June 2014 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

MIT OCW-centric, C.C. World University and School has a new web URL - http://worlduniversityandschool.org
by Scott MacLeod 24 Jun '14

24 Jun '14

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 Hi Association of Internet Researchers, MIT OCW-centric, C.C., World University and School, which is like Wikipedia with MIT OpenCourseWare, and which is planning accredited online university and I.B. degrees, has a new web URL - http://worlduniversityandschool.org - until WUaS is fully accredited at the undergraduate level, probably around 2018 (when we would get an .EDU address). WUaS is planning to facilitate open, C.C., wiki schools in all 7,106 languages and 242 countries, in addition to accrediting in countries with 'large' languages for free degrees; Wikipedia is in at least 300 languages and MIT OCW is in at least 8 non-English languages, by way of comparison. As MIT OCW- and great universities- OER-centric wiki schools, please feel free to teach, learn, and add resources to the current Wiki (which presently has about 670 wiki pages, all in English, so far). Best, Scott - -- - - Scott MacLeod - Founder & President - - http://worlduniversityandschool.org - - World University and School - like Wikipedia with MIT OpenCourseWare (not endorsed by MIT OCW) - incorporated as a nonprofit university and school in California, and is a U.S. 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt educational organization, both effective April 2010. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.22 (Darwin) Comment: GPGTools - https://gpgtools.org Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQEcBAEBCgAGBQJTqMazAAoJEGXWPCwOJYCoZ8cH/3Ao494CnUxFM0Nv3q86GCW0 n8kEecx+34ewy/5TfaH/gL48jmWJlQgZL+dnYUMrwEuSYYS6HaYpNMrBe8zKnXbn 2lUZd1MldjPyOuSpp+tDfD5L/l2rjDb5BIwCHVw/jDO4DOM6RCx1cebigFSpaQf9 cbA+zCeNylmeyVIKdYstxdyeBCBb6Qkoyv2R9GBvVanP6vCVgSQhr3IPJ2KLzrOT SXC0SOh/dgZfAm6bjTl5+RqBEXh8Fmu0w1wTMEdcn9DbPKGZ7dp4HbDXUOjsoyUV 3QqADbkVQympKuzuqDLXSxkAhKGXg90fnXorboEBCZvsbGxWBoTpSOdp8ac09Q8= =ZFd4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Online mob justice
by Penn Pantumsinchai 24 Jun '14

24 Jun '14

Hi everyone, I am currently starting research on online mob/vigilante justice and was wondering if anyone is researching the same topic or know of any studies/resources. Prime examples of online mob justice include the failed hunt for the Boston bomber by Reddit users or many of the 'human flesh search engine' cases in China. I would be grateful for any suggestions. Thank you very much! -- Penn Pantumsinchai University of Hawaii at Manoa Department of Sociology, Ph.D. Student

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From 'gazing' to 'grabbing': Lecture this week: Terri Senft at Aarhus University
by Annette Markham 23 Jun '14

23 Jun '14

Dear Colleagues, If you're in Aarhus, Denmark, this week, drop by to hear this talk by Terri! Also, thanks for distributing this announcement to those who might find it relevant. *** The STS group and Department of Information Studies invites you to attend a talk by Theresa Senft, PhD, New York University. This Week! Wednesday, June 25 10 (:15) - 12:00 Nygård 2nd floor Lunchroom Aarhus University *Title:* From Gazing to Grabbing: Feeling One’s Way through Data that Moves" *Speaker:* Theresa Senft, Ph.D., New York University *Abstract: *What does it mean to write about data that moves us emotionally, data that moves through a range of actors and networks online, or both of these? I have long argued that rather than solely theorizing social media transactions through filmic conceptions like “the gaze” or even televisual language like “the glance,” internet scholars might be better served by the tactile notion of “the grab.” I chose the word because of its relation to skin: grab means to grasp, to seize for a moment, to capture (an object, attention), and, of course, to leave open for interpretation, as in the saying “up for grabs.” From a materialist perspective, the grab interests me because it tends toward commodity fetishism, rather than scopophilia (the psychic modality of the gaze.) From a feminist and anti-racist perspective, the politics of the grab certainly matter: it’s difficult to argue with the fact that historically, some bodies have been grabbed more than others In this talk, I focus on “grabbing” as a both theoretical construct and concrete practice of investigation, feeling, and writing. To do this, I combine Henri Lefebvre’s notion of rythymanalysis as method, Roland Barthes’s thoughts on writing spectatorship as “wound,” Susanna Passonen’s arguments about working through sensation as ethical praxis, and my own research, in which I consider the relationship between online “selfie culture” and recent developments in biometric and racial profiling practices, worldwide. *Bio:* Theresa M. Senft’s is an internationally recognized scholar of digital media. Her work explores the impact of digital media technologies on cultural conceptions of the private, the public, the pornographic, and the pedagogic in global society. Her most recent book is Camgirls: Celebrity & Community in the Age of Social Networks (Lang: 2008.) She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Social Media (with Jeremy Hunsinger, Routledge: 2014) and working on a book tentatively titled, Fame to Fifteen: Social Media and the Micro-Celebrity Moment. Senft is on the faculty at the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University, where she teaches classes on media, writing, and aesthetic theory. Prior to that, she was a Senior Lecturer at the University of East London’s Media Studies Program in the U.K..She most recently founded the international Selfie Research Network and is editing a special issue on the topic of Selfies for the International Journal of Communication. ***************************************************** Annette N. Markham, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Aesthetics & Communication, Aarhus University Guest Professor, Department of Informatics, Umeå University, Sweden Affiliate Professor, School of Communication, Loyola University, Chicago amarkham(a)gmail.com http://markham.internetinquiry.org/ Twitter: annettemarkham

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ASA Datathon: Big Cities, Big Data — Sign-up by August 1!
by Alex Hanna 23 Jun '14

23 Jun '14

As the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association gets closer, so does the first ASA Datathon! We’re on from 1pm August 15 through 1pm the 16th at Berkeley’s D-Lab <http://dlab.berkeley.edu/>. Public presentations and judging will take place at one of the ASA conference hotels, the Hilton Union Square <http://www.hiltonsanfranciscohotel.com/>, Room 3-4, Fourth Floor from 6:30-8:15 on August 16th. We’ve got a new website up -- asa-datathon.github.io -- that’ll be updated as the event approaches. If you haven’t signed up yet, make sure <http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1516540/datathon> you do! Signing up will give us a better idea of who will be at the event and how many folks we can expect to feed and caffinate. We’re also going to give teams a week to get to know each other before the event, so signing up will allow us to make sure everyone gets the same amount of time to work. If you’re interested, you are invited. We don’t discriminate against particular methodologies or backgrounds. We hope to have social scientists, data scientists, computer scientists, municipal staffers, start-up employees, grad students, and data hackers of all stripes - quantitative, qualitative, and the methodologically agnostic. Our title implies an interest in “big cities” but honestly, we’re more interested in real estate and housing data. Because a majority of the population lives in cities, cities will likely be important focal points in many of the projects that come out of the datathon. We’re hoping some teams focus on rural areas, too. Questions that we’ve considered include: - How are home buyers different now compared to home buyers ten years ago? Can the recession explain any of these differences? If so, would we expect a home-buying rebound or did the recession combine with other trends (increasing amount of student loan debt) to cause a permanent change in home buying patterns? - Who buys homes in rural areas? Are there halos of second-home buying around major cities? Around major airports? What kind of impact does this have on rural economies? - Are there specific industries that drive housing patterns? For instance, the tech industry is under fire in San Francisco right now for accelerating gentrification. Is this historically accurate? How does it compare to industries like the financial sector influencing prices in the New York metro area? Are these stories about single industries influencing real estate ecosystems oversimplifying more complicated patterns? - How does access to natural resources - and proximity to natural disasters - shape purchasing decisions, if at all? In other words, is there evidence that buyers take natural risks into their value considerations? These are just some questions we’ve tossed around among ourselves. We’re sure our participants will come up with other great questions that use real estate and/or housing data. We can’t wait to see what happens in August. -- Alexander Hanna PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology University of Wisconsin-Madison http://alex-hanna.com @alexhanna

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Re: [Air-L] Mechanical Turk tasks
by Nicole Ellison 22 Jun '14

22 Jun '14

Hi, I asked a colleague about this and here are some resources she pointed me to: Paolacci, G., Chandler, J. (2014). Inside the Turk: Understanding Mechanical Turk as a Participant Pool. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(3), 184-188. Paolacci, G., Chandler, J., Ipeirotis, P. G. (2010). Running Experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Judgment and Decision Making, 5(5), 411-419. Kittur, Chi, and Suh. Crowdsourcing User Studies with Mechanical Turk. CHI '08. Paolacci also has a blog called 'Experimental Turk <http://experimentalturk.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/reputation-as-a-sufficient…>' that might have posts about this (e.g., http://experimentalturk.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/reputation-as-a-sufficient… ) She wrote a workshop paper awhile back that cites other stuff that is further afield (mostly cognitive psych) but related to the same question: http://crowdresearch.org/chi2011-workshop/papers/hullman.pdf Hope this is helpful. Nicole Nicole Ellison Associate Professor School of Information University of Michigan

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The 2013 Social Informatics Best Student Paper Award
by Fichman, Pnina 22 Jun '14

22 Jun '14

Call for nomination for the 2013 Social Informatics Best Student Paper Award The Special Interest Group for Social Informatics (SIG-SI) and the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics (RKCSI) are seeking nominations for an award for the best paper written by a doctoral student on a topic informed by social informatics. Nominations may include a published paper in a peer reviewed journal during 2013 or a conference paper presented in 2013. The author or authors will present their paper at the 10th Annual SIG-SI Symposium on Saturday, October 30, 2014 and receive a $500 cash award at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) in Seattle in October, 2014. Nominations letters should be sent to Howard Rosenbaum (hrosenba(a)indiana.edu<mailto:hrosenba@indiana.edu>) or Pnina Fichman (fichman(a)indiana.edu<mailto:shachaf@indiana.edu>) by August 15, 2014 and must include a full citation, a brief explanation for the nomination, and a copy of the article. Self nominations are acceptable. Winners will be notified by August 30, 2014. For more information about the Special Interest Group for Social Informatics (SIG-SI): http://asistsigsi.wordpress.com For more information about the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics (RKCSI): http://rkcsi.indiana.edu Pnina Fichman and Howard Rosenbaum School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University ------------------------ Pnina Fichman Chair, Department of Information and Library Science Director, Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics Director, Master of Library Science School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~fichman/

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Job: Course Leader for Journalism, Univerisity for the Creative Arts, UK
by Yuwei Lin 21 Jun '14

21 Jun '14

Hello all, My employer, the University for the Creative Arts (UK) is recruiting Course Leader for Journalism. Deadline is very tight - next Tuesday 24th of June 2014. Details and application form can be found at https://jobs.ucreative.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx?ref=14-AMCD321-01 Please could you circulate this ad in your circle? Cheers. Best wishes, Yuwei

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GROUP '14 Workshop on Crowdwork || Nov 9, 2014 || Sanibel Island, FL
by Karin Hansson 21 Jun '14

21 Jun '14

CALL FOR POSITION PAPERS GROUP 2014 - ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork Sanibel Island, Florida, USA - November 9, 2014 The Morphing Organization: Rethinking Groupwork Systems in the Era of Crowdwork Workshop website: http://morph.wp.horizon.ac.uk ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT DATES Paper Submission Deadline: August 01, 2014 Notification of Acceptance: September 01, 2014 Workshop Date: November 09, 2014 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Web 2.0 has provided organizations remarkable opportunities to improve productivity, gain competitive advantage, and increase participation by engaging crowds to accomplish tasks at scale. However, establishing and integrating crowd-based systems into organizations is still an open question. The systems and the collaborative processes they enable appear diametrically in dissonance with the norms and culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing in traditional organizations. They require mechanisms for articulation of work, coordination, cooperation, and knowledge co-creation that are fundamentally different from those in current groupwork systems and processes. This workshop will bring together researchers investigating issues related to crowdsourcing, social computing and collaborative technologies, organizational science, and workplace research, work in industry, government and voluntary sectors, to discuss the future of groupwork systems in the era of crowdwork. We invite position papers that seek to address the following questions that are of interest to the workshop: What is the future of groupwork systems in the era of crowdwork? How do emerging trends in crowdwork, such as organizational collaboration with an undefined network of people, affect how we conceptualize groupwork? What are the implications for the design of groupwork systems? How can groupwork research contribute to crowdwork research? What can be learned from the success stories and failures of groupwork systems of more than two decades to inform the design of effective organizational crowdwork systems? Can the research and design principles of traditional groupware, workflow systems, and CSCW applications be extended to support organizational collaborative work with the crowd? How can collaboration “in the crowd” be motivated and sustained, while promoting openness and mutual knowledge co-creation, safeguarding organizational intellectual capital, and ensuring maximum job satisfaction and career growth for the crowd worker? What are the underlying ideology and principles in the socio-technical architectures of tools for supporting collaboration and knowledge sharing? What are the norms and cultures of collaboration in organizations, and how and when do they work for or against the involvement of crowds? How do we understand the participatory processes at stake in crowdwork, ensure equal representation, and design sustainable hybrid economic systems from an organizational perspective? What functions should the next generation of groupwork systems embody to make them viable as an organizational work tool in the era of crowdwork? Submissions should be sent by email to: group14crowdwork(a)gmail.com We recommend that position papers: Are between 2-4 pages long and formatted to ACM GROUP guidelines; Include title, your name, affiliation, and email address; Has an abstract (up to 200 words); Provide a short biography with your background and area(s) of expertise (up to 150 words); Specify your main interest in the workshop (up to 50 words); Workshop Organizers Obinna Anya (IBM Research) Laura Carletti (University of Nottingham) Tim Coughlan (University of Nottingham) Karin Hansson (Stockholm University) Sophia B. Liu (US Geological Survey) For any questions, please contact us by email: group14crowdwork(a)gmail.com

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Establishing rationale for rejecting completed MTurk tasks
by Robinson,Cory 20 Jun '14

20 Jun '14

Can anyone point in the right direction for literature establishing some sound guidelines for rejecting poor quality completions from MTurk workers? For example, my survey had an average completion time of 9:30, but I have respondents “complete” the survey in less than a minute. I would think it would be appropriate to reject these workers responses? Additionally, I have responses that I have reviewed where a worker selected the middle answer for all survey questions. I would assume that’s valid to reject this completion as well. Many thanks in advance, Cory -- Stephen Cory Robinson cory.robinson(a)colostate.edu<mailto:cory.robinson@colostate.edu> Office: Clark C258A http://colostate.academia.edu/StephenCoryRobinson

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Call ESA RN18: Media and Communication in and after the Global Capitalist Crisis: Renewal, Reform, or Revolution? (Deadline July 1)
by Christian Fuchs 20 Jun '14

20 Jun '14

Media and Communication in and after the Global Capitalist Crisis: Renewal, Reform or Revolution? European Sociological Association - Research Network 18 (Sociology of Communications and Media Research) 2014 Conference University of Bucharest, Romania October 17-18, 2014 Submission deadline: July 1, 2014 Submission per e-mail to christian.fuchs(a)uti.at (Abstracts as txt or doc file including a title, contact email, affiliation, 250-500 word abstract) RN18 covers the conference fee and accomodation in Bucharest for 6 participants (3 nights each, single room). If you want to apply for such financial assistance (e.g. because you are a PhD student without travel funds or because your university does not provide assistance for conference attendance), then please indicate this circumstance in your submission. Please note that this support excludes travel costs. The world has experienced a global crisis of capitalism that started in 2008 and is continuing until now. It has been accompanied by a crisis of the state and a general crisis of legitimation of dominant ideologies such as neoliberalism. Responses to the crisis have been variegated and have included austerity measures of the state that have hit the weakest, an increased presence of progressive protests, revolutions and strikes that have made use of digital, social and traditional media in various ways, the rise of far-right movements and parties in many parts of Europe and other parts of the world, the Greek state’s closing down of public service broadcaster ERT and increased commercial pressure on public service broadcasting in general, new debates about how to strengthen public service media, increased socio-economic and class inequality in many parts of the world and at a global level, precarious forms of work in general and in the media and cultural industries in particular, the emergence of new media reform movements, an extension and intensification of the crisis of newspapers and the print media, an increasing shift of advertising budgets to targeted ads on the Internet and along with this development the rise of commercial “social media” platforms, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the existence of a global surveillance-industrial complex that operates a communications surveillance system called “Prism” that involves the NSA and media companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, Skype, Apple and Paltalk; discussions about the power and freedom of the press in light of the Levenson inquiry, shifting geographies of the political and media landscape that have to do with the economic rise of countries such as China and India. Given this context, the main questions that ESA RN18’s 2014 conference asks and to which it invites contributions are: How has the crisis affected the media and communication landscape in Europe and globally and what perspectives for the future of media and communications are there? What suggestions for media reforms are there? How feasible are they? What kind of media policies and reforms do we need today? Which ones should be avoided? Are we in this context likely to experience a renewal of neoliberalism or something different? Plenary sessions: 1) Keynote Talk: Prof. Peter Ludes (Jacobs University Bremen, Germany): Wanted: Critical Visual Theories! 2) Special Session: Public Media and Alternative Journalism in Romania With Dr. Raluca Petre (‘Ovidius’ University Constanta, Romania): On the Distinction between State and Public Media: Re-Centering Public Options; Dr. Antonio Momoc (University of Bucharest, Romania): Alternative Media as Public Service Journalism; Costi Rogozanu (journalist and media activist, criticatac.ro) – Is Alternative Media an Alternative? ESA RN18 welcomes submissions of abstracts for contributions. Questions that can for example be addressed include, but are not limited to the following ones: * Media and capitalism: How have capitalism and the media changed in recent years? Are there perspectives beyond capitalism and capitalist media? How can we best use critical/Marxist political economy and other critical approaches for understanding the media and capitalism today? What is the role of media and communication technologies in the financialization, acceleration, and globalization of the capitalist economy? What are the conditions of working in the media, cultural and communication industries in the contemporary times? What is the role of Marx today for understanding crisis, change, capitalism, communication, and critique? * Media reform and media policy in times of crisis: How do the media need to be reformed and changed in order to contribute to the emergence of a good society? Which media reform movements are there and what are their goals? What have been policy ideas of how to overcome the crisis and deal with contemporary changes in relation to European media and communication industries? What can we learn from recent discussions about the media’s power and freedom, such as the Leveson inquiry? What are implications for media reforms? * Media and the public sphere: How should the concept of the public sphere best be conceived today and how does it relate to the media? How has the public sphere changed during the crisis in Europe and globally? What has been the relation between public and commercial broadcasting during and after the crisis? How have public service media changed, which threats and opportunities does it face? How can/should public service be renewed in the light of crisis, the Internet, and commercialisation? Can public service be extended from broadcasting to the online realm, digital and social media? What has been the role of public service media in Europe? How has this role transformed? * Media and activism: How can media scholars best cooperate with activists in order to contribute to a better media system and a better society? What are major trends in media activism today and how do activists use and confront the media and how do commercial, public and alternative media relate to contemporary social movements? What have been important experiences of media activists and media reform organisations in the past couple of years? What are the opportunities, risks, limits and possibilities of media activism today? For answering these questions, we also invite contributions and submissions by media activists, who want to talk about and share their experiences. * Media ownership: Who owns the media and ICTs? What are peculiar characteristics of knowledge and the media as property? What conflicts and contradictions are associated with it and how have they developed in times of crisis? How concentrated are the media and ICTs and how has this concentration changed since the start of the 2008 crisis? How has media and ICT ownership, convergence, de-convergence and concentration developed since the start of the 2008 crisis? What reforms of media and ICT ownership are needed in light of the crisis of capitalism and the crisis of intellectual property rights? * Media and crisis: What have been the main consequences of the crisis for media and communication in various parts of the world and Europe from a comparative perspective? What role have the media played in the construction of the crisis? How have the media conveyed the social and economic crises of recent years to citizens and what are the consequences of this flow of ideas and explanations? What role can they play in overcoming the crisis? What is the relationship of the media and class during and after the crisis? What role have ideologies (such as racism, right-wing extremism, fascism, neoliberalism, anti-Semitism, etc) played in the media during the crisis and what can we learn from it for reforming the media? How have audiences interpreted media contents that focus on austerity, crisis, neoliberalism, protests, revolutions, or media reforms? * The globalisation of the media and society: What are major trends in the globalisation of capitalism, society and the media? Given the globalisation of media and society, what are challenges for media and society today? What can we learn from non-Western media scholars and media cultures outside of Europe? Are concepts such as cultural/media imperialism, transnational cultural domination or the new imperialism feasible today and if so, in which ways? * Digital and social media: What is digital labour and how has class changed in the context of social and digital media? What is the connection of value creation, knowledge labour and digital labour? How do the global dimension and the global division of digital labour look like, especially in respect to China, India, Asia and Africa? How do new forms of exploitation and unremunerated labour (“free labour”, “crowdsourcing”) look like in the media sector (e.g. in the context of Internet platforms such as Facebook or Google)? What is the relationship of the commons and commodification on digital and social media? How do capital accumulation and targeted advertising work on social media and what are their implications for users and citizens? What are alternatives to capitalist digital and social media? How can alternative social and digital media best look like and be organized? What can in this context be the roles of the digital commons, civil society media and public service media? Which ideologies of the Internet and social media are there? How can we best understand the surveillance-industrial Internet complex operated by the NSA together with Internet corporations such as Google and Facebook and what are the implications of Edward Snowden’s revelations? How do power and political economy work in the context of platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WikiLeaks, Wikipedia, Weibo, LinkedIn, Blogspot/Blogger, Wordpress, VK, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, etc? * Media and Critical Social Theory: What can we learn and use from critical sociology and the sociology of critique when studying the media? What do critique and critical theory mean in contemporary times? What are critical sociology and the sociology of critique and what are its roles for studying media and communication’s role in society? Which social theories do we need today for adequately understanding media & society in a critical way? What is the role of political economy and Marx’s theory for understanding media & society today? * Communication and (Post-)Crisis: How has the crisis affected the communication landscape in Europe and globally and what perspectives for the future are there? How do the working conditions in communication industries look like after the crisis? What are the challenges for communication industries in the near future in the context of the crisis and post-crisis? What is the role of post-crisis-communication industries in a globalised economy? Conference Fee For members of ESA RN18: 40 Euros For non-members of ESA RN18: 60 Euros

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