrus and Ojamaa, 2020; also Schich et al 2014; Schich and Meirelles, 2016) and predict that such data tools could enable not only to analyse how in public sphere/cultural innovation system novelties are arrived at, but also who have interacted and laboured to make them happen and ‘what the public values’ in terms of Moore. Yet, in addition to analytics there is value in the use: while there is some work out on the potentials of public value generation by (cultural) open data provision (Callinan et al., 2018; Lin, 2015; Pereira, 2017), the value created by transparently interlinking cultural producers, content, services and consumers needs special attention and is understudied everywhere.

The promise of blockchain is similar – it is an autonomous technology enabling ‘free’ data markets – i.e., data become resistant to the network effects of platforms. The affordance of blockchains for data management is accountability – any piece of content can be written to a blockchain, establishing a secure record of creation that can be tracked, traded, verified, etc. The qualities that a ledger possesses are clarity, consistency and consensus as a factual and agreed-upon recording of the basic datum of an economy: of identity, property, contract and value (O'Dair 2019, Potts and Rennie, 2018). This would enable agents to validate identity (Norta et al, 2019) in order to enter into contracts without needing to share private information. This means overcoming the trust problems characteristic of internet-based cooperation and trade (Dopfer and Potts 2019, Potts and Hartley 2018). There are many initiatives attempting this for the creative industries – Cinezen, FilmChain, MinersINC, Resonate, Binded, Custos, Kodak, Ujomusic, musicNow, etc.

What is interesting to us is that blockchains could enable labour to be traced across a supply chain – it would become a public record who produced or repurposed what. This relates to our aim to understand the role of labour in value and, more specifically, in public value creation. The question is how a data management technology could bring about a new form of coordination where labour becomes publicly visible and can start influencing value perceptions. This relates to Locke’s (1690) concept of ‘just deserts’ – an economic system in which individual labour is important, is possible to identify and conditions just rewards. In the digital economy where incremental innovations accumulate, individual labour contributions have been impossible to identify. This has enabled what Simon (2000) has pointed out – any inventor or investor builds on a vast store of collectively produced intellectual capital, yet they feel justified in earning a much higher proportion of rewards than their own contribution warrants.

Blockchain as a complementary technology to open data provision could enable to trace how value is built when some of its ‘particles’ are publicly contributed forms of content and data and some by independent labourers. It has been suggested that governments should set up a blockchain-based digital infrastructure of registries that would underpin cultural production ecosystems. These could enable identity management, data security, asset provenance, contracting and value transfer (Potts and Rennie, 2018; Norta 2018a, 2019).

We are interested in this potential, but also in how to use open (linked) data and blockchains in complementary ways (technical work for integration has started: Beris and Koubarakis 2018, Kim and Laskowski 2018, Janowicz et al 2018, Norta 2018b, Ruta et al, 2018) as coordination technologies for cultural innovation systems so that whole systems start to generate both public value and private assets.

Relatedly our main research question is: 
**How the emergent open cultural data provision utilises Semantic Web and blockchain technologies to integrate a diverse set of value creators into ‘datafied cultural innovation systems’ and what are the ways therein to generate more public value?**

Applied aim of the project is to design appropriate solutions for ERR and put forward recommendations for how to improve the public value generation by cultural open data provision.

Towards this end we integrate and build Moore's and Mazzucato's views to public value generation and suggest that **if we reconceptualise ‘public sphere’ as a ‘cultural innovation system’ to which public institutions and all cultural labourers notably contribute and which as a whole is designed to sort out the publicly valued cultural services, then we need to find a way to identify their contributions so that return a part of the wealth created by this system to these public institutions and independent labourers as value creators for enabling their continued contributions into the creation of public value.**

So, these have been our initial ideas. They do change dynamically, however. But for this project also to rely itself on new decentralised data infrastructures we decided to start communicating about it on Subsocial - a new decentralised social network utlising the token economy. We created a special 'space' for this here. For us this is an experiment itself. Let us see where will it takes us. 

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The origins: The initial ideas for the project on the public value of cultural data

**Introductory talk at the 10th Winter School of the Estonian Graduate School of Culture Studies and Arts**

This winter school is generally about the ‘digital condition’ and the role of arts and culture within it. To discuss this, we need first to consider culture. There are, of course, tens of different definitions of culture, but if we see culture as a very heterogeneous system of meanings that evolves and changes through communication between people and between different subsystems, then of course, the digital condition changes, and has changed, everything. 

What digital materiality and mediation mean for culture is often conflicting and full of paradoxes. However, we must start from somewhere: 

* Firstly, it is simply about the affordance of storing data (that is, potentially meaningful material). 
* Then, it is about interlinking those meaningful units, which may change their relationships. This is what is happening in contemporary cultural databases, where changing metadata schemas and algorithms are facilitating the changes in these relationships. However, paradoxically, there’s also a risk of fixing those relationships, of making them permanent and channelling them – as digital links fix only a select few of the relationships, potentially reducing the degrees of interpretative freedom, diminishing the relative openness and casualness of meaning that is associated with analogue cultures. 
* However, it is also, of course, about easing communications. Digital networks enable new communication channels between people and cultural subsystems and make it easier for people to access information and meanings.
* The latter also makes it easier to interconnect meaning systems, to combine cultural forms and epistemic communities and in this way, to create new meanings and forms, new identities and new creative communities.

As said, when making interconnections between a culture’s texts and when (re-)combining the forms and conventions, new ones tend to emerge. So, digitality can also be seen as a process that leads to textual innovation. Examples include:

* New forms of interactive and networked literature started to emerge in the late 80s when Apple introduced the HyperCard, which motivated new experiments in digital poetry and hypertextual writing. 
* There are new forms of interactive film (while they have a long history, it is only now that this form is taking off). There’s also YouTube, which is, effectively, a hypertextual video network that facilitates new kinds of sub-systems and continuities in culture.
* For music, Spotify is having a similar effect, especially its playlists, which create new combinations, new cultural continuities, new practices and, perhaps, also new musical identities and forms of belonging and social organising. 
* There are also the new hybrid forms, for instance, the many contemporary videogames that increasingly combine the conventions of filmic storytelling with many other interactive and participatory digital formats and conventions. 
* Lastly, on a higher level, the cultural process of linking and combining texts and a culture’s subsystems is increasingly known as transmedia communication. Transmediality can be understood as a broader phenomenon consisting of numerous practices, but increasingly codified practices of transmedia storytelling have also emerged. These bring us well-designed storyscapes, such as the Star Wars universe and many others. 

However, such interlinking and innovation is often seen as intensifying time. And also making time irrelevant. On the one hand, change has become more rapid and cultures are not getting much time to digest the changes. There is only little time for the new forms, concepts and relationships to solidify. Our meaning systems appear to many as constantly unearthed and unstable, which causes many of the contemporary conflicts. However, there’s also the squeezing of time, as texts from different eras are becoming interconnected in the databases. Old texts are easily accessible and becoming recombined with those from different eras. Thus, suddenly, the time between them no longer matters. Time has become abstract. Databases create their own times, temporary ‘micro-times’ as it has been also put.

So, times change. What does this mean for the humanities? On the one hand, we have new and better tools to study changes over time:

* By using data or network science to explore digitised resources, we can study in new ways the relationships in and between past times. This is the kind of work we are doing more and more at Tallinn University (CUDAN).
* However, we should take very seriously what such relativity of time means for contemporary culture. What does it mean for innovation and creativity? What does it mean for cultural memory formation? What does it mean for identities? And so on.

When we study contemporary cultures and their synchronic dynamics, we can see that the digital condition is an intensification of communication, dialogue and interchange. However, paradoxically, digital condition is also about auto-communication, which is still counterintuitive for digital cultural myths. With this I refer to closures, bubbles, echo chambers, the intensification of institutional or community auto-communications, the digging into digitised archives to celebrate one’s own pasts and the day-in-day-out confirmation of established genealogies. 

Yet, there are also the many dialogues. Thus, there is a need to study the communications, dialogues and interchanges between different cultural subdomains. What does the digital mediation and the digital channels of communication mean for this dynamic? Some argue that mobile social media constituted the new communication channels that enabled the Arab Spring to happen ten years ago. If so, then what are the roles of the new decentralised communication platforms and the new cultural forms of meaning in the current events in Belarus and Russia?

Of course, in this context, we need to emphasise that the digital condition is as much about decentralisation as it is about centralisation. To a very significant extent, platformisation is shaping the modern internet. 

* Platformisation is almost automated in digital culture, as in economic terms, digital culture operates with information goods that favour economies of scale. Plus: the networked communications condition also ‘network externalities’ – in terms of utility for users it makes always sense to join the biggest network. So, a few networks grow while others don’t. 
* We use these dominant networks and platforms, and we feel empowered by their participatory and interactive affordances. However, at the same time, we provide data about our lives and desires to those platforms, which then use us and our data for their operations. Such data collection and use for further decision making is called datafication of society/culture.
* The risks of datafication are apparent. Not only does it undermine our privacy, but the data collected is, also, unavoidably flawed. Data is always a summary of cultural complexities; it is a simplification. In terms of Juri Lotman, it is a simpler secondary modelling system. Such simpler models are good for noticing phenomena that otherwise we would not. However, in terms of Umberto Eco, data models are also, unavoidably, destined to lie. In the humanities, we need to become critically aware of how such models work in culture and the injustices they produce. To think about the risks, we have invited Professor Lina Dencik, the head of the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University, to give a plenary talk on these issues. 

We need to consider the risks, especially because digital culture is often framed by its futurisms. It is generally framed by optimism, expressed in the attempts to consider solutions for existing problems. For this it is also accused of ignorant ‘solutionism’ (by Yevgeni Morozov). Yet, we should not downplay the solution-orientedness, but emphasise the value systems that the solutions should be based on and driving. Humanities are very well placed to work on these value systems. As well as to address the cultural complexities that may be sometimes overseen.

Therefore, if we discuss critically, for instance, datafication and platformisation, then we should also ask: Are we going to be satisfied with more of the same or does something need to change? 

Topics for the rather immediate future include: 
* What impact will the installation of 5G networks around the world have?
* How will these networks enable the Internet of Things?
* Will the 5G networks also make possible a spatial storyworld or spatial web (the “metaverse” or the “mirror world” to use the current industry-driven terms)  based on augmented reality (AR)?
* Will blockchain really be able to facilitate the decentralisation of the platformised internet?
* Should there be limits to automation and the use of AI technologies in the governance of our cultural lifeworlds?

Based on these examples of future topics, perhaps one of the central questions for researchers of the digital condition of the future could be: What does it really mean to live in the metaverse or mirror world?

When planning our digital lives, what comes to the front is the relationship between the humanities and post-humanist thinking, because the further intertwining of technological and biological systems continues to emphasise the limits and limitedness of what it means to be human. However, I suggest the humanities should be driving this questioning and the necessary interdisciplinary dialogues. There is increasingly a need for a humanities-driven dialogue between biosciences and computer sciences, an area in which Estonia is well positioned due to its strong research traditions in biosemiotics and now also in cultural data analytics.

However, a research tradition that has not been much pursued in Estonian universities is the material study of digital culture, the studies of the machinery, the apparatuses, the ‘stuff’ that the signs, texts and meanings are made of. These machines then condition in specific ways what the texts and the meanings are really like. Here I am talking broadly about the various approaches within the broader domain of new materalism, more specifically, approaches such as media ecology, software studies and media archaeology. Due to this lack, we have put some emphasis on this topic in this winter school (such as the keynotes by professors Katherine N. Hales, Jussi Parikka and David Berry).

All in all, what does the digital condition mean for the students of the arts and humanities? It means studying the changing forms of culture, but also the dynamically changing relationships in culture. There are new tools, but also a need for a heightened reflexivity and critical stance towards these tools. It also means that there are new questions about the boundaries of culture and questions about if and how we should pursue the new interdisciplinary dialogues. There are new questions about the purpose of the humanities today. What is their role in the hierarchy and system of contemporary sciences? 


Indrek Ibrus, 25.01.2021


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Culture and humanities in the maturing digital era

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Public Value of Open Cultural Data

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Indrek Ibrus

Introductory talk at the 10th Winter School of the Estonian Graduate School of Culture Studies and Arts

This winter school is generally about the ‘digital condition’ and the role of arts and culture within it. To discuss this, we need first to consider culture. There are, of course, tens of...

It is time to announce another collaboration and a case study of our project – Marché du Film, one of the biggest film markets in the world, an essential part of the Cannes Film Festival.

Marché du Film is operating Cinando, one of the biggest digital platforms for film projects. The platform is...

\*\*This research project titled "The Public Value Chains of Cultural Open Data Solutions" is funded by the Estonian Research Council. This is what the abstract of our original application claimed: \*\*

"The project studies the complex ways in which cultural open data solutions could produce...

Our team collaborates now also with ERR where we aim to analyse ERR broadcasting data of several decades and develop ways to publish some of it as open data. The aim is to research ways to improve the datasets and prepare them for further analysis by the public. The initiative is based on the...

I am a professor of media innovation at Tallinn University, I study media change combining for this evolutionary and institutional economics, cultural semiotics, political economy of media and other approaches. Co-author/editor of "On the Digital Semiosphere", "Emergence of Cross-Innovation...

This is a space for the Tallinn University research project on how data  technologies such as Semantic Web and bockchain can be used for creating public value in cultural industries.

Tallinn University and Tallinn University of Technology collaborate with White Rabbit on developing new blockchain based Registry of Film RightsTallinn University and Tallinn University of Technology collaborate with on developing new blockchain based Registry of Film Rights

Tallinn University...