[Air-L] PhD scholarship: machine vision and Instagram's participatory and promotional cultures

[Nicholas Carah]

Hello,

We are advertising a fully-funded PhD scholarship (tuition fees + living allowance stipend) to work with me at The University of Queensland's School of Communication and Arts and A/Prof Dan Angus and Prof Jean Burgess at QUT's Digital Media Research Centre on our three-year Australian Research Council Discovery Project on machine vision and the participatory and promotional cultures of Instagram.

We welcome applications from international and Australian candidates.

Details below, any questions please feel free to get in touch.

https://scholarships.uq.edu.au/scholarship/phd-scholarship-machine-vision-and-instagrams-participatory-and-promotional-cultures

Research Environment

UQ ranks in the top 50 as measured by the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities. The University also ranks 46 in the QS World University Rankings, 42 in the US News Best Global Universities Rankings, 66 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and 54 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities.

School of Communication and Arts

The project is embedded within an Australian Research Council Discovery project involving collaboration between Nicholas Carah at the School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland and Daniel Angus and Jean Burgess at Queensland University of Technology's Digital Media Research Centre. The project runs for three years. The project provides opportunities to work alongside leading researchers on digital media across humanities, social sciences and computational approaches. The University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology are both nodes in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision-Making and Society. This research environment will provide world-class opportunities for research training and a rich intellectual environment to explore the relationships between machine vision, digital media and our cultural life.

The award

Supervisor - Associate Professor Nicholas Carah<https://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/1512>

Funded through our ARC Discovery project 'Using machine vision to explore Instagram's everyday promotional cultures', we are looking for a PhD researcher to work with our team to develop a project that examines Instagram's participatory and promotional cultures. The project will employ media and cultural studies approaches, and computational methods developed by the research team. You will have the opportunity to develop skills in a combination of humanities and computational approaches to digital media, using critical and qualitative approaches alongside novel machine vision and data visualisation techniques. The project will focus on a particular aspect of Instagram's participatory culture, this might relate to food, lifestyle sport, music or another case you are interested in. An objective of the project will be to explore the intersections between Instagram's everyday cultures and the classification of those cultures by machine vision systems. The project will be part of a larger effort to develop critical approaches to understanding the interplay between machine learning and everyday life in digital cultures.

A working knowledge of media, communication and cultural studies approaches to digital media platforms would be of benefit to someone working on this project.
HDR funding type
Living stipend scholarship
Scholarship value
$28,597 per annum (2021 rate), indexed annually
Scholarship duration
Three years with the possibility of two 6-month extensions in approved circumstances
Opening date
25 September 2020
Closing date
22 November 2020

You can find out more about the project here: http://mediamachines.org/image-machines/ and here: https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/projects/using-machine-vision-to-explore-instagrams-everyday-promotional-cultures/



Nicholas Carah
Associate Professor | Deputy Head of School | School of Communication and Arts | The University of Queensland

07 3365 3145 | n.carah at uq.edu.au<mailto:n.carah at uq.edu.au> | UQ Researchers<https://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/1512> | research teaching writing<http://mediamachines.org/> | @nnniccc<https://twitter.com/nnniccc>