Bruce Caron

Bruce Caron, the founder and current executive director of the New Media Studio and the New Media Research Institute in Santa Barbara, was trained as a social anthropologist and an urban cultural geographer. He is skilled in a variety of multimedia authoring tools and digital media production. He completed the first multimedia dissertation at UC Santa Barbara. Through the New Media Studio, he is realizing the goal of bringing new tools and skills to the public to help democratize the technological advantages of the digital revolution. Bruce has a wide-ranging academic background in both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and has been active for several years in issues of digital libraries, the use of multimedia in education, and the theory of digital media. Bruce has taught at colleges and universities in Japan, and at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California and has served as the president of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners and as an elected member of the National Science Digital Library Policy Committee. He is leading a public awareness action in Santa Barbara, lightblueline.org, which proposes to mark the vulnerability the community faces due to human induced climate change. He is currently the PI on a NASA funded ACCESS project, the Data and Information Application Layer (DIAL), which uses forefront technology to bridge between commercial off the shelf data access/visualization software and multimedia authoring software. He has a long-time interest in issues of social participation, and is leading an effort to explore this within cyberinfrastructure. This effort, now at cybersocialstructure.org, includes issues of governance and implicit controls on participation in virtual organizations (virtual democracy). Currently he is the Project Manager for a UCSB project called “DigitalOcean”, which is exploring the use of social network software to support interactions among several key communities: from early career marine scientists, to media producers, to middle-school children.

cybersocialstructure

New Media Studio

lightblueline