Digital Media/Communication: DigitalOcean by Bruce Caron, Ph.D.
Bruce Caron, Ph.D.Executive Director
New Media Research Institute
Santa Barbara, CA
Vision:
In collaboration with the School of Natural Resources and the Environment, the DigitalOcean Project (DO) is a Web 2.0 ocean science education social networking infrastructure. DO’s forefront social networking technology connects ocean scientists and media producers into a common venture to further the public use of scientifically validated media. The DO Early Career Ocean Science Social Network will offer new channels for ocean research discovery, coordination, collaboration, and communication. This effort will accelerate the pace of turning ocean science into ocean policy.
Bruce Caron, Ph.D., Executive Director, TNMS
Bruce is the founder and current executive director of the New Media Studio and the New Media Research Institute in Santa Barbara. He is the project manager for DigitalOcean, an emerging social networking/social media software platform for science. 
He is leading a public awareness action in Santa Barbara, lightblueline.org, which proposes to paint the seven-meter elevation contour on that city's streets, to mark the vulnerability the community faces due to human induced climate change. He is the PI on a NASA 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 is a PI on an NIH project; working with the Mayo Clinic to bring medical scanning visualization tools into the classroom. He is also the project director on Sampling the Sea, a MacArthur Foundation funded Digital Media and Learning effort based at UC Santa Barbara. He will be speaking about this project at SXSW this year. This year he was awarded the Martha Maiden Lifetime Achievement Award from the ESIP Federation. He recently finished a novel, Junana, which outlines an alternative present, where the promise of educational gaming turns the world on its head as hundreds of millions of teenagers know more than their parents, teachers, and the marketplace.
He is leading a public awareness action in Santa Barbara, lightblueline.org, which proposes to paint the seven-meter elevation contour on that city's streets, to mark the vulnerability the community faces due to human induced climate change. He is the PI on a NASA 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 is a PI on an NIH project; working with the Mayo Clinic to bring medical scanning visualization tools into the classroom. He is also the project director on Sampling the Sea, a MacArthur Foundation funded Digital Media and Learning effort based at UC Santa Barbara. He will be speaking about this project at SXSW this year. This year he was awarded the Martha Maiden Lifetime Achievement Award from the ESIP Federation. He recently finished a novel, Junana, which outlines an alternative present, where the promise of educational gaming turns the world on its head as hundreds of millions of teenagers know more than their parents, teachers, and the marketplace.Bruce was trained as a social anthropologist and an urban cultural geographer. He is skilled in a variety of multimedia authoring tools, and completed the first multimedia dissertation at UC Santa Barbara.
Through the New Media Studio and the New Media Research Institute, 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, the chair of the DLESE Data Access Working Group, on user working group for SEDAC (Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center) at Columbia University, and as an elected member of the NSDL Policy Committee.
