I started three new research projects this quarter and re-wrote part of my M.A. thesis as well. I’m a bit worried that I’ve got too much going on, but I’ll be making a big effort to extend/finish projects in the spring and summer. I’m also keeping an eye out for social technology research internships for the summer.

Projects:

1. I’m taking my first stab at analyzing survey data. It’s pretty interesting trying to figure out the different techniques and seeing relationships in the data. Fortunately I’m working with a group on this one so I’m sure we’ll make good progress and hopefully finish something next quarter.
2. For my class about news I’m looking at the crowd as editor on digg. I think this project has some promise & I intend to keep working on it definitely over the summer if not somewhat in the spring.
3. For my social networks class I’m looking at the idea of a social tag-based exploratory search system. This one is just a proposal, I don’t have any data for it as of yet. Hopefully I can extend the idea in the technology in organizations class I’m taking next quarter.

I’ve had an avatar on Second Life for some time now, but I’m hardly ever there. I just joined so I could attend events there and see what the fuss was about. The financial aspect is interesting from a social perspective – it’s bizarre to have someone try to sell you a virtual condo or virtual clothes.

What has been interesting to me is the more everyday aspects of life online – tools like social bookmarking sites tend to disappear into routine browsing after a while. Maybe less flashy research topics are more for me, but I could always have second thoughts.

Links on the presenter’s name go to the abstract in the AoIR program.

Hugh Mackay presented part of what seemed like a huge amount of ethnographic data about the role of the net in “normal” households. It’s nice to get a good dose of reality in terms of how people are actually using the internet today. It’s easy to get caught up in the geek world and think everyone is like you. People are actually not using it for a wide variety of purposes, just a few well defined genres, and not very often, usually something quick and specific.

Sabryna Cornish, a UIC alum, presented part of her PhD work on how major print newspapers framed the internet between 1988 and 1994. She has found the words safety, security, and lost as the most frequently associated with the internet in news stories throughout the whole period. I was somewhat surprised at “lost” showing up so high, but safety and security seem to be a pretty strong theme even today. I wonder if the themes have stayed the same through say 2004? I’d imagine that there is more diversity, but these themes still might take the top spots. It’s an interesting finding, if you think about the exuberance about the early internet, but not if you think about the conventions of journalism and scare tactics.

Nancy Baym presented a study of how Ann Landers and Dear Abby wrote about the internet from about 1992-2002. This was very interesting partly because the ‘internet as home-wrecker’ theme seems so funny to us now. She found a major shift in 2000 where letter writers and columnists stopped talking about the internet as a common problem that we face, but as individual issues i.e. the problem is that your husband/wife is having an affair, not the internet.

Richard Smith talked about his experience using podcasts, live streaming media, and many more technologies in his courses. I’ve seen/heard a lot of “how to use podcasts/Web 2.0/etc.” in the classroom, but this wasn’t tool-focused or exuberant. He had actual experience and research to base this on, and focused on learning. He recorded the presentation itself (he walks the walk..).

My own session went well. Although it was fairly early on the last day of the conference I still got some good feedback and questions. I’ve held off putting my part of the research for IRB reasons, and it’s just a first draft right now. We’re clear with the IRB, and maybe someone will find it useful, so here it is. It’s about our experience using tags at AoIR 05.

When I clicked on the link I found that the page was in French, which I’ve never studied but knowing some Latin, Spanish and Italian I can make out a bit when it’s written. Having the clue of “gender” enabled me to make much more sense out if this, even just looking at the pictures, than I could have done otherwise. (BTW, the pictures themselves are interesting if you like foreign signage.)

Of course there’s less context than if this were linked in a blog post or whatnot, but in this case it was enough to make an important difference.

Today I met with a group of PhD students in the businesses school who are looking at some of the technologies I’ve been researching (blogs, wikis, tagging) as well as open source software and e-commerce. We’ll be submitting a panel proposal for the International Conference on Information Systems. I think it’ll be a good learning experience trying to translate my communication research for a different discipline. The differences are even embedded into the format – as panelists we’re each supposed to talk for 5 minutes then have a 20 minute discussion — 5 minutes? No wonder bullet points became popular.

I suggested using a wiki on the first day of class (even then I was thinking it would be an interesting case) and it went from there. As time went on several broader questions emerged.

* What is the place of collaborative writing in graduate education & academia?
* Why do people contribute, and in what way do the do so?
* What is the pedagogical value?

Hopefully we’ll have a good discussion.

I have seen a number of attempts to use specific tags to bring bits of info together – most successfully on Flickr, with just a quick search revealing that desktopshowandtell has been in use well over a year now, which makes some sense given its promotion on kottke. I’ve also seen some, mostly smaller & tech oriented conferences using tags to bring some info together. In the paper I try to add a few ideas about practical implementation at a conference & make more info about one particular case available.

It also shows you don’t often ‘get what you came for’ in research. My focus was on motivation – which was fine and tended to reinforce the conclusions of other qualitative studies, but the stuff on anonymity turned out to be a bit more novel and in some ways more interesting.

Annette Markham gave a good presentation about how, in research, ethics and method are one. Method is the context for ethics in research and ongoing reflexivity and a focus on “problem solving or world-fixing” is a way to get to a contextual & ethical project. (slides here, pdf).

Another interesting point was during a discussion of the technical limitations of data security and privacy (i.e. you have very little if any privacy online due to both technical limitations and under U.S. law) an issue came up from another researcher who is studying young bloggers. Many give out quite a bit of information about themselves, and the question was if this is due to ignorance about the nature of the medium or rather to the age and outlook of young people. So while it’s true that many don’t know about the finer points of textual analysis or even the facts about the internet archive, I think that most have the exact same perspective as many researchers which is that while it’s technically possible to get at this information I’m not narcissistic enough to think that anyone would actually bother to do it. The point of the presentation is that this is an erroneous assumption and these things happen much more often than we think, but I wouldn’t say that young bloggers who do disclose information that could harm them in the present (my route to school, my parent’s aren’t home this weekend, etc.) or information that is not intended for their parents or employer’s eyes are particularly ignorant, just particularly at risk.