Professor Brian Yecies

Associate Professor Brian Yecies is a recognized leader in the field of cultural and creative industries, which ranks among the fastest-expanding sectors and contributes an annual value of $4.3 trillion USD (6.1%) to the overall global economy (according to UNESCO). New agendas in the field have been initiated through his long-standing investigations on the complex social, cultural, technological, political, and industrial impacts of communications and screen and digital media. He has a record of leading cross-disciplinary research teams and projects that emphasize the innovative application of digital research methods to the study of popular culture and new technologies. Specifically, Yecies is a leading scholar on the digital and cultural transformation of Korea and Asia, with an established record of collaborating with and mentoring colleagues, spearheading the empowerment of others, and influencing change in the field. See his academic profiles here and here, and LinkedIn here.

Since 2018, he has led and successfully completed a 3-year competitively awarded Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project (with Jack Yang) titled Mobile Webtoons: Creative Innovation in a New Digital Economy (DP180101841). This was the first major Australian government study of its kind to investigate the emergent webtoon ecosystem and economy in Korea and their impacts on policymakers, scholars, and creative practitioners across the global creative industries. Through this interdisciplinary project, involving colleagues from Engineering, Information Sciences, and IT Computing, Yecies worked closely with a range of Korean webtoon industry representatives as well as the Australian Cartoonists Association, providing a mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources for advancing digital media storytelling aesthetics and technologies and the big data methods to study them. Through his project outputs, Yecies and his project team trained some of Australia’s next generation of emergent mobile media content creators on how to develop webtoons and apply transmedia storytelling techniques to the wider creative industries sector, including cinema, television, K-pop, webnovels, fashion, and print comics.

Currently, Yecies is leading a multidisciplinary team of 24 members and PhD candidates for an 2022-2026 Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP210300009) titled Empowering Australia’s Visual Arts via Creative Blockchain Opportunities. The project involves the interdisciplinary fields of digital and social media, creative arts/design, computer science, cybersecurity, and business/finance – with a team from 3 different universities and 9 commercial and community partners who are national change-makers: Australian Copyright Council, National Association for the Visual Arts, Copyright Agency, Australian Network for Art & Technology, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Data61– Australia’s leading national science organization.