In this introduction, we share the process of developing this double special issue for Imaginations: from the call for papers to the articles we present in this first special issue volume, and beyond. When we proposed this special issue in 2024, we began by thinking about how to live and work with the rapidly-changing analyses of artificial intelligence softwares, moral panics, and resistances to and takeups of the already-voracious consumption of existing oppressive datasets and social relations. Building on recent work about rebuilding, revisualizing, repairing, or refusing inevitable pathways for AI ubiquity, we were certain we could find other ways of thinking. Drawing from deep scholarly engagement with issues of ethical database scraping and intellectual property violations, environmental impacts, and workflow interferences and augmentations, we asked contributors: What do we/they/you want to happen next? Where do we want to be next year, or five years from now? What are the next 25 years going to look like? The articles we offer in this special issue are mapping and pushing boundaries around the ways we encounter, engage with, and consider the possibilities for AI. This introduction connects these nine articles and how they rethink the world through Indigenous sovereignty, Ubuntu intelligence, speculative methods in policy and practice; and embedded in visual culture sectors through folklore, innovation, labour, archives, and the environment.

In the first of this double issue, we grounded the collection in Mass Culture’s Research in Residence: Arts’ Civic Impact (RinR) project. Aimed at creating a suite of impact measurement frameworks for arts organizations to assess where and how their work has impact, the SSHRC- and Mitacs-funded project embedded four individual graduate student researchers and one team of two graduate students—all from different post-secondary institutions—in arts organizations across the country. Also supported by a group of arts funders comprising an advisory, this first-of-its-kind initiative has had impressive impacts of its own in both the academic and culture sector spheres. Since publishing our first collection of articles, the landscape has changed. RinR’s graduate student researchers have all moved on in some way, be it finishing a master’s degree and starting a doctorate, finishing a doctorate and moving into a post-doctoral fellowship, finishing graduate school and working within an academic institution, and even continuing with their studies while starting a family. Other people involved in RinR have likewise changed jobs or even left the arts sector or academia altogether. Assembling this second issue has afforded us, the co-editors, some very welcome reflection on the project, the relationships we built through it, and how it continues to shape both our individual careers and perspectives on the arts’ civic impact.

The book was inadvertently published with the following errors as listed below and belated corrections have been incorporated. Chapter 2: Figure citations have been updated Chapter 5: Figures and section headings have been updated Chapter 9: Copyright text in the images in the Figures have been updated Chapter 11: Appropriate page breaks has been updated Chapter 13: Box and Text alignment, and Footnotes have been updated Chapter 14: Figure citations have been updated The corrected chapters and the book have been updated with these changes.

In the first of this double issue, we grounded the collection in Mass Culture’s Research in Residence: Arts’ Civic Impact (RinR) project. Aimed at creating a suite of impact measurement frameworks for arts organizations to assess where and how their work has impact, the SSHRC- and Mitacs-funded project embedded four individual graduate student researchers and one team of two graduate students—all from different post-secondary institutions—in arts organizations across the country. Also supported by a group of arts funders comprising an advisory, this first-of-its-kind initiative has had impressive impacts of its own in both the academic and culture sector spheres. Since publishing our first collection of articles, the landscape has changed. RinR’s graduate student researchers have all moved on in some way, be it finishing a master’s degree and starting a doctorate, finishing a doctorate and moving into a post-doctoral fellowship, finishing graduate school and working within an academic institution, and even continuing with their studies while starting a family. Other people involved in RinR have likewise changed jobs or even left the arts sector or academia altogether. Assembling this second issue has afforded us, the co-editors, some very welcome reflection on the project, the relationships we built through it, and how it continues to shape both our individual careers and perspectives on the arts’ civic impact.

Over the last decade, culture sector researchers have aimed to expand our understanding and measurements of impact assessment. In this paper, the authors take a deep dive into the happy accidents that create new ways of managing and working at several creative hubs in Canada. These happy accidents influence governance structures and practices these spaces take up but also help leaders and facilitators to respond to emergent needs in the cultural communities they seek to support. Drawing from two rounds of interviews and field research over the last four years, we compare seven creative hubs across Canada that have transformed their approaches to leadership and community engagement. We consider, first, how three types of creative hubs talk about their visions and values, and then how they operationalized those values in the spaces they are charged with activating. We look at two typical non-profit organizations (Tett Centre, National accessArts Centre), three social enterprises (cSpace, Culture Link and Artscape) and two outliers (UKAI, BC Artscape - the latter defunct). Many of these organizations face challenges as regional operations. Some explicitly aim to ameliorate the legacies of colonialism, discrimination and lack of representation in the culture sector. UKAI and BC Artscape are particularly interested in disrupting economic valuation frameworks by putting feelings and compassion at the centre of their operations. Others are compelled by more responsive but still competitive incubators for precarious creative workers, including cSpace and CultureLink. Consequently, we ask: in what ways is each hub ‘successful’ on their own terms, and which are useful exemplars to others? We look at each organization’s narratives of impact, process and affect emerging from overcoming challenges that include the global Covid-19 pandemic, bureaucratic debacles such as offering a disability organization a heritage site that is only accessible by stairs, and a series of awkward missteps and honest efforts towards decolonization.

The authors conduct an empirical investigation of the national Equity X Program to understand not just the barriers that women face in becoming producers and developing business skills to move their career forward as artist entrepreneurs in Canada but also how emerging professionals feel about their perceived opportunities. The authors first situate the study within the literature on equity and inclusion in the creative sector and the importance of the music industry in this context. They then use an impact assessment framework that incorporates key indicators around equity and inclusion, aesthetic goals and approaches, and accessibility measures to help organize six rich clusters of data drawn from respondents (N=397). Using iterative open coding of open-ended responses to semi-structured questions, as well as critical discourse analysis, the authors examine the clustered data to illustrate or address these impact measures and to tease out the implications of each cluster of data. The analysis of the six clusters of data can help the sector (and their funders and policymaking supporters) better understand priorities for entrepreneurial capacity-building, including professionalization, technical skills, self-development, a sense of belonging through networking, entrepreneurial development, and emotional engagement in the sector. While the study does not suggest that systemic discrimination can be overcome any time soon, it does provide evidence of the ways in which women creatives in music believe that becoming more proficient in technical and business skills will help them; it also illustrates their optimism about being able to overcome discrimination. This generates a more complex understanding not just of some of the challenges faced by diverse women artist-entrepreneurs within Canada’s music ecosystem but also perceptions about how they aim to overcome these challenges. The article concludes by outlining future work required to ameliorate system-wide discrimination in arts entrepreneurship.

Archive/Counter-Archive (A/CA): Activating Canada's Moving Image Heritage is a seven-year research-creation project involving more than 100 collaborating artists, academics, and activists from across the country that reveals how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) come into contact with vulnerable community-driven audiovisual archives, an important part of contemporary cultural heritage. This article examines the power dynamics embedded in A/CA as well as in current ICT infrastructure, legislation, and organizational policy and resources, to address two emergent challenges experienced by the network over a three-year period. The authors ask whether and in what ways A/CA was able to oppose the extractive power dynamics embedded within the current cultural heritage preservation and ICT management systems through operational models and ICT tools that incorporate creative approaches. Locating this project where community-engaged research comes together with the study of digitization and platformization of cultural production and heritage, the authors used autoethnographic and feminist intersectional discourse analyses to examine the tensions and challenges embedded in the communities of practice that took shape over these three years. The first set of findings explores the organizational limits imposed on the network’s participants, including the lack of national and local resources for digitizing and sharing vulnerable and often marginalized media archives. This was addressed in the A/CA context by developing a flexible contracting approach for the digitization and use of the vulnerable media being digitized, as well as through the development of a national Action Plan. The second set of findings demonstrates how creative interventions in community-based partnerships and artist residencies affected the genesis of a Principles of Respect (PoR) Committee and related pragmatic in-the-field efforts to address some of the historically troubled relationships that large, official media archives have had with Indigenous and Black communities. The authors explore the ways in which creative workshops and artist residencies are mobilized within A/CA to help build a more respectful and reciprocal set of relations. Lastly, we examine the broader implications for intellectual property and content management as it is influenced by the current role of ICTs in relation to cultural heritage, suggesting some ways forward.

This book sits in the transdisciplinary space between digital ethnography, autoethnography, arts-based research and creative pedagogies. It contributes to the growing body of literature responding to the COVID-19 pandemic (Mathiyazhagan in Overcome COVID-19: Creative expressions of young people 2020), and centres around a 21-day digital autoethnographic collaborative online experiment in which over 165 participants from 26 countries responded to daily prompts in a range of affective and creative modalities, to express our experiences of isolation, community, sense-making, and life as it changed under the first few weeks of COVID. Teachers, artists, academics, philosophers and makers all drew from our own practices and geo-political perspectives to collectively find commonality in exploring the macro conditions through to the microscopic and granular experiences of our culturally diverse lives.

In the fall of 2020, a series of videos created for the exploratory shared experience called Massive Micro Sensemaking were presented at the Virtual International Arts (VIA) Festival for Social Change in New York. In this article, Luka considers these works as caring, reflective and expressive practices of resilience during a global crisis, while questioning who benefits from promoting ideas about social resilience in such circumstances.

On Method is a collaborative knowledge-translation project that combines critical pedagogy with arts and independent-filmmaking production strategies to develop compelling video content for researchers. In this article, the authors analyze four key principles of research translation contributing to the successful creation of On Method, a nine-episode video textbook that explores key concepts and approaches in qualitative methods. The principles include how to assemble a strong team; how iteration works in this context; the collaborative nature of the process; and building content for varied audiences. On Method aims to update previous media-based approaches to education by showcasing a primarily virtual production process that generated rich content to attract media-savvy audiences to a consideration of qualitative methods in the digital sphere and to build critical thinking in the public sphere. RÉSUMÉ On Method est un projet collaboratif d’application des connaissances qui associe la pédagogie critique à des stratégies de production artistique et cinématographique indépendante afin de développer un contenu vidéo qui soit attirant pour les chercheurs. Dans cet article, les auteurs analysent quatre principes clés de l’application de la recherche qui ont contribué à la réussite de On Method, un manuel vidéo en neuf épisodes qui explore les principaux concepts et approches des méthodes qualitatives. Ces principes sont : la constitution d’une équipe solide, l’utilité de l’itération dans ce contexte, la valeur d’une approche collaborative, et la création d’un contenu ciblant des publics variés. La série On Method vise à mettre à jour les approches médiatiques antérieures envers l’éducation en se fondant sur un processus de production essentiellement virtuel qui a généré un contenu riche dans le but de motiver les publics versés dans les médias à réfléchir sur les méthodes qualitatives dans la sphère numérique. On Method vise en outre à contribuer à la pensée critique dans la sphère publique.

In what ways have forms for engendering the interconnection and materiality required for creative production changed in the time of COVID-19? How and why have our notions of imagining and visualizing cross-cultural production and its modes of research, analysis, and representation shifted? The global pandemic and responses to it through various forms of cultural production have seen an explosion of productivity and collective social actions as well as the reinforcement of entrenched systemic racism and other forms of discrimination and imbalance. In this special issue, authors weave together a series of dialogues, methodological approaches, and materialities that reflect on the visuality of the experiences that were first developed through shared critical autoethnographic practices during and after an international Massive Micro Sensemaking experiment involving 165 people.

In this article, I explore how two research-creation projects helped me to process the stresses of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown using a critical autoethnographic approach. Video editing weaves the two projects together, providing both a descriptive and abstract engagement with ideas about glitter as method and media making as a form of analysis. The article starts with Prompt #3 from the Massive Micro Sensemaking undertaking led by Annette Markham and Anne Harris in May and June, 2020, and is punctuated by the text and links to the videos produced by media artist Midi Onodera between April and July 2020.

Global events like a pandemic or climate change are massive in scope but experienced at the local, lived, microscopic level. What sorts of methodologies and mindsets can help critical internet researchers, functioning as interventionists or activists, find traction by oscillating between these levels? How can we push (further) against the boundaries of research methods to build stronger coalitions and more impactful outcomes for social change among groups of scholars/researchers? This panel presents four papers addressing these questions based on a large scale online autoethnography in 2020. This “Massive/Micro” project simultaneously used and studied the angst and novelty of isolation during a pandemic, activating researchers, activists, and artists to explore the massive yet microscopic properties of COVID-19 as a “glocal” phenomenon. The challenge? Working independently and microscopically through intense focus on the Self but also working with distributed, largely unknown collaborators, in multiple platforms. The emerging shape of the project itself showcases the challenges and possibilities of how research projects at scale can (or don’t) reflect and build social movements. The panel’s four papers situate the project through a kaleidoscope of perspectives featuring participants from 7 countries, who variously explore: the value of the project for precarious or early career researchers, how MMS worked as both collaborative space and critical pedagogy, how non-institutional or playful experimentation in asynchronous collaborations can lead to new synergies; and how MMS developed an independent life of its own, beyond studying COVID to generating multiple communities of future digital research practice.

How does this pandemic moment help us to think about the relationships between self and other, or between humans and the planet? How are people making sense of COVID-19 in their everyday lives, both as a local and intimate occurrence with microscopic properties, and a planetary-scale event with potentially massive outcomes? In this paper we describe our approach to a large-scale, still-ongoing experiment involving more than 150 people from 26 countries. Grounded in autoethnography practice and critical pedagogy, we offered 21 days of self guided prompts to for us and the other participants to explore their own lived experience. Our project illustrates the power of applying a feminist perspective and an ethic of care to engage in open ended collaboration during times of globally-felt trauma.

This special issue of Information, Communication and Society reflects on the generative work presented at the 2019 annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (#AoIR2019). The conference attracted approximately 380 people from 35 countries to work through the theme, Trust in the System. Delegates analysed developments on the internet, in social media and through data management, including those grounded in Indigenous perspectives and varied communities, resiliencies and collective voices. Plenary provocations prompted discussions about our various relationships with "trust", "system" and "the", while research sites included webtoons and webnovels, fans and games, chemsex and porn, the rise of digital assistants and evolving digital practices in politics, health, education, environment and the media. Creative industries, automation and platformization figured broadly. Ethics, methods and theory ranged from science and technology studies (STS) to queer and indigenous theory to algorithmic approaches, digital ethnography, creative methods, and emergent work in bot detection across social media. The resulting articles curated for this collection are offered by emerging to established scholars, from around the world.

In this introduction we are pleased to present the papers invited to the #AoIR18 special issue, and the thematic for the annual Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference.

This article unpacks two infographic analyses to highlight two important themes regarding changes to the distribution systems and business models for the converging broadcast and telecommunications industry. First is that the recent revolution in production practices is now reverberating through the distribution system, as illustrated by a provisional mapping of a complex stakeholder ecosystem. Second is the clarity and consistency of the messages received from Canadians during CRTC consultations. In the Let’s Talk TV consultations, consumer-citizen messages centered on the desirability of readily available online and on-demand content, particularly Canadian and local content. By showing various stakeholders and their points of intersection throughout the process, this article aims to make a complex business more comprehensible, or at least more accessible, to a broad audience.

Abstract The material culture of archives is reconsidered in the Psychogeographer's Table (PGT), a counter-archive created by the Narratives in Space + Time Society (NiS+TS) in response to the impending centenary of the accidental catastrophe of the 1917 Halifax Explosion (HE). The PGT counter-archive addresses the relationship between viewer and archive material in a number of novel ways. The subject matter of the archive considers the public geographies shaping our cultural landscape in the Explosion’s debris field, including the militarization of the waterfront and the invisibility of certain racialized and classed communities. The PGT is a portable sculpture and a curated repository of archival materials generated by NiS+TS, exhibited at the Dalhousie University Art Gallery in the fall of 2017. Further, the PGT’s unique materiality is reflected through multiple layers of mapping created through collaborative walking, augmented reality experiences and storytelling. These engagements situate the viewer within the archive, past and present, contrasting the everyday with the catastrophic event.