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FW: Blogpost: The Ethical Responsibility of Researchers in Community Informatics
by Michael Gurstein 13 Mar '11

13 Mar '11

As both an academic (and research) discipline and a community (and policy) practice, Community Informatics links a variety of communities and many with a widely varying degree of resources and opportunities. http://wp.me/pJQl5-6i Mike

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on the flexibility of the internet vs. books
by nativebuddha 13 Mar '11

13 Mar '11

the author focuses on the issue of authority, but flexibility comes up too: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13rubin.html -=robert

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Re: [Air-L] CMS for cross-dept/university project?
by Alexandra Samuel 13 Mar '11

13 Mar '11

hi Chris, Jumping into the conversation on the CMS front. I've built about thirty online communities and blogs, some in Drupal and some in Wordpress, and echo what has been said about Wordpress being a bit easier for folks to use (that said, the latest Drupal release is really focused on usability). Much depends on what your campus has the most of; if there's an IT team that has experience with one or the other, I'd make that the decisive factor. But before you jump into platform choice (a subject I can geek on about for hours) let me suggest a few meta-level steps & considerations: 1. Get really clear on your requirements before you choose a platform. In other words, make a list of the kind of content you need on your site, the functionality you need, and the different kind of users who will use the site (and what they need to have permission to contribute, edit or view). You inspired me to finally (!) post the quick-and-dirty requirements for our website in progress (see http://bit.ly/hZmlqG ); I wrote them in a very Drupally way but you could just make a list of the different content types and functions needed and then get some advice on which platform is best suited. 2. Think not just about what kinds of participation/contribution you'd like, but what you'll realistically achieve. I note that you want "social media tools" but I find a lot of organizations over-invest in social capacity that turns out to be unsustainable at their size (for more on this, and strategies that DO work for smaller organizations, see this post: http://bit.ly/why90101) What I've found sustainable for us is to have a 10-hr/wk student who keeps our Twitter account active, and who can review the blog posts that our various faculty and associates have written on their various blogs & then get them onto our site (initially via cut-and-paste but ultimately via an aggregation that queues those posts for review & approval). Since you're running a writing program you can look at hiring students to do more writing-intensive work (e.g blogging ) but I'd have very low expectations for faculty contribution, unless those faculty members are already writing blogs that you can republish or creating other kinds of content (course assignments, papers, etc) that an enterprising student assistant could round up and post to the blog.General rule of thumb is it takes 2x as much effort to get someone else to contribute as to write something yourself. 3. Collaborating with other universities is totally smart and in a sane universe would make sense; that said over 6 years in building online communities for NGOs we never saw a single aspirational peer-to-peer collaboration actually come to pass. What seems to work better is for one organization (i.e. you) to take the lead, build what you need, and then make it available for others to use. You can do this by downloading your entire site configuration and handing it to someone else to use as the basis for creating their own site (as a tarball) or conceivably (in the case of Drupal) creating a single multi-site installation that allows all the different organizations to run their site off the same installation (saves on maintenance and development costs but limits your ability to diverge from one another in your site structure, though not in your sites' design.) The big advantage of Drupal for what you're talking about is its use of taxonomy. If you were building a Drupal site you could set up some overarching categories (which you can use in addition to free tags) and use those to categorize events, speakers, teaching resources and other types of content (e.g. status updates, blog posts). Drupal automatically generates a page for every category or tag on the site, so for example you could end up with a page on "scientific writing" that would include events, speakers, teaching resources, blog posts etc all related to that topic, and automatically have comparable pages for professional writing, online communications, nonprofit communications etc. With a very modest amount of custom theming work (ie. the creation of custom templates) in Views, you could make those tag/category pages divide up those different kinds of content into different sections of the page and it can all look quite nice. Wordpress is going to be at least a bit easier for folks to contribute to (esp for bloggers) but a bit less flexible (though it's amazing how much you can do in Wordpress now). It's a bit easier to mess around with and tweak, which can be a pro or a con: if you've got one, semi-geeky person who gets into it, they can continue building out the site by adding widgets, plugins, customizing the theme, etc. All that is possible in Drupal too but a little trickier; it takes a higher level of skill and nerve to hack on a Drupal site. (I say this as a woman who regularly tortures her Wordpress blog but is a lot more cautious when working on my Drupal sites). BTW note that both Wordpress and Drupal can support aggregation-driven strategies as noted above in #2. In principle we'd be happy to share our Drupal install for simcentre.ca once it's done but I'd need to check with our long-suffering developers to see if that is ok with them. OK I'll stop now but happy to answer more questions if it's helpful. Best of luck! Alex Alexandra Samuel, Ph.D. Director, Social + Interactive Media Centre, Emily Carr University alex(a)alexandrasamuel.com | Twitter @awsamuel | 604.726.5445

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Fwd: [IP] From US Department of State
by jeremy hunsinger 12 Mar '11

12 Mar '11

Begin forwarded message: > From: Dave Farber <dfarber(a)me.com> > Date: March 12, 2011 11:58:29 AM EST > To: ip <ip(a)listbox.com> > Subject: [IP] From US Department of State > Reply-To: dave(a)farber.net > > > > > Begin forwarded message: > >> From: Randall Webmail <rvh40(a)insightbb.com> >> Date: March 12, 2011 11:49:03 AM EST >> To: dave(a)farber.net >> Subject: For IP: From US Department of State >> >> "We know that many people are worried about the welfare of their friends and family in Japan. We understand also that some telephone landlines there are disrupted. We are recommending that people try contacting loved ones in Japan by email, text, SMS message, or social media. >> >> We have stood up a consular Task Force that will be responding to concerns about specific U.S. citizens in Japan. People may email the taskforce at japanemergencyusc(a)state.gov. And I'll repeat that, japanemergencyusc(a)state.gov. Concerns about specific U.S. citizens in the tsunami zone overseas outside of Japan should be sent to pacifictsunamiusc(a)state.gov. Again, I'll repeat, pacifictsunamiusc(a)state.gov. >> >> So that we may properly pursue your inquiry, we will need information about the person in Japan who may need assistance. For each person, please be sure you send us the person's full name, date of birth, place of birth, as much information as possible regarding their physical location and contact information within Japan. And also please send us any information that you feel is important for us to know such as any preexisting medical conditions or whether you or your loved one is either elderly or a child in Japan without his or her parent." >> >> http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/03/158213.htm >> > Archives | Modify Your Subscription | Unsubscribe Now Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality. -Jules de Gaultier () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments

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CMS for cross-dept/university project?
by Chris Werry 12 Mar '11

12 Mar '11

Hi, Was hoping someone on the list might be able to offer some advice on CMS choice. We have a common book program on campus. The writing program and some departments teach the same book in order to foster conversation and community. There is interest in expanding this so 4 or 5 other universities/colleges in the area also participate. Folks on our campus want to set up a CMS to help make this happen. I'm trying to help with some of the planning. They want a CMS that can be used to coordinate events and speakers, upload shared teaching resources, and perhaps leverage some social media tools to build community. But nobody involved has much technical expertise, and...I'm not sure they really know what they want to do with the site. Early on I showed them some drupal sites, but some of our partners weren't too familiar with this, and at that point we didn't have any tech people to help with drupal. So the conversation turned to Wordpress...I showed them more model sites, including CUNY's Academic Commons, which they really liked. But of course a group of developers put a lot of effort into this. So it would be no simple feat to attempt something similar. We now have one developer, and as it turns out she's most familiar with drupal - although she can also build Wordpress sites. So my question is, does anyone have any recommendations? Perhaps some model sites or distributions of drupal? (Has anyone tried openscholar - I suspect it may be too focused on building individual faculty sites). Or a Wordpress site that fits the bill? One final thought. The folks running this do have some money, so if you've been involved in a customization of drupal or Wordpress which could be reworked and re-themed by our developer, they might be willing to pay for 'consulting' etc. I'm interested in this main because I'd like to see such platforms created for our writing program, in order to support some of the work we do across departments and with outside groups. Any advice greatly appreciated. Chris

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Content Analysis specific newsgroups
by Aneesha Bakharia 12 Mar '11

12 Mar '11

Hi Anybody know of any content analysis specific newsgroups. My research is on evaluating algorithms for content analysis and I am looking to join a community. Regards Aneesha

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Dedoose (Qual & Mixed Methods Web Research App) Updates
by Jason Taylor 11 Mar '11

11 Mar '11

Hello everyone, it's been quite a while since we posted about Dedoose, and wanted to let everyone know about some of the major updates over the past few months. For those not aware of Dedoose, Dedoose is a web-based application for qualitative and mixed methods researchers designed by Drs. Thomas Wiesner and Eli Lieber of UCLA's Center for Culture and Health after years of frustration with NVivo, MaxQDA, and other software. You can find out more on our site over at http://www.dedoose.com. Here are some of the major new features over the past few months: - Full code import, export, and code merging. Continuing our tradition of easy-in easy-out, you can now export and import codes, along with merging codes together merging the code applications at the same time. We now have full exporting of all Data in your project. If for some reason Dedoose does not fit your needs, your free to take your data elsewhere. We stand by the fact that we believe we are the best at what we do, and it's our responsibility to our users to keep being the best. We promise never to lock in users like many of our competitors do. - Training Center for inter-rater reliability testing both for code application and code weighting. We are using Cohen's Kappa and Pearson's Correlation for tests respectively. This works great for an individual researchers testing their accuracy over time, or for groups of researching to verify consistency of application and/or weighting. - Chat system: Now chat in real-time with any member of your project using Dedoose. - The Advanced Project Importer: Got an excel spreadsheet with a ton of quantitative and qualitative data and want to create a Dedoose project? Using our advanced importer Dedoose with automatically create all the descriptor fields, descriptors, documents, excerpts, codes, and link everything together at once completing what we call the indexing phase of your study. Simply add more codes and apply them to the excerpts and then begin your analysis. - Insane performance increases: Over the course of the past few months users have been pushing Dedoose well beyond what we initially believed where "normal" studies, especially with quantitative researchers trying Dedoose. We enjoy a good challenge as at the end of the day it only makes us greater. Our engineering team has stepped up to the challenge in a big way optimizing so many different pieces of Dedoose. We are seeing large projects load over 10x faster, over 30x reduction in memory usage, and the ability to store 20x more data per project. In one example one of our projects is holding over 750,000 individual descriptor field values, and is loading smoothly. - Complex filtering: We implemented the ability to select multiple filters across categories allowing the very intuitive and easy creation of complex and/or Boolean logic filters. This makes it very easy for example to find all excerpts with 3 particular codes with specific weights that also happen to be linked to a particular descriptor field option ( for example females). - Full .doc support: In addition to rtf, txt, docx, we have added support for the older Microsoft office format .doc, including embedded images. We also have found great tools to automatically batch convert from pdf's to docs, allowing full use of PDF's as well. - Payment and Pricing changes: We have simplified our pricing, turned on month-by-month pay as you go, as well as added additional discounts for paying for 6, or 12 month terms. In addition we are fully willing to beat any competitors price in any situation. These is just a small sample, for more check out our blog over at http://www.dedoose.com/blog and our forum over at http://www.dedoose.com/forum We are wrapping up some additional feature improvements over the next few weeks, and then going headfirst into brining in video and audio into Dedoose. For those that haven't tried Dedoose, it's free and instant to sign up, no credit card or billing information required at sign up. After a month you are prompted to pay, but are allowed to hide the dialog for a while after that. This gives you the chance to export out any work from Dedoose you like in case you don't want to continue your trial, but we are pretty sure Dedoose will meet your needs :-P Happy Coding ~ Jason Taylor Dedoose Lead Developer

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Re: [Air-L] Twitter no longer allowing use for scholarship
by Rhiannon Bury 11 Mar '11

11 Mar '11

Ooops, meant to send to the list. Sorry for the spam. ________________________________ From: Rhiannon Bury <rcbury(a)rogers.com> To: air-l(a)aoir.org Sent: Fri, March 4, 2011 12:26:00 PM Subject: Twitter no longer allowing use for scholarship I just came across this article via RWW twitter feed: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_recent_changes_to_twitters_terms_o… Does anyone here know anything more or has anyone been directly affected? Rhiannon Rhiannon Bury, PhD Associate Professor, Women's and Gender Studies Athabasca University Canada's Open University rbury(a)athabascau.ca

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e-books
by Jonathan Sterne, Dr. 11 Mar '11

11 Mar '11

Hi All, I'm just curious. How many people actually read e-books in the DRMed format that publishers provide through a browser interface? I'm at Stanford this year, which has lots of titles in electronic form. But many of them are unreadable past a couple pages. A .pdf that could be displayed on an e-reader device would be fine, but I can't see sifting through a web portal that lets me do a whole lot less than what I could do with a physical text. If I really want to read the book, I get the physical copy or see if there's a .pdf floating around. Best, --J

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Faculty Position | SUNY Institute of Technology
by Steven Schneider 11 Mar '11

11 Mar '11

Hello, The SUNY Institute of Technology is hiring an Assistant Professor to teach in our online graduate (MS) program in Information Design & Technology, and our on-campus undergraduate program in Communication & Information Design. We are especially interested in hiring a person with interests in new media. If you're interested, apply quickly at http://bit.ly/hOPaPN: we're developing a short list in the next two weeks and will be interviewing in April. If you're interested in more detail about SUNYIT or our programs, drop me an email. //steve. -- Steven M. Schneider SUNY Institute of Technology | http://www.sunyit.edu Professor, Department of Communications & Humanities steve(a)sunyit.edu | 315.792.7331 | http://sunyit.edu/~steve

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