Sad News: Death of Brenda Danet
Yesterday, the world of internet research lost a dear friend and colleague. Brenda Danet died in New Haven, CT, following a heroic (and most graceful) battle with leukemia. Despite her years of ups and downs with the disease, she continued to produce work that guides many of us and our students. Brenda was a pioneer -- intellectually and personally. She did her BA at Radcliffe and PhD (in Sociology) at the University of Chicago, but spent most of her professional life in Israel. She taught at Hebrew University, where she was appointed Danny Arnold Chair of Communications in 1998. Following her retirement in 2000, she migrated back to the US, where she became a Research Affiliate in Anthropology at Yale. Most of us know Brenda from her delightful book CyberPlay, and her more recent co-edited volume (with Susan Herring) on The Multilingual Internet. Those of us fortunate enough to have known Brenda in person cherish our memories of a strong, self-confident woman who inspired us to think, was full of wit, wore the most lovely scarves, and helped us laugh at ourselves. Brenda will be very sorely missed. Naomi Baron American University Washington, DC USA
My sympathies go out to Brenda's family and friends. I, too, will mourn her death. She was one of the earliest supporters of AoIR, and my conversations about internet research predate AoIR's formation by quite a few years. She always spoke up and had interesting things to say and interesting questions to ask. I will miss her. Sj On Nov 23, 2008, at 4:55 PM, Naomi Susan Baron wrote:
Yesterday, the world of internet research lost a dear friend and colleague. Brenda Danet died in New Haven, CT, following a heroic (and most graceful) battle with leukemia. Despite her years of ups and downs with the disease, she continued to produce work that guides many of us and our students.
Brenda was a pioneer -- intellectually and personally. She did her BA at Radcliffe and PhD (in Sociology) at the University of Chicago, but spent most of her professional life in Israel. She taught at Hebrew University, where she was appointed Danny Arnold Chair of Communications in 1998. Following her retirement in 2000, she migrated back to the US, where she became a Research Affiliate in Anthropology at Yale.
Most of us know Brenda from her delightful book CyberPlay, and her more recent co-edited volume (with Susan Herring) on The Multilingual Internet. Those of us fortunate enough to have known Brenda in person cherish our memories of a strong, self-confident woman who inspired us to think, was full of wit, wore the most lovely scarves, and helped us laugh at ourselves.
Brenda will be very sorely missed.
Naomi Baron American University Washington, DC USA _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Amen and thanks to Naomi and Steve. Brenda's support of AoIR included her successful run for Secretary, a position she then had to resign as her illness progressed - but, characteristically, I think, only with great reluctance and after much effort to continue, despite it all. She was a dear soul and will be mourned deeply by many of us, both within the AoIR community and beyond. -c.
My sympathies go out to Brenda's family and friends. I, too, will mourn her death. She was one of the earliest supporters of AoIR, and my conversations about internet research predate AoIR's formation by quite a few years. She always spoke up and had interesting things to say and interesting questions to ask. I will miss her.
Sj
On Nov 23, 2008, at 4:55 PM, Naomi Susan Baron wrote:
Yesterday, the world of internet research lost a dear friend and colleague. Brenda Danet died in New Haven, CT, following a heroic (and most graceful) battle with leukemia. Despite her years of ups and downs with the disease, she continued to produce work that guides many of us and our students.
Brenda was a pioneer -- intellectually and personally. She did her BA at Radcliffe and PhD (in Sociology) at the University of Chicago, but spent most of her professional life in Israel. She taught at Hebrew University, where she was appointed Danny Arnold Chair of Communications in 1998. Following her retirement in 2000, she migrated back to the US, where she became a Research Affiliate in Anthropology at Yale.
Most of us know Brenda from her delightful book CyberPlay, and her more recent co-edited volume (with Susan Herring) on The Multilingual Internet. Those of us fortunate enough to have known Brenda in person cherish our memories of a strong, self-confident woman who inspired us to think, was full of wit, wore the most lovely scarves, and helped us laugh at ourselves.
Brenda will be very sorely missed.
Naomi Baron American University Washington, DC USA _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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Having been offline the past week, this sad news only now reaches me.... One of Brenda's contributions Steve did not mention was that she served on the editorial board of New Media & Society during its early years, performing that all-too-often unacknowledged labor of reviewing journal submissions and pointing young scholars in the direction of NM&S at a time when the title was far from recognized. Brenda did all of this, and more. I particularly remember, and cherish, the personal conversations we had across the years, usually in some corner of a conference venue. Thank you, Brenda.... Nick Jankowski At 05:47 24-11-2008, you wrote:
My sympathies go out to Brenda's family and friends. I, too, will mourn her death. She was one of the earliest supporters of AoIR, and my conversations about internet research predate AoIR's formation by quite a few years. She always spoke up and had interesting things to say and interesting questions to ask. I will miss her.
Sj
On Nov 23, 2008, at 4:55 PM, Naomi Susan Baron wrote:
Yesterday, the world of internet research lost a dear friend and colleague. Brenda Danet died in New Haven, CT, following a heroic (and most graceful) battle with leukemia. Despite her years of ups and downs with the disease, she continued to produce work that guides many of us and our students.
Brenda was a pioneer -- intellectually and personally. She did her BA at Radcliffe and PhD (in Sociology) at the University of Chicago, but spent most of her professional life in Israel. She taught at Hebrew University, where she was appointed Danny Arnold Chair of Communications in 1998. Following her retirement in 2000, she migrated back to the US, where she became a Research Affiliate in Anthropology at Yale.
Most of us know Brenda from her delightful book CyberPlay, and her more recent co-edited volume (with Susan Herring) on The Multilingual Internet. Those of us fortunate enough to have known Brenda in person cherish our memories of a strong, self-confident woman who inspired us to think, was full of wit, wore the most lovely scarves, and helped us laugh at ourselves.
Brenda will be very sorely missed.
Naomi Baron American University Washington, DC USA _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
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Dear AIR-ers - The NMC today released the first in a new series of regional and sector-based Horizon Reports with the Horizon Report: 2008 Australia-New Zealand. The new series is a product of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, an ongoing research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education around the globe. This volume is the first in a new series of regional reports, and examines emerging technologies as they appear in and affect higher education in Australia and New Zealand in particular. In defining the six selected areas—Virtual Worlds & Other Immersive Digital Environments; Cloud-Based Applications; Geolocation; Alternative Input Devices; Deep Tagging; and Next-Generation Mobile—the project drew on an ongoing discussion among knowledgeable leaders and practitioners in Australia and New Zealand business, industry, and education, as well as published resources, current research and practice, and the expertise of the NMC community itself. The Horizon Project's Australia-New Zealand Advisory Board probed current trends and challenges in post compulsory education as they uniquely are expressed in Australia and New Zealand, explored possible topics for the Report, and over several rounds of rankings and dialog, selected the final technologies. The Horizon Report: 2008 Australia-New Zealand Edition (304K, 32 pp) is available now on the NMC website at: http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2008-Horizon-Report-ANZ.pdf The 32-page report is free, and has been released with a Creative Commons license to facilitate its use, easy duplication, and broad distribution. Denise N. Rall, PhD. Internationalisation Project Officer Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Office: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/ Presenter, Internet Research 9.0, 15-18 October 2008, Copenhagen, DK Start your day with Yahoo!7 and win a Sony Bravia TV. Enter now http://au.docs.yahoo.com/homepageset/?p1=other&p2=au&p3=tagline
I am very sorry to hear of Brenda's passing and appreciate Naomi conveying the sad news to this group. Brenda was a keynoter at the second Internet Research conference, and a major figure in the origins of this field. Brenda was -- and still is -- ahead of her time. She was a major inspiration to me in many ways. The first paper I ever wrote about the internet (in 1991) was presented on a panel she organized at the American Folklore Society, and it was she who urged me to publish the work. There are many things to appreciate about her scholarship. One was her keen sense of the importance of history in understanding the internet. For instance, when she wrote about graphic play in IRC, she connected it to folkloric graphic phenomena centuries old for ten times the insight. Maybe 100 times the insight. When everyone seemed to be comparing online interaction to face-to-face communication, she was among the first to articulate its relationship to writing, ponder the potential loss of the aura of the book, and note that email bore many resemblances to mail delivery in nineteenth century London. When most people were (are still) focused on the English language internet, with Susan Herring, she encouraged and collected work about "the multilingual internet" that has been extremely helpful in globalizing our field. Methodologically, she exemplified how to conduct excellent qualitative research. Perhaps best of all, as David Silver once said of her, she "put the funky back in internet research." If you haven't read her book Cyberpl@y, you must. She was also a kind and gracious woman. Her voice in our conversations will be missed. Nancy
Nancy Baym wrote:
...If you haven't read her book Cyberpl@y, you must.
She was also a kind and gracious woman. Her voice in our conversations will be missed.
Well said. A sad loss for our community, indeed. -- Mark D. Johns, Ph.D. Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Communication Studies Luther College, Decorah, Iowa USA http://academic.luther.edu/~johnsmar/ ----------------------------------------------- "Get the facts first. You can distort them later." ---Mark Twain
A journalist sent me the following inquiry: "Do you know anyone who has done research on how the explosion of modern media communications and technology has affected the success of efforts to place humans under slavery conditions and keep them there? Do countries with more restrictive media/technology communications regimes have a greater incidence of human slavery and a reduced chance of these people getting out of such slave conditions? Overall has the use of technology by the criminals or the reduced access to media by the victims resulted in more or less slavery?" If you have pointers, please contact me offlist. Susan
participants (8)
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Charles Ess -
Denise N. Rall -
Jankowski -
Mark D. Johns -
Nancy Baym -
Naomi Susan Baron -
Steve Jones -
Susan Crawford