a thaumaturgical compendium

I posted earlier about the Hyperlinked Society collection, made up of a bunch of essays on the role of hyperlinks, um, in society. Just found out via a tweat from one of its co-editors that it’s available in a searchable, linkable form here. Pretty cool if you ask me!

This sort of post has now become a staple, but here are some things I’m doing instead of blogging. I’ll try to post a little bit about these projects as they progress.

• Finishing up my new book, Search Engine Society. I’m putting the finishing touches on the index. All of it was desperately out of date the moment I wrote it, but that was inevitable. Luckily, Polity has been very good about turn-around timing on this. It’s due out in October, if the gods of printing allow. Indexing is more annoying than I thought. Can’t we just Google it?

• Research for a paper about Digg, and ratings. I had originally planned on writing this up in the form of a Dr. Suess book, but I think I’m headed for something a bit more traditional at this point. This actually follows a line of research from my dissertation, lo, so many years ago.

• Research for a paper about the use of hyperlinking in the rhetoric of extremism (and particularly racism) on the web. Again, this is a project that I’ve been thinking about for about a decade, but I’m only now getting things together for it.

• Early stages of planning to take the initial ideas I presented in a paper at NCA last year, about collaborative filtering, netroots, and the public agenda, and apply them to the presidential election. I want to finish this up sometime in, say, November.

• Organizing materials for my next book. Will be working on it over the next year or so. There are a three separate ideas I’ve been working on, but I think I’m going to look at the nexus of networked communication, learning, creativity, and government.

• I’m revising my “Intro Interactive” course. No, really. This will be the first time I have revised a course rather than starting pretty much from a clean slate. Very exciting. Hoping to outsource some of it, and interview some friends and former students to get a look at the interactive industry.

• I’m rewriting “Communication, Media, and Society” from scratch, trying to provide the means for doing my “students design the class” thing and still having it work for an online version.

• Early stages of planning for my spring courses: “Web Programming” and “Something Else.” There are several possibilities for my special topics, including: Search Engine Society (duh!), Surveillance, Virtual Worlds,

• I’ve been doing some prep on a major project, which will be my top priority when it launches later this year. Laying the foundation and doing some planning over the next few months. I’ll announce it formally on my birthday later this month.

But I haven’t been blogging. I’ll try to do better. Oh, and if I owe you something (refereeing, emails, invoices, money, the head of your sworn enemy), I’ll get to it. Just a bit bogged down right now.

Just got a copy of the new collection of essays edited by Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui. Looking forward to digging into it. This came out of a set of talks at Annenberg (East) a couple of years ago, and the essays tend to take a fairly broad view of the issues surrounding hyperlinking.

On re-reading my chapter, I’m not as thrilled as I might be. It’s clear I was writing it while thinking about the book I’ve been working on, but the argument comes out more muddled than it needs to be. Wish I’d focussed things down a bit more, but that’s water under the bridge. Glancing through some of the other articles, I see a lot of ideas similar to mine better expressed. There’s a nice group of authors there, and I’m lucky and honored to be in the same volume with them.

Normally I wouldn’t be so base as to suggest you “order yours soon!” but it looks like Amazon is running short on stock, so you might want to :). Of course, you can also order it directly from U of Michigan Press (for a bit more), and they have the table of contents and other information on their site.

Just noticed the article Derek & I wrote is up on the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication site. In case the wording of the abstract makes you wonder: yes, we are both native English speakers :(.

An Analysis of Topical Coverage of Wikipedia

* Alexander Halavais (School of Communications, Quinnipiac University) * Derek Lackaff (Department of Communication, State University of New York at Buffalo)

Abstract

Many have questioned the reliability and accuracy of Wikipedia. Here a different issue, but one closely related: how broad is the coverage of Wikipedia? Differences in the interests and attention of Wikipedia’s editors mean that some areas, in the traditional sciences, for example, are better covered than others. Two approaches to measuring this coverage are presented. The first maps the distribution of topics on Wikipedia to the distribution of books published. The second compares the distribution of topics in three established, field-specific academic encyclopedias to the articles found in Wikipedia. Unlike the top-down construction of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia’s topical coverage is driven by the interests of its users, and as a result, the reliability and completeness of Wikipedia is likely to be different depending on the subject-area of the article.

Posting will continue to be sporadic over the next month, as I continue to juggle about six different deadlines, in addition to all the stuff that goes along with the start of the school year. But in the midst of this it was nice to hear from some of my old colleagues about a paper we put together while I was still a student at the University of Washington. It was presented at a conference, and I thought it was an interesting paper, but I had pretty much forgotten about it.

Nice thing about historical work, as opposed to web-related research, is that it actually has a little bit of a shelf-life. After some massaging by the lead authors, it was recently published in the Howard Journal of Communications. I’m still not used to the idea of articles with seven different authors—almost feels like a hard-science citation!—but thanks to some good management and a bunch of very easy-to-work with folks, it was a rewarding, learning experience. The paper also speaks, I think, to the degree to which the status quo is maintained and frames discussions of race in contemporary contexts.

Some details:

Spratt, M., Bullock, C.F., Baldasty, G., Clark, F., Halavais, A., McCluskey, M., & Schrenk, S. (2007). News, Race, and the Status Quo: The Case of Emmett Louis Till. Howard Journal of Communications, 18(2).

Using inductive and deductive framing analysis, the authors examine how 4 newspapers covered a key event sparking the civil rights movement – the 1955 murder of Emmett Till – in an effort to gauge how the press covers events that are part of larger social ferment. The Daily Sentinel-Star (Grenada, Mississippi), Greenwood Commonwealth (Mississippi), Chicago Tribune, and Chicago Defender varied in intensity of coverage, use of sources, and attention to crime news and, as a result, framed the story differently. The African American Defender defended Emmett Till’s reputation, focused on larger issues of civil rights, and provided a clear argument for social reform. The 3 mainstream dailies defined the case primarily as one in which the victim invited his own death; they provided little or no support for reform. In this case, an advocate press seemed better able to give voice to those who challenged an entrenched status quo. By examining initial coverage of the Till case, we can better understand the news reporting traditions and devices that shaped (and continue to shape) narratives about the struggle for racial equality and justice.