Re-linking the discussion

David Brake in comments on the Liz/Elijah conversation below, notes:

Aargh. This is why I find weblogs often really frustrating as means of communication or content management. This post and its responses require a lot of background knowledge to understand which is hard to find.

Actually, I think weblogs are _normally_ far less context-dependent than other forms of communication, and folks are _generally_ pretty good at linking back to source information. I may have just fallen down on my hyperlinking there. So, here’s some linkiness and context to try to wrap that together.

*Conference abstracts*

The Association of Internet Research has held an annual meeting for the last 5 years. It’s a group that provides an interdisciplinary venue (and one that is friendly to cultural studies and generally not as focussed on the “hard” social sciences) for those interested in, broadly, social issues related to the internet. Work that is presented there is often aligned with what might find in the journal New Media & Society. The most recent of the growing conferences, and the one in discussion here, occurred in Toronto at the end of last year. I organized a double panel entitled *Broadening the Blog* (abstracts for part 1 & part 2). I presented a paper (“Urban sociology and a research agenda for the blogosphere,” “pdf”:http://alex.halavais.net/research/halavais-ir4.pdf) as well as chairing presentations by Thomas Burg, Cameron Marlow, Matthew Rotthenberg, Aaron Delwiche, Taso Lagos, Liz Lawley, and Jason Nolan. (Jo Ann Oravec was unfortunately unable to attend.) It was early in the morning, and not as well attended as I might have liked — though not quite as sparse as Cameron’s photo suggests (especially as the morning wore on). A Google search will turn up some presenters and audience blogging about it.

There were a couple of other sessions at the conference that were grouped roughly around different blog-related issues — I don’t think any of these were organized ahead of time as panels, they were collected via the regular grouping process — as well as some blogging-related papers that ended up in sections that were not particularly blog-focused. Among these was the research presented by Elijah and his collaborators, a paper called “Beyond the Unusual: Weblogs as Genre” (“abstract”:http://www.ecommons.net/aoir/aoir2003/index.php?n=105, “ppt slides”:http://www.blogninja.com/aoir.blog.final.ppt). Unfortunately, AIR doesn’t open access to full papers, and I don’t know that a full copy is floating out there somewhere. Likewise, Googling will turn up some posts on those presentations.

Based, I believe, on the same set of data, Elijah also co-authored a paper for the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science. Though I’ve never attended, the conference is a long-standing one (they are on number 38) and some of the most solid research I’ve seen is presented there. The focus tends to be heavily on “technology,” (in the engineers’ conception) but some of the mini-tracks take a pretty social perspective. The so-called “HICSS paper” is Susan C. Herring, Loius Ann Schiedt, Sabrina Bonus, Elijah Wright, “Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs.” Abstract and full paper can be found here.

I suppose I could be even linkier, but hopefully this can serve as atonement for previous hyperlinklessness

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2 Comments

  1. stefanos
    Posted 7/4/2004 at 9:25 pm | Permalink

    did not know about new media and society: nor about the blogoshere papers until recently.

    I guess this helps me to understand your blog and overall theme. I think for future newcommers, a series of blog entries that layers the information may be helpful. but then again, its kind of the loose surfing, reading, and learning cause its healty for ones being increases the ability to retain all this info, or at least know how to get to it via a search within the blog. I like the way harold rheingold has his thefeature magazine set up, blog like and with a grading system to find important links and posts. Researchers who are trying to develop a new idea, can hyperlink this stuff and then get someone participating in a debate remotely ( either by “lurking” or viewing off in time in the future)

    so when i define networking and blogs to other doctors, and how this is a system to distribute information in genereral, i know how to search and find effieciently the blog posts the can help me say what i am trying to say. That this system will be integrated into health care is true. the forces that alex writes about are here as well, but may be in lag time mode of social acceptance.

    stef

  2. Posted 7/6/2004 at 8:12 am | Permalink

    Thanks for straightening all of that out, Alex – I didn’t really have time or access to the web in order to be able to do so over the weekend.

One Trackback

  1. By Mathemagenic on 7/18/2004 at 8:11 pm

    Weblog conversation tracking tool
    First a quote from Kenneth Burke (stolen from Piers Young ):”cit”Imagine that you enter a parlour.

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