- Air-L - lists.aoir.org

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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CFP: Workshop Ethics of Cyber Conflict
by Mariariosaria Taddeo 01 Jun '13

01 Jun '13

Dear Colleagues, Apologies for cross posting. Please find below a CFP on a 'Workshop on the Ethics of Cyber Conflict', which I am organising in collaboration with the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. With kind regards, Mariarosaria Taddeo -- Dr. Mariarosaria Taddeo Research Fellow in Cyber Security and Ethics, PAIS, University of Warwick Research Associate - Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford http://taddeo.philosophyofinformation.net/index.html ************************************* Ethics of Cyber Conflict Time: November 2013 Place: Rome, Italy Participation fee: none In the age of the so-called information revolution, the ability to control, disrupt or manipulate the enemy’s information infrastructure has become as decisive as weapon superiority with respect to determining the outcome of conflicts. So much so that Pentagon’s definition of cyberspace as a new domain in which war is waged, alongside land, sea, air and space, comes as no surprise. The deployment of cyber conflicts as part of a state’s defensive or offensive strategy is a fast growing phenomenon, which is rapidly changing the dynamics of combat as well as the role that warfare plays in political negotiations and the life of civil societies. Such changes are not the exclusive concern of the military, for they also have a bearing on ethicists and policymakers, since existing ethical theories of war, together with national and international regulations, struggle to address the novelties of this phenomenon. The issue could not be more pressing and there is a much felt and fast escalating need to share information and coordinate ethical theorising about cyber conflicts. Contributions to the workshop will address issues concerning the way ICTs are affecting our ethical views of conflicts and warfare, as well as the analysis of just-war principles in the light of the dissemination of cyber conflicts; humanitarian military interventions based on ICTs; whether preventive acts of cyber war may satisfy jus-ad-bellum criteria; challenges of upholding jus-in-bello standards in cyber warfare, especially in asymmetric conflicts; attribution and proportionality of the response to cyber attacks; moral permissibility of automated responses and ethical deployment of military robotic weapons. More details can be found on the workshop website http://ccdcoe.org/428.html . The workshop will be a two-day event organised by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence and chaired by Dr Mariarosaria Taddeo, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. The event will gather ethicists, experts in military studies, policymakers and experts in cyber security to discuss the ethical problems caused by cyber conflicts. Submission of Papers: Authors are required to submit an extended abstract of the planned paper which should describe the topic and set out the main aspects and structure of the research (up to 1000 words). Following a preliminary review and acceptance of the abstract, the authors will be requested to submit the full paper that meets high academic quality, which will be considered for a publication in an international peer-reviewed journal. Speakers will be offered travel, transfer from,and to the airport, accommodation for the duration of the event. Submission details, author guidance and other practical information will be made available on the Centre’s website latest by August 2013. Important Dates Extended abstracts (1000 words): 9 September 2013 Notification of acceptance: 30 September 2013 Full paper: 07 November 2013 Registration is required for this event, please contact events -at- ccdcoe.org For enquiries about the workshop, please contact Lt Ludovica Glorioso (ludovica.glorioso -at- ccdcoe.org) or Anna-Maria Talihärm (anna-maria.taliharm -at- ccdcoe.org)

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

31 May '13

Re: Ruth's comment that: "The internet is always changing and I worry that to fully take on board Nicole's suggestion of only submitting things that had 'findings' ..." I'd like to clarify that this is not what I said at all, nor do I think this should be the case. I'm actually pretty shocked that my note was interpreted this way. My comment was about the need for different kinds of presentation formats that support different kinds of work. For empirical ("straight") research, I think it makes sense to include "findings" when assessments about quality are being made. The perceived low-quality of the conference (and its subsequent implications for funding, tenure decisions, etc.) have been noted by others, and I think encouraging people to include their findings when submitting empirical work will go a long way towards addressing the problems others have noted with regard to cocktail-napkin-notes presentations or excellent abstracts/poor papers. ***I also think there should be separate formats for the other kinds of work that Terri and others have mentioned - be they roundtables, birds of a feather, performances, workshops, etc.*** I think the conference can support these different kinds of presentation modes. I agree that having clearer guidelines for authors and reviewers will help with the reviewing problems that have been noted, as would a larger reviewing pool. Thanks, Nicole -- Nicole B. Ellison Associate Professor School of Information University of Michigan

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Let's talk about AoIR
by Baker, Andrea 31 May '13

31 May '13

Hi, everyone, I am out of town for a few days, and wanted to note just that I find this discussion fascinating. I hope we don't cut it off prematurely, but rather let the opinions flow freely. Clearly we are gathering a wide range of opinions on all sides, in response to this year's CFP and reviews, and the nature of AoIR, and its future direction. I hope to weigh in a little later on. cheers, andee

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Re: [Air-L] Let's Talk About AoIR
by Deller, Ruth A 31 May '13

31 May '13

Wow, a few days away on annual leave and I come back to find AOIR asploding all over my inbox! Lots of things to digest here but my twopenn'orth on a few of them (apologies, these thoughts will be conference specific ones not ones pertaining to AOIR in general, although I might come back to that later) CONFERENCE TEMPLATES I'll hold my hands up, I really struggled with the format this year both to write and to review. I'm used to just submitting and reviewing conference abstracts of 250-500 words so a longer one - yet something too short to be a proper paper - was a bit of a shock to the system, and not only that, it had its own particular fonts and styles and layouts! I found that quite intimidating and unnecessarily formal and I wasn't sure of its purpose. As others have said, it was too short to be a paper, too long for an abstract and trying to decide exactly what got put into it was hard. When reviewing, it was problematic using the template because everyone had interpreted it in different ways, some giving mini papers, others extended abstracts, others something else entirely - I genuinely found it hard to judge and I do a lot of reviewing of abstracts and of papers - but this hybrid beast was new to me. Having seen Terri's comment about roundtables/panels, I fear I am possibly one of those guilty of confusing them in the reviewing process this year somehow - on last year's system it seemed much clearer whether things were papers, panels, fishbowls etc - although I was on the organising team last year and accessed everything via the back system so maybe it looked different for team members than for actual reviewers. I do worry that we might have lost some quality papers, panels and roundtables purely because of the formatting issues and people's difficulty in interpreting the brief both as authors and reviewers. CONFERENCE FEEL AND SO ON I think one of the things this issue with the templates highlights is the problems of interdisciplinarity - I am ALL FOR it and think one of our biggest strengths is that we can accommodate scholars from lots of disciplines and countries - but it does mean that, naturally, we all differ a lot in practice and in terms of what is considered 'prestigious' (unlike some people's experiences, my research centre actually thinks a lot of AOIR - probably not enough to fund me to go to Denver but that's just because they don't like spending money). Therefore, we're probably never going to agree on what the conference should be: a creative exchange where newer, innovative stuff can be shared, or a place for finished products. I'm not an either/or person, so I would always advocate the both/and way of thinking. Being on the conference team last year I did sometimes find we were restricted in what we could put on the programme and how we could structure plenaries, keynotes etc. I personally feel that we're researching at the cutting edge and the creative edge. The internet is always changing and I worry that to fully take on board Nicole's suggestion of only submitting things that had 'findings' would stifle that and lead to more dated things being presented rather than allowing us to be fresh - and I think one of our distinctive markers should be our ability to be up-to-date with developments in our research field. Academia moves ridiculously slowly, the internet maddeningly quickly - we can't let everything be dictated by the former when we're interested in the latter. That said, I also appreciate the concerns over 'rigour' needing to be part of the process. I wasn't convinced by the arguments that conferences aren't a place for sharing works-in-progress though - every conference I've ever been to (and they've all been interdisciplinary or in media, cultural studies and a bit of sociology and all in either the UK or USA so I acknowledge that different fields and countries will vary) has had a combination of new work, work-in-progress and work completed. I love that and I think it keeps things fresh as well as encouraging newer work, PhD students etc. I've heard terrible presentations on completed work and excellent ones on work-in-progress so I don't consider the stage the work is at to be a marker of quality at all. One option could be to have different streams - completed papers, work-in-progress, whatever. I'd love us to have more workshops or similar where we get to experiment with different internet platforms and technologies. I bet several people would love it if they could have an hour to learn about, and get to grips with, 4chan or Tumblr or Vine or whatever it may be. I would love much more creativity and innovation in the programme - more 'traditional' conference fare is fine, but only to a point. Conferences for me are much more about connection than anything else - I read articles and books if I want the finished, extensive product. I want conferences to inspire me and introduce me to exciting people. OTHER CONFERENCE STUFF Sarah mentioned the size of the conference (and the expense of it for many). I don't know if this is worth thinking about, but another organisation I was once part of used to have an annual conference of its members, who were from all over the world. It got difficult and expensive for many people to meet that way, so they moved to having conferences on each continent instead with a 'global gathering' every two or three years. So maybe we could look to alternate with a continental/national conference one year and a big global shindig the next? Or have more web/internet-based ways of sharing and connecting - if not streaming, then weeks/months where we actively work to share stuff via blogs or online repositories or YouTube or Twitter or whatever works best for what we want to share. Ruth

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Let's talk about AoIR.
by Terri Senft 31 May '13

31 May '13

Hi Pals, With the encouragement of Andrew and Alex, I wanted to approach the list regarding some questions I have about culture of the Association of Internet Researchers today. I'm asking because after this round of conference proposal reviews, I feel personally and professionally a bit disconnected from this group these days. This freaks me out a bit, because I've always thought of AoIR as my intellectual home. I am wondering if this is just me (which would be fine!), or if others are in struggle as well. Some Big Questions I Have: 1. Who are we, personally and professionally? What makes us the same as organizations like ICA or ACM? What makes us different from these organizations? 2. How do we perform our identity at our annual conference? How is it reflected in the way we phrase our calls for submissions? How is it reflected in submission procedures? 3. How do we want to define "rigorous scholarship" in our organization? How do we want to deal with scholarship that strikes us as urgent, necessary or fresh, but not sufficiently rigorous? 4. Is there even an "us" anymore? Can positivists, activists, and artists really sit in the same room and discuss 'internet studies'? My answer used to be affirmative, but that was before internet studies was as ubiquitous as literature studies. 5. Should the desire for a conference that showcases professionalization trump a desire for a conference that encourages its youngest scholars and its most senior ones to take risks, make mistakes and push the boundaries of the field? Okay, that's plenty to start. As they say in AA, take what you want and leave the rest. Fondly, T -- <http://goog_689013053> <http://goog_689013053> Dr. Theresa M. Senft Global Liberal Studies Program School of Arts & Sciences New York University 726 Broadway NY NY 10003 home: *www.terrisenft.net <http://goog_689013053>** *(needs a serious updating) facebook: www.facebook.com/theresa.senft twitter: @terrisenft

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