Anyone who's ever read any FLOSS documentation will appreciate that physicists are not necessarily the most fluent analysists or writers if the topic is user experience ;-) Paula Cox wrote:
The need for knowing about computer technologies in communications research is becoming greater than the rudiments of web composition and traffic analysis. Already, artificial intelligence is being applied to content analysis, as in the case of a number of papers published on the Enron email corpus. The skill sets involved fall outside those typically found among communications researchers. A principle researcher in one of these Enron studies is Andrew McCallum at UMass, who is a physicist iirc. Another physicist, Andrew Smith, is responsible for the Leximancer tool mentioned earlier by Thomas Koenig. Less abstract tools like structural equation modeling are common now, and require competence in computer technologies beyond SPSS.
Whether these technologies should be incorporated in curricula is maybe not the right question, as they are not the types of skills one gets in a course or two. Perhaps the field should recruit from among information science and computer science undergrads who come equipped with the skills already.
-----Original Message----- From: air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-aoir.org-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Elizabeth Van Couvering Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 4:40 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] Technical competence
But let's consider the recent issue of archiving websites -- clearly we need some kind of technical competence for that. Ditto link analysis. Ditto for reading others' papers and understanding whether they've used a correct or appropriate methodology. For example, in understanding the so-called popularity of a website people should know to differentiate between 'hits' and 'pages' and 'visitors' and should be able to figure out whether robots have been excluded - to take a random example that demands a bit of specialised knowledge. Shouldn't this be the kind of thing we are considering for our students?
Elizabeth
On 6 Jun 2005, at 22:34, Paula wrote:
Yes, I'd agree with this - it can be useful to understand something of how any particular technical medium is productive in online social formations, but find it far more useful to approach social software primarily from the point of view of the user. The users will always manage to exceed the developers' constructs anyway.
Conversely, I find it really interesting how social softwares materialise the culture of their developers whilst users will often try to use it according to the needs of a completely different culture.
Paula
Ledbetter, Andrew Michael wrote:
Long-time reader, first-time poster. :-)
I agree, interesting question, and an important question. I think the (a) particular research question and (b) population under study significantly influence the level of technical competence a researcher would need. And we must not forget that the vast majority of web users, e-mail users, online gamers, etc. do not know much at all about UNIX, perl, Java, or probably even basic ideas about how the TCP/IP protocol operates. Given this, might there be occasions where lacking in-depth computer science knowledge might actually help a researcher approaching the Internet from a social science perspective, since they may be able to more easily view the technology through the users' eyes rather than the developers' eyes?
In my own research, I find that my computer science background helps me understand the contours of how the nature of a technology encourages and discourages certain forms of social interaction... but I find that my social science background helps me far more in understanding how human beings appropriate the technology in their social interaction.
Andrew ------------- Andrew M. Ledbetter Ph.D. student, University of Kansas Department of Communication Studies aledbett@ku.edu
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Elizabeth Van Couvering PhD Student Department of Media & Communications London School of Economics and Political Science http://personal.lse.ac.uk/vancouve/ e.j.van-couvering@lse.ac.uk
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