A Mccosker
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 8402 |
|---|---|
| NOME | A Mccosker |
| PRENOMES | A |
| SOBRENOME | Mccosker |
| ASSINATURA | MCCOSKER A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Swinburne University of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0666-3262 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 60 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 126 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 60 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2004 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
From Principles to Practice
As AI technologies become more integrated and embedded into everyday services, activities, and social connectivity, the notion of inclusive AI is increasingly pertinent; yet the concept lacks theoretical cohesion and remains elusive in practice. In this paper we propose a practice-based framework for inclusive AI, developed through collaborations with community, humanitarian, health, legal, and learning organisations. We conceptualise inclusive A…
From Tech-Solutionism to Community-Centred Data Capability for Disaster Preparedness
The urgency of enhancing community resilience in the face of escalating disasters necessitates a shift in disaster preparedness strategies. This paper presents a novel approach developed in collaboration with the Australian Red Cross, focusing on community-centred data practices for disaster resilience. Recognising the limitations of traditional digital humanitarianism, which largely relied on crowdsourcing and social platform data, our project s…
Digital Social Connection at the Lonely Urban Fringe
This study explores how individuals in outer metropolitan areas use digital tools to maintain social connections in settings with physical isolation and limited social infrastructure. Based on interviews with 44 participants, the research identifies four layers of digital social connection: close relationships, social support networks, group participation, and community engagement. The findings show that people use a variety of digital platforms,…
Revitalising the Concept of the Everyday in Internet Research
In an academic milieu in which a lot of critical attention is dedicated to the data-grabbing, algorithmically biased, and asymmetrical power of massive techno-corporations, this panel explores how a focus on situated ordinary practices can provide us with a more complex, nuanced, and even at times contradictory account of what happens when pervasive digital technologies are experienced in everyday life. It does so via a combination of empirical r…
Bootstrapping the digital divide
This paper examines intersections between social disadvantage and digital inequality in low-income household settings using situational analysis. Partnering with social service organisations, we conducted qualitative fieldwork research over 12 months with low-income households in disadvantaged suburbs in Tasmania, Australia. The research involved home visits, phone interviews, technology tours, and learning biographies with members of households.…
Missing the human touch
Existing research suggests that machine translations of literary texts remain unsatisfactory. Such quality assessment often relies on automated metrics and subjective human ratings, with little attention to the stylistic features of machine translation. Current understanding is limited regarding the extent to which AI may transform the literary translation landscape, with implications for other critical domains for translation such as the creativ…
Deepening the data divide
This paper investigates open public data and data sharing reforms in Australia (2018–2022) and their potential role in deepening the ‘data divide’. In the contemporary datafied welfare state, open public data and data sharing are increasingly vexed issues in times of data-driven artificial intelligence (AI). We scrutinise public consultation surrounding the establishment of the Australian Data Availability and Transparency Act 2022 (DAT Act). Thr…
Digitally skilled but socially disadvantaged
This paper presents a case study of smart home technology use in a low-income household, focussing on the paradox within the digital divide of having high digital skills while experiencing social disadvantage. Contextualised within a larger study of digital disadvantage in low-income households, we use an ethnographic case study approach to examine the experiences of a single parent who lives with her son in public housing and uses various smart …
Relational Ethics in the Administration of Healthcare Technology
Automation and AI-driven decision support systems are increasingly reshaping healthcare, particularly in diagnostic and clinical management contexts. Although their potential to enhance access, efficiency and personalisation is widely recognised, there remain ethical concerns especially around the shifting dynamics of healthcare relationships. This article proposes a conceptual framework for understanding the relational ethics of healthcare autom…
A qualitative exploration of online forums to support resilience of rural young people in Australia
Introduction: Prevention and early intervention are crucial strategies for improving young people's mental health and well-being. Building resilience is a key component of these strategies, especially among young individuals in rural areas who face well-documented mental health disparities. This study aimed to investigate how online mental health forums can contribute to enhancing individual resilience in young rural users. Methods: = 1,000) made…
Using Data Bricolage and Mixed-Methods GIS to Uncover Mental Health Service Gaps in Rural Australia
This article develops an approach to data bricolage by mixed-methods geographic information systems (GIS) to challenge assumptions that quantitative service provision data and consumer surveys are the only sources of data that can inform gaps in service accessibility.Claims of repurposing health data have long animated health geography, but methodological advances have only recently begun to open opportunities for geographical analyses of reused …
Data for Social Good
This open access book provides guidance for organisations in the community sector on how to get started with community data science projects.
Mental Health and the Digital Care Assemblage
This paper examines the socio-technical ecosystems that shape the moderation of mental health content. To explore how care is formulated across and between different actors and automated systems, I focus on the experiences of moderators and users of three peer-based mental health support platforms. The analysis is framed by the notion of the 'digital care assemblage' to delineate the interactions between goal-oriented moderation policies, automat…
Techno-Political Promises of Pandemic Management
This article considers the politics and practicalities of responding to the COVID crisis with ‘an app for that’. It shows how seductive solutionism in times of crisis created political impetus to direct the public health response to contact tracing through Contact Tracing Apps (CTA). Rather than focus on user-based concerns (uptake, privacy, etc.), we’ve investigated how apps interface with complex systems and infrastructures of public health. Ou…
Vernacular Pedagogies for the Synthetic Media Age
This paper draws on our research into the cultures of production surrounding the development of deepfakes and use of other forms of generative AI across public sites such as GitHub and YouTube, and subsequent reflective classroom experimentation and learning. Expanding on the notion of ‘vernacular pedagogies’ – informal and in situ education and relational literacy work – we propose a set of approaches for widening participation and involvement i…
Moderating Mental Health
Across commercial social media platforms and dedicated support forums alike, mental health content raises important questions about what constitutes risk and harm online, and how automated and human moderation practices can be re-configured to accommodate resilient behaviours and social support. In work with three Australian mental health organisations that provide successful discussion and support forums, this paper identifies moderation practic…
Community transformed? Exploring the interaction between online support and rural community life for people with acute mental health conditions
Accounting for diversity in older adults’ digital inclusion and literacy
In many parts of the world, older adults continue to face significant barriers to digital inclusion, but the source of that inequality is not well understood. However, we do not know enough about differences among older people seeking to improve their digital skills. Examining the impact of a national three-year digital inclusion programme reaching more than 580,000 older adults in Australia, this study explores factors that affect digital skills…
Moderating mental health
Covid-19 deepened the need for digital-based support for people experiencing mental ill-health. Discussion platforms have long filled gaps in health service provision and access, offering peer-based support usually maintained by a mix of professional and volunteer peer moderators. Even on dedicated support platforms, however, mental health content poses difficulties for human and machine moderation. While automated systems are considered essentia…
A Novel Mixed Methods Approach for Integrating Not-for-Profit Service Data via Qualitative Geographic Information System to Explore Authentic Experiences of Ill-Health
Meeting the mental health needs of rural populations is challenging internationally, with few methods and scarce data available to inform site-specific planning. We developed a mixed methods approach that integrates Not-for-profit (NFP) organization data in a Geographic Information System (GIS) to explore interrelated understandings of mental health experiences in rural places. Integrating qualitative experience data from online forums with quant…
Making sense of deepfakes
As a form of synthetic media built on the Internet’s extensive visual datasets with evolving machine learning techniques, deepfakes raise the specter of new types of informational harms and possibilities for image-based abuse. There are calls for three types of defensive response: regulation, technical controls, and improved digital or media literacy. Each is problematic by itself. This article asks what kind of literacy can address deepfake harm…
Developing data capability with non-profit organisations using participatory methods
In this paper, we explore the methodologies underpinning two participatory research collaborations with Australian non-profit organisations that aimed to build data capability and social benefit in data use. We suggest that studying and intervening in data practices in situ, that is, in organisational data settings expands opportunities for improving the social value of data. These situated and collaborative approaches not only address the 'exper…
Spanning communication boundaries to address health inequalities
Healthcare services face persistent barriers in reaching and improving access for marginalized or hardly reached people. This paper details the strategic use of social media among community connectors, or members of a community who address health issues in their local contexts by spanning socio-cultural boundaries within the community. Undertaking qualitative research in rural Australia and Ireland, we find evidence that through their strategic u…
Social media for social good? A thematic, spatial and visual analysis of humanitarian action on Instagram
As an image and location sharing platform, Instagram offers intimate visual access to events, experiences and situations in a manner that is mobile and contextual. Partnering with Australian Red Cross, this paper develops a mixed methodology for using Instagram data to identify and understand individuals’ everyday humanitarian activity in a major urban centre (Melbourne, Australia) outside of the temporal frame of crisis. The research integrates …
Men seeking women
This paper draws on qualitative research conducted with cis men aged 18–35, who used dating apps to meet women both before and during COVID-19 lockdown. Men in our study — which sought to better understand the aspects of app use that make young people feel safer or less safe — offered affectively loaded accounts of app use, which featured racialized and gendered experiences of ‘awkwardness’, shame, and contempt. Our analysis engages with Bollen a…
Trolling as provocation
This article explores the productive role of provocation in YouTube publics in the context of two culturally and geographically situated visual events that took place in New Zealand throughout 2011. Through qualitative analysis of the extensive comments fields for the two videos, the article examines the nature of participatory acts associated with what has been called at different times flaming, hating or trolling. The article argues that such a…
Hashtagging depression on Instagram
Heavily used hashtags on Instagram and other platforms can indicate extensive public engagement with issues, events or collective experiences. This article extends existing research methods to paint a fuller picture of how people engage collectively with public issues online. Focussing on Instagram content often deemed ‘problematic’, we develop and test what we call a ‘hashtag practice’ approach. This approach targets the hashtag #depressed, and …
Engaging mental health online
Digital platforms offer an important means for improving the reach, scale and accessibility of community-based support for those dealing with mental health issues. They enable new forms of health participation. A research gap remains in understanding the role of peer mentors in building effective digital environments for mental health support. This article presents part of a larger study centred on the digital interventions of prominent mental he…
Everyday Data Cultures
This panel deploys a range of qualitative methodologies to investigate how processes of datafication meet with the subjective experiences of ordinary people, and the practices of everyday life. We draw on the model of 'everyday data cultures' proposed by Burgess (2017) to explore the ways diverse data practices - including the production and circulation of data visualisations, modes of data storage and vernacular engagements with data literacy - …
Boundary spanning practices of community connectors for engaging 'hardly reached' people in health services
Making sense of deepfakes
As a form of synthetic media built on the Internet’s extensive visual datasets with evolving machine learning techniques, deepfakes raise the specter of new types of informational harms and possibilities for image-based abuse. There are calls for three types of defensive response: regulation, technical controls, and improved digital or media literacy. Each is problematic by itself. This article asks what kind of literacy can address deepfake harm…
Governance networks that strengthen older adults' digital inclusion
Accounting for diversity in older adults’ digital inclusion and literacy
In many parts of the world, older adults continue to face significant barriers to digital inclusion, but the source of that inequality is not well understood. However, we do not know enough about differences among older people seeking to improve their digital skills. Examining the impact of a national three-year digital inclusion programme reaching more than 580,000 older adults in Australia, this study explores factors that affect digital skills…
Dating apps as public health 'problems
In this paper we examine how popular media reporting positions dating and hookup app use as a 'social problem' that impacts on health and wellbeing. The paper adopts a mixed-methods media studies approach to create and analyse a dataset of over 6,000 international news articles published within a 12-month period, drawing on thematic content analysis and inductive and deductive techniques. These analyses are framed in relation to online consultati…
Social Media Activism at the Margins
This article is concerned with social media activism at the margins and deals with the problem of managing visibility and voice and the role of affect in the emergence of contested publics over time. While we hear a lot about social media mobilization and exchange during critical and large-scale protest events, less is understood about the capacities for building and maintaining more peripheral dissident publics over longer timeframes. And while …
Contested Publics
While social media tools enable new kinds of creativity, cultural expression and forms of public, civic and political participation, we often hear more about the harms that arise from instances of trolling and ‘aberrant’ online participation, including racist provocation. In media and communications research, these issues have been framed in a number of ways, usually focusing on new tools for civic engagement, political participation and digital …
Coding Labour
As well as introducing the Coding Labour section, the authors explore the diffusion of code across the material contexts of everyday life, through the objects and tools of mediation, the systems and practices of cultural production and organisational management, and in the material conditions of labour. Taking code beyond computation and software, their specific focus is on the increasingly familiar connections between code and labour with a focu…
Developing data capability with non-profit organisations using participatory methods
In this paper, we explore the methodologies underpinning two participatory research collaborations with Australian non-profit organisations that aimed to build data capability and social benefit in data use. We suggest that studying and intervening in data practices in situ, that is, in organisational data settings expands opportunities for improving the social value of data. These situated and collaborative approaches not only address the 'exper…
Reluctant selfies
This paper explores how older people’s reluctance to engage in social media’s more vernacular practices, such as selfie-taking and sharing, can be attributed to specific social barriers to online inclusion and participation. Drawing on empirical research conducted during social media-oriented digital literacy workshops with older people, we explore how ‘reluctant’ participation was linked to perceptions of social media cultures that did not match…
Social media work
Social media platforms are associated with significant digital transformations but also carry some uncertainty for organisations seeking to capitalise on their affordances while developing new professional roles. This article explores the characteristics and contexts of social media work and the different approaches of organisations as they enter a second wave of application, moving beyond participation to data extraction within conditions of con…
De-framing disaster
In recent years, the massive devastation and suffering caused by global-scale disasters has fuelled intense flows of Web-based media and communicative exchange. Where studies of traditional broadcast disaster media have often sought to identify the frames that position victims and viewers, this paper focuses on those forms of emerging media that operate outside of and to some extent work to de-frame institutional coverage through modes of affect.…
Community transformed? Exploring the interaction between online support and rural community life for people with acute mental health conditions
Moderating mental health
Covid-19 deepened the need for digital-based support for people experiencing mental ill-health. Discussion platforms have long filled gaps in health service provision and access, offering peer-based support usually maintained by a mix of professional and volunteer peer moderators. Even on dedicated support platforms, however, mental health content poses difficulties for human and machine moderation. While automated systems are considered essentia…
A Novel Mixed Methods Approach for Integrating Not-for-Profit Service Data via Qualitative Geographic Information System to Explore Authentic Experiences of Ill-Health
Meeting the mental health needs of rural populations is challenging internationally, with few methods and scarce data available to inform site-specific planning. We developed a mixed methods approach that integrates Not-for-profit (NFP) organization data in a Geographic Information System (GIS) to explore interrelated understandings of mental health experiences in rural places. Integrating qualitative experience data from online forums with quant…
Mental health support apps and 'proper distance
mHealth programmes and apps have been developed by organisations like Beyond Blue and the Black Dog Institute, as tools to help people manage their mental health. The pace of development raises questions about ensuring sustained engagement and an ethical approach. Derived from ethnographic research at each organisation, this article explores reflections by research and development workers on the relational aspects of technology development, how t…
East Timor and the politics of bodily pain
The central concern in this paper is the imagery of suffering that emerged from East Timor in the years of Indonesian military occupation prior to the 1999 vote for independence. These images included the widely televised footage of the massacre in the East Timorese capital, Dili, in 1991, and the circulation of a variety of photographs appearing to represent the torture, rape and execution of East Timorese men and women. Taking onboard issues of…
East Timor and the politics of bodily pain
The central concern in this paper is the imagery of suffering that emerged from East Timor in the years of Indonesian military occupation prior to the 1999 vote for independence. These images included the widely televised footage of the massacre in the East Timorese capital, Dili, in 1991, and the circulation of a variety of photographs appearing to represent the torture, rape and execution of East Timorese men and women. Taking onboard issues of…
A Vision of Masochism in the Affective Pain of Crash
This article investigates the image of masochism presented by David Cronenberg’s film Crash (1996) and the public controversy that it provoked. The analysis of the film and the media debates and outrage presented in this article follows recent theoretical accounts of masochistic sexuality that emphasize lived experience and corporeality. In the narrative’s unusual couplings and unconventional sexual experiences, there is an intensification of the…
Living With Cancer
Blogs have been used extensively to self-document the intimate and often intensive experiences of living with serious illness, charting their author's health and treatment often over many years, connecting with others and drawing attention and concern along the way. This paper analyses a selection of typical ‘cancer blogs’ with the aim of understanding the kinds of personal investment, or labour, involved in the process of forming and maintaining…
De-framing disaster
In recent years, the massive devastation and suffering caused by global-scale disasters has fuelled intense flows of Web-based media and communicative exchange. Where studies of traditional broadcast disaster media have often sought to identify the frames that position victims and viewers, this paper focuses on those forms of emerging media that operate outside of and to some extent work to de-frame institutional coverage through modes of affect.…
Trolling as provocation
This article explores the productive role of provocation in YouTube publics in the context of two culturally and geographically situated visual events that took place in New Zealand throughout 2011. Through qualitative analysis of the extensive comments fields for the two videos, the article examines the nature of participatory acts associated with what has been called at different times flaming, hating or trolling. The article argues that such a…
Deleuze and the New Camera Consciousness
A review of Patricia Pisters' The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working With Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, 2003
Rethinking ‘big data’ as visual knowledge
Informational data, we are told, are proliferating ever more rapidly and with increasing complexity. In an age of ‘big data’ we are seeing a broad reaching, and often uncritical fascination with data visualisation and its potential for knowledge generation. At its extreme this represents a fantasy of knowing, or total knowledge. Nonetheless, for those working in visual anthropology, big data and data visualisation offer significant extensions to …
Contested Publics
While social media tools enable new kinds of creativity, cultural expression and forms of public, civic and political participation, we often hear more about the harms that arise from instances of trolling and ‘aberrant’ online participation, including racist provocation. In media and communications research, these issues have been framed in a number of ways, usually focusing on new tools for civic engagement, political participation and digital …
Coding Labour
As well as introducing the Coding Labour section, the authors explore the diffusion of code across the material contexts of everyday life, through the objects and tools of mediation, the systems and practices of cultural production and organisational management, and in the material conditions of labour. Taking code beyond computation and software, their specific focus is on the increasingly familiar connections between code and labour with a focu…
Untangling Digital Citizenship
A review of Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert, Being Digital Citizens (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2015
Social Media Activism at the Margins
This article is concerned with social media activism at the margins and deals with the problem of managing visibility and voice and the role of affect in the emergence of contested publics over time. While we hear a lot about social media mobilization and exchange during critical and large-scale protest events, less is understood about the capacities for building and maintaining more peripheral dissident publics over longer timeframes. And while …
Toward a classification of world metropolitan spatial strategies
The content of main strategy maps of ten worldwide metropolitan strategies is analysed to identify similarities and differences leading to a classification of the strategies. Their structure is compared via traditional cartographic elements of point, line and area, and 'relational' elements such as mesh, attraction and territorial dynamics. The type of each map is then compared via the level of abstraction of map content. Type and structure are j…
Non-human Sensing
Data literacies for the postdemographic social media self
In a postdemographic world, characterized by the continuous production and calculation of social data in the form of likes, comments, shares, keywords, locations or hashtags, social media platforms are designed with techniques of market segmentation in mind. “Datafication” challenges the agency of participatory social media practices and traditional accounts of the presentation of self in the use of social media. In the process, a tension or para…
Social media work
Social media platforms are associated with significant digital transformations but also carry some uncertainty for organisations seeking to capitalise on their affordances while developing new professional roles. This article explores the characteristics and contexts of social media work and the different approaches of organisations as they enter a second wave of application, moving beyond participation to data extraction within conditions of con…
Implementing Healthy Planning and Active Living Initiatives
Factors including internal local government functioning, collaboration and the use of co-benefits have been noted to assist in the uptake of healthy planning policies and projects by local governments. However, less commonly noted is a possible reverse relationship: that implementation of healthy planning projects can contribute positively to organisational functioning and collaboration, and can result in a range of co-benefits that then can be u…
Engaging mental health online
Digital platforms offer an important means for improving the reach, scale and accessibility of community-based support for those dealing with mental health issues. They enable new forms of health participation. A research gap remains in understanding the role of peer mentors in building effective digital environments for mental health support. This article presents part of a larger study centred on the digital interventions of prominent mental he…
Mental health support apps and 'proper distance
mHealth programmes and apps have been developed by organisations like Beyond Blue and the Black Dog Institute, as tools to help people manage their mental health. The pace of development raises questions about ensuring sustained engagement and an ethical approach. Derived from ethnographic research at each organisation, this article explores reflections by research and development workers on the relational aspects of technology development, how t…
Boundary spanning practices of community connectors for engaging 'hardly reached' people in health services
How Does a Car Learn to See?
In Chapter 6 , we examine a little understood aspect of autonomous vehicle technology: vision capture. While most attention relating to driverless cars has focused on the legal and safety concerns associated with removing a driver’s control, fundamental to the long-term success of autonomous vehicles is the development of visual capture and processing - that is, the processes that are involved in the mapping, sensing and real-time dynamic visual …
Camera Consciousness
In Chapter 2 , we further develop the concept of camera consciousness, positing it as an effective way of accounting for the social changes involved with the increasing autonomy and intelligence of camera technologies and image processing. We begin with the visual anthropology of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, and use the concept of camera consciousness to develop an analytical framework, with the aid of William James, Gilles Deleuze, Jane Be…
Drone Vision
In Chapter 5 , we ask: How does the increasingly ubiquitous aerial drone affect and depend on new forms of distributed, wireless visuality? While a lot of attention has been paid to the trajectory of drone technology as it has arisen out of military contexts and has since invaded urban spaces, we examine the essential role played by drones’ camera technology, visual controls and wireless relations. To understand the implications of drones (both s…
Interrogating Seeing Machines
In Chapter 1 , we establish the overall terrain of the book and give an abbreviated account of the core concept (camera consciousness) and its key thematic concerns (the social impacts of machine vision, the importance of visual literacies). As we explain in this chapter, camera consciousness involves both an awareness of cameras and a self-conscious reaction to their power to make visible, to reveal, capture and hold their target and to fix it f…
Face Value
In Chapter 3 , we examine the value of face images in the application of face recognition technology. Expanding on the example of China’s camera and face recognition-assisted “social credit system” and its “algorithmic governance” goals, this chapter offers an alternative point of focus to a reading that prioritizes surveillance and governance. We focus not on the loss of privacy these systems entail but, rather, on the new modes of digital inclu…
Automating Visual Literacies
In Chapter 7 , the concluding chapter to the book, we consider the implications of the technologies discussed throughout the book through the lens of visual literacies. This critical lens prompts us to ask what it really does mean to automate each element of the competencies of visual literacy. At the same time, this same lens leads us to question how automation, machine reading and machine learning supersede what we have understood to be the exc…
Sociology (39 obras) · Political science (34 obras) · Computer Science (33 obras) · Public relations (26 obras) · Psychology (22 obras) · Business (17 obras) · World Wide Web (13 obras) · Mental health (12 obras) · Social media (12 obras) · Social science (12 obras)