October 2008 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

Re: [Air-L] Online Research Methods Texts
by Daren Carroll Brabham 28 Feb '09

28 Feb '09

I found this helpful in a recent study I did using IM interviewing. It covers other online methodological issues, too: Kazmer, M.M., & Xie, B. (2008). Qualitative interviewing in Internet studies: Playing with the media, playing with the method. Information, Communication & Society, 11(2), 115-136. db --- Daren C. Brabham Graduate Teaching Fellow Department of Communication University of Utah 255 S. Central Campus Dr., Rm. 2400 Salt Lake City, UT 84112 phone: (801) 633-4796 daren.brabham(a)utah.edu www.darenbrabham.com <http://www.darenbrabham.com/>

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Wikipedia Bibliography
by Mark Bell 22 Jan '09

22 Jan '09

Folks, I thought I would post my Wikipedia bibliography from my master's thesis. Hope you find it useful. http://www.storygeek.com/?page_id=83 M -- Mark Bell MA student in Ball State University's Digital Storytelling program ( http://www.bsu.edu/cim/storytelling/) http://www.storygeek.com http://www.digital-ethos.com/ "The future is here...it's just not widely distributed." - Tim O'Reilly

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Re: new media and shock
by Stephanie Kent 19 Jan '09

19 Jan '09

Hi all - I generally just lurk, but I was struck by a discontinuity in discussion last Thursday and think it bears on this question of becoming inured to shock. There were 6 posts on "London...the internet accounts" interspersed with 4 on "AoIR 6.0 Chicago 2005 Registration is now open", 1 each on "iCS 8.2", "Call for proposals", and "Internet and fun/joy/pleasure". In the three days since, "London" vanished, some of the other threads continued, and new ones appeared. This is no doubt the nature of most conversations on this list, and perhaps everything that could be said about shock and bearing up and giving sympathy was expressed in the comments that were posted, and/or continuation has moved to other venues. But I had some cognitive dissonance reading the disparate threads as business-as-usual went on for many (including me) while others were wondering just how "usual" their lives were going to continue to be. I'm not familiar with any of the literature on shock, but some levels or layers of protection are evident in the acts of just getting on with things, whatever those immediate things that consume us may be. At the same time, I'm aware it would also be counterproductive (at least to purposes of peace and justice) to mine the event for all its tragedy, as this would play into political efforts to cast the attack in symbolic terms that fuel nationalisms and other hatreds. Shock, by definition, puts one in a state of non-responsiveness; the challenge may be the degree to which that lack of response gets carried over or continued into the return to the mundane, especially after the state-of-shock has worn off. best, steph http://www.reflexivity.us On Jul 10, 2005, at 3:07 PM, air-l-aoir.org-request(a)listserv.aoir.org wrote: > Hello all--a colleague of mine asked me if I could help him with the > following question. I'm not an authority on the Frankfurt School or > its > theorization of shock but hope that some of you out there might be. > Any > suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. > > Ken > > > His problem/question is as follows: > > Much ink has been spilt over shock within Frankfurt School writings. A > concept clearly taken over from Simmel and Freud, shock runs to the > heart > of Benjamin's media theory. But have Benjamin and Adorno appropriated > the > term as face value without ever considering the implications of their > assertions? Adorno's thinking would seem to intimate that at some > future > date nothing will ever shock us anymore, for the body will have > developed > such a thick protective barrier that nothing harmful will ever get > through--an idea worth resisting in itself. > > Are there any sustained studies of the question of shock particularly > within the domain of media Are there any articles within media theory > that > address the matter of shock in a postmodern, digital world?

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FYI: DERI, NUI Galway launches the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition
by Uldis Bojars 26 Nov '08

26 Nov '08

Hi, Please find attached information about a competition involving a large amount of online community data. Feel free to forward this message to others who may be interested in this competition. Uldis http://captsolo.net/ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Breslin <john.breslin(a)deri.org> Date: Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 4:52 PM Subject: DERI, NUI Galway launches the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway is running a unique competition from 1st August to 30th September 2008 in conjunction with boards.ie, Ireland's largest discussion forum site. The competition is an open contest in which entrants can win over €4000 in Amazon.com vouchers by submitting an interesting creation based on an RDF data set of discussion posts from boards.ie over the past ten years: * The first prize is an Amazon voucher for $4000 (~€2500) * The second prize is a voucher for $2000 (~€1250) * The third prize is a voucher for $1000 (~€625) Read the rules and find out more information on the contest at: http://data.sioc-project.org/ The data set (approximately 9 million documents) has been represented in the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) RDF format developed by DERI, NUI Galway for expressing the information contained in social websites (forums, mailing lists, blogs, etc.). Entrants may create whatever they feel is interesting based on this data: it could be a novel web application that makes use of the data set, a report on analyses performed on the data, a tool that allows one to visualise or browse the semantic structure, or whatever else the imagination can come up with! The data reflects ten years of Irish online life, collected between 1998 and 2008 from boards.ie. boards.ie is one of Ireland's busiest websites, with over a million unique visitors a month. The most popular discussion areas are 'after hours', soccer, motors, poker, and computers. Popular topic threads include one about a virtual pub (over 4000 pages), member discussions (2800 pages), poker stories (1800 pages), Liverpool rumours (1250 pages), recruitment in the Gardaí (800 pages long), and a freebie list (250 pages). To enter the competition, go to http://data.sioc-project.org/ to access the data sets and view the guidelines. There will be three prizes for the top entries, as judged by an independent panel of three experts. The contest is open to anyone except current / former researchers with DERI and employees of boards.ie Ltd. One person may make multiple entry submissions. The closing date is the 30th September 2008. The purpose of this contest is to generate interesting applications or creations that make use of community data represented in the SIOC Semantic Web format. All rights to these creations will remain with the contest participants (not including the underlying data, whose copyright remains with the creators). Neither DERI nor boards.ie Ltd. will acquire any commercial rights to these applications or creations as submitted through this contest. Up until now, this data has been publicly viewable, but it was difficult to leverage it without any added semantics due to the fact that it was embedded in heavily-styled HTML pages. (DERI is a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) established at NUI Galway in 2003 with funding from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). After five years of operation, DERI has become an internationally-recognised institute in Semantic Web research, education and technology transfer.) -- Dr. John Breslin DERI, NUI Galway http://www.johnbreslin.org/ john.breslin(a)deri.org

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convergence
by Sabryna Cornish 06 Nov '08

06 Nov '08

Hi all--I am teaching a graduate course on media convergence. I have a good idea for readings for the course, but wanted some suggestions from list serv members about what they might require graduate students to read. I am purposely not including a description of the course to see what list serv members think about when they consider the term media convergence. I will say this is a theoretically based course. Thanks in advance for any help! Sabryna Sabryna Cornish Assistant professor of journalism Department of communication Northern Illinois University

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Open source literature
by Angela Adkins 01 Nov '08

01 Nov '08

Hello all, I have been asked for literature suggestions by a colleague with a budding interest in research on open source, particularly in how the community of developers/contributors maintains a collaborative environment and in resistance to open source. I would like to help him but alas, I am not overly familiar with specific research on that topic. But I am always impressed at the helpfulness and willingness to share on this list, so I thought this would be a good place to ask. Does anyone have suggestions for good sources to get started? I would gladly pass them along--anything would be much appreciated Thank you! -- Angela Adkins Department of Sociology The University of Akron Akron, OH 44325-1905 Ph: (330) 234-1499 Email: ama13(a)uakron.edu

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new reviews in cyberculture studies (november 2008)
by David M Silver 31 Oct '08

31 Oct '08

dear aoir people, happy halloween! each month, the resource center for cyberculture studies publishes book reviews and author responses. ( http://rccs.usfca.edu/booklist.asp ) books of the month for november 2008 are: Reclaiming the Media: Communication Rights and Democratic Media Roles Editors: Bart Cammaerts & Nico Carpentier Publisher: Intellect, 2007 Review 1: Arthur L. Morin Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art Editor: Caroline A. Jones Publisher: MIT Press, 2006 Review 1: Kathleen O'Riordan Author Response: Caroline Jones enjoy. there's lots more where that came from. david silver http://silverinsf.blogspot.com

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camphone visual usages
by gaby david 31 Oct '08

31 Oct '08

hi again and sorry for not having been that detailed in my former email. my research is on "visual usages of the camphones". i have been analyzing some videos as "case sutdies" and know i am studying the visual platforms where these videos are shown and shared. however & since my approach is mainly visual, i analyse the content, the ways of visualisation and how all this will determine not only usages but content as well & viceversa. i do not come from the social sciences, i have a fine arts background and now my methodology is more in to the visual studies... so if any one of you is working from visuals , could you please let me know how are you doing it? any other of you who are into the media studies might also have good tips. hope not to have been too long. happy halloween! gaby david

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interpersonal readings
by Christian Nelson 31 Oct '08

31 Oct '08

Hi folks, I'm teaching an interpersonal communication course next semester and would like to spend some time discussing the effects that communication via the Internet is having on interpersonal relationships. Anybody know of good readings for creating such discussion, or a good reader? Thanks for any help with this, Christian Nelson

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Participation inequality - querying the crowd
by Bernie Hogan 30 Oct '08

30 Oct '08

Dear AoIRers, Over the past few years I've seen numerous studies demonstrating how participation online follows an extreme skew in any given context. Many people post few comments, few people post many comments. Jakob Nielsen characterized this in a classic short article: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html This was dovetailing on some "new networks" work showing online networks having a similar skew (although, it is somewhat different for the statistically inclined - perhaps power-law rather than pareto, log-normal etc...). But for simplicity's sake, its similar- many sites have few links, few sites have many links. But while scale-free networks and extreme skews have been extensively studied from a statistical point of view (i.e. what is the parameter for this curve or how does the clustering shift over time), I can't recall any studies discussing the motivations (either social, economic or psychological) for participation inequality and why it differs from person to person or site to site. I've heard of some studies showing gender, efficacy or time online to be factors, but even these are minor - I'm more interested in why any of those people are massive contributors while others less so, not subtle variations among the massive contributors. Any thoughts? Papers? Presentations? Take care, BERNiE Bernie Hogan Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford 1 St. Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS United Kingdom http://individual.utoronto.ca/berniehogan/

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