I know danah, and at least my understanding of her work, particularly in talking about Facebook vs. MySpace is that she particularly looks at class differences in the two sites, although clearly race and education are clearly intertwined with class. As danah as well as Eszter Hargittai have found, there are differences between the two site in terms of race, class and education: both real differences in terms of characteristics of their users and perceived differences. For instance, Hispanics are significantly more likely to use MySpace and Asians are significantly less likely to use MySpace; African Americans and nonHispanic whites are similar in amount of Facebook and MySpace use so it is certainly not a simple black as white issue. Also, users of MySpace are more likely to come from lowerclass households. These class differences are manifested in discussion between peers (e.g. Facebook people sometimes look down on MySpace users) and certainly perceptions of the two sites by the elite. Facebook is perceived as THE social network site because its users tend to look more like elites in media, education etc. even though the audience size of the two sites is not as large as media reports would suggest. This has some real consequences. The media all but ignore MySpace, and groups that recruit through social networking (e.g. businesses and schools) concentrate on Facebook so that the lower class and Hispanics are less likely to receive these recruiting attempts from business and education . This is an oversimplification of their work, but danah and Eszter, I hope I have the gist of it. To see more detailed discussions visit: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html http://www.esztersblog.com/2009/07/08/popularity-of-facebook-and-myspace-cha... ________________________________________ From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of air-l-request@listserv.aoir.org [air-l-request@listserv.aoir.org] Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2009 5:00 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Air-L Digest, Vol 65, Issue 19 Send Air-L mailing list submissions to air-l@listserv.aoir.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to air-l-request@listserv.aoir.org You can reach the person managing the list at air-l-owner@listserv.aoir.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Air-L digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: facebook ethnic diversity? (Bertil Hatt) 2. CFP Workshop: The Computational Turn (David M. Berry) 3. Re: facebook ethnic diversity? (Gonzalo Bacigalupe) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2009 03:58:30 +0100 From: Bertil Hatt <bertil.hatt@ensae.org> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] facebook ethnic diversity? Message-ID: <111a48f00912181858q666f6c9bn4a787a9d647956d6@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 I read it as a polite reply to (the hype over) danah boyd's blog post on the differences between MySpace & Facebook: boyd herself never reduced the argument to black vs. whites, but that's the reading everybody had. They had to reply to it, and they wisely avoided to stirr up more flames at the time (their silence was a good pointer that the intuition was onto something, as this study indicates). Now that the result is far less ?scandal prone? they closed the question with an interesting approach. But the intended reader was the science-skiming media, hence the rather sound methodolocial base, but the not so academic presentation of the results: with some work, they could have published somethign based on that for, say, ICWSM, but they haven't (so far). Doing so, they also don't have to justify their use of too much, too personal data ? the kind no IRB would let any academic handle. By the way, I'd love to have some academic lobbying from you guys to ask Facebook for some run time on that database: they have gold in their hands to answer so many questions ? and we are all interested not in detailed data, but the statistical results. If we can negociate that they let us run some scripts, provided those can't possibly reveal any personal information, won't run against their corporate interest, and could help social science, that would be amazing. Maybe some Ivy League universities already pay for that. That offer would lead to lots of interesting discussion on what makes Facebook users different from the general Internet users, way more then what they can have internally?something valuable for the company. About doing the same study abroad: Outside of Nothern America there are no universal, easy to study, significant social class markers; where race carries a similar stigma as it does in the US, such studies are often prohibited. I have no doubt Facebook uses similar approaches for marketing purposes, but any details would be commercially invaluable, and the insights probably as ?dull? as what they are in the US after a few years of significant presence. ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2009 09:19:41 +0000 From: David M. Berry <D.M.Berry@swansea.ac.uk> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] CFP Workshop: The Computational Turn Message-ID: <BA6DA4C5-608D-4EDF-8A2D-47B34684F0F7@swansea.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed; delsp=yes The Computational Turn in Arts and Humanities ====================================== SWANSEA UNIVERSITY 9TH MARCH 2010 David Berry, Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University. d.m.berry@swansea.ac.uk The application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts & Humanities are resulting in new approaches and methodologies for the study of traditional and new corpuses of Arts and Humanities materials. This new 'computation turn' takes the methods and techniques from computer science to create new ways of distant and close readings of texts (e.g. Moretti). This one-day workshop aims to discuss the implications and applications of what Lev Manovich has called 'Cultural Analytics' and the question of finding patterns using algorthmic techniques. Some of the most startling approaches transform understandings of texts by use of network analysis (e.g. graph theory), database/XML encodings (which flatten structures), or merely provide new quantitative techniques for looking at various media forms, such as media and film, and (re)presenting them visually, aurally or haptically. Within this field there are important debates about the contrast between narrative against database techniques, pattern-matching versus hermeneutic reading, and the statistical paradigm (using a sample) versus the data mining paradigm. Additionally, new forms of collaboration within the Arts and Humanities are emerging which use team-based approaches as opposed to the traditional lone-scholar. This requires the ability to create and manage modular Arts and Humanities research teams through the organisational structures provided by technology and digital communications (e.g. Big Humanities), together with techniques for collaborating in an interdisciplinary way with other disciplines such as computer science (e.g. hard interdisciplinarity versus soft interdisciplinarity). Papers are encouraged in the following areas: - Distant versus Close Reading - Database Structure versus Argument - Data mining/Text mining/Patterns - Pattern as a new epistemological object - Hermeneutics and the Data Stream - Geospatial techniques - Big Humanities - Digital Humanities versus Traditional Humanities - Tool Building - Free Culture/Open Source Arts and Humanities - Collaboration, Assemblages and Alliances - Language and Code (software studies) - Philosophical and theoretical reflections on the computational turn Participation Requirements Workshop participants are requested to submit a position paper about the computational turn in Arts and Humanities, philosophical/ theoretical reflections on the computational turn, research focus or research questions related to computational approaches, proposals for academic practice with algorithmic/visualisation techniques, proposals for new research methods with regard to Arts and Humanities or specific case studies (if applicable) and findings to date. Position papers will be published in a workshop PDF and website for discussion and some of the participants will be invited to present their paper at the workshop. Please ensure you put 'The Computational Turn' in the subject line of the email submission. Deadline for Position papers: February 10, 2010 Email papers to: d.m.berry@swansea.ac.uk Workshop funded by The Callaghan Centre for the Study of Conflict, Power, Empire, Swansea University. The Research Institute in the Arts and Humanities (RIAH) at Swansea University. References Clement, Tanya E. (2008) ?A thing not beginning and not ending?: using digital tools to distant-read Gertrude Stein?s The Making of Americans. Literary and Linguistic Computing. 23.3 (2008): 361. Clement, Tanya, Steger, Sara, Unsworth, John, Uszkalo, Kirsten (2008) How Not to Read a Million Books. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/hownot2read.html Council on Library and Information Resources and The National Endowment for the Humanities (2009) Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub145/pub145.pdf Hayles, N. Katherine (2009) RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments. Theory, Culture and Society 26.2/3 (2009): 1-24. Hayles, N. Katherine (2009) How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://hdl.handle.net/1853/27680 Kittler, Fredrich (1997) Literature, Media, Information Systems. London: Routledge. Krakauer, David C. (2007) The Quest for Patterns in Meta-History. Santa Fe Institute Bulletin. Winter 2007. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.intelros.ru/pdf/SFI_Bulletin/Quest.pdf Latour, Bruno (2007) Reassembling the Social. London: Oxford University Press. Manovich, Lev (2002) The Language of New Media. MIT Press. Manovich, Lev (2007) White paper: Cultural Analytics: Analysis and Visualizations of Large Cultural Data Sets, May 2007. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://softwarestudies.com/cultural_analytics/cultural_analytics_2008.doc McLemee, Scott (2006) Literature to Infinity. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee193 Moretti, Franco (2005) Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso. Robinson, Peter (2006) Electronic Textual Editing: The Canterbury Tales and other Medieval Texts. Electronic Textual Editing. Modern Language Association of America. Retrieved 10/11/09 from http://www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/ETE/Preview/robinson.xml Schreibman, Susan, Siemens, Ray & Unsworth, John (2007) A Companion to Digital Humanities. London: WileyBlackwell. --- Dr. David M. Berry Department of Political and Cultural Studies Room KH029 Keir Hardie Building Swansea University Singleton Campus Swansea SA2 8PP Tel: 01792 602633 http://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/academic/Arts/berryd/ ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2009 13:04:18 -0500 From: Gonzalo Bacigalupe <bacigalupe@gmail.com> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] facebook ethnic diversity? Message-ID: <43F42BE5-D574-4785-AFA1-62830FABAAC6@gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii This digital divide data is from a report dated 2005 (www.civilrights.org/publications/nation-online/digitaldivide.pdf). It has been cited in later reports. Digital divide has decreased but what may be more interested to analyze is the digital literacy levels. Access does not mean use or access to the information. Does anyone knows of new reports? Gonzalo Bacigalupe @bacigalupe Associate Professor University of Massachusetts Boston On Dec 18, 2009, at 6:00 PM, air-l-request@listserv.aoir.org wrote:

Message: 7 Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:27:12 +0200 From: gustavo <gustavo@soc.haifa.ac.il> To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] facebook ethnic diversity? Message-ID: <dca47d810f3bcd2f6b31d68db3239b13@soc.haifa.ac.il> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

More on this issue, selection bias is present. According to the 2009 Report for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund by Robert W. Fairlie University of California, Santa Cruz and National Poverty Center, University of Michigan

"The Digital Divide in the US is large and does not appear to be disappearing soon. Blacks and Latinos are much less likely to have access to home computers than are white, non-Latinos (50.6 and 48.7 percent compared to 74.6 percent). They are also less likely to have Internet access at home (40.5 and 38.1 percent compared to 67.3 percent). ? Asians have home computer and Internet access rates that are higher than white, non-Latino rates (77.7 and 70.3 percent), and Native Americans have lower rates (51.6 and 40.9 percent)."

...

From here the study of Facebook has an implicit sample selection bias. Minorities are less likely to have access. Individuals that belong to minorities groups and have access are a selected group of highly skilled and educated that are not different in their social characteristics to the whites having access. Facebook results do not reflect the state of social and digital inequalities in the population. Furthermore, is blurres the real divisions in society.

Gustavo Mesch, Associate Professor University of Haifa. Chair, Communication and Information Technologies Section American Sociological Association

------------------------------ _______________________________________________ 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/ End of Air-L Digest, Vol 65, Issue 19 *************************************