Researcher blog

25 June

Although the project has now officially come to an end, we continue to work hard to get our work out there in the academic community and beyond and so are concentrating on our outputs and focusing on that all-important impact. This week we submitted another article, this time focusing on the network analysis.

The article, entitled ‘YouTube interactions between agonism, antagonism and dialogue: video responses to the anti-Islam film Fitna’ is available on request from the research team.

Next week I am speaking at two exciting events to which I was invited. The first is the Social Media and the Sacred, which is the Mediating Religion International Research Network’s Annual Conference (28-29 June, London).  Title of presentation: Innovating methods across disciplines: studying religion on YouTube. I will highlight the methods we have used in the project by focusing on some of the outcomes from using each different method (data gathering, survey, content analysis, network analysis and so on) and again promote our free research tool. The conference is co-organized by the Centre for Research on Socio Cultural Change (CRESC) and the excellent research team led by Kim Knott at Leeds university who I have written about before.

Then later in the week I will at the 'Faith & Youth' one-day conference in Leeds (2nd of July). This event has been organized by the Faith X Change network, which –from their website- is ‘is a research network with a focus on issues of relevance to young people of faith engaged in civil society. It is particularly interested in work with or about young people of all faiths engaged in social action - in communities, in organizations, and in politics. It is a learning network that seeks to support research which can underpin policy and practice in this field’.

Both events will offer a great opportunity to further share our work with not only the academic community, but others as well.

 

4 June

Funding for the project officially ran out at the end of May, but there is still a lot to do! I will not have time to write a blog each week, but will certainly put updates up as when I have relevant project news.
This week a short article highlighting the cutting edge innovative methods we have developed for studying and gathering data on YouTube has gone up on the Religion and Society website. Some highlights:

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The Fitna project team sought to not only reliably capture this online material, but moreover to automatically code the metadata associated with each video in order to save valuable time. The project’s Research Associate, Dr Farida Vis, took creative initiative and enlisted the help of Mike Thelwall, webometrics expert and Professor of Information Science at the University of Wolverhampton. He describes webometrics as ‘the study of web-based content with primarily quantitative methods for social science research goals using techniques that are not specific to one field of study.’

Thelwall developed a custom-made e-research tool for the project, which overcomes these serious issues of data gathering, stating that: ‘from a cybermetrics perspective, the project was an excellent initiative to be involved with because it involved large-scale web data collection and analysis, which is a cybermetrics specialism, with clear social goals. It was also valuable to gain experience of analysing YouTube, as a relatively new and high-profile web site that represents a novel and innovative web environment. The opportunity to develop and adapt cybermetrics methods was particularly exciting.’

Furthermore, in analysing the material, the team critically engaged with a set of methods frequently used within the Social Sciences, assessing their merits for studying YouTube. The team have recently presented on their methods at the Innovative Methods in the Study of Religion Conference, organised by the AHRC/ESRC funded Religion and Society programme, led by Professor Linda Woodhead at Lancaster University, which has funded this research.

In line with the open-access philosophy, the team have made the e-tool available for free to other researchers, which has been greeted very positively. Jasjit Singh, a PhD student at the University of Leeds studying young British Sikhs said:

“The Fitna project is a real example of cutting edge innovative research. It is always challenging to find structured ways of studying new media - what Farida and her team have done is to develop a clear method on how to study YouTube videos and even more importantly have made these tools available to everyone else. Like myself, I'm sure many academics will find the methods and the e-tool which the project team have developed very useful for their own research.”

Similarly, Professor Roger Hewitt of Goldsmith University, Scientific Co-ordinator of the international European research programme: ‘The Re-emergence of Religion as a social force in Europe?’ funded by NORFACE highlighted the value of such cross-disciplinary collaboration as, “…a really good example of the kind of work we were hoping to find going on.”  

 “The internet has become an important new location for religious activity and discussion and this is increasingly recognized but the way this team have gone about developing ways to subject it to serious academic analysis is very exciting.”

“Bringing Computer Science and Media Studies together in this way has clearly been most productive for the team and this can only have a positive impact on the wider research community.”

For more information on the e-tool, including a user guide and how it can be downloaded along with a set of other webometrics tools developed by Mike Thelwall, please visit: http://lexiurl.wlv.ac.uk/searcher/youtube.html

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Full article here. Hopefully it will also appear on the main AHRC site as well get a write in Times Higher. We’re working on it! We of course want to share our free research tool with as many researchers as possible.

 

28 May

No blog this week, on annual leave.

 

21 May

This week I was invited to take part in an event in Manchester University organised by Kate Cooper, entitled ‘Conflicting Identities: Religion, Race, and Belonging in a Changing World. A round-table discussion sponsored by the University of Manchester in collaboration with BBC Religion and Ethics’.  The idea of the day was to ‘discover how individuals in academic, media, and stake-holder organizations can sharpen each other’s thinking about issues of social inclusion.  The theory behind the day is that by learning how one another think, colleagues in the three sectors can develop work that is not only better-informed and more responsive to the current context, but also more creative and exciting.  We also want to discover how the involvement of ‘ivory tower’ disciplines such as theology and ancient history can add value to discussion of social issues in the public forum.’

As part of the workshop Kate had invited two senior members from BBC Religion and Ethics (Jean Claude Bragard and Christine Morgan) who were essentially there to give the academics and others a good understanding of what is involved in turning an idea/research into a radio or television programme. It was very inspiring to bring such a diverse group of professionals together and the set up of the day worked well.

Linda Woodhead, director of the Religion and Society programme, gave a keynote presentation, highlighting the differences across three key generations in terms of their relation to religion. She argued that the parents of the baby-boom generation mainly engaged with religion as a ‘package’, something you were born into and with an organisation and leadership you stayed with for life. Baby boomers were an unusually secular group, who reacted against religion. As part of the secular welfare state, a highly secular project, religion needed to be left behind. Moreover, they reacted against their parents. Younger people, the children of the baby-boomers today don’t have to react against their parents. But they may actually react against secularism. She suggested a different, more open situation, where religious choice more possible.

For the rest of the day, we were put into teams with whom we had to come up with three ideas for academic projects and three ideas for a radio or television programme. The BBC people as well as Linda moved around the room helping each team in turn. Our team (Ruth Deller, Joanna Sadgrove, Mark Cutter) got on so well that we have decided to see if we cannot try to work together in the future. Between us we have a formidable set of skills and it is rare to click so well with a group of people, so to be continued!

In terms of the ideas we came up with as part of the workshop three of our projects got top votes, including our TV/radio ideas for ‘Project Modest Runway’ and young Israelis refusing to serve in the Israeli army, the IDF. I will certainly stay in touch with my group and following a very productive chat with Christine from the BBC, see what is possible in terms of pursuing some of these ideas.

 

14 May

This week I have been working on getting positive feedback for the project from the various academics I have met at conferences his year. Specifically I am hoping to get some good endorsements for the e-tool Mike Thelwall has developed for the project. Mike has now kindly produced a how-to-guide for the tool, which is free to download if you contact him. I will work on the piece some more and hopefully it can then be sent to various places such as the programmes site, the AHRC site as well as a highlight in Times Higher.

Mike’s how-to-guide, ‘Getting data from YouTube with LexiURL Searcher’ for the e-tool can be found here. I will also add it as a separate section on the main website so that visitors to the site can instantly find it.

 

7 May

This week we are really starting to focus on our outreach strategy beyond the academic publications and to that end Liesbet had a good conversation with PR officer Amanda of the university. Initially we were simply suggesting to pitch for a spread in The View, the university newsletter, but Amanda suggested we could try to get the news about our e-tool in the Times Higher. This is of course very exciting and we should make the most of this possible opportunity.

I am going to contact Mike Thelwall to write a short how-to-guide for the research tool and to make sure that he is happy for us to pursue this avenue. I will also try to get something on the Religion and Society website and hopefully the main AHRC one. Exciting stuff and very much in line with our recent online dissemination success. See last week’s blog.

 

30 April

This week I was invited to speak at an event organised by Connection Factory, which is ‘an online network, and series of events, which aims to bring together media professionals and academic researchers, primarily to explore the potential of new forms of public service media’. The event, ‘Public Engagement for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Researchers’ sought to discuss how to better disseminate and share our work with a wider audience than strictly an academic one. My talk, entitled ‘Fitna: the video battle. Outreach, impact and creative dissemination’ highlighted the increased focus on research ‘impact’ within academia, examining the ways in which impact is defined by the AHRC as well as some of the critique it has received from within academia, specifically highlighting Nathalie Fenton’s recent piece in 3-D, the newsletter for the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Organisation (MeCCSA).

Moreover, I aimed to explore, using examples from our own project, to consider what one might do with unexpected and potentially negative impact. When two online pieces appeared on Dutch websites discussing some of the findings from our project, the comments users left were on the whole negative.

For example, to the article that appeared in De Jaap (in Dutch), comments included:

‘senseless conclusion, pointless research… Is there even money for this work? What is the relevance? What are we supposed to do with the conclusions? Jesus, I have always though that the academic world was weird en wrong, but this takes the biscuit… What’s next? … my blood begins to boil from this kind of work. (JM)

Negative about the project in general: ‘but research budgets have to be spent otherwise the ministry will cut off funding’. (JM)

Accusations that social science is a pseudo science, with frequent sarcastic references to our work as ‘science’ (Maarten); ‘Those researchers are only doing this work to get notices? Right?’ (Bart van de Hulsbeek)

Nobody at the event dealt with this issue, but it is worth asking what to do with a negative public response. Furthermore, when we speak about ‘public value’ what role should ‘the public’ have and how to value this? It is also important to remember that one always deals with multiple possible publics, particularly in research on new/online media. So if ‘the public’ is the ‘general public (2.0)’ (as seen in our unexpected outreach) how can they best be engaged? I concluded with the idea (borrowed from Simon Firth) that it is worth considering the quality of the engagement rather than the quantity of those engaging with the work.

As part of further exploring our online dissemination potential, I had made sure to put the presentation slides online beforehand and to actively use twitter during the event. Just before starting my presentation, I tweeted the link to the presentation slides (here) and during my presentation as well as after it others in the audience re-tweeted this link as well as their evaluation of my talk. I was pleased to see these positive comments (here, here, and here, for example), which of course meant that the information was shared with a much larger online audience. The online impact was such that when we checked the statistics for the website the next day, my tweet has generated so much traffic to the publications page, that this had become the second most visited page across the whole of Loughborough University, after the main university page. This is of course quite a remarkable and unexpected finding and we will certainly build on this online dissemination strategy in the future.

It will be worthwhile to produce a graph where we map the traffic to the website over the course of the project. Alongside this we will look at all the events one of us presented work from the project and how this can be linked to peaks in traffic to the website. It is clear that there will be a clear spike in traffic at the end of April following my Connection Factory talk. This is a valuable finding as it is a cost effective and simple dissemination strategy that others might want to adopt in the future.

 

23 April

This week we submitted the final version our article, ‘Emerging citizenship on YouTube: activism, satire and online debate around the anti-Islam video Fitna’, which will appear in Critical Discourse Studies, vol.7(4).

Details of the article were highlighted in last week’s blog and the full article is available from the research team.

16 April

Submitted another article from the project this week. In it we analyse whether and how the participatory opportunities of the digital technologies, in our case YouTube, invite performances of citizenship, especially with respect to the articulation of religious and/or political identity. The sheer numbers of YouTube activities (videos, views and comments) demonstrated that this was not at all a marginal phenomenon within the wider Fitna and Wilders controversy, making the question as to what these videos mean, or – to be more precise - for which contexts the posters make them meaningful, all the more pressing.  We used the concepts of ‘voice’, ‘performance’ and ‘citizenship’ to approach this issue and found that the video genres unique to visual digital culture (tagging/jamming, cut-and-mix and vlogs) each invited their own kinds of political and religious performances, and assumed particular traits and interests of their audience. The most common YouTube reaction for Muslims was to upload copies of videos that expressed their own understanding of Islam as a peaceful religion in contrast to the picture drawn by Wilders. The jamming videos saying sorry were unique digital means of activism, enabling a particular participation in the controversy around Fitna that assumed a global audience open to apology. The cut-and-mix videos, appeared to be especially welcome means for satire and parody and appealing to audience emotions, but also for the deconstruction of Fitna which addressed audience cognitive competence.  Vlogging about Fitna, was often part of a more regular practice of video production that was individually or institutionally maintained. We conclude that the particular articulations of religious and political identities, with different modes of audience address assume a connectedness between dispersed people in which new forms of(unlocated) citizenship emerge.

 

9 April

Earlier this week, Dutch Communication Scholar (University of Amsterdam), Linda Duits, posted two short articles about our project on two Dutch websites dealing with current affairs. It first appeared on De Jaap, and later in the day was adopted by the much larger and well known HP de Tijd.
In their titles both articles alluded to Wilders abusing womem in some way. I have translated the opening paragraph from the HP de Tijd article:

‘Geert Wilders is an advocate for women’s rights. He is outspoken against the terrible patriarchical oppression of women. That is to say, the Muslim woman. Despite this position, we know little about Wilders and [his position on] women. He has an imported Hungarian bride, but that’s as far as it goes. A group of communication scholars are conducting research into the way in which Wilders represents women in his controversial ‘film’ Fitna. They propose that Wilders exploits women and their bodies. Wilders as a Dutch loverboy? [translated from the Dutch by the author].

This article was accompanied by a picture of Wilders wearing a lilac hijab, with the parliament in the background. Both articles received a significant amount of comments, especially the piece appearing on the well know current affairs site, where within hours it became the most read article on the site having received more than 80 comments by the next day. The nature of many of these comments was very telling, as most were very negative, both about the project and the nature of our readings, as well as about academia in general. The other thing that was interesting for me was that although this is not to focus of our project, we specifically point out that we are not in the business of analyzing Fitna itself, but rather the response and how this can be theorized, the editors at De Jaap where the article appeared first, preferred this much more sensational ‘hook’. It has certainly led to a considerable amount of debate and if I have time at some point (!), it would be good to have a closer look at the nature of these comments as it can and I think should be seen as a form of dissemination. In that sense it is very valuable to get a flavour of how our research is perceived by those outside academia.

 

2 April

Overall the Innovative Methods in the Study of Religion conference this week was very enjoyable and it was good to hear about some interesting projects. In terms of scope, ambition and methodological innovation, we measured up very well I would say.  I did some live tweeting from the various panels, which at least a couple of international colleagues interested in the area but unable to attend the conference followed.

Our paper was part of a very strong panel that was nicely complimentary in terms of interests, specifically with the work of Elizabeth Poole and Teemu Taira (part of a project lead by Kim Knott replicating a study from the early 1980s about the coverage of religion in the media), but also Kaye Haw, who presented work on video, voice and participatory research (website details: http://www.videoandvoice.co.uk).

It was really nice to have Mike Thelwall (co-author) attend the presentation and people were of course very excited about the research tool and our mixed methods approach. I have put the slides of the presentation in the publications section. We received some very nice feedback and many thought the collaboration and ongoing dialogue with Mike was great.

I briefly met Rebecca Catto, who assist Linda Woodhead in running the Religion and Society programme and also runs the programme’s website. As we have now decided that we will make the e-research tool Mike designed for the project available to the wider research community, it would be good to write up a news item for the programme’s page. In the meantime, simply get in touch with me (f.a.vis@lboro.ac.uk).

 

26 March

Preparing for the conference next week on Innovative Methods in the Study of Religion. With this paper we aim to get a number of things across:

1. We work from the assumption that within certain disciplines (Media Studies for example) there exists an assumption that YouTube represents easy and accessible data. But as we have found with our project this certainly is not the case and as a data archive if you like, it is in constant flux, unstable with new videos constantly added, others taken down and posters simply get suspended as we saw with quranmiracles.
2. In terms of the theme of the conference we have to show the relevance of studying religion on YouTube. So far the work on the YouTube core (Paolilli, 2008) seems very relevant and showed that religion represents a significant cluster.
3. We need to address the issue of data collection, which is where the e-tool Mike Thelwall developed for the project is highlighted. But, moreover, what exactly is data on YouTube? What does it mean and how can it be theorized? Linked to this each method (and data!) employed has its own limitations, which need to be addressed. As part of the discussion about the e-tool I will highlight the problems we had with manual collection of the material during our pilot study.
4. I will highlight the methods that we have employed so far or are still in the process of employing: content analysis; network analysis (with Mike’s help!); genre analysis; survey analysis (both still ongoing).
5. In the end a number of things need to be clear: that there is a real value in studying religion on YouTube, that as a depository for video material it does not offer easy data; and finally we need to highlight the value of working across disciplines. In this case the collaboration with Computer Science has really paid off!

Mike Thelwall will attend the conference as well, which is great and it will be good to discuss further how we can share the e-tool further with the research community, which would be very valuable for those doing work in this area.

 

19 March

Submitted another project article this week. In it we look at the alternative YouTube videos made by women from a feminist perspective, contrasting the gender portrayal and narratives in Fitna with those in the alternative videos. We contend that Fitna expressed an extremist Orientalist discourse, in which women are presented as the current and future victims of the oppression of Muslim men and Islam. In contrast, the YouTube videos give voice to women themselves who come from across the globe, are relatively young and often active Muslims. Secondly, they express different viewpoints in generically new ways, criticizing and ridiculing Wilders or producing serious and committed explanations of their own understanding of Islam. Thirdly, although relatively few women appeared in the videos, the ones who did spoke for themselves, not only taking on Wilders, but also claiming their right to speak within Islam. We propose to understand these videos as acts of citizenships through which women constitute themselves as global citizens, in some cases by engaging in ‘deliberation’ as it is understood in feminist political theory, in other cases by taking a ‘voice’ that can be responded to. 

 

12 March

No blog this week. Away on annual leave.

 

5 March

Earlier this week, Kim Knott, Elizabeth Poole and Teemu Taira came to present findings from their project: Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred, sponsored by the Religion and Society programme. It is a longitudinal study, replicating an 18-month project that Kim herself was involved in as a post doc nearly 30 years ago.
Their main research questions are to do with:
1. How is religion – both ‘conventional’ and ‘common’ – and the secular sacred portrayed in contemporary newspapers and on terrestrial television? What key themes emerge, and how are such themes treated?

2. What does the portrayal of these themes reveal about the relationship between (a) religion and the media, and (b) religion and secularity?

3. How are media portrayals of religion received and experienced by their audiences in light of their own religious/secular interests and everyday media practices?

4. How do findings from the new research compare with those from the 1982-3 study, and how can any changes be interpreted historically and theoretically?
(from their project proposal). The key event that they looked at in the 1982-3 study was the visit of the Pope to Britain. For the updated study, they examine Geert Wilder’s ‘failed’ visit to the UK in February 2009, which received considerable media attention. They contend that the main discourse through which Wilders is covered in the UK press, is around a discourse of ‘freedom of speech’. Similar to a study done by the Dutch News Monitor, ordinary citizens, in particular Muslim voices are absent. Elizabeth Poole writes a blog where she, among other things, gives updates on this exciting project.

 

26 February

Still coding! Not much else to report. Looking forward to presentation at Loughborough next week by Kim Knott, Elizabeth Poole and Teemu Taira, who are also doing some work on Geert Wilders. Specifically they’re looking at the ‘failed’ attempt by Wilders to enter the UK in February 2009, to show Fitna in the House of Lords. They argue that the main way that was reported was around issues of ‘freedom of speech’ rather than discussing what the film is about or discussing Islam. It will be an interesting paper, I’m sure.

 

19 February

There is not that much exciting progress to report this week, as I have been coding a lot! We are working on an article that focuses on the female posters in the corpus and the videos they made. Specifically we are coding the way in which each person in the video appears (still/moving image, text, voice), whether they have any religious markers (Christian/Islam/other) in terms of items of clothing and headwear and whether they are pr/anti/neutral on Fitna and the wider Islam debate in general. We also code how long they appear on screen. Especially this time coding takes a lot of time! But it will be worth it as we will be able to compare the way in which gender is represented in the Wilders film and establish if and in what way gender featured in the response videos. Do they show different kinds of Muslim men and women? Specifically in terms of the women, what alternative representations can we find in the response videos and in what kind alternative settings are women able to speak (or not)? I’m looking forward to the coding being done so that we can do some statistical work on the results and see what we’ve got.

 

12 February

Following the exciting meeting with Mike Thelwall last week about doing a network analysis of the posters who uploaded videos during the peak period (February – May 2008), I sent him the details and the first networks are now in.

The one highlighting the connections between posters based on subscriptions looks especially promising. We find eight clusters of connections: one large cluster and seven smaller ones, which comprise of between two and eight posters each. The larger cluster is made up out of 28 posters with some connecting to each other, that is to say that the arrow indicates the poster they are connecting to, but they are also being connected to. What is exciting for our research is that this larger cluster seems to mainly be made up out of Muslim posters.

In studying the structure and the network of YouTube, what the core is made out of Paolilli (2008) notes that currently ‘there is no clear picture of how people use YouTube and why’. However, in his study, he found that similar to other social networking sites, YouTube appears to have a clear social core among its authors. Whilst this main core is made up of mix of the most popular genres, namely guitar music, humor, video game related movies and rap music, he also identifies a significant cluster for religion, Islam and Christianity in specific, which merits further investigation. He notes that YouTube producers are strongly linked to others producing similar content, thus making the different clusters socially cohesive.

This is very useful to our project and our very preliminary findings, specifically this main cluster identified, certainly seems to be socially cohesive along the lines Paolilli suggests.

 

5 February

Something very interesting happened this week. After we got a very low response rate to our survey the first time we tried (only 1 out of 50 filled out the questionnaire) we decided to do away with our sample method and instead invite all posters who had made videos during the key time period we’re looking at. So that meant sending out another 369 invites and reminders to those already invited. We immediately noticed that we had a significant jump in channel views, up from 25 last week to 85 today, and moreover various YouTube users also got in touch with us via our channel asking more questions about the project or to simply let us know that they weren’t going to take part. Some even subscribed! One user contacted us to ask whether we would have any objections to him making a response film to the project. We said we didn’t and so this film was uploaded on Wednesday evening. Initially it only received a handful of views, but after I tweeted about it and an influential Dutch twitter user re-tweeted the URL to the video the viewing figures started to grow. At the last count today, they were up to 421.

This video has raised a number of interesting questions and points for debate about doing work on Web 2.0 and the possibility for such unintended developments and precisely what to do with them.  For other disciplines such as anthropology being more directly involved in your own research is not that unusual, but the speed and reach Web 2.0 offers in such instances perhaps does make it different from less digitally (inter)connected fieldwork. It is certainly an interesting development that if nothing else allows us to say something about the reach of our project and possibly its social impact beyond academia. To be on the safe side we have of course informed both the funding council and the university of this development and we’ll just watch this space.

I also went to meet with Mike Thelwall this week to discuss the possibility of doing a network analysis of the YouTube posters who had uploaded response videos to Fitna.  Such an analysis may look at a range of possible links: the users they are friends with, which channels they subscribe to and the way in which they comment on each others’ videos. We are really keen to see what -if any- clusters or connections may come out of this and how we can best label them. Will it be possible to easily identify clusters along religious lines for example? It is clear that quite a few of the posters we have looked at so far self-identify as Muslims, but will this be their most tangible link to other posters? I can’t wait for the results!

 

29 January

A lot to report this week! After the rather shaky start we had with the survey, we decided to do two things. First of all, I gave our YouTube channel a bit of a make over, which will hopefully improve the response rate. So far it has already resulted in an increase in channel views (up from 1 to 25). Moreover, we decided that we would now invite all posters who uploaded videos during the peak of activity (February – May, 2008). This means that we have to invite an additional 369 posters and send reminders to the 50 we had already invited. Hopefully this result in a strong improvement soon so that our target of 30 completed (usable) surveys is not in jeopardy.

This week I also found out about an interesting initiative in the Netherlands, a website run bij Theo Zijderveld, on Media, Religion and Culture. The first theme the website will address is Islam and the media, and I will contribute a short article about the Fitna project for this and from then on contribute when time permits. The other contributors are mainly based in the Netherlands, but I saw that Stewart Hoover will also add his insights, so it should be an interesting site for discussion.

Apart from all the excitement with the survey, I got in touch with Emilio Spadola, who I met at the Boulder conference and who read a really interesting paper there. He kindly sent me his paper, which was very useful and so this week I have been reading that and some extremely helpful references he uses:

Eickelman, D and Salvatore, A (2002) ‘The Public Sphere and Muslim Identities’ European Journal of Sociology, Vol. 43, No.1:92-115.

Anderson, D, Eickelman, D F and Jon, W (1999), ‘Redefining Muslim publics’ in Anderson, D, Eickelman, D F and Jon, W (1999).

I found the first particularly helpful as it alerted me once again to the Eurocentrism of the Habermasian public sphere. Instead the authors concentrate on the work of John Dewey, and so I finally ordered Dewey’s ‘The Public and its Problems’ and look forward to reading it in full. Related to these theoretical concerns and our interest in ‘listening’ I read Tanja Dreher’s recent article in Media, Culture and Society with great interest:

Dreher, T (2010) ‘Speaking up or being heard? Community media interventions and the politics of listening’ Media Culture and Society, Vol. 32, No. 1: 85-103.

One of the key issues she addresses is that of media power and issues of responsibility and listening, namely that it is not merely marginalised voices that have to improve their possibilities for speaking up, but rather, and more crucially, that it is those in power who have along way to go in terms of hearing these voices. She says:

Thinking through the difficulties and the limitations of speaking up and intervening in the mainstream news media means that, for me, the question of media change in the context of multiculturalism becomes a question of changing the processes and politics of hearing rather than of speaking (98).

These may be obvious points when articulated in this way, but considerable empirical work is needed to better understand both the speaking and the listening she describes.

 

22 January

Back from America and straight back to dealing with various urgent project tasks. The main one is to invite 50 YouTube posters to take part in our questionnaire, which Sabina launched before the end of the year. She has compiled a theoretical sample, targeting as many men as women, from a range of different ages and from different countries: a third coming from the Netherlands, another third from Europe, North American, Australia and New Zealand and the final third from the rest of the world.

After I invited all 50 I had a bad feeling we may get a low response and after we only had 1 response after a number of days I wrote a short paper with a number of suggestions. One of the factors that may be an issue is the fact that we did not select on levels of activity. That means that some of the posters, who only uploaded one Fitna response two years ago on a channel specifically opened for this purpose, may now be hard to reach. We may also need to address the look of our YouTube channel. Currently it is a blank canvas and this may be a problem. If the response rate doesn’t pick up we may need to rethink our approach and this may actually highlight something about the use and appropriateness of the survey method for studying Web 2.0 platforms.

 

15 January

The rest of the conference was very enjoyable and our paper went very well. It was a shame that we had to compete with a very popular clashing session, but in the end we had a great discussion. Not in the least because of the excellent paper that completed our session, by Emilio Spadola entitled: ‘Islamic Respons-abilities: Whispers and Echoes of the Technologized Call’. What was really fascinating about his paper was how he introduced the idea of ‘the call’, meaning a variety of things, but predominantly the call to Islam as well as Islam’s many calls. I certainly want to know more as it could link very nicely with the work that we are doing on listening, voice and re-thinking concepts of online participation (such as lurking).

Another paper that stood out for me was Linda Duits’ paper on young Muslim girls in the Netherlands. The premise of this paper was to link two issues related to young girls, Muslim and non-Muslim: the veil and belly shirts, which exposes large parts of the belly. So the controversy over on the one hand wearing too much and on the other too little and both deemed veering too far from the norm. What Duits eloquently showed is that in the end what she studied, was girl culture and by not projecting preconceived ideas onto these girls, she argued that the most important thing to all of them was to fit in, to be normal. She argued that this meant getting away from studying ‘the Other’ as a separate category, but to more productively study young Muslim girls simply as girls.

Linda was also one of the scholars who attended a meeting with Stewart Hoover and Nabil Echchaibi, the directors of the The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, who have started work on a series of very interesting projects to do with Islam (and the Media).
For more information, they are both online: Stewarts blog and Nabil’s website.
All in all it was a great experience and I am grateful to Stewart for inviting me to stay a bit longer to attend meetings and to both of them for organizing such an interesting conference. The powerpoint of the paper I presented is available in our publications section.

 

8 January

This week I am in America, where I’m attended the Islam and the Media conference in Boulder, Colorado. Being fully up to date with the latest Web 2.0 requirements, the conference has its own Twitter hash tag that a handful of conference goers are making good use of. Whilst I am not participating in actively tweeting the conference, I enjoy lurking on the site and reading what various people have to say.

With so many scholars interested in similar issues the conference will be a good opportunity to get feedback on our work. One of the things I want to highlight in the paper is the nature of the discussions that I have found for some of the videos, those uploaded by the Egyptian girls in particular. What is striking about these videos (discussed last week) is that they are made by women, explaining the Quran and in some sections of the video also reading verses of the Quran. The comment sections of some of these videos are noticeably different from most of the comment sections I have so far come across elsewhere, where people tend to leave far shorter, less in-depth comments and very often these are unfriendly and aggressive in nature. This is especially the case in those comment sections where young Muslims and non-Muslims (often both male) interact. The comments for the Egyptian girls seem to be much friendlier, polite in nature and the posters actually take the time to read and respond to what viewers have said. Take for example this exchange between oreses and emmuinsanity, one of our Egyptian posters:

Your response is well directed and logical. I learned from it. Still I think you address only the issue of the Koran verses. This issue is irrelevant to the main idea that the movie “Fitna” is about. The main question/challenge for Muslims such as yourself is to understand why so many other muslims interpret the Koran wrongly? Why logical Muslem scholars such as yourself don’t stand up to extremists that violate your religion? Why is your voice only heard in place radicals can’t hear? (oreses, 1 year ago)

And here is emmyinsanity’s reply:

Hello Oreses,

Thank you for your nice comment.

First of all, we are not scholars at all. We are ordinary teenage students. Each and every verse in the movie was actually followed by verses that explained it clearly. The Quran speaks for itself. In this video, we wanted to clarify that the kind of ppl who do such actions (like 9.11) do not do it because The Quran tells them to… it’s against our religion. (emmyinsanity, 1 year ago)

The comment sections of these Egyptian posters, all female, seemed to have opened up quite a safe space for non-Muslims to comment and ask questions of a group of young Muslim women who had gone to the trouble of making an extensive response to Fitna. Moreover it raises interesting questions around religious authority and gender, about online religion/religion online.

 

1 January - No update this week

 

25 December - No update this week

 

18 December

Following last week’s discovery that our most prolific poster had been suspended and the subsequent realisation that the key response period for posters had been between February and June 2008, I decided to look into this in more detail. Originally this period had produced 70 videos from female posters and I spent this week watching them all. Five were discarded as they had nothing to do with Fitna and some of these were referring to Bollywood movie ‘Fitna Dill’. This left 65 videos of which seven were re-uploads of Fitna itself, including translations (with subtitles) into English, Polish and Farsi. Quite quickly one video, in two parts stood out.  Part one or two appeared 16 times and was therefore the most frequently uploaded video in this small selection of 65 videos. On all occasions young Egyptian women had uploaded these clips and mostly around the same time: at the end of April. In the first part of the film they aim to set the record straight on the way Wilders has used the verses from the Quran in Fitna, emphasising his misleading interpretations.  In the second part they address the way in which they see Muslims being treated around the world, but mostly focusing on Iraq and the Israel/Palestine conflict. They include many gruesome images, particularly of dead and wounded children and babies, so be warned when opening the links below.

Part one of this video

Part two of this video

Following this closer work on the response period of the female posters, it was of course important to do the same for the full corpus of 1413 videos. During the distribution of the responses over the full time period of uploads present in the corpus (December 2005 – September 2009) two periods clearly stand out: March and April 2008, the time when Fitna was released and re-released. During this time 639 videos were uploaded. This time period accounts for nearly half of videos in the corpus (45%).

If we take a similar time period as adopted for the uploads from women and focus on responses between February and the end of May, we find 775 videos, over half the corpus (55%). This is the most significant period of activity and our main focus.

Another notable period of activity occurs around February 2009, which coincides with the time Geert Wilders unsuccessfully tried to gain entry to the United Kingdom to show Fitna in the House of Lords.

 

11 December

This week started with the shock discovery of the suspension by YouTube of our most prolific poster, quranmiracles. This news was unfortunately exacerbated by the fact that not all her videos had been downloaded by aTube Catcher and so forced us return to the (archived) corpus with some very critical eyes, which of course is never a bad thing. Following the very useful feedback at the recent ECREA conference, we had resumed considering some under developed issues. Specifically to do with identifying and defining what we mean by a ‘response’ to Geert Wilders’ film. That is to say that at present, we have a corpus of 1413 videos that have been uploaded over a very long time frame, which includes the release of the film and its aftermath, but goes up to September 2009.  In working on the 200 videos made by women, which we’re currently concentrating on, an interesting pattern, which is even more strongly present in the full corpus, emerges.

If we look at when the main response activity occurred, taking the release of the film into consideration, then we see a clear peak of activity in March and April 2008, a slowing down in May and a near total collapse in June. It would make sense to concentrate on the period February – May 2008, that is 70 videos (35%).

We can see further activity in 2009, picking up particularly around June. This is more than a year after the film was released yet one can observe a strong increase in ‘response’ videos. This is mainly to do with the adoption of the tag ‘Wilders Fitna’ by one poster in particular, quranmiracles.  Out of the 200 videos made by women included here 94 were made by quranmiracles, but all of these were uploaded long after Fitna was released (most are from the summer of 2009). For example of the 35 films uploaded in August 2009, 33 are from quranmiracles. Most of these videos are conversion videos celebrating Islam, but so far we have yet to come across one that comments on Fitna. So of the videos uploaded outside the suggested period, most, 72%  (94 out of 130) are made by quranmiracles. In light of this it makes sense to concentrate on the first wave of activity, on those videos that make direct (or indirect comments) on the film.

 

4 December

Following the successful ECREA conference in Rotterdam last week, I have been reading most of this week and taking on board the comments made at the conference, specifically those to do with the theoretical framework.

Nick Couldry made a number of very useful points in this regard and his suggestions have been tremendously helpful. He argued that significant work had been done recently taking us beyond simply examining ‘voice’ and the conditions under which a voice gets to speak. He suggested that we include in our analysis the important act of the reception of that voice, the listening to that voice as a democratic act that matters. He specifically highlighted work by the Listening Project, an Australian collaborative research project that had published in a recent special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.
In the special issue Tanja Dreher, one of the project’s convenors makes her case for why work on listening matters:

Attention to listening thus offers an important way to think about media and multiculturalism beyond the vital goal of empowering marginalized voices. The interest in listening is situated and strategic, aiming to develop thinking on media change beyond increasingly predictable critiques of representation and a politics of speaking up which leaves the primary responsibility for change with those who are subject to media racialization. Crucially, attention to listening shifts some of the focus and responsibility for change from marginalized voices and on to the conversations, institutions and privileges which shape who and what can be heard in the media (2009: 447).

These extremely helpful comments directly and indirectly lead to a number of very useful texts, which I will all add to the bibliography, to be launched early next year:

Couldry, Nick. 2009. Rethinking the politics of voice. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 23 (4): 579-582
Crawford, Kate. 2009. Following you: Disciplines of listening in social media. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 23 (4): 525-535.
Dreher, Tanja and Christina Ho. 2009. (eds.). Beyond the Hijiab Debates: New Conversations on Gender, Race and Religion. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars.
Dreher, Tanja. 2009. Listening across difference: Media and multiculturalism beyond the politics of voice. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 23 (4): 445-458.
Ho, Christina. 2007. Muslim women’s new defenders: Women’s rights, nationalism and Islamaphobia in contemporary Australia. Women Studies International Forum 30: 290-298.
O’Donell, Penny. 2009. Journalism, change and listening practices. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 23 (4): 503-517.

 

27 November

We were at another conference this week, ‘Media, Communication and the Spectacle’ held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, organised by a number of ECREA divisions. Our paper, ‘Weapons of gender: images of women in and against Fitna’ was well received, but unfortunately I only had ten minutes to deliver it, so had to rush through it a bit. I got all points across and various people approached me afterwards for further discussion, which is always very helpful and always greatly appreciated. Overall the feedback included a very helpful suggestion to look more into the act of listening and voice, as we so far had only mentioned voice. Nick Couldry suggested a number of references that I will look at next week. Someone else suggested that we give more consideration to the conditions under which a voice can come to speak. That is to highlight the architecture of the online space more. This is very helpful and immediately made me think of recent work done by José van Dijck on YouTube. Full reference:

Van Dijck, José. 2009. Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content. Media, Culture & Society 31 (1): 41-58

Apart from these comments there was a keen interest in the e-research tool developed with Mike Thelwall and people posed some technical questions that I will feed back to Mike. I was also reminded that I have to still have to establish whether or not posters are individuals or organisations. Currently our division is along gender lines with the assumption that most of the gender unknowns are organisations, but this needs to be verified and our unit of measurement clarified. When you get good comments like this, it is so helpful to read your work at conferences and be reminded of what you still need to do and to be further inspired to continue to explore certain theoretical frameworks. I will upload my paper and PPT in the next few days.

 

20 November

This past week has been very busy. Liesbet gave a seminar presentation in Nottingham and I have been crunching more numbers as well as coding a sample of videos made by female posters and looking ahead to our presentation at the ECREA conference next week (see news for all details). In terms of the numbers, I specifically concentrated on country information the posters had listed.  Some of this work had been done before, but then we focused on the three main countries (The Netherlands, The United States and The United Kingdom). Now we wanted to get a clear sense of the full breakdown, so I re-examined the data. For the corpus we’re looking at we have selected 1413 videos, which were made by 700 different YouTube posters. As it turns out there is an enormous variety in the geographical locations that people declare in their user information. Users list a total of 72 different locations, some, as they are mainly identified by a two-letter country code, took some time to decipher. Examples include: VA, DZ, AQ, QA, BI, GU, KI, FM, WF and EH*.

It comes as no great surprise that although we have such great variety in terms of the number of different locations, it’s a limited number of countries that dominate the list. That is to say that 74% of the posters come from one of the top ten countries (The Netherlands, The United States and The United Kingdom, Germany, Egypt, Canada, Pakistan, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, India, France and Morocco). I was struck by the richness in locations on this list, stretching five continents. On the other hand more than half of all the posters (52%) come from one of the top three countries on this list, topped unsurprisingly by The Netherlands. What this list however does not reflect is how many videos are produced per location and so it only tells part of the story. This will be a further important part of the analysis. We already know that whilst the West African country of Togo only has one poster in this corpus, this person is the most prolific poster in the whole corpus and it will be worth seeing how this country information looks if we not only measure how many posters are from each location, but how many videos they have uploaded.

*Vatican City (VA), Algeria (DZ), Antarctica (AQ), Qatar (QA), Burundi (BI), Guam (GU), Kiribati (KI), Wallis and Futuna Islands (WF), and Western Sahara (EH).

 

13 November

This week we have started looking at how to approach some of the YouTube posters for interview and have thus started discussing a questionnaire, which is very exciting. I have set up a YouTube channel for this purpose and once we have agreed on the details of the questionnaire this is how we will contact users. Understanding why people have uploaded certain videos and finding out more about their media habits as well as their religious beliefs and use of YouTube in general, will form an important element of the project. This is a very empirically driven research project and a lot of its strength lies in this thorough multi method approach. In terms of this latest part of the project, the work of Patricia Lange, who (as far I know) has done the most extensive YouTube ethnography to date and has published from it widely, will be important for us to look at.

More information can be found here: http://www.patriciaglange.org/

One of the issues that had recently come up at the conference in Sweden (see 6/11, 30/10) was to find a stronger theoretical framework for explaining what it is that we think these posters are doing and more importantly, why it matters. Liesbet had suggested looking specifically at the work of Alison Jaggar and this week I also distributed work on acts of citizenship (Isin and Nielsen, 2008) and work by Mitra and Watts (2002), who offer the idea of ‘voice’ as a way of thinking, a theoretical lens if you will, through which to explore the Internet and cyberspace. More specifically, they argue that the ability ‘to speak’, that is to have a voice online, can be more important than to be ‘heard’ (p.490). Following on from, we agreed that it would be a good idea to start building a online bibliography of the work we have been looking at and to post this on the website in due time.

 

6 November

At the meeting this week we discussed some of the issues raised at the conference in Sweden last week and as a consequence I have been watching and re-watching Fitna all week. I consciously wanted to read it as a text stripped of all the information we now have about it, information about the motivations of its maker as well as the global responses we focus on in our project. So each time I re-watched the film I focused on different issues and watched with different intentions in mind to highlight specific issues by making them more visible so to speak. These issues included ‘gender’, the discourses concerning the dangers of Islam Wilders highlights (and how these compare to mainstream media representations), the use of source material and its remediation (thank you Anna Roosvall for this comment!), the way in which different people are frequently represented in groups (specifically Muslim men), the presence of Non-Muslim white men as victims of terror in the name of Islam (including Wilders himself in two headline stories about his safety in the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf). Finally I forced myself to examine the explicit showing of dead bodies in horrific ways, images normally strictly absent from the mainstream media (this latter point inspired specifically by the work of John Taylor).

Horrific images of dead bodies are shown early on in Fitna, in the imagery linked to the aftermath of the Madrid bombings. This footage shows a lot of dead and at times dying bodies, torn, unclothed and bloodied, images the mainstream media would not deem acceptable to show.

This point is poignantly highlighted in the discussion that unfolded in the UK in the aftermath of these bombings when it emerged that The Guardian had altered the colour of a bloodied body part in a front page image to make it indistinguishable by blending it into to background. In an article about the issue, Paul Johnson, the Guardian's deputy editor commented that: ‘”It's an extraordinary photograph that was just in the margins of what we could use on the front page, but in that left-hand corner was an identifiable body part. To my mind that put us over the threshold."’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/mar/12/pressandpublishing.spain .

What this highlights is that Wilders does not simply re-show familiar images, but rather that he includes horrific images not familiar to most audiences and not deemed acceptable by the mainstream media. Linked to The Guardian’s Madrid image, the editor of The Telegraph further highlights the problem of showing body parts, explaining: ‘"We try not to do it, but at the end of the day we make decisions that are right for our readers, not for other journalists," he said, adding that an image of an Iraqi boy published in the Telegraph during the war had prompted dozens of complaints because body parts were visible in the background’  (ibid).

Considering such unfamiliar horrific images in Fitna, we must be careful not to repeat the now popular idea that Wilders simply showed what was already well known and shown, but rather in a more amplified and connected way by linking so many stereotypes about Muslims and Islam together.

 

23 October

I have now had a chance to look a bit more closely at the new corpus of 1413 videos we are working with (made by 700 different YouTube users) and specifically focused on the categories ‘gender’, ‘age’ and ‘country’ (or location).

In terms of gender, most users declare this (nearly 90%) and for those that don’t this can be because the category is not relevant, in the case of an institution or simply because the poster does not wish to list it. There are 76 posters that list their gender as female, making up 11% of the total number of posters and 78% of the posters say they are male. Whilst women make up only 11% of the number of posters they do slightly better in terms of the number of videos they collectively produce (200 videos), which is 14% of the total number of videos included in this corpus.

Out of the 700 posters, 468 declare their age (67%). Don Tapscott, in his recent Grown Up Digital (2009), puts the cut off point for what he descibes as the ‘Net Generation’ at 31 in 2008 (p.3). If we apply a similar approach, our oldest Net Generation poster is 32 in 2009. In this corpus 307 posters list their age as 32 or younger (67%).  There are 20 posters 60 or over (4%), including six that claim to be over 100 years old, with five listing the oldest age YouTube allows, 108.
When we specifically look at young men and women we find that of the 76 women in the corpus, those listing their age, 42 (70%) are 32 or younger. Of the 549 men 251 (64%) are 32 or younger. Taken together we have 307 Net Generation posters (this includes 14 that have not declared a gender, but did list an age), of whom the overwhelming majority (82%) are male. This finding is supported by the literature in this area.

Finally, when examinging where people delare they are located, a total of 654 posters (93%) list this, more than for the categories gender and age. The countries most frequently listed are the Netherlands (30%), The United States (16%) and the United Kingdom (9%).

Because we are at the MEDIA, ISLAM AND MODERNITY: Challenges to the Nordic Context seminar in Sweden next week, I have also had a quick look at the Nordic countries, which make up 4% of locations where this information is listed. The Nordic countries combined produce 49 videos or which most come from Sweden (21 videos) and Denmark (20 videos), which seems in line with the prominence of debates around Islam within these countries in recent years.

Whilst the West African country of Togo only has one user listed in the corpus, quranmiracles is singlehandedly responsible for 95 videos, that is 7% of all the videos in this corpus. This is the highest number of videos from a single poster.

Taking a closer look at this prolific poster, who is listed as female and at 55 years old is firmly outside Tapscott’s Net Generation. Their Channel contains over 400 (407) videos, all of which are linked to Islam and a significant number are concerned with those that have converted to Islam, especially those from different religion backgrounds. Six of the ten most watched videos focus on celebrities, mostly African Americans, either converting to Islam, praising or defending the religion. The most popular video (158,272 views) is about Michael Jackson reverting to Islam. Collectively these ten videos have been watched nearly 1 million times (957,903 views). We will continue to code the 95 quranmiracles videos included in the corpus for our article about gender and hopefully I will be able to blog about them further in the next few weeks.

 

16 October

This has been quite an eventful week. We started coding a sample of the videos from our new corpus, for the gender analysis of an article we have been working on. We want to analyse both Fitna itself in terms of gender and then specifically look at the 200 videos made by female posters and examine how gender narratives are manifested in these videos. Most significantly we are interested in what ways these videos may differ from the ways in which dominant and stereotypical gender narratives have been portrayed in the Wilders film. For example, do we see women in a domestic setting, at work, speaking for themselves? In the coding of these videos we take the individual as the unit of analysis and code 23 variables for each person (with some variables concerned with the person who has uploaded the video). What we immediately realised when we started coding is how difficult this is going to be! This is very different from coding still images (which is tricky enough) and this is also not the same as coding moving images. The most challenging videos to code are those that are a combination of various types of visual and aural material, including a series of still images (which all have to be examined individually), moving images, text, and speech. Specifically those that are edited to include a lot of material in a short amount of time and so flashes by quite quickly are a real challenge. This is a good example of such a tough video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98nzHr5KExo

But we agreed that it will be valuable to add such detailed gender analysis to our article, so we are currently in the process of fine tuning the coding sheet and for now we have decided to code the less challenging videos first before returning to the most tricky ones.

In February of this year Jacqui Smith had banned Geert Wilders from entering the UK, fearing inter faith violence, but Wilders tried to enter regardless receiving considerable press coverage in the process. This week that ban was overturned at a tribunal and Wilders wasted no time and landed in the UK this morning.

There has been some press coverage of this current visit and I am sure there will be more in days to come. A quick glance at this coverage however suggests that most attention was given to the decision of the BBC to have BNP leader Nick Griffin on Question Time next week with a short mention of Wilders. We quickly responded to the news of the Wilders visit by writing an editorial piece for the UK national media, which hopefully will get placed somewhere. It might also be worth looking at doing something more substantial, for example by looking at the difference between the press coverage of his failed attempt in February and his current visit. A quick search on Lexis Nexis indicates (for the search term ‘Geert Wilders’) that there are 89 results for the UK national press between 10 February and 20 February. It would also be worth to see how the Dutch press dealt with this incident, especially considering Wilders traveled with a sizeable group of Dutch journalists who recorded and reported all minute detail of his ‘failed’ visit. Looking at the main Dutch national newspapers (but with slightly adapted search terms as Wilders is considerably newsworthy in the Netherlands, so along with his name adding Verenigd Koninkrijk OR Engeland OR London), 28 articles were published about his attempt to visit the UK with some headlines referring to ‘Circus Wilders’. By refusing Geert Wilders access to the UK in February and denying a critical assessment of his film and views on Islam, the UK government along with the British and Dutch media gave Wilders a significant media platform, one he was adept at turning into a media circus. It is expected that when compared with coverage linked to the current visit there will be fewer articles and media interest in this story.

 

Friday October 9 2009

We had a couple of very exciting project meetings recently where everything seems to come together in a productive way. We are currently working on an article that will explore both the Fitna film itself, and its gender narrative in specific, but moreover will consider how such narratives are at work in the response videos. For now we’re focusing on the videos made by women (200 out of the new corpus of 1413 videos). What we are interested in is the absence in Fitna of the non-Muslim white male and we will argue that Geert Wilders places himself in that role of saviour. We will also look at each person in the film and develop a specific coding frame to see how men and women appear both in the film and in the response videos.

I have also started archiving all the 1413 videos using a programme (aTube Catcher) that is able to download videos straight from the website and covert them automatically into the right format (MPEG) that is needed for Transana. Due to the size of most of the videos this will still be quite a lengthy process. On the other hand it is automated and means that other tasks can be undertaken while the computer harvests and archives videos. The saved videos then still have to be checked and possibly renamed so that they can be located easily and used in Transana. We have indeed come a long way from our humble manual coding beginnings!

Friday October 2 2009

Following what had essentially been a pilot study using the search term ‘Fitna Wilders’ and awaiting the completion of the YouTube API to include full user information, ten search terms were entered into the updated YouTube API programme on 24 September. This search also included the original search terms ‘Fitna Wilders’.

The terms ‘Fitna Wilders’ were included again in this new extensive search because the original pilot search had been done in two parts during the development of the API and (as described previously) this had brought to light that the data set had changed in the period between the two searches. In creating the full and final corpus for the study, it was deemed important to generate all data on the same day (for consistency across the corpus) capturing as much relevant information as possible for our purposes.

For the searches ‘Fitna Geert Wilders’ and ‘Fitna Wilders’ the numbers of videos made by women is remarkably high compared to the number made by women in the rest of the eight search terms. For most of these search terms the number of videos made by women is between five and ten percent. For the two searches singled out here, that number is far higher, 27.98% and 24.64% respectively. Following on from the results of the pilot study it is plausible to suggest here that a single prolific poster has made a noticeable difference here.
This is confirmed when on closer inspection it becomes clear that for the search ‘Fitna Geert Wilders’, 90 of the 122 videos were made by quranmiracles, that is 73.77% of all the videos made by women found in the results of that search. For the search ‘Fitna Wilders’, prolific female poster quranmiracles was responsible for 83 of these 120 videos (69.17%).

For the current total corpus of 3942 videos, there are 1413 unique videos and this will be our new total corpus.

Friday September 25 2009

I went to a software workshop earlier in the week, to learn how to use Transana, which seems to be the best software for doing audio/visual analysis. The workshop was fantastic. It was run by the developer of the software, David Woods and so the level of expertise was unprecedented. It was great to be able to describe exactly what you were hoping to get from the programme or, as was the case with me, halfway through the second day having that light bulb moment and realising just what it can do for a specific project.

Like importing some of the quantitative codes from the API and attaching these to each video in Transana. So things like 'username' 'age', 'gender', 'country' etc. This means that when we have added the qualitative layer all the metadata is still anchored to each video, but it means that we will be able to ask far more in depth questions and produce really interesting stuff. A real quantitative/qualitative project. For more information on the software: http://www.transana.org/

Friday September 18 2009

The updated API programme is now up and running and so I was keen to immediately check the gender codes against my manually coded results (for 'Fitna Wilders') and guess what: we have double the number of female posters than we previously thought, 10.4% instead of 5.4%! The API is giving us access to the data that users declare when they sign up to YouTube. So we have 29 female posters rather than 15. So what is clear from this is that there is rich additional data behind the web interface that IS accessible, but harder to get at, but does give a far more detailed picture of what is going on. It also confirms that most of the users that I had coded as 'unknown' are, as expected, male.

Moreover, the most prolific poster of them all, quranmiracles (45 uploads) turns out to be FEMALE! This poster had previously been coded as 55 year-old ‘gender unknown’ from Togo.
The API has interestingly brought to light some of the difficulties coding for gender manually. It can be hard to read gender clues from the poster's profile page. It could be said that the presence of the researcher (and their assumptions) is somewhat revealed now there is an opportunity to compare the data to that of the API. For example, poster ferarie1992, http://www.youtube.com/user/ferarie1992, had been coded as a girl, mainly influenced by the featured video made for their female friend Els and her new boyfriend (my assumption) Douwe (featuring pictures of the couple in large hearts). The video on the right hand side (out of view on the main page) where we see the poster (clearly male) playing Nintendo Wii with his friend David had not been visible and was not found. At the same time, some users, such as alicerose, who had been included as a woman, does not come up as female in the API data. The user may very well be a woman and arguably there are clues to support this, but if she is a woman, she did not declare it to YouTube and to not complicate matters, we will only use the API data for now, which would exclude her from the group of female posters.

Friday September 11 2009

I went to see Mike this week to get the API programme and learn how to use it. It hadn’t been clear to me until we met that he had created this tool especially for our project following our interesting email discussion. Following a very long discussion when we met, he is now updating the programme to include all the user profile information. You can see the code here:

http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_profiles.html

The bits that are interesting to our project are in the second half of the code string where it shows the codes for ‘age’, ‘gender’ and gives geographical information. It also gives further information that might be of interest to us later on (what other things are people interested in?). What this shows is that it should be possible to also code this information automatically and we were speculating at the mouth-watering possibility that the raw digital data will be able to tell us more than we currently have access to via the web version of the site. This remains to be seen, but if the API can give results for gender with this information linked to individual posters, then that would be a really great result and will be massively helpful to us. He will have the updated programme done in the next few days, so we’ll know soon enough, possibly already next week.

Friday September 4 2009

I’ve had very interesting responses from Anita and Anna concerning my query about the women in my test corpus. As only a very small number of the posters are women, which in a way one expects (online gender divide), but these numbers seem very low. I hope they don’t mind me quoting directly from their emails, but their responses were so helpful, that I want to include them here. First Anna:
Now, about gender online. My research is different in that the online groups are signposted as * Muslim WOMEN's groups* and men are asked not to apply for membership. However, I've had to problematise 'gender' as a category because 1/ according to feminist theories, the binary of genders is problematic (and on the other hand, in Islam genders are strictly outlined and do not overlap) 2/ in online contexts you simply cannot be sure of what gender a participant is, as they may be lying for some reason.
As far as I know, there is no literature on Muslim women's online habits in terms of gender performance and disclosure. I am surprised that sometimes gender of video posters is unclear, as I have always found that Muslim women openly created the 'Muslim women's discourse' and being a woman was an important part of it. The literature I have found totally supports this. Could the debate have moved on into realms where gender is insignificant? I don't think so. I think with YouTube it may be different than other sites such as Facebook - after all people go there to mainly watch videos, and networking is somewhat secondary. Perhaps it is the message that counts, not the poster's identity, from these posters'
perspective?
My second thought is that women may be omitting their gender because they may fear cyberbullying. In my experience, YouTube is a very rough context, with people 'trolling' just anyone. And research confirms that women are more bullied online than men.
Or - is it not disclosing the gender an attempt to remain modest? Gary Bunt has written about e-hijab. I think his latest book iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam may be helpful to you although it does not particularly focus on gender.
And Anita:

There is very little published about Muslims on line it may be an issue of looking a bit closer into some conference proceeding and drilling back to more conventional feminist literature. I do have some other Islamic publications and a contact for some feminist (??) Muslim women. I think the issue of identity concealment is quite complex - I think Muslim women have a heightened awareness of public/ private space (This could be a VERY interesting study) particularly because of enculturalisation, social stigma, issues of spirituality (and guilt). There are many reasons why a Muslim woman may want to conceal her identity online. Well a lot of this is speculation. I will see if I can find something a bit more substantive and get back to you.

Friday August 28 2009

I still have some concerns about this limitation of 1,000 videos you can gain access to and as it turns out this limitation also extends to the number of comments you can see, also only 1,000. These will be the most recent 1,000 which is unhelpful and for research purposes you would likely want to see the first 1,000 rather than the last. I am not sure how much of an issue this will be, but I have already found one very popular video that has more than 20,000 comments. Mike has suggested a way to get round this, but it would involve copying and pasting everything into a new document, which sounds very time consuming. Unfortunately Google, who own YouTube are not likely to give permission to gain access to more than 1,000 videos at a time, so we’ll have to work within these limitations. When starting this project I had not fully taken on board how little we really understand about YouTube, how it works, what it is and how it is used! I have been reading an interesting book on the subject by Burgess and Green (2009), who make similar points. They argue that due to its multiple functions: ‘a “top-down” platform for distribution of popular culture and a “bottom-up” platform for vernacular creativity’, it is important to treat YouTube itself as an object of research. They usefully posit that:
Because there is not yet a shared understating of YouTube’s common culture, each scholarly approach to understanding how YouTube works must make choices among these interpretations, in effect recreating it as a different object each time – at this early stage of research each study of YouTube gives us a different understanding of what YouTube actually is (2009:6-7).
Following from last week’s results that only around 5% of the posters can be indentified as female I have emailed Anita Greenhill and Anna Piela again to see what they make of this.

Friday August 21 2009

I have been working with the data Mike sent me and I have been coding three additional codes manually, with some interesting results. For the 476 videos I have been looking at there are 279 individual posters with most uploading one video and only a handful more than this. Focusing on my three manual codes, some interesting information is emerging:
If we look at the countries the posters are from it is clear that most posters are happy to declare this category as 94.26% include a country option on their channel. Most declare The Netherlands in their country option. There are 84 posters from The Netherlands (30.11%), followed by the United States (42 – 15.05%), then the United Kingdom (22 – 7.88%) and finally Egypt (11 – 3.94%) and Germany (8 – 2.86%). Whist it comes as no surprise that most posters come from The Netherlands, the United States may come as a surprise and this reveals something of Wilders’ popularity in the US and Americans’ affinity with the film (as most posters seem very positive about it).
What still needs to be explored in greater detail is the number of videos that are uploaded per country and the above data only talks about number of posters. For example it is important to remember that whilst the African country Togo only had one user, this poster, quranmiracles, was singlehandedly responsible for 45 videos. In terms of age 61.29% declare this and most of the ones that do include their age are under the age of 30, namely 53.80%, so overwhelmingly young, with the youngest poster as young as 14. Ages over 50 are far fewer and three declare the maximum age of 108, which we can assume is not their real age.
Only a relatively small number of posters declare their gender, 37.27%. Overall most that declare identify themselves as ‘Male’ (23.66%), and ‘Unknown – Male’ (8.96%), where there is a good chance that the poster is male. Combined this means that over 30% of posters are male and it can be anticipated that in the category ‘Unknown’, which is over half (51.97%) many posters will also be male. Female posters are quite rare, with only 3.94% declaring themselves as ‘Female’ and a further 1.43% from ‘Unknown – Female’ where we can assume that the posters is female gauged from other clues on the channel or in the chosen name. This means that just over 5% of posters can be identified as female.
Again the next step will be to look at all of this in more detail and to identify the posters that are female and have a closer look at what they have uploaded. Also other codes need to be looked at added and analysed.

Friday August 14 2009

Mike has gotten back to me and talking to another computer scientist friend there seems to be a shared consensus: why am I coding the metadata manually? Both of them suggest writing a computer programme to do the coding automatically, or at least most of it. Mike has also sent me this spreadsheet containing the information for 476 videos that he generated using the search term ‘Fitna Wilders’. It contains the following codes: Video ID; Post date/time; Update/time; Title; Video URL; Video poster and Video poster URL. As it turns out YouTube comes in different forms, with the web version being the one that most of us are familiar with. But if you watch videos on your phone or iPod the layout looks different and is programmed to suit that device. Apparently there is also all the raw data, which you can get access to through YouTube API. But because this comes in an unreadable form you need a programme that can both get the data for you and process into a form that you can then use. That is what Mike has used to generate these 476 videos he has sent me. Sadly they do not contain the ‘gender’, ‘country’ and ‘age’ code, so I have decided to add these manually. I am very intrigued about this API though and must read up on YouTube.

 

Friday August 7 2009

Back on the manual coding and more frustration! YouTube seems to have a restriction on how many videos it will return for each search. Even though the search term we have agreed upon, ‘Fitna Wilders’ results in 2,780 videos YouTube will only give you access to the first 1,000. Unfortunately for our search it seems to only give you access to the first 16 pages (with 20 videos per page) rather than the 50 it should do to make up 1,000. There also seem to be a high number of duplicate videos, so exactly the same video containing the same metadata, the specific information linked to each video. YouTube returns the videos in a default mode, which means that the duplicates are supposedly filtered out, but there seems little evidence of that in the results I’ve looked at so far. I have a hunch that people working in the computer sciences may be able to help me further and to that end I have emailed Mike Thelwall and his PhD students at Wolverhampton to see if they can help me further. In terms of the coding I have added a couple of codes because the gender one was turning out to be so unreliable. Therefore I have added ‘country’ and ‘age’ to see where people are from and what age they are, which will all help us better understand these posters.

 

Friday July 31 2009

On holiday, no blog this week

 

Friday July 24 2009

On holiday, no blog this week

 

Friday July 17 2009

Coding the metadata for the YouTube videos is not as straightforward as we would have liked. Especially for the gender code, where we try to ascertain the gender of the posters, seems to be particularly tricky one. For now it is based on visiting each user’s channel page, reading it and looking for clues about their gender. Sometimes it’s quite straightforward, but most of the time it’s not at all. Doing all of this manually is also incredibly time-consuming and doesn’t seem terribly efficient. I am going to look into alternatives in early August, when I’m back from my break.

Friday July 10 2009

Following the two recent events I attended I have stayed in touch with some of the delegates and this week received a very interesting email from Anita Greenhill, who had told me she could tell me about her experiences of watching Fitna with other Muslim women. She recalled that at a woman’s dinner she went to the woman hosting the dinner invited the children in attendance to watch the film on the Internet. She also called in some of the women and Anita explained she asked her son not to watch it and openly suggested this may not be suitable material to watch for a two year old. The dinner host argued that it was important for the children to see how Muslims are being treated and portrayed. Whilst Anita said she was concerned about the levels of violence the other women didn’t share her worry and suggested that it was very important for their children to watch and some children saw the film more than once. It is really fascinating to hear this account and at a later stage of the project it would be really valuable to hear further accounts, specifically of how women have viewed the film and how they too may have made conscious decisions to allow their young children to watch it and to provide an additional running commentary themselves highlighting and challenging dominant media representations.

Friday 3 July 2009

The CRESC event went very well and I enjoyed it a lot. People seemed to like the paper and were very enthusiastic about the project, which is great. I met some fantastic researchers there, including someone who is just finishing a PhD in this area, Anna Piela (York) who spoke on ‘Muslim Women's Internet discussions of gender relations in Islam’. I also had a very fruitful, although brief discussion with Anita Greenhill from Manchester University, who told me that she knew of Muslim women’s groups using the film. I would love to hear more about this and hopefully meet up with her in Manchester. On Monday and Tuesday I attended Gordon Lynch’s ‘Media and the Transformation of Religion’ conference which is part of an AHRC-funded research seminar series hosted by the Centre for Religion and Contemporary Society, Birkbeck College, University of London. Full list of their events here: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/crcs/events/ .
It was very good for me to go to these two events back to back and hear so many wonderful papers and meet some of the key people in this area. Both Birgit Meyer (Amsterdam) and Stewart Hoover (Boulder, Colorado) attended both events and it was good to hear more about their work and have the opportunity to ask further questions. I was particularly taken with Birgit’s papers on the disappearance of the medium, the notion that the medium is most visible under particular circumstances, most often when it is new. New media platforms are certainly very visible at the moment. Stewart talked very interestingly on the crisis in masculinity in the United States and as it turns out for those he interviewed Mel Gibson (as Braveheart) is the most cited positive male role model. I wonder who that might be in the UK. A number of members of the BBC Religion Department who are based in Manchester also attended the event and it is rare for academics and journalists to spend this much time together at such a small conference. It was very good to hear their impressions of ‘our’ work on the second day. I thought it worked very well and I will certainly stay in touch with some of them.
Still planning to make the blog properly interactive, especially now that I have told so many the blog exists! I will post my paper and powerpoint on the site, you will find it under ‘Publications’. Gordon Lynch has posted a short report on his event here: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/crcs/research/Rel_seminar2/

 

Friday 26 June 2009

It’s good to hear that news of the website is spreading. Liesbet just let me know that Gordon Lynch (Birkbeck) has distributed the link to the website to the Theory, Culture and Religion network and that Birgit Meyer (Amsterdam) has put up the link on the VISOR website. Great! I also just had some very nice cards for the project delivered. Instead of business cards, we have project cards, with one side describing the project briefly and the other side giving the website link and the contact details of the whole project team. They look really good and will be useful to have for the events I am attending in the next few days. Tomorrow I am at the CRESC Religion, Media and Social Change symposium at SOAS in London with a paper entitled: ‘Women’s voices in and around Fitna’. I will post the paper and the power point presentation on the site and I hope that people will feel free to comment.

 

Friday 19 June 2009

Our website has gone live! Liesbet designed it and Peter Riley-Jordan in IT did a great job sorting it all out. We seem to be the first small grant to have a website up and running, which is exciting. The grant is part of the large AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society programme, details can be found here: http://www.religionandsociety.org.uk/research
We have a lot of exciting events to look forward to for dissemination of our project results. Liesbet has been invited to speak at a symposium on ‘Media, Islam and Modernity’ in Sweden in October, organised by The Nordic Research Network on the Mediatization of Religion and Culture. Details of the seminar here can be found: http://www.media.uio.no/mrc/network. I am attending two events in the next couple of weeks: one in London and one in Manchester. In terms of the website it is unfortunately not yet possible to have a proper blog (I wanted to use WordPress) as the University does allow blogs internally. What I might do when I have a moment is set up a WordPress blog for the project, so that when you click the ‘Researcher blog’ link on our site, you get redirected to the external blog. It would be good to have the site as interactive as possible!

 

Friday 12 June 2009

Having decided that we are now taking the 2,770 videos generated through searching for ‘Fitna Wilders’ as our starting point, I have devised a coding scheme that will quantitatively analyse the meta data available for each video. As gender, specifically the way in which Muslim women are portrayed in the media, plays such a big part of the representation of Islam, it takes a central role in our project. So some of the things I am coding for include ‘gender’, which means that we want to know - as much as this can be known - if the poster is identified as a man, a woman, an organisation, or not at all. Of course we also want to know how often the video has been watched, how many responses it got (I will then code all this at a later stage for the qualitative analysis) and whether the video was a response to another video or not. It will also be valuable to find out if the poster is a first time YouTube user and only starting posting in response to the film. For the later analysis of the videos we aim to use Transana and I will use MAXqda to analyse the comments sections of the videos.

 

Friday 5 June 2009

Just started the project! I am very excited about working on this for the next year and I aim to write my researchers blog once a week to keep a diary of the project’s progress. There are thousands of videos on YouTube related to this film and searching through the YouTube search engine different search terms generate very different numbers of results, so we need to make some decisions right away. For the term ‘Fitna’ you get the most hits (6,370), but this may be to do with issues unrelated to the Geert Wilders film. Attaching ‘Wilders’ to the search, so searching ‘Fitna Wilders’ gives most hits (2,770) compared to other variations that included his name. I will work on a coding frame for this large corpus, so that we get a sense of what is going on with these responses and narrow down what we want to look at in more detail. Some of the videos are reproduced quite a lot, so we first of all need to get a sense of how many unique response videos exist.