I noticed awhile back that Jean Burgess was doing some research on YouTube. A description from her blog research page:

I’m currently designing a major case study of YouTube as a complex system that sits within the history of the emergence, mass popularisation and marketisation of new media technologies and literacies (from the printing press to the Kodak camera and the domestication of personal computing).

In a recent post titled YouTube Research Gazette Jean brings together a great collection of YouTube research. First up, the Infoscape Research Lab who have on their site a section with the url name ‘videopolitics’. A description on the project titled ‘Code Politics: Party Leaders and Partisans on YouTube.’

Where do issues in virtual public spheres come from during an election? This research project aims to examine the movement of issues through media over time via coding, archival and analytical research into online media processes, understood as code politics. When and how do parties set the agenda, or do they? How does the blogosphere deploy new media formats such as embedded video or RSS, and how do aggregators (such as www.YouTube.com) that provide these formats influence agendas? What is the relationship between political parties, mainstream media, bloggers and the blogosphere?

There is other things to explore here but what caught my eye in the meantime was Chuck Tyron’s writing published on Flow TV. Chuck is profiled on his Chutry blog and he has an extensive delicious tag on YouTube. He is also participating on braintrustdv. About braintrustdv:

BRAINTRUSTdv is an ongoing attempt to understand electronic cinema on its own terms as well as through the prism of the twentieth-century art form from which it derives.

BRAINTRUSTdv is more concerned with the history of video technology than with the latest development; more concerned with aesthetic debates than with technical specifications; more concerned with articulate arguments than with terse weblog exchanges.

Back to Tryon’s writing on Flow TV which covers a number of socio-political perspectives.