Chronicling the vernacular and the middlebrow in post-digital culture.

Middlebroware is a research project initiated by Dr. Frederik Lesage, an associate professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Digital media and creative practice have become inextricably entwined in the contemporary collective imaginary. The goal of this project is to better understand this imaginary and how constitutes a new material and symbolic order for culture. Specifically, we investigate how the design, marketisation, and use of digital tools — from Photoshop to PowerPoint, from Unity to the Google search engine — reify creativity.
IAMCR conference presentation on "Searching for Tasks"
Jul 22, 2020
Frederik Lesage
skills

Due to the pandemic, this year's IAMCR conference had to move not once, but twice. It was first shifted from China to Finland in order to deal with the initial outbreak. When the outbreak reached Europe, the Tampere team shifted its entire program to an online format. The team did a wonderful job considering these exceptional circumstances. Sadly, this meant the conference presentations took place entirely through a webportal.

Affect Probes and the Creative Publics research project
Jul 6, 2020
Frederik Lesage
Critique

The most recent paper based on research with Tara Mahoney of Gen Why Media (and currently a research fellow at the David Suzuki Foundation) has just come out.

Searching for Tasks – Digital taxonomies for skills
Jun 9, 2020
Frederik Lesage
pedagogy skills

Skills and skills training remain, without a doubt, some of the big key words for any policy discussion concerning the future of work. While compiling some literature for our Mitacs-funded investigation into digital skills I started to come across a lot of interesting pieces on how digital platforms are developing their own taxonomies for modeling skills.The two big corporate players I can currently find are LinkedIn and Coursera.

the latest:

The Photoshop Inscriptions Project (https://dhil.lib.sfu.ca/pi/) has just been featured by SFU's Digital Humanities Lab as part of Day of Digital Humanities 2020 #dayofdh2020.

Chronicling the vernacular and the middlebrow in post-digital culture.