a thaumaturgical compendium

To add to my “links for new grad students” file: How to Read in College (via Liz). This will join some of the classics and not-so-classics I’ve been assembling, including Agre’s Networking on the Network, and Writing with Sources. Only one of these three is targeted at grad students. I worry that this says something about the quality of our grads, but I don’t think it does. What it says is that the quality of preparation for graduate school in the social sciences is generally inadequate. (And is, I think, partly reflected in the cultural hurdle of an incoming grad class that is >50% Asian each year.)

I had a setback in Media Law yesterday. I tried to do mini-mock trials: twelve of them simultaneously. It was not a pretty sight. I may write more on this on Tuesday.

I also decided to talk politics on the class site. How can we be going to war and expect to ignore it? It seems pretty clear to me that the pro-war position is one of fear. Just like any bully, our fear is manifested as violence. Many people seem to think that going to war will somehow make us safer, and given our culture, this seems like a difficult idea to unseat.

Which is a very roundabout way to get to the point of this posting. I gave a short answer test. Two reasons not to do this. The first is that it is taking many, many hours to grade. The second is that it shows that there exists a frightening lack of depth among our undergraduates.

This is most clear in a question about the Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798. It is very easy to confuse these with the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act passed in 1917 and 1918, so I wasn’t too surprised about people who confused these. I was pretty surprised by those who suggested that:

a) Jefferson came to power after WW1
b) WW1 ended in the 1860s
c) The Civil War occurred at the end of the 1700s
d) The acts were meant to defend against Communists infiltrating in 1798
e) The president was worried that the French Revolution, which happened in the 1920s, would spread to the US.

One of these alone would be frightening, but together they constitute a truly scary lack of any feel for history. And what makes this perhaps the most scary is that this represents the bottom 20% of a class in which the top 20% ranges from pretty bright to brilliant. We serve neither of these demographics well, and do a mediocre job of the mediocre middle 60%. Back in my day…. uphill both ways in snow… yada-yada-yada.

Anyone who knows what I’ve been working on lately, knows that it has to do with changes in word frequency over time. I’m using this to analyze differences in newspaper coverage, to identify salient changes in hate speech sites, as well as to look at the “social weather” of blogs. It looks as though I am not alone:

Jon Kleinberg, at Cornell University in New York, has developed computer algorithms that identify bursts of word use in documents.

While other popular search techniques simply count the number of words or phrases in documents, Kleinberg’s approach also takes into account the rate at which the word usage increases. (New Scientist)

Kara pointed this out to me on Slashdot, and my first reaction was a bit gut-wrenching. It is always awful to think someone has beat you out. Some of my ideas, of course, appear in papers presented at AEJMC and at the AIR conference last year, but I’ve been too slow to get them out the door. I guess I’d better before it is too late. And some of this, as this short blurb suggests, is evident from other approaches. I came to this as a way of categorizing text that seemed to work well.

This leads to some interesting questions about self-disclosure on blogs. (Let me be clear at the outset: I have no pretensions that anyone got this idea from me! ) I have talked a little about this, and put up a python script for people to play with.

But I have kept a significant chunk of my work to myself. Part of this is that I know if I sketched it out, those with more time and programming skills would easily put it into practice (i.e., lazy web). So this is a very selfish thing to do. My livelihood is at stake, if others make use of my ideas before I do, I’m literally out of a job. So, I am forced to walk a tightrope: I want to be “radically open,” but at the same time have to recognize that timing is everything.

Anyway, that original gut-wrenching feeling—which wasn’t helped by a senior colleague noting that I was likely to go uncited in the literature if I published research in a similar vein—has given way to the security of knowing that someone far more respected than I am thinks the idea has merit. It’s better to be part of a small community doing similar work than to try to be a community of 1.

Sonia Arrison, from the Pacific Research Institute came to speak on the campus last week. There was a good turnout, driven in part by Gary Ozanich and I encouraging our undergraduate students to attend, and a good showing of students from the Masters in Informatics program. (Some comments on the lecture from students in my Media Law class can be found here.) A bunch of students (most of them) left directly after Ms. Arrison’s comments, which I thought was really very rude to the two respondents, but what can you do.

I would have preferred that Ms. Arrison delved a bit more deeply into current issues and what she considers to be effective solutions. I suspect she was aiming for a very general audience, which is good—especially considering the number of undergrads there who may not have had any grounding in issues of privacy. But it did come off as a bit of a laundry list of existing issues, rather than a critical analysis or assessment. For example, had she talked in more depth about privacy audits in industry, or directly about the USAPA and its current affects on how law enforcement does its business, or on the current state of crypto as a counter to government incursions on liberty, I think this would have made for a much more interesting lecture. In other words, since she was coming from a “think tank” I wish I had gotten a feel for what she and her colleagues were “thinking” about the issues. I think if she had spoken in a bit more depth on some of the issues she has written about, it would have made for a more interesting lecture.

Enough people have expressed an interest in doing a panel on blogging for the Association of Internet Researchers conference this autumn, that I’m going to try to throw it together at the last minute. The proposal is due March 1, so there is some coordination effort required. I have a list of folks I need to send an email out to, both those who have already expressed an interest in the panel (getting a firm committment and an abstract from them), and others who I think might be interested. Unfortunately, I am at home and missing some of the emails on that list, so it won’t go out until tomorrow.

Here’s the very drafty abstract for the panel that I just typed up. It needs serious work, but I want to get a feel for the range of the papers before I massage it:

Read the rest of this entry »

I think the article in the Union Tribune last week (A penny for your blogs) is fairly nicely put together. It manages to de-hype while still getting at some of the promise of the medium. I recently talked to a journalist and predicted that we would know that blogging had hit the turning point when we saw the following headlines: “Blogging addiction strikes teens” and “Child bloggers the target of pedophiles.” And, of course, when folks start to talk of the Satanic influence of blogging, and the immoral ideas that it spreads. These are the hallmarks of a maturing technology—and we will probably have to wait until AOL and Microsoft join the party to see them.

Due to the tireless efforts of Liz Lawley the Microcontent Research Center proposal was submitted to NSF. I am very much the not-counting-chickens sort of pessimist, so I won’t talk about our chances. What I will say is that it was a great opportunity to look at some of the research challenges that exist. Everyone remains desperately shocked that no good social science is being done. Despite the negative note about Clay Shirky’s piece below, I now realize its utility: people are getting excited about hard evidence for the effects of blogs. I’m hoping this leads to more thorough research in the area.

I now move on to a couple of projects that have been waiting in the wings. One traces citation networks on a small, snowballed sample of blogs. The other is assembling—on short notice!—a panel for this year’s Associate of Internet Researchers conference in Toronto. I’ll have an abstract up on that today or tomorrow and hopefully we’ll have some interesting stuff to present at the October conference. This panel, along with one I am on at the International Communication Association this may, should provide a collection of core research papers (journal special issue? edited volume?) on blogging in its various forms.