My Christmas (To Do) List

check-markWhenever I’m feeling overwhelmed by my “to do” list I get the impulse to make it public, because by doing so, I somehow bracket it and make it feel less overwhelming. This is my “work” to-dos. I have family coming for the holidays, there’s a lot that needs to happen around the house (we are considering selling and finding a place with more space and less commute), and some long-delayed major dental work that needs to be done, but you really don’t care about that. And I’ve left off all the exciting things like committee work, advising, writing letters of reference for people, refereeing, etc.

Honestly, you probably don’t care about any of this, but I’m putting it out there because (a) you might care, and might actually want to be involved in some way and (b) nobody really reads this blog any more so it’s not too self involved to do this. I guess I could always make my To Do list entirely public–but I suspect that would increase rather than decrease my stress. I’ll put that project on a back burner for now.

1. Funding Proposal. Trying to put together a proposal to the NSF for extending the work on BadgePost, applying it to peer-certification of social science methodology expertise. This is a bit of a last-minute push, but I’m hoping to throw it together pretty quickly. Two of the people I asked to serve on the advisory committee are applying to the same solicitation, so my suspicion are odds are pretty low here, but it’s worth a try, at least. Also Co-PI on a different proposal with a colleague.

2. Book Proposal. I’ve been saying I’m writing this book, All Seeing for years, but haven’t actually proposed it to a press. I need to do that before Christmas, and getting the book in some kind of drafty state will be the major project of the first part of 2016.

3. Talk at Harvard. If you are in chilly Cambridge in late January, I’ll be giving a short talk and a discussion with Alison Head about social search, looking especially at the potential for tracing search patterns in a more discoverable way.

4. Article: Death of the Blogosphere. I’ve proposed a chapter that looks at what the blogosphere meant, and what influence it had, and how it might stand as a counter-example to “platformed” social media.

5. Article: Badgifying Linked-In. I have been sitting on survey data that shows what people think when you swap badges in for LinkedIn skills. I really need to write it up, but–to be honest–it’s one of those things that doesn’t quite fit anywhere. I have a potential target journal, but it’s way outside of my normal submission space. At least it might provide interesting reviews. Hard to get excited about this one for some reason.

6. Course: Technology & Collaboration. This is a new course for our new masters program. I actually have a syllabus for it, but it was for the course proposal, and it is kind of horrible. This week, I need to get a new syllabus in working order so people know whether they want to take it. It’s online, which means it has to be more structured that my usual approach, and the hope is that students will have early drafts of Real Research™ by the end of the semester.

7. Course: Sex Online. I’m really hoping I can fall back a lot on what is already “in the can” for this course, though I have a long list of updates I need to make to it, and because FB killed my private group last year, I have to figure out whether to go with Reddit or Slack for discussion.

Projects on Hold

1. International Communication Association. I really wanted to get more than one thing in. I have a great panel on peer-veillance and IoT in, with a great group of people, but ICA is always a crapshoot. I’ve only had one (maybe 2) things ever rejected, but I thought they were my best work. And the worst thing I ever submitted got an award. So, waiting to hear on reviews. This is a long haul (Fukuoka), but if accepted, I will try to see if anyone in Japan wants me to give a talk (or potentially in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.). And there looks to be a fun post-conf on Human-Machine communication, which is of interest to me.

2. Mapping StackOverflow Achievement Sequences. Did some work with Hazel Kwon on figuring out how to make sense of the order in which people achieve certain badges on Stack Overflow. It was kind of a sticky analysis question, but we finally worked out something, and I think I even ran the analysis. But something came up, and it’s fell off my radar. Now I have to figure out if I took good enough notes to be able to recover it or if I have to re-do a lot of thinking and work on it. Probably won’t touch it until the new year.

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