a thaumaturgical compendium

No, I’m not talking about the arrest of three of our students for making racist threats against African-American students on campus. Rather, I’m quoting from a recent New York Times editorial, which begins

People who follow politics know Quinnipiac University as the home of the polling institute that bears its name. But lately it has been making a name for itself — a bad name — for a different reason.

It goes on to condemn our administration’s continuing efforts to silence an alternative news source on campus, and its failure to clearly support open discourse. It calls for an expression of support for these ideals from the administration, and I think we can assume, by extension, support for both the Society for Professional Journalists and the Quad News.

This is the sort of Public Relations week university presidents dread, and PR professionals–if they are good–live for. After all, it’s a chance to prove your salt. Unfortunately, there’s only so much lipstick you can put on a pit bull (isn’t that the phrase?), and until the administration finally admits to being wrong (and staying wrong even when the whole world–including the faculty of the university–was telling them just how wrong they were), and begins to make public and substantial amends, they could be looking at a devastating long-term impact on the reputation of the university. Even as it stands, that reputation is in peril. The hard-fought boost provided by the efforts of the polling institute could be largely undone by bad publicity about an administration that seems inept in the face of two scandals.

And although the stories have not been reported together, yet, it’s pretty clear that they are linked. The reason for the original conflict, it seems to me, was the campus paper’s desire to report on the administration’s handling of a previous racial incident. While no administration likes the role of the press as a watchdog and the Fourth Estate, one of the advantages of this function is that it provides an opportunity for course correction. Rather than seeing the reporting as a chance to get out in front of the racial issues on campus, the administration instead saw it as an airing of dirty laundry, a problem best kept secret so as to not affect applications and rankings. This was a serious error. The reporters for the Chronicle reported what they saw, and readers correctly surmised that the administration’s response to racial incidents on campus was ineffectual. The events of the last week serve as a demonstration of this.

The actions of these students are inexcusable, and they should be ashamed. But I think it would be wrong to not assign some culpability to the administration, and by extension to the community as a whole, for not doing enough to counter bigotry on the campus. This did not come out of the blue. We had forewarning. And rather than deal with it head on, some on the campus chose to shoot the messengers. Now is the time to embrace open discussion, to assert the communities dedication to fundamental values like free speech and equality, rather than equivocate about the privileges of a private school being beyond constitutional guarantees. We have an opportunity, while the eyes of the world are upon us, to turn this around and even to our advantage. We can go from being seen as a campus that is home to censorship and bigotry (however dimly that may reflect the reality of our university) to being known for being especially open to a free discourse among community that values diversity. But that can only happen with leadership willing to make it happen.

Google has a search engine warped back to 2001. Even though they don’t have page caches of these sites, a little ego-searching sends me back pretty quickly.

David Sedaris in the Shouts & Murmurs column of the New Yorker, entitled Undecided. On undecideds:

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

Read the rest

Last night, we did a hyper-short meeting of my large Intro Interactive grad seminar, so that we were able to go to a panel discussion on race, gender, and age in the coverage of the election. One of the objectives of the day was to get folks Twittering, and so, in about 4 minutes, I showed them Twitter and got them to sign up. As we were headed out the door to parade across campus for the panel, I encouraged them to Twitter in the panel, using the hashtag “#501″.

OK, a quick aside. Many find live-twittering events annoying, since it results in a flood of posts. Had I the time, I would have set up an alt account to twitter the event. Someone complained (protected tweet, so I will not quote) about my own flood. As an aside, this poster noted that IRC was a more appropriate way to do this. In fact, students in this course regularly use IRC (via mibbit since our campus is port-unfriendly to IRC), but I wanted to expose them to Twitter and get them using it, and so this was an experiment in that direction.

With about a dozen people tweeting, the #501 hashtag quickly popped up on a number of trend analyzers on Twitter, eventually becoming the number one keyword on the Elections page. I was pretty surprised by this, to be honest. I don’t know how many people watch that page, but I suspect it’s a fairly large number of people who are heavily involved in tracking the elections. Having “#501″ pop up was confusing to a lot of folks. Many seemed to think we were intentionally gaming the system. In fact, it was just a dozen people, many of them new accounts, twittering up a storm. If someone wanted so flood that system, it looks like it wouldn’t be that difficult.

Yesterday, the Internet Research 9.0 conference got going at IT University in Copenhagen with a set of workshops. I participated as a mentat mentor, and I’m not sure how much the doctoral students got out of it, but I learned a great deal. It’s an interesting way of meeting academically, since we tend to deliver “finished product” at conferences, rather than ideas and works in progress–even in sessions labeled explicitly as meant for work in progress.

This morning I presented in the first slot on the first day of the program. Being the first presentation of the day is never a good thing–folks aren’t there and when they are they are not awake–but better the first day than the last! I’ve already posted my own presentation, as well as the beginning of a series describing how I did the research. The presentation went, OK, I guess, but there were not many questions–in fact, I was worried that there would be none–so either the presentation sucked a bit, or they were just stunned by it. I fear, through my read of the audience that it fell a bit flat.

The advantage to going first is now it is done, and it leaves me to be able to be an observer to a greater degree and enjoy others’ presentation. The first of the remaining papers in my session, by Marianne van den Boomen, talks about communities and networks as metaphors for online discussion. Her argument is that such metaphors (and particularly the community metaphor) has a long history, and one that brings with it notions that are not at all reflective of the divided attention on the web. (As an aside, she mentioned a book I want to look up for possible use in my undergrad class: Networking with Bodies and Machines). This was a very nice overview of the problem of metaphors, and given some of my interest in metaphorical thinking and the internet, it was great to see it well handled. I recommended yesterday that students should avoid the entire concept of community, since it was so tied up in such debates. Nonetheless, as a thinking tool, the “network” and the “community” is an interesting approach.

Andrew Cox presented a paper on the nature of Flickr groups: how do people use this. Previous work shows little use of groups, little group loyalty, and little cross-posting of photos. This was largely an exploratory paper, establishing some metrics, and being able to provide a classification of group types, and the various participation in the groups. It’s a useful collection, but isn’t entirely clear what it shows, or how it generalizes beyond Flickr. I may have missed this, however.

Andra Siibak presented an analysis of self-presentation on rate.ee a site used by Estonian youth for social networking and dating. She analyzed the photos on the site, as well as surveying users. She showed an interesting break between what people say are important and how they depict themselves in their images.