Content for the next generation of broadband Internet technology is being developed by a University of Queensland academic.
Dr Philip Graham from the UQ Business School is heading an international interdisciplinary group researching broadband content development.
He has been awarded $70,000 as one of seven recipients of the 2003 UQ Foundation Research Excellence Awards for early career researchers, valued in total at $465,000.
“Broadband is high-speed Internet access technology and is delivered via Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Lines (ADSL), optical fibre cables or microwave and satellite networks,” Dr Graham said.
“Because of broadband’s increasingly central role in economic development, cultural innovation and cultural preservation, broadband content development has become a key research priority worldwide with huge R&D potential.”
Dr Graham is working with researchers from the University of Waterloo’s Canadian Centre for Cultural Innovation (CCCI) on a project closely associated with the Australian Creative Resources Archive (ACRA) based at UQ’s Ipswich campus.
The projects have complementary infrastructures and a similar aim of simulating broadband usage by identifying development factors in new forms of broadband content.
Dr Graham has received more than $2 million in grants for the two projects, with an additional $4.9 million under assessment and $3 million in related grants under development in Australia alone.
He said although broadband could always be improved by increasing data transfer rates, the main problem at the moment was the lack of content for broadband platforms.
“A good analogy would be the emergence of television as a new medium. None of the program formats that we are familiar with today existed prior to the development of the television,” Dr Graham said.
“It took years for content developers to create the types of programs we now watch.
“It also took a long time for large-scale industries to emerge, copyright laws to be established, and for distribution and business production models to be sorted out.”
Dr Graham said the same problems faced broadband content development, but the development of rules and conventions for its production were more difficult than those of centralised mass media industries.
“Not only does broadband have a global scope, but almost anyone can engage in the production of broadband content using every type of data possible,” he said.
The international research group hope to identify the kinds of resources, infrastructures and networks of expertise necessary for the development of successful broadband content.
They also hope to contribute to the development of new content by discovering the kinds of digital resources, data formats, authoring tools, retrieval mechanisms, intellectual property models and business models best suited to broadband content development.
Dr Graham said several aspects of the research had commercialisation potential, with Hewlett Packard and Creative Commons already expressing interest in some aspects of the research.
In particular, he said mass digitisation strategies for converting other forms of media, faster high-fidelity digitisation and various software and hardware developments were likely commercialisation outcomes.
The $70,000 grant will be used to employ a postdoctoral fellow and part-time research assistant, travel to Canada and purchase computer equipment.
Dr Graham began lecturing at UQ in 2000 while completing his PhD in media and communication.
He has more than 20 years experience in the advertising, film and music industries and has spent the past five years researching new media.
Internationally-recognised in the fields of language and discourse analysis, political economy of communication and media history, Dr Graham’s work has been published in more than 30 refereed publications in the past four years.
He is co-editor of the new Critical Discourse Studies journal and is on the international advisory board of the New Media and Society journal.
Media: Videos and still photos are available at www.uq.edu.au/news/researchweek or for further information, contact Dr Graham (telephone 07 3381 1083) or Joanne van Zeeland at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 2619).
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