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 Amy Bruckman Associate Professor College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332-0760 Tel: 404-894-9222 Fax: 404-894-3146 Email: asb@cc.gatech.edu Web: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/