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

funded Ph.D. position
by Uwe Matzat 15 Sep '08

15 Sep '08

Dear colleagues, I would be thankful for distributing this information to Master students interested in the field of internet research. I'm available for incoming questions. Best regards, Uwe Matzat --- The Eindhoven University of Technology (the Netherlands) has the following vacancy PhD student on the project "Surfing the information waves: Finding, revealing, and evaluating information online" at the School of Innovation Sciences. Job description The Ph.D. student is expected to do research leading to a Ph.D. thesis in the project "Surfing the information waves: Finding, revealing, and evaluating information online". At the core of this project lies the question how people deal with the reliability of information on the Internet, to what extent the formal and informal mechanisms that facilitate reliable exchange of information offline have online equivalents, and to what extent new online mechanisms and tools are and can be developed to facilitate reliable information exchange. Typical questions of interest are: How do people discern useful and reliable information from useless and unreliable information in online settings? How can users be motivated to provide reliable information and how can the provision of unreliable information be minimized? To what extent do the answers to these questions depend on the kind of online setting? For the project we anticipate doing research in several areas of application, such as medical information sites and groups, social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Xing, etc), and general economic and consumer sites, such as eBay, Amazon. Requirements The candidate should have a Masters degree (or equivalent) in the social sciences (sociology, psychology, political or communication science), excellent knowledge and skills in quantitative methods of data analysis, and familiarity with new forms of online communication. Most of all, we are looking for someone with a natural curiosity with respect to online interaction of any kind. Knowledge about theories pertaining to the topic in (social) psychology or sociology would be an additional asset. The candidate should be proficient in English (speaking and writing). Conditions of employment We offer a (full-time) Ph.D. position for 4 years. Gross salaries are in the range of 28K gross per annum in the first year and 35K during the fourth year and include attractive benefits (e.g. technical infrastructure, child care, sports facilities). A small teaching load can be part of the job. More information can be found at: http://www.tue-tm.org/snijders/PhD/ Application Send your application or requests for further information by email to Prof. dr. C. Snijders (c.c.p.snijders 'at' tue.nl). The application should consist of a motivation for your application, and extended curriculum vitae, a description of your obtained scientific degree, and a list of courses and the grades you obtained for those courses. -- ======================================= Uwe Matzat Sociology Section Department of Technology Management Eindhoven University of Technology P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven The Netherlands --------------- phone: +31 40 247-8392 email: u.matzat(a)tm.tue.nl http://www.tue-tm-soc.nl/~matzat/ =======================================

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Pew Internet study: cloud computing popular, privacy worries linger
by Richard Forno 15 Sep '08

15 Sep '08

Report link: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/262/report_display.asp for those interested. --rf http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080914-pew-cloud-computing-study-deb… Pew study: cloud computing popular, privacy worries linger By Julian Sanchez | Published: September 14, 2008 - 05:55PM CT A new survey by the Pew Internet and American Life project, released Friday morning at Google's Washington, DC headquarters, finds cloud computing applications taking off among Internet users. But respondents also told pollsters that they have profound concerns about ways their personal data might be used—among them, the kind of ad- targeting practiced by... Google. As Internet users increasingly find themselves using multiple (potentially incompatible) networked devices to get online from a variety of locations, it should come as little surprise that large numbers of them are availing themselves of "cloud" services that offload computing or data storage functions to someone else's server, allowing e-mail, photos, or documents to be accessed anywhere. More than half of Internet users have used Web-based e-mail services, which study author John Horrigan called the "starter drug" of cloud computing, while just over a third have stored personal photos on sites like Flickr or Photobucket. Cloud apps like Google Documents and Adobe Photoshop Express were third most popular, with 29 percent of respondents saying they'd used one, while fewer than 10 percent had used Web-based services to store personal videos or back up their hard drives. All told, 69 percent of users had used at least one form of cloud computing; 40 percent had used two or more. For users under 30, those numbers jumped to 87 percent and 59 percent respectively. < - > http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080914-pew-cloud-computing-study-deb…

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Conspiracy Groups
by jameshay＠illinois.edu 14 Sep '08

14 Sep '08

This suggestion to the thread about Conspiracy Groups arrives a bit late, but I hope that it helps: See Jack Z. Bratich, CONSPIRACY PANICS: POLITICAL RATIONALITY & POPULAR CULTURE, SUNY Press, 2008. One chapter is about activism related to the "9/11 Truth Movement." Another chapter, "Trust No One (on the Internet)," is about Webs of conspiracy. James Hay Institute of Communication Research University of Illinois--Champaign-Urbana Message: 1 Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:54:17 -0600 From: CJ Pascoe <c.j.pascoe(a)coloradocollege.edu> Subject: [Air-L] Conspiracy Groups To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org Message-ID: <60C91EB2-1C01-48DB-89B4-6AE56A57B3DF(a)coloradocollege.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes I'm hoping that the combined wisdom of this list can point me in the correct direction. One of my undergraduate students is writing her senior thesis on American 9/11 conspiracy theory groups. I can help her with a general sociological framing of these groups, but I'm not sure where to direct her in terms of literature on new media and conspiracy groups (apart from a good This American Life episode from National Public Radio). Do any of you have suggestions for specific articles/books on conspiracy theory groups and their use of new media? Thanks, CJ ___________________________________________ C.J. Pascoe Assistant Professor Department of Sociology Colorado College Phone: 719-389-6735 Web: http://faculty1.coloradocollege.edu/~cpascoe Dude Book: http://ucpress.edu/books/pages/10671.html Digital Youth: http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu

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Guest Editors’ Introduction: Text Annotation for Political Science Research
by Stuart Shulman 14 Sep '08

14 Sep '08

I think the Guest Editor's Intro, written by a computer scientist and political scientist, is well worth the read. http://www.jitp.net/files/v005001/JITP5-1_Editors_Note.pdf The ITP section of APSA (fast growing these days) just voted to adopt JITP as the official journal of the section at the recent APSA meeting. CONTENTS Guest Editors' Introduction Text Annotation for Political Science Research Page Range: 1 - 6 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802149590 Claire Cardie, John Wilkerson Text Annotation and the Cognitive Architecture of Political Leaders: British Prime Ministers from 1945–2008 Page Range: 7 - 18 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802149624 Stephen Benedict Dyson While differences in the personalities of leaders dominate popular discussion of politics, the systematic academic study of these factors has long been beset by problems of conceptualization and measurement—difficulties that have led many in political science to conclude that such studies are not worth the effort. In this light, one of the most exciting recent developments in political psychology has been the emergence of text analysis schemes, and accompanying automation software, that offer the possibility of treating what leaders say as indicative of how they think. In this essay, I consider a text analysis protocol designed to isolate the cognitive architecture of political leaders, in particular their characteristic information processing propensities, and apply the protocol to a comprehensive set of text: the universe of prime ministerial responses to foreign policy questions in the British House of Commons from 1945–2008. The resulting data, encompassing twelve separate prime ministers, shows that the technique can discriminate reliably between individuals and exhibits promising signs of validity. Keywords: Text annotation, political psychology, foreign policy analysis, British prime ministers CORPS: A Corpus of Tagged Political Speeches for Persuasive Communication Processing Page Range: 19 - 32 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802149616 Marco Guerini, Carlo Strapparava, Oliviero Stock In political speech, even if the audience is sympathetic to the speaker and does not need to be persuaded, it tends to react or respond to signals of persuasive communication (including an expected theme, a name, an expression, and the tone of the voice). In this article, we describe the creation of a corpus of political speeches tagged with audience reactions, such as applause, as indicators of persuasive expressions. We hypothesize that corpora of this kind can be usefully employed in the qualitative analysis of political communication. In addition, we present a corpus-based approach for persuasive expression mining that relies on techniques from natural language processing (NLP). We show how the approach can support the analysis of political communication, providing insights well beyond those of traditional word-counting analysis techniques. Keywords: Persuasion, natural language processing, political communication, corpora collection Classifying Party Affiliation from Political Speech Page Range: 33 - 48 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802149608 Bei Yu, Stefan Kaufmann, Daniel Diermeier In this article, we discuss the design of party classifiers for Congressional speech data. We then examine these party classifiers' person-dependency and time-dependency. We found that party classifiers trained on 2005 House speeches can be generalized to the Senate speeches of the same year, but not vice versa. The classifiers trained on 2005 House speeches performed better on Senate speeches from recent years than on older ones, which indicates the classifiers' time-dependency. This dependency may be caused by changes in the issue agenda or the ideological composition of Congress. Keywords: Machine learning, text classification, generalizability, ideology, evaluation Recognizing Citations in Public Comments Page Range: 49 - 71 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802153683 Jaime Arguello, Jamie Callan, Stuart Shulman Notice and comment rulemaking is central to how U.S. federal agencies craft new regulation. E-rulemaking, the process of soliciting and considering public comments that are submitted electronically, poses a challenge for agencies. The large volume of comments received makes it difficult to distill and address the most substantive concerns of the public. This work attempts to alleviate this burden by applying existing machine learning techniques to the problem of recognizing citation sentences. A citation in this context is defined as a statement in which the author of the public comment references an external source of factual information that is associated with a specific person or organization. The problem is formulated as a binary classification problem: Is a specific person or organization mentioned in a sentence being referenced as an external source of information? We show that our definition of a citation is reproducible by human judges and that citations can be detected using machine learning techniques with some success. Casting this as a machine learning problem requires selecting an appropriate representation of the sentence. Several feature sets are evaluated individually and in combination. Superior results are obtained by combining feature sets. Syntactic features, which characterize the structure of the sentence rather than its content, significantly improve accuracy when combined with other features, but not when used in isolation. Although prediction error rate is adequate, coverage could be improved. An error analysis enumerates short-term and long-term challenges that must be overcome to improve recall. Keywords: Citation analysis, public comments, e-rulemaking, text mining, information extraction, machine learning Good News or Bad News? Conducting Sentiment Analysis on Dutch Text to Distinguish Between Positive and Negative Relations Page Range: 73 - 94 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802154145 Wouter van Atteveldt, Jan Kleinnijenhuis, Nel Ruigrok, Stefan Schlobach Many research questions in political communication can be answered by representing text as a network of positive or negative relations between actors and issues such as conducted by semantic network analysis. This article presents a system for automatically determining the polarity (positivity/negativity) of these relations by using techniques from sentiment analysis. We used a machine learning model trained on the manually annotated news coverage of the Dutch 2006 elections, collecting lexical, syntactic, and word-similarity based features, and using the syntactic analysis to focus on the relevant part of the sentence. The performance of the full system is significantly better than the baseline with an F1 score of .63. Additionally, we replicate four studies from an earlier analysis of these elections, attaining correlations of greater than .8 in three out of four cases. This shows that the presented system can be immediately used for a number of analyses. Keywords: Sentiment analysis, valence, polarity, political communication, automatic content analysis, semantic network analysis Automatic Annotation of Semantic Fields for Political Science Research Page Range: 95 - 120 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802149640 Beata Beigman Klebanov, Daniel Diermeier, Eyal Beigman This article discusses methods for automatic annotation of political texts for semantic fields—groups of words with related meanings. This type of annotation is useful when studying political communication, such as legislative debate or political speeches. We present three types of automatic annotation: unsupervised clustering, dictionary-based approaches, and a method based on relevant experimental data. All methods are applied to analyzing Margaret Thatcher's political rhetoric. For this data, we find that unsupervised clustering is most useful for tracing topics; dictionary-based methods are most effective in a comparative setting; whereas the last method is the most promising for detecting off-topic, singular uses of semantic domains, which are often rhetorical tools used to achieve a political end. Applicability, strengths, and weaknesses of each method and of their combinations are addressed in detail. Keywords: Political communication, speech, rhetoric, semantic fields, topic, framing, clustering, lexical cohesion, Thatcher, Blair Workbench Note An Automated Approach to Investigating the Online Media Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections Page Range: 121 - 132 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802149582 Arno Scharl, Albert Weichselbraun This paper presents the U.S. Election 2004 Web Monitor, a public Web portal that captured trends in political media coverage before and after the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Developed by the authors of this article, the webLyzard suite of Web mining tools provided the required functionality to aggregate and analyze about a half-million documents in weekly intervals. The study paid particular attention to the editorial slant, which is defined as the quantity and tone of a Web site's coverage as influenced by its editorial position. The observable attention and attitude toward the candidates served as proxies of editorial slant. The system identified attention by determining the frequency of candidate references and measured attitude towards the candidate by looking for positive and negative expressions that co-occur with these references. Keywords and perceptual maps summarized the most important topics associated with the candidates, placing special emphasis on environmental issues. Keywords: U.S. presidential elections, media monitoring, Web mining, natural language processing, semantic orientation, keyword analysis Workbench Note Media Monitoring by Means of Speech and Language Indexing for Political Analysis Page Range: 133 - 146 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802149632 Iason Demiros, Harris Papageorgiou, Vassilios Antonopoulos, Andreas Pipis, Athena Skoulariki In this article, we describe a media monitoring system that we have developed and implemented for the Secretariat General of Communication and Secretariat General of Information in Greece (SGC-SGI). The system applies emerging technologies for audiovisual recording, speech recognition, language processing, multimedia indexing, and retrieval, all integrated into a large video and audio library that covers broadcast news and current affairs in Greek and English. It assists SGC-SGI in compiling information; annotating and analyzing news; and monitoring national, political, social, economic, cultural, and environmental issues concerning Greece in general. Keywords: Video annotation, speech recognition, multimedia information retrieval, e-government, political analysis, media content analysis Book Review The Internet and National Elections: A Comparative Study of Web Campaigning, Randolph Kluver, Nicholas Jankowski, Kristen Foot, and Steven Schneider (Eds.) New York: Routledge, 2007, 279 pages Page Range: 147 - 148 DOI: 10.1080/19331680801979062 Arthur Sanders Book Review Radical Democracy and the Internet: Interrogating Theory and Practice, Lincoln Dahlberg and Eugenia Siapera Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2007, 272 pages Page Range: 149 - 150 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802132612 Stephen Coleman Book Review Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, Geert Lovink New York: Routledge, 2007, 344 pages Page Range: 150 - 151 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802042282 Kevin Wallsten Book Review Cybercrime: Digital Cops in a Networked Environment, Jack M. Balkin, James Grimmelmann, Eddan Katz, Nimrod Kozlovski, Shlomit Wagman, and Tal Zarsky (Eds.) New York: New York University Press, 2006, 276, pages Page Range: 151 - 153 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802042324 David S. Wall Book Review Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective, Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Jack Linchuan Qiu, and Araba Sey Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007, 331 pages Page Range: 154 - 155 DOI: 10.1080/19331680802042373 Kenneth Rogerson -- Dr. Stuart W. Shulman Assistant Professor Department of Political Science University of Massachusetts Amherst http://people.umass.edu/stu/ stu(a)polsci.umass.edu Editor, Journal of Information Technology & Politics http://www.jitp.net Director, QDAP-UMass http://people.umass.edu/stu/QDAP-UMass/ Associate Director, National Center for Digital Government http://www.umass.edu/digitalcenter/

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Research on critical evaluation of internet information?
by Fiona Bradley 14 Sep '08

14 Sep '08

Is anyone aware of recent research on criteria to evaluate online information, especially if aimed at resarchers and students? For many years, libraries have been providing guides to evaluating information on the Internet that asks students to look at the URL (is it .com or .gov? is it a personal or organiation site?), the published date, the existance of an author byline etc as critiera to evalute online information. These criteria are perhaps becoming a little too simplistic now to really evaluate a site and in many cases can be misleading – especially with the rise of academic blogging, online datasets, preprint archives, association sites etc which fall out of these boxes. I'm having difficulty finding critiera that goes beyond looking at the URL, authorship and page design and which looks at appraising all types of information whether printed or online, and evaluating the quality of peer review, accuracy of datasets and statistics and so on. Is anyone aware of work in defining evaluation criteria that can be used by researchers, academics and students? I am aware of some studies of critiera for consumer health sites but I'm more interested in appraisal for the purposes of citing information in research or student papers. thanks, Fiona Bradley Information Services Librarian University of Technology, Sydney

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Ontario Digital Economy Conference -- October 1, 2 and 3, 2008
by Bermonte, Anne (MGS) 12 Sep '08

12 Sep '08

During October 1, 2 and 3, the Ministry of Government Services, in collaboration with the Ministries of Food, Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Small Business and Consumer Services, Northern Development and Mines and Industry Canada's FedNor will be hosting Ontario's Digital Economy Conference at the Deerhurst Resort in Muskoka, Ontario. The 3-day conference will focus on the transformation of Ontario's economic, social and environmental future through the adoption and use of broadband technology, and innovative applications and products. I'm attaching a link to the conference website for additional information. Some of the featured speakers are: * Robert Bell (Executive Director and Co-Founder, Intelligent Community Forum, New York) * Mayor Brenda Halloran (Mayor of Waterloo) * Dr. Ed Brown (CEO, Ontario Telehealth Network) * Rob Dowler (Corporate Chief Strategist, Province of Ontario) * Doug Cooper (Country Manager, Intel Canada) * Stuart MacDonald (CEO, TripHarbour.ca) * Robert J. Sawyer (Canadian Science Fiction Author) * Lev Gonick (Founder, Chair Emeritus of OneCommunity and CIO of Case Western) * Brian Beaton - K-Net I hope that a number of you in the research community will be able to join us in beautiful Muskoka for this exciting and informative conference. Further information, including a preliminary program, registration and further details are available at: http://www.thedigitaleconomy.ca Anne Bermonte Senior Policy Analyst Ministry of Government Services

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Akamai's State of the Internet
by jeremy hunsinger 12 Sep '08

12 Sep '08

http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee http://wiki.tmttlt.com http://www.tmttlt.com Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student. -George Iles

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25 New Media Researchers invited to attend PICNIC'08
by Anne Helmond 12 Sep '08

12 Sep '08

Would you like to attend the PICNIC conference, but your university refuses to finance your ticket unless you are the keynote speaker? If you are an academic researcher, scientist, or all-round investigator we have exactly 25 passe partout tickets (value 1245 Euro) available for those with an enquiring mind. What do you need to do to qualify for a completely free pass to PICNIC08? First, make sure you have an updated profile on the PICNIC network (free). Include information about your work in the profile, with a link to further information. Then send an email (picnicresearchers [at] gmail.com) to describe what part of PICNIC interests you most. How does this relate to your own work? Stick to one page max (A4), and if you like you can add one picture (for instance a graphic that illustrates your work). What can you win? "Tickets for PICNIC'08. The full thing: access to the PICNIC conference, the specials, the parties, the award ceremonies, everything! In addition, you will be invited to a special breakfast research seminar to meet with the other researchers. This informal gathering, titled 'Enquiring Minds' will take place on Wednesday morning September 24, Westerunie 9-11, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Deadline for applications is Wednesday, 17 September 2008. More info: http://www.picnicnetwork.org/page/25870/en

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Re: [Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 50, Issue 10
by Gary Hall 12 Sep '08

12 Sep '08

For more on conspiracy theory, you could see Clare Birchall's Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (London: Berg, 2006). There is also her essay in Culture Machine, Vol. 6, 2004: 'Just Because You're Paranoid, Doesn't Mean They're Not Out to Get You'. It's online at: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/12/11 Gary -- Gary Hall Professor of Media and Performing Arts School of Art and Design, Coventry University Co-editor of Culture Machine http://www.culturemachine.net Director of the Cultural Studies Open Access Archive http://www.culturemachine.net/csearch Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press http://www.openhumanitiespress.org My website http://www.garyhall.info Gary air-l-request(a)listserv.aoir.org wrote: > Send Air-L mailing list submissions to > air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > air-l-request(a)listserv.aoir.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > air-l-owner(a)listserv.aoir.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of Air-L digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Conspiracy Groups (CJ Pascoe) > 2. Re: Conspiracy Groups (Erika S. Poole) > 3. Re: Conspiracy Groups (Holly Kruse) > 4. Re: Conspiracy Groups (KMV) > 5. Re: Conspiracy Groups (Nishant Shah) > 6. another web-based research/citation manager (jeremy hunsinger) > 7. Re: New AoIR website (Dominik M. Rosenauer) > 8. Collating and sharing blogging-related references (David Brake) > 9. Re: Collating and sharing blogging-related references > (jeremy hunsinger) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:54:17 -0600 > From: CJ Pascoe <c.j.pascoe(a)coloradocollege.edu> > Subject: [Air-L] Conspiracy Groups > To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org > Message-ID: <60C91EB2-1C01-48DB-89B4-6AE56A57B3DF(a)coloradocollege.edu> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes > > I'm hoping that the combined wisdom of this list can point me in the > correct direction. One of my undergraduate students is writing her > senior thesis on American 9/11 conspiracy theory groups. I can help > her with a general sociological framing of these groups, but I'm not > sure where to direct her in terms of literature on new media and > conspiracy groups (apart from a good This American Life episode from > National Public Radio). Do any of you have suggestions for specific > articles/books on conspiracy theory groups and their use of new media? > > Thanks, > CJ > ___________________________________________ > C.J. Pascoe > Assistant Professor > Department of Sociology > Colorado College > > Phone: 719-389-6735 > Web: http://faculty1.coloradocollege.edu/~cpascoe > Dude Book: http://ucpress.edu/books/pages/10671.html > Digital Youth: http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu > > > > > > > > > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 2 > Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:57:37 -0400 > From: "Erika S. Poole" <erika(a)cc.gatech.edu> > Subject: Re: [Air-L] Conspiracy Groups > To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org > Message-ID: <48C87B11.8060108(a)cc.gatech.edu> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > > You might be interested in the book "The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy > Theory and the Human Sciences" > edited by J. Parish and M. Parker. > > Best of luck! > > Erika Shehan Poole > PhD student, Human-Centered Computing > Georgia Institute of Technology > http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~erika > > > CJ Pascoe wrote: > >> I'm hoping that the combined wisdom of this list can point me in the >> correct direction. One of my undergraduate students is writing her >> senior thesis on American 9/11 conspiracy theory groups. I can help >> her with a general sociological framing of these groups, but I'm not >> sure where to direct her in terms of literature on new media and >> conspiracy groups (apart from a good This American Life episode from >> National Public Radio). Do any of you have suggestions for specific >> articles/books on conspiracy theory groups and their use of new media? >> >> Thanks, >> CJ >> ___________________________________________ >> C.J. Pascoe >> Assistant Professor >> Department of Sociology >> Colorado College >> >> Phone: 719-389-6735 >> Web: http://faculty1.coloradocollege.edu/~cpascoe >> Dude Book: http://ucpress.edu/books/pages/10671.html >> Digital Youth: http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> The Air-L(a)listserv.aoir.org mailing list >> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org >> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: >> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org >> >> Join the Association of Internet Researchers: >> http://www.aoir.org/ >> > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:05:31 -0500 > From: Holly Kruse <holly-kruse(a)utulsa.edu> > Subject: Re: [Air-L] Conspiracy Groups > To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org > Message-ID: <E424E5DD-4ACD-4E94-924C-BD1D16EDE0B5(a)utulsa.edu> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed > > Mark Fenster's _Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American > Culture_ has just come out in a revised edition that deals with 9/11 > conspiracy theories. The original included analysis of the > alt.conspiracy Usenet newsgroup. Here's the link: > > http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/f/fenster_conspiracy.html > > > >> I'm hoping that the combined wisdom of this list can point me in >> the correct direction. One of my undergraduate students is writing >> her senior thesis on American 9/11 conspiracy theory groups. I can >> help her with a general sociological framing of these groups, but >> I'm not sure where to direct her in terms of literature on new >> media and conspiracy groups (apart from a good This American Life >> episode from National Public Radio). Do any of you have >> suggestions for specific articles/books on conspiracy theory groups >> and their use of new media? >> >> > > > Holly > > ----- > Holly Kruse > Faculty of Communication > The University of Tulsa > 800 S. Tucker Drive > Tulsa, OK 74104 > 918-631-3845 > holly-kruse(a)utulsa.edu or holly.kruse(a)gmail.com > http://personal.utulsa.edu/~holly-kruse > > > > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 4 > Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:14:57 -0700 > From: KMV <cuuixsilver(a)gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [Air-L] Conspiracy Groups > To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org > Message-ID: > <a4123b700809101914q3eef7956g9f2c1e91db136959(a)mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > In 2006 V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam had an even called > Tangent Conspiracy. As part of That, Florian Cramer gave a great talk about > the connection between the web and conspiracies. The video is archived > here: > http://www.v2.nl/portal2004/events/channel/item.sxml?uri=urn:v2:portal2004:… > > He talks about the web as inherently paranoid, about hacker culture and > conspiracy theories, and a historical survey of some representative > conspiracies, and mentions 9/11. It might be helpful as an example of a > different way of framing. > > Also, I believe Brian Massumi has done some useful writing about 9/11 > paranoia generally: "Fear (The Spectrum Said)" *positions: east asia > cultures critique* 13.1 (2005) 31-48 -- > http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/positions/v013/13.1massumi.html > > and this: > "Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption" Theory and Event 10:2 > http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2massumi.html > > You need access through a library or university though. > > Best, > > Kim > > On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 6:54 PM, CJ Pascoe > <c.j.pascoe(a)coloradocollege.edu>wrote: > > >> I'm hoping that the combined wisdom of this list can point me in the >> correct direction. One of my undergraduate students is writing her senior >> thesis on American 9/11 conspiracy theory groups. I can help her with a >> general sociological framing of these groups, but I'm not sure where to >> direct her in terms of literature on new media and conspiracy groups (apart >> from a good This American Life episode from National Public Radio). Do any >> of you have suggestions for specific articles/books on conspiracy theory >> groups and their use of new media? >> >> Thanks, >> CJ >> ___________________________________________ >> C.J. Pascoe >> Assistant Professor >> Department of Sociology >> Colorado College >> >> Phone: 719-389-6735 >> Web: http://faculty1.coloradocollege.edu/~cpascoe<http://faculty1.coloradocollege.edu/%7Ecpascoe> >> Dude Book: http://ucpress.edu/books/pages/10671.html >> Digital Youth: http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> The Air-L(a)listserv.aoir.org mailing list >> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org >> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: >> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org >> >> Join the Association of Internet Researchers: >> http://www.aoir.org/ >> >> > > > >

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Re: [Air-L] Conspiracy Culture
by Bertha Chin 12 Sep '08

12 Sep '08

There's also "Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files" by Peter Knight. Bertha > Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:54:17 -0600 > From: CJ Pascoe <c.j.pascoe(a)coloradocollege.edu> > Subject: [Air-L] Conspiracy Groups > To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org > Message-ID: <60C91EB2-1C01-48DB-89B4-6AE56A57B3DF(a)coloradocollege.edu> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes > > I'm hoping that the combined wisdom of this list can point me in the > correct direction. One of my undergraduate students is writing her > senior thesis on American 9/11 conspiracy theory groups. I can help > her with a general sociological framing of these groups, but I'm not > sure where to direct her in terms of literature on new media and > conspiracy groups (apart from a good This American Life episode from > National Public Radio). Do any of you have suggestions for specific > articles/books on conspiracy theory groups and their use of new media? > > Thanks, > CJ > ___________________________________________ > C.J. Pascoe > Assistant Professor > Department of Sociology > Colorado College > > Phone: 719-389-6735 > Web: http://faculty1.coloradocollege.edu/~cpascoe > Dude Book: http://ucpress.edu/books/pages/10671.html > Digital Youth: http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu > > > > >

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