Disclaimer: liveblogging
Nicholas Proferes, “Oh, the Ethics You’ll Know”
Analysis of research ethics from the Air-list – using nvivo. Ethics is a strong component of the air-list discussion. When is something public? Private? Both? Are author intentions important? What about context in which originally published? Note the link between ethical debates and new platforms/ technologies. Importance of graduate students in stimulating debate. Problem of using analog analogies: nuance of digital realm lost? There is a challenge to make space for new approaches to ethics.
Outstanding – Dr Seuss is honorary member of AoIR from now on
Alex Leavitt, “How I Saved An Internet”
Looking at Encyclopaedia Dramatica – archive of digital subculture. Assumption of net researchers is that the space / place we visit online sort of ‘stays there’. But it is not that way. Leavitt found that ED was completely deleted one day. And Oh Internet was created in its place. (but along the way, all the wiki edits which Leavitt was studying were lost). Nice contrast of ephemera vs visibility. Leavitt restored the wiki from oblivion (not always without complaint). Importance of researchers’ relationship to the objects they study.
Clever, researchers serve and protect the Internet
Janet Salmons, “See Change: the Visual in the Virtual Interview”
Importance of move from text to image in culture because of the Internet. Must questions be posed with words? Or indeed should they be answered in words? Nicely drawing on the depth, complexity and multi-dimensional form of the image which distinguishes it from words. Visual elicitation stimulates interview subjects to respond. Nice – idea of mind-map as stimulus for interviewee responses. In an online interview, a white board can be used to create visuals on the fly.
Excellent: lots to think about here because images say so much, but quickly – overcoming major challenge of interviews
Susanna Haas Lyons, “Flexing Facebook’s Civic Muscles ”
The enormous amount of people on Facebook really matters. What however are the dos and don’ts of mobilising Facebook for public deliberation for civics. Important implication – recruitment of participation is done in part through the extent of reach in Facebook. App used to create the engagement space. Nice, but also limited. “Discuss, Propose, Promote” – excellent empowerment of users by making them also responsible for building support for particular promotion. Participants have lower privacy concerns. While Facebook is not totally representative, a combination of Facebook with other methods can work. Asynchronicity of participation important. “Learn from fails”
Good presentation: liked the focus on taking risks to experiment with what works.
Stuart Shulman, “The bin Laden Post Mortem Tweets”
Focus is on crowds. Notes that political scientists did not see it coming –that there would highly charged political action from the crowd, powered by social media. Can you harness the power of the crowd to do large-scale text analysis in academia? To make the money go further, or do things which cannot be afforded. Crowd-sourced analysis of OBL tweets. There was an especially interesting approach relating to humour in the tweets. 26 people, $750 cost. Simple coding of the humour-value of tweets.
Humour does make a difference: opening our minds to new thinking – great research method.
Brian Hughes, “Super-charging Creative Teams with Negative Feedback”
Importance of negative feedback – but it is not placed on line…except by their friends! Creative teams need to be kicked sometimes. Make it personal – people need to feel disappointed. It has emotional strength – hard to get, but also hard to give. Reasonable. Thoughtful – there has to be thought involved, so it is complex. Easier to give NF to a team. Coaches and mentors are better placed to give negative feedback. Share the vision, criticise the methods. And the feedback might come in a roleplay environment.
Solid, clear and direct: no reason to give negative feedback on this one!
Richard Smith, “Doing It Right: Professional Digital Media Education”
Distinguishes professional education from research-led education. Four universities own this degree. Digital media here means ‘interactive design’. How can students create digital media experiences? – address a need, serve a problem – real-world focus. Teamwork is central to the degree. Some of the material learned is about teams – e.g. project management. Importance of who this is for – the user, the users’ stories and expectations. Humility matters – as does courage and curiousity. And reflexivity makes a difference. Teams fundamentally depend on trust and individuals need passion. Note professional educational needs – importance of limited residency, compressed program to suit needs of people already working. Professional development is a future goal.
I like the way that the team and the task is central to the pedagogy here.
Ericka Menchen-Trevino, “The Future of Internet Research Methods: Combining Real-World Observation & Self Reports”
There are challenges in bringing everyday life into the lab – it is too artificial. The data from companies is, while extensive, shallow. So, create some software that will acquire the rich content of individuals’ uses of the web for news consumption. Clever use of proxy server for data collection. But combined data with interviews. An interesting question: recruitment. Cragslist! Would it seem creepy to ask a person about their habits in searching and reading online. Not really. Crucially, the ‘overuse’ of media which is reported is now solved because there is evidence which can be used to prompt people who might have forgotten what they have done online.
A little challenging to consider the recording of use, but perhaps that is a sign of people’s pleasure at being research subjects? Great software idea.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Social Life of Scholarship”
Hilarious – a book on the falsehood of the ‘death of the book’ was written, but could not be published! Average sales of humanities books? 400 over lifetime – and most to libraries. So perhaps a book that is dying is this form. It does however conflict deeply with the scholarly futures of people. Importance of other forms of publication such as blogs which are vibrant and reach people more deeply. The problem is, always, credit: blogs are not creditable for jobs and productivity because of a lack of peer-review. Peer review = gate-keeping, to create enforced scarcity. In fact, we need to move to an economy of abundance in scholarly communication.
Brilliant – she nails it, and the problem is truly the move from scarcity to abundance.
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