Just to add another term: Internet science ("iScience"). Please check out the book "Dimensions of Internet Science" (http://www.psychologie.unizh.ch/sowi/reips/dis/) and the iScience server at http://psych-iscience.unizh.ch/ As it says on the book site: "Internet Science is a new and exciting interdisciplinary field. Its purpose is the conduct of empirical studies which examine the Internet as both an instrument for, and an object of, scientific investigation." The instrument aspect and the empirical focus, in particular, seem to distinguish the definition from those for "Internet research" and "web science". Best wishes --u At 12:46 Uhr -0400 4.5.2007, Amy S. Bruckman wrote:
Do folks here see "Web Science" becoming a part of AoIR?
We're starting a Web Science initiative in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. We interpret the term broadly to mean "the interdisciplinary study of the Web." (Not just semantic web stuff.) Compared to the kinds of things the AoIR community usually addresses, I would say we're a bit broader because we include more core computer science. Part of our reason for calling it "web science" instead of "Internet research" is to appeal to the folks coming from the hard side of computer science.
One of our goals is to increase communication across disciplines. For example, we had a great conversation at a faculty meeting yesterday about the "interestingness" algorithm on flickr, and how this might reflect a new view of algorithms that draws together our social computing and theoretical computer science faculty in a new way. And if we can draw in our economics, public policy, "new media", etc. folks too... then this starts to look interesting!
So basically I see "Internet research" and "web science" becoming synonyms in the long run.
YMMV :-)
-- Amy
-- PD Dr. Ulf-Dietrich Reips Past President, Society for Computers in Psychology (http://scip.ws) Editor, International Journal of Internet Science (http://www.ijis.net) *new address* Universität Zürich Psychologisches Institut Binzmühlestr. 14/13 8050 Zürich, Switzerland iScience portal (http://psych-iscience.unizh.ch/)