a thaumaturgical compendium

I split sessions this morning. The sessions are not named this year, but I started in a program that seemed to circle around issues of identity.

Social Class in Online Discussions

The first presentation was on disclosure of class in parenting groups (Karen Farquharson of Swiburn). She was interested in the ways in which class was disclosed in these forums and whether there was interaction across class groups. It’s an interesting topic. Not surprisingly, people did disclose class in various ways in this group. There was an article, maybe in New York Magazine that suggested that establishing class relationships was one of the main functions of one of the sites. The presenter did not indicate which four sites she examined, but I am not surprised that this shows up.

Her second conclusion was that people of different classes talk to one another. She explicitly indicated that this was a qualitative piece of research, which is fine, but I wish we would have been exposed to more of an indication of why she thinks her research supports this. I can imagine ways of operationalizing this in order to quantify the relationships. Not necessary, but as it stands, I’d be curious as to how her paper makes that case.

Yukari Seko from York & Ryerson presented on suicidal and self-injury bloggers on livejournal. She made use of TAPoR, an online system for simple content analysis that I will want to check out. She also made use of a term I have tried to push for the idea of blogging to empty space: murmuring. The presentation was very quick and very full, and I’ll be interested in catching the paper as a whole. There was a lot there.

Memes on Livejournal

Hilary Wheaton, from the University of Western Australia, spoke on memes on livejournal. Lots of people have tried to use memetic approaches to look at blogs: the trick is in a clear definition and application. Unfortunately, it wasn’t entirely clear how she was bringing down the memetic concept to something that is really applicable. As with the complaints of the acquisition of “complexity theory” by the humanities as an analog, rather than in concrete ways. There are good ideas here with regard to the idea of ideas that exist outside of the personal identity and—at the same time—connected to the outside. I would have preferred that she took on something more like the idea of symbolic interaction rather than pulling from Rheingoled, Turkle, and Bruns. That’s a personal preference, I suppose, but otherwise it strikes me as slightly too “mushy” to use as an observational lens.

Overall, it seems that the paper provides an entree into a set of possible observations, and there may be more on the evidence side in the paper itself, but the presentation itself didn’t draw clearly enough from a systematic investigation of the perceived memes and memeplexes on the blogosphere. It was only in the last few minutes of the presentation that she discussed the two meme channels: icons and quizzes. More clearly identifying the features of a meme, and how these align with quizzes and icons, and then finally what this means to the use of these symbols. I also had to dash out toward the end, to try to catch another presentation, so this critique may have been addressed in the questions

Tracking the Spread of Hype on the Web

I crossed over to another session to hear the presentation by Lina Heilsten of KNAW on the diffusion of bird flu news/hype among blogs and online newspapers. She begins by indicating that she is going to be looking at nuts & bolts. She is presenting a piece of a larger funded research project that looks at ways of tracking online discussions of science. In particular, she is looking at how to track discussions across different domains (scientific, commercial, etc.). Without the web, it seems that a particular “hype” frame begins and spreads among spheres.

Drew from BlogPulse and Lexis-Nexis/PubMed. Looked at the development of the topic: frequencies of posting over time. Also looked at cross-references (other than hyperlinks). Finally, looked at the interaction between blogs and online news sites. There is a hockey-stick explosion in articles on PubMed in 2005, after a triggering study. This was echoed in newspaper articles, which also was partially triggered by a landmark study. In particular there was a spike of articles in October, which seems to dissipate over time, though there is a second, smaller wave later in the year when it was in the wild in Europe. It also spread through news agencies, starting in a few and spreading outward.

Newspapers, blogs, and medical journals do not often refer to each other. Is it that blogs reference something other than traditional newspapers. There seems to be a peak related to Yahoo and BBC news articles. This raises some interesting ideas. I suspect that bloggers may be alerted to news, but cite the BBC or Yahoo because they are more easily linkable. I think there is an important difference between what you use and what you cite.

Well, I was blogging this as we were working, since I had a machine in front of me. But somehow as we came to our break, I was chatting with someone and my left hand, entirely without my permission, reached up and Apple-Qed away my post. Too bad, too, since it was an exemplar of conference blogging: witty, link-filled, and informative. And probably a bit too long. Browsers ought to check to see if you have “unsubmitted” form data before closing on you.

There will be a public wiki built up around some of the projects being done at QUT and elsewhere in Australia surrounding mobile learning. There were a lot of interesting little ideas, some of them seemingly cultural. The idea, for example, that someone would drive by the campus to grab something off the wireless network is absolutely foreign to me. While we may not have the broadband penetration common in some places, I get the impression most have as good, or better, connections at home these days than they do on campus.

Richard Smith related an experience of unintended mobile-enhanced public backchannelling (MEPB). He runs a piece of software called BluePhoneElite that communicates the incoming text messages from his mobile to his laptop. Students in one of his classes stumbled across his phone (I guess), and started messaging it. As people realized that this showed up on the overhead projector, they started using it to ask questions and the like. Eventually, he used to to do things like ask questions of the class, and they would text in short responses. With some manipulation, he was able to tally up responses, etc.

The BluePhoneElite folks have been promising scripting hooks for newer versions of their software. With that, you could bypass the whole clicker infrastructure that seems to be seeping onto campuses lately, and just have students use their mobiles.

In any case, I’ll be experimenting a bit with this. The trick is that most people still don’t use text messaging, and so it may be a bit of hurdle to get folks to try. Would have been fun with a big class though.

As I said, I took decent notes, but they are gone. I enjoyed the session, though I think I would have liked a bit more structured look at what people are doing—from a technical perspective—and case studies of what worked and didn’t. While I appreciated the broader focus on active learning, I suspect that those interested in a workshop like this already lean pretty heavily in that direction.

I love to travel. I know I do, because it says so in my bio. But hold on a sec, what’s that feeling deep in my soul, aching for my own bed? Or perhaps it is (dun, dun, duh!) bad airline food.

As an aside, I know you aren’t supposed to actually eat the airline food, you are supposed to assemble your own takeaway that you bring to the flight with you. That’s fine for the first flight, but what about the rest of them? Airport food doesn’t have to be terrible (mmm… clam chowder at Logan Field), but it generally is both (a) yucky, and (b) pricey. Moreover, when you are traveling on your own, you often run into food dilemmas.

I am blogging instead of eating. I’m at the Marriott in Brisbane without someone to go to dinner with, which leaves me eating at a sit-down place on my own, which makes me uncomfortable enough it just isn’t worth it. Or I could hike down to McDonald’s or Hungry Jack’s, which also isn’t worth it. (Moreover, they seem to roll the sidewalks up pretty early in the business district.) Or I could try unfamiliar fast food in an unfamiliar city; which experience tells me is not a good idea. Or I could peruse the mini-bar… let’s see… a mini-box of Pringles for $5 (and I’m not exactly a fan). I normally throw a bunch of Balance Bars into a bag for just this reason, but missed it this time around. Maybe it’s time for room service.

The trip from JFK to Brisbane took nearly 21 hours in airtime, and more than double that including layovers and airport transfers. Now, to be fair, the longest layover was in Fiji; much of yesterday, during which I took a boat out to a small private island. It was small enough that I could circumnavigate the shallow waters surrounding it in about half an hour or so. The waters were crystal clear and teaming with aquatic life. I even had a run-in with a banded sea krait, who I find out only afterwards is ten times as venomous as a rattlesnake. Another good reason remote deserted islands (you can see the island where they filmed Cast Away in the distance—check out the Flickr set) should have wireless. You could sit and watch the clouds float by in a perfect azure sky all day long. Yes, laying in a hammock with a cold beer and reading a silly spy novel is pretty clichéd as relaxation goes, but it worked for me.

Unfortunately, the long flights across time zones, date lines, and the equator (along with being way behind on my levothyroxine) has me sleeping in awake times and (mostly) awake in sleeping times, and that doesn’t help finding food.

I’ll be in Brisbane all next week (Monday to Sunday) for the Internet Research conference. I should have a bit of free time, especially before and after the conference, so if you are in that part of the world, and would like to get together, drop me an email, or comment below.

My influence

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Basically, it’s a ranking scheme that uses you Google PageRank, your Technrati inlinks, and your Bloglines subscriptions to determine how “influential” you are. I am one-millionth as influential as Slashdot, for example, and about a fiftieth of Smart Mobs, where I read about it.

First of all: Google, buy a clue. It’s not a blog if it doesn’t have comments. Google is pushing their calendar, and in a recent post gets clever about time travel. But, as with most calendars, they do a terrible job of time travel. I’m crossing the international dateline next week, and my calendar is a mess. Someone needs to invent a calendar trick that makes it easier to arrive sooner than you left and still be able to have a coherent schedule. Good luck.

Many people dismiss Wikipedia out of hand as a trusted source, precisely because it is written and edited by “anybody.” This differs, they suggest, from a newspaper, which is “fact checked,” or from an academic paper, which is “peer reviewed.” Over the last two years, I have chatted with a number of people about the possibility of peer reviewing Wikipedia “from the outside.” At Wikimania, a number of proposals were made—some of which are already under way—to make Wikipedia both a more credible and a more accurate source of information. The two, while complementary, are not necessarily identical.

What I would like to do is assemble an editorial board of recognized experts in Internet Studies, Computer-Mediated Communication, and Human-Computer Interaction who would go through the process of finding appropriate peer reviewers and certifying particular versions of Wikipedia articles as being peer-reviewed. This would provide the reader with an additional indication that the work is of high quality and accurate.

To do this, we need to assemble a group of people who have some level of recognition in the field, and who are willing to devote a small amount of time to helping to select a core set of articles and oversee the review process. While we will be looking at a number of ways to make this process more technologically easy, the key issue here is to find a group of people willing to invest a little time and their reputations in an effort to make Wikipedia a more trusted source.

If you are interested in chatting a bit more about the project, drop me a note. If you will be in Brisbane for the Internet Research, perhaps we can discuss the possibilities over lunch on Thursday.