May 2013 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

Quantitative analysis of online pornography
by Antoine Mazieres 22 Mar '14

22 Mar '14

Dear IRs, I am looking at available data of online pornography and looked at available studies made out of them. I'm very surprised to mainly only find studies on impact/effect of pornography on humans with almost none study on topology/dynamics/evolution of the object itself. Does some of you have some references in mind that dig in that direction ? (If I manage to arrange a dataset out of available data on public website, I would be glad to share it, let me know if you're interested.) Thanks for your help, All best, Antoine http://mazier.es/

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Call for Paper: Computers in Human Behavior Special Issue on "Newcomer Participation in Online Communities", Deadline: Sept. 30, 2013
by Aditya Johri 30 Aug '13

30 Aug '13

Special Issue of Computers in Human Behavior: "Newcomer Participation in Online Communities" Special Issue Editors Aditya Johri, Virginia Tech Vandana Singh, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Rosta Farzan, University of Pittsburgh Oded Nov, NYU Polytechnic Online communities have become one of the most common forms of organizations on the Internet. They are integral to the functioning of resources such as Wikipedia and form the backbone of many software development efforts, particularly Open Source Software. Going back at least a decade, researchers have examined various issues related to online communities. They have examined different forms of participation and highlighted the problems encountered in maintaining and growing these communities. One important finding from this literature is that it is critical to nurture and support newcomers for communities to thrive. Newcomers are essential for any organization and their successful participation determines their performance, turnover, motivation, and overall productivity and innovation in an organization. Empirical literature on how newcomers become part of an organization focuses primarily on socialization and assimilation. Studies have examined how newcomers proactively seek information, how information acquisition leads to formation of social relationships and assimilation in the work environment, and how newcomers move from peripheral to full participation within a community of practice. Despite the recognition of the importance of newcomers, few studies have looked at how newcomers actually participate in online communities and what role, if any, technology plays in this process. In this special issue we plan to further explore the role of newcomers in online communities. Some Suggested Research Topics . What role does the experience that newcomers bring with them play in their participation in online communities? How do newcomers influence practices within the community? . How does a newcomer integrate into the community and move from the peripheral circles to the core of the community? . Are newcomers and their support different in different forms of online communities such as Open Source Software or Wikipedia or Citizen Science? . What lessons can we synthesize for learning analytics? . Can newcomers be classified? The special issue will consist of around 8-12 articles. All papers will undergo peer review. Submit any queries to: CHB.newcomer(a)gmail.com. Deadlines April 30, 2013 Abstract submission(optional) (500 words) Submit abstracts to: CHB.newcomer(a)gmail.com May 15, 2013 Initial notification sent to authors Aug. 31-Sept. 30, 2013 Submission of full papers (5000-10,000 words) Submit at: Elsevier system: http://ees.elsevier.com/chb/ November 30, 2013 First round of review feedback January 31, 2013 Revised submissions due March 1, 2014 Final decisions and feedback April 30, 2014 Submission of final manuscripts _______________________________________________________ Aditya Johri Assistant Professor Engineering Education Computer Science (courtesy) Industrial and Systems Engineering (courtesy) 616 McBryde Hall, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg 24061, USA. <ajohri(a)vt.edu><540-231-0653> http://filebox.vt.edu/users/ajohri _________________________________________________________

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Call for Participation: IR14 Preconf on Microcredentials
by Alexander Halavais 16 Jun '13

16 Jun '13

Representing personal history, ability, and reputation online: Microcredentials, badges, endorsements, and other mechanisms With the momentous changes in social media use in professional contexts, and the rapid evolution of learning ecologies and experimentation with different kinds of learning online, the need to present experience and expertise to new communities is now more pressing than ever. The ways in which individuals formally construct their identities for multiple publics is also changing. While the traditional resume or biography remains important, we are finding new ways of explicitly summarizing our traces online and communicating these experiences to various publics. During this half-day pre-conference, attendees will present recently completed work and work in progress that addresses badges, microcredentials, reputation economies, markers of expertise, and related work. Our emphasis will be on empirical work that draws on a range of approaches to understand how reputation, experience, and expertise are made visible, regulated, and shared within online contexts and across contexts. The time will be split between a small number of presentations of more completed work, and thematic discussions around broader questions and research agendas for the area. Thanks to support through the Digital Media and Learning Competition, the pre-conference and lunch is free of charge to participants but there will a limited number of seats. If you are interested in participating, please submit a one-page (max) brief of your research and interests with a brief bio, to Alexander.Halavais(a)asu.edu by June 15, 2013. -- -- // // This email is // [x] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net // // Please attribute any stupid errors above to autocorrect on my phone. // (But I probably was typing on a keyboard.)

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2013 Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture Series Features Jeremy Silver
by Shing-Ling (Sarina) Chen 13 Jun '13

13 Jun '13

The 2013 Steve Jones Internet Research Lecture Series will feature Jeremy Silver. Silver will deliver his lecture, “The Digital Medieval“, at 12:30 pm (London time) on Thursday, June 20 in Hilton Metropole, Board Room 1, during the International Communication Association’s 63rd Annual Conference, in London, UK, June 17-21. Jeremy Silver is an entrepreneur, adviser and digital media thought-leader, focused on innovation and growth in creative businesses. He advises on the creative industries at the UK Technology Strategy Board. He is Chairman of Semetric, a real time analytics company providing actionable data to the entertainment business and Chairman of MusicGlue, an artist’s services company providing direct to consumer online ticketing to bands (including for example, Mumford & Sons, Marillion, Enter Chikari). He is a non executive director of the Bridgeman Art Library. He is Chairman of Gollant Media Ventures. Silver was CEO of Sibelius Software (a music notation software company) which he led for six years and sold to Avid Technology, securing an exit for the Founders and investors, Quester VCT. During the first internet bubble, Silver was worldwide Vice President of New Media for EMI Music Group in London and then in Los Angeles. He went on to run the playlist-sharing, social music service, Uplister Inc, based in San Francisco, backed by August Capital. Silver began his music industry career at the BPI as director of press & PR, and went on to become director of media affairs at the Virgin Music Group, working closely with many artists including Genesis, Meat Loaf, Brian Eno, Massive Attack and the Future Sound of London. Silver has presented and spoken on music and digital media at conferences and seminars around the world including TEDx, Midem, Thinking Digital, and In The City. Silver has a PhD in English Literature. Silver’s intermittent blog appears at www.mediaclarity.com This event is co-sponsored by the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research (www.cccsir.com) University of Illinois, Chicago, and the International Communication Association. For more information about this event, please contact Shing-Ling Sarina Chen, sarina.chen(a)uni.edu.

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Call for Conference Locations
by Kendall, Lori 03 Jun '13

03 Jun '13

Please share widely... Call for Proposals to Host the Internet Research (IR) conferences in 2015 and 2016. The Executive Committee of the Association of Internet Researchers is seeking statements of interest for hosting the annual meeting of the Association in October of 2015 and 2016. The Internet Research conference draws an international group of researchers and practitioners to present and discuss work at the cutting edge in understanding the social and cultural aspects of the internet. Organizations or consortia who may be interested in hosting the conference should contact Lori Kendall at vp (at) aoir.org. We will provide a guide to a full proposal for those invited to apply. At this stage, we seek an indication of interest and intent. We are most likely to entertain applications for North American locations for 2015 and elsewhere for 2016, but all strong proposals are welcome. Hosting AoIR provides visibility to your institution and city from researchers from around the world, drawing a group of well-known scholars to your city during the period of the conference and providing lasting connections. Geography still matters in an internet age, and hosting Internet Research represents one way of locating important centers of innovation in social computing. The most recent conference was held in Salford, UK and the upcoming conferences will be held in Denver, USA and Bangkok, Thailand. (See the full list of locations at http://aoir.org/conferences/past/.) We generally seek hosting cities that are reasonably accessible by international visitors, and provide a range of lodging, dining, entertainment and cultural attractions within reasonable proximity of the venue. The venue should provide a central hall and breakout meeting rooms for a minimum of 400 attendees, as well as the necessary infrastructure for presentations and high-speed wireless internet access. There are generally 7-8 concurrent presentation rooms over a period of 3 days, plus a day of 3-6 preconferences. The conference generally provides some form of onsite refreshments during the day (snacks, coffee, and in many cases lunch), as well as a banquet and receptions. The Association generally handles registration, and will (with the aid of a program chair) provide assistance with the infrastructure for the peer review and the publication of selected papers. Officers of AoIR serve on the organizing committee and are involved closely with the planning and execution of the conference. The local hosts are responsible for coordinating all on-site arrangements, contracts, transportation, arrangements with local hotels or other lodging, technology, supporting staff for the event. The hosts should be willing and able to mobilize local support for the conference, including volunteers, fund-raising, and cost-sharing. At this time, we are seeking brief letters of interest. For those sites the Executive Committee feels are suitable for the upcoming conference, we will provide organizers with instructions for a full proposal, and are happy to work with them to provide a strong proposal. At this time, please provide some indication of what you could offer in terms of hosting. In particular: 1. Who makes up your group, who the proposed local chair would be, and your connection to internet research and AoIR. 2. Information about the venue, including recent conferences held there. We have, in the past, held AoIR in hotels and conference centers, as well as university and research campuses. Please give some indication of the layout of the facility and its proximity to lodging and dining (including less expensive options), as well as to its suitability for a conference like Internet Research. 3. Proposed dates. IR is generally held in early October, and usually over a Thursday-Saturday, with pre-conferences on a Wednesday, though there is some flexibility. It is helpful if we are able to avoid conflicts with other major conferences of interest to attendees. 4. What makes your city and venue particularly attractive to the Internet Research community? The committee will review letters of interest as they are submitted, through the end of July 2013. Best, Lori Kendall (AoIR Vice President)

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Re: [Air-L] Let's Talk About AoIR
by William Bain 01 Jun '13

01 Jun '13

Dear AOIRers, I just wanted to note that recently the tendency on air-l seems to be that a discussive moment springs up from time to time, instead of being more constant, as in the past. Guess that's obvious from what's been said on this thread. However, in my humble, the cfp's and tecnho refs are great but I think the listserv is at its most dynamic when lots of opinions are being exchanged. The more info the better as I see it........ Possibly important in terms of renewal & spreading the word? Best wishes, William PhD Student Comparative Literature Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

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Re: [Air-L] Let's Talk About AoIR
by Sarah Florini 01 Jun '13

01 Jun '13

HI, all. I just want to echo what has already been said about the conference organizers. You guys are awesome. I appreciate all your work. I'm sure everyone feels the same. I, personally, see this conversation as part of the growing pains of the organization. The change in the submission process just happened to be the thing that sparked it. But, the conversation was probably going to happen sooner or later. If such conversations didn't happen occasionally, AoiR would become calcified and cease to be the reflexive intellectual space we all seem to appreciate. But, I have nothing by love and praise for the conference organizers. There have been a lot of good ideas put forth. I think the track idea might be a useful one to think about. We're an interdisciplinary organization, and if we want to have an interdiscipinary conference we need to try and find a way to accommodate the disciplinary needs of members. That way people can "fit" AoIR into what they need to be doing for tenure, promotion, travel funds, etc. A lot of people have said that their home departments don't take AoIR conferences seriously and won't give them funding to come. Those people need a peer refereed full paper that can be published in proceedings to justify their attendance to their departments. I would hate to see AoiR conferences loose those people and their work. So, we should keep those needs in mind. But, we also need to keep in mind the points that have already been made about work in-progress, performances, activist work, etc. It seems like there could be some kind of track system for different kinds of work so that we can be more confident that those different "flavors" of contribution are being evaluated appropriate criteria. Also, ditto to what Terri said about being willing to help. As these problems get tackled, I'm always happy to help with what I can. Best, Sarah Florini A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Department of Communication Arts University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Conference review, “sampling procedure,” and interdisciplinarity
by Huatong Sun 31 May '13

31 May '13

Dear Terri, I was Reviewer 3 for your roundtable proposal who asked about sampling procedure. Thanks for your feedback to my review, and I appreciate having this chance to engage in a discussion of exploring the interdisciplinarity of the AOIR. Maybe you don’t remember, I met you and Nicole in the CSCW workshop on digital identity in Chicago in 2004, and I enjoyed chatting with you about your book project of camgirls at that time. In this message, I'd like to clarify about some misunderstanding about my review and share my thoughts. Hopefully this side of reviewer’s story will help improve the quality of future AOIR conferences, :). A disclaimer first: I saw most of the current discussion about the AOIR review system started from this year’s paper template; however, I didn’t use that template to review your proposal, and I reread the CFP part concerning the roundtable session to make sure I understood the expectation of the conference organizers for this format before reviewing your piece (since I didn’t get particular review guidelines for roundtable proposals). And I do support work-in-progress submissions: I regularly submit this type of work for feedback myself and I organized a review of this type of submissions for a conference last year. Let’s go back to the review. A review is just a review, one person’s opinion about certain research, and I’m upset to see such a review is misinterpreted in this context of a discussion on how to make an interdisciplinary conference better. So far I only attended AOIR once (as many interdisciplinary researchers with small travel budgets on this list, I have to be highly selective on the conferences I go). While I enjoyed the fresh ideas at AOIR, I was disappointed to see some presentations only had the depth of news reporting, which I regarded as an issue of description vs. interpretation in research. Of course your proposal is much more than that, but I don’t want to deny that my past experience influenced my review. I wanted to see more of the details, as I wrote in the comment. I guess one could understand my feelings if s/he serves on a job search committee: There are always those moments of disappointment when you see a stellar job applicant looks glorious on paper articulates his/her research framework poorly in a phone interview. By all the means, I’m sorry about the misunderstanding and frustration that came from my unsophisticated use of “sample” in review comments. I’m a qualitative researcher, and I don’t do experimental social science research at all. When I asked about “sampling procedures” in review, I simply wanted to know how you chose your cases for cross-cultural comparison because I reviewed many cross-cultural studies that picked up their sites randomly without justification. The lesson I learned from this case is that I would be much more careful about my wording in review in the future, particularly for this type of interdisciplinary conferences. Even though I didn’t intend to, people could misinterpret the connotation that go with certain words. I apologize about this misuse. On the other end, I was wondering whether the sampling question lacked legitimacy if it had been raised by an experimental social scientist. Isn’t one part of the joys of attending this kind of interdisciplinary conferences is to have our ideas collided in different perspectives? Yes, we are looking for camaraderie in professional communities, but we also want to see our ideas inquired and challenged by people who share research interests in similar topics but employ different research methodologies. Or maybe are we just still so discipline-rooted? The conference review process is always an interesting and heated topic for discussion. I’d like to recommend Jonathan Grudin’s recent piece: “Varieties of Conference Experiences” (The Information Society, 29: 71–77, 2013). Citing Anderson’s research, he wrote: “A selective conference accepts perhaps 5 percent that most experts would agree are strong, dismisses about 50 percent that attract no positive reviews, and arguably conducts a lottery to select among the rest to fill the remaining slots” (p. 75). For an interdisciplinary conference like AOIR, it is not a surprise that we have arguments about those selected papers. Yes, my submission was selected this year, but the one before this was rejected. As a writing scholar, I saw the problem of the paper template, and I discussed it in length with my colleague Jim Porter as we both tried hard to fit our own papers into that template before the deadline. I hope we are able to find a better system to review papers, and this is why I wrote to share another side of the story. Terri, I feel your pain about center and marginality, as my work was considered marginal. I still remembered how I was stunned to find that I was the only one who had a different skin color from dozens of attendees in a big meeting room as I was respectfully nodding my head and earnestly taking notes of the feedback for my dissertation proposal at a graduate research network years ago. In retrospect, I’m grateful for the critical (and sometimes brutal) feedback. It has taught me how to negotiate in a milieu of diverse perspectives, learn to be open-minded, and not to be offended by the face value of the words; of course it helped me improve my project eventually. I always use that experience to remind myself to be supportive to new work. I hope this note clarifies some confusions and misunderstanding about my review. I’m looking forward to reading more exciting work from you! Best, Huatong ------------------------------------------------------------------ Huatong Sun, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Digital Media Studies Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences University of Washington Tacoma http://faculty.washington.edu/htsun/ Book: Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users http://global.oup.com/academic/product/cross-cultural-technology-design-978…

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terri misinterpreted me
by Barry Wellman 31 May '13

31 May '13

just for the record, as these things perpetuate. Barry Wellman _______________________________________________________________________ S.D. Clark Professor FRSC NetLab Director Faculty of Information (iSchool) 611 Bissell Building 140 St. George St. University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 3G6 http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman twitter: @barrywellman NETWORKED:The New Social Operating System. Lee Rainie & Barry Wellman MIT Press http://amzn.to/zXZg39 Print $22 Kindle $16 Old/NewCyberTimes http://bit.ly/c8N9V8 ________________________________________________________________________

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Re: [Air-L] Let's talk about AoIR.
by David Toews 31 May '13

31 May '13

I am an outsider looking in, I don't attend AOIR. Nor do I attend AA, but I do lurk on this listserve and I consequently I feel free to take from Terri's list of questions the problem of "Who are we?" I'm not a part of the we, so for me its more a problem of "who are you?". I'm actually very interested in the question of "who are you". From what I can see, you are an organization of communications scholars rooted in the idea that the internet represents a dramatically new media of communication who are at the same time trying to downplay this drama because you are at the same time rooted in the notion that communications as a field still needs to be more professionalized. So your choice to me seems simple: a) make it explicit that this is a communications organization with respectable professional standards, or b) re-think your objectives: are you committed to such objects 'the internet' and 'media' or are you open thinkers enough to pursue new ways of imagining the convergence of the social, cultural, and technological? I would think (b) would be alot more interesting. The world has enough 'communications' conferences and organization. Two cents worth from an outsider. -- Dr. David Toews, PhD Assistant Professor Sociology Department York University 2060 Vari Hall 4700 Keele Street Toronto, Ontario Canada M3J 1P3 Tel. 416-736-2100 ext. 60307 Fax. 416-736-5370 dtoews(a)yorku.ca Follow me on Twitter! http://twitter.com/dtoews

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