I wanted to share this great slideshow courtesy of my SL friend and fellow Australian virtual worlds researcher, Joanna Robinson. Joanna works and studies at the GNWC Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver and is a leading presence for digital media studies in Second Life. Her work is very cool and theoretically rigorous – enjoy!

Yesterday I presented my session about avatars and identity play in Second Life. It was more of a workshop than a presentation, and there were some wonderfully fascinating stories people shared about their avatars: why they created them and crafted them the way they did; what decisions they made about identity markers to include; how other people perceived their avatars; and any identity experiments (gender, fashion, race and so on) that they had explored. I really enjoyed hearing people’s stories, and wish I had had the foresight to log a transcript of the chat!! I managed to crash out 5 times during the session :/ This meant I didn’t have time in the end to really recap some of the central points I wanted to make!! Here are some shots from the session of people sharing and participating:

… and a few resources, links, landmarks, copies of slides, free clothes and avatars and so on were given out at the end. If you didn’t get to go to the session (or you missed out because you had to leave early) and would like a gift bag, just send me an im in world!

(My thanks to CDB Barkley, Joanna Trailblazer, Jokay Wollongong, Heidi Trotta, Nick Noakes, Stephanie Misfit, Tasrill Sieyes, Desideria Stockton, Thinkerer Melville, Anne Enigma, Larry Pixel and many many others who contributed in various ways to the session – by sharing stories, posing for photos, letting me use their photos, contributing avatars and giving me freebies to add to the resources kit!)

Next week the NMC is running an entire weeks symposium on “Creativity in Second Life” There are a number of strands: Machinima, Fashion, Sculpture and Modeling, Virtual Photography, and Teaching Environments, social / arts events, and lots of practical and interactive sessions. I am involved in three sessions, all at (sort of) Australian friendly times. Here are the details of these sessions (in Second Life time):

Fri Aug 17 7pm – Fri Aug 17 8pm

Teaching On the Second Life Stage: Playful Educational Strategies for Serious Purposes

Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Conference%20Center/64/193/22

Angela Thomas (aka Anya Ixchel), University of Sydney

Kim Flintoff (Kim Pasternak), Edith Cowan University

Theatrical spaces have historically been places used to teach, purge and shape culture. For over a decade, virtual reality has offered a new kind of theatrical space; now, with the rise of social networking spaces, many more people are using the potential of the web to perform, critique and comment on cultural issues. Second Life provides a new and exciting space where students can explore issues that are both personal and global in significance. Teaching strategies which incorporate dramatic and theatrical components are perfectly suited in the Second Life environment for engaging students in playful but meaningful reflection on such issues. This session will involve participants in role-playing, reflection and discussion. Participants will also be encouraged to brainstorm the possibilities of incorporating such strategies into their own educational programs.

Sat Aug 18 4pm – Sat Aug 18 5pm

No More Business Suits Please: Creative Identity Play in SL

Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Conference%20Center/185/136/43

Angela Thomas (aka Anya Ixchel), University of Sydney, Australia

Second Life offers a unique opportunity to refashion one’s self and to play with fictional identities. Yet many of us who work inside Second Life feel trapped in our offline identity roles and conform to traditional discourses of femininity, masculinity, appearance, beauty and fashion. Professionals wear business suits, educators cry out for more modest clothing, and artists wear funky coloured skins. In some contexts, people who resist these discourses are discriminated against. This session explores how we might be able to leverage one of the greatest affordances of Second Life—the avatar—for personal, community and professional agendas.

20070818T160000/20070818T170000

Sat Aug 18 5pm – Sat Aug 18 6pm

Panel Session: Reflections on Creativity in Second Life

Location: http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Conference%20Center/214/18/51

Moderator: Alan Levine (aka CDB Barkley), The New Media Consortium
Lori Bell (aka Lorelei Junot), Alliance Library System
Jo Kay (aka Jokay Wollongong), Illawarra Institute TAFE, New South Wales
Hilary Mason (aka Ann Enigma), Johnson & Wales University
Troy McConaghy (aka Troy McLuhan), ISM Corporation
Nick Noakes (aka Corwin Carillon), Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Beth Ritter-Guth (aka Desideria Stockton), Lehigh Carbon Community College
Angela Thomas (aka Anya Ixchel), University of Sydney

Lately on the AoIR list there’s been some useful discussion about gender and blogging, so I figured I would compile some of the links together here so I don’t lose them.  I wrote about this area of research in a book chapter in 2005 but the book hasn’t been published yet.  It’s actually frustrating how long some things take before going to press.  By the time it comes out people reading will go – huh, that’s old news!  But it wasn’t when I first wrote about it   I really think blogging should be recognised more as a new form of scholarly writing but then I said that a few years ago too.

Henning, Jeffrey. “The Blogging Iceberg.” *Perseus*. 4 October 2003. Perseus Development Corporation. 11 November 2005
http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/thebloggingiceberg.html

Herring, Susan and Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah Wright. “Women
and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs.” *Into the
Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs*. Ed. Laura J.
Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica
Reyman. June 2004. 11 November 2005
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/introduction.html

Papers from the 2006 Blogher Conference
http://blogher.org/about-blogher-conference-06

Book chapter – Posting with Passion: Blogs and the Politics of Gender
by Melissa Gregg in Uses of blogs
(http://snurb.info/index.php?q=node/335)

Papers from AAAI 2006 Symposia on Computational Approaches to
Analyzing Weblogs
(http://www.aaai.org/Library/Symposia/Spring/ss06-03.php):

- The Identity of Bloggers: Openness and gender in personal weblogs by
Scott Nowson and Jon Oberlander -
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s9553330/papers/SS0603NowsonS.pdf

- Effects of Age and Gender on Blogging by Jonathan Schler, Moshe
Koppel, Shlomo Argamon, and James Pennebaker -
http://lingcog.iit.edu/doc/springsymp-blogs-final.pdf

- Gender Classification of Weblog Authors by Xiang Yan and Ling -
http://www.stanford.edu/~xyan/publications/SS0603YanX.pdf

(By the way, does anybody know the original source for that image so I can attribute it?)

Alan’s write-up of my talk is on the NMC blog here – thanks so much!

And here is the line-up for our panel session at the ECAR conference:

Yay! Here is my final book cover!!!

And here is one of the endorsements:

How lovely of Len Unsworth to write such kind words.

This is the proposed book cover design for my book!!!  Yay!!!  Finally its *almost* here.  I am very excited now to be this close

Thanks to Sue, I have just found out about this exhibition at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition itself is one thing to be fascinated with, but I am even more interested to find out that the exhibition has an associated blog, with reviews, links to reviews, commentary, and even video clips of people discussing their work. It’s just wonderful! For example, here is the artist of the cover image for the catalogue (shown above) discussing the ways in which women’s body parts are appropriated to sell books, and ironically it was her feminist statement on this that was selected as the cover for the catalogue:

And here are some of the blog reader comments about their conflicting feelings over the cover.

Like Sue, I think this is really innovative – I can’t think of any other museums or galleries using blogs to engage the public in critical discussions of their exhibitions.