Research process

Since I'm about to finish my last exam of the semester and start into the heavy research phase for my Alley Talk paper for HICSS, I started refreshing my memory on the research process, per what I learned in one of my classes last semester.

Seems I'm not the only one doing this - much talk about this on the AoIR list lately, which yielded this excellent overview of a good and manageable research process for the social sciences. Yes it is one person's account of how he does research, but I find it to be fairly solid.

Academic career greenlighted

April has been an odd month, full of trials and tribulations.

I will stop working for big Pharma next month and will start concentrating solely on my academic advancement and career. I've waited for this for a long time and it seems the day is fast approaching.

Also, to my shock, awe and no small amount of nervousness, my paper "Fear, Risk in the Digital Anomaly" got accepted to the Association of Internet Researcher's annual conference "Internet Research 6.0: Internet Generations" in Chicago in the fall!

Here I am in the listings and here's the abstract that I submitted.

Luckily the paper itself is already written, as I'm taking four courses in May and June so I expect to be up to my ears in writing for sociology and poli sci courses.

As I mentioned here a few weeks back, I'm also working on a paper for the HICSS annual conference in Hawaii in January 2006 - my abstract got accepted there too. Deadline for it is June 15 and my ethnography is barely started. Eeps!

The next 12 months will be very busy and hopefully rewarding.

Gaming for education

The UN has entered the gaming fray with an online Flash-based game designed to teach youth about world hunger. In this video game, hunger is the enemy and the air workers have to get food to the masses on a fictional island in order to vanguish it.

Conference submission prank

In an attempt to highlight how many conferences are setup these days in the name of money rather than furthering research and understanding, three studentsfrom MIT got together and wrote a computer program that generates a "research" paper based on random but contextual grammatical sentences. While it may sound far-fetched, they succeeded in getting a paper accepted to a supposedly academic-oriented technology conference.

Think Media program

So what about Switzerland for graduate studies? The Alps? This program and its faculty reads like a who's who of digital culture.

Digital Culture reading list

Now this is a digital culture reading list! wow!

Sociolinguistics of texting

While doing searches this evening for graduate programs in digital culture studies, I stumbled across this essay on the sociolinguistics of youth texting. As it might play into a paper I'm working on for a conference, it is useful to have around.

HICSS conference submission

I submitted an abstract to the HICSS conferencefor the Persistent Conversation minitrack and got accepted. Hawaii in January - good. Not knowing what awaits me there in terms of audience and slant- not so good. This is far from being a purely sociological audience.

I do hope I get into this AIR conference in October based on my Fear & Risk paper, so that I have at least one under my belt that is more purely digital research before doing HICSS.

Funny that I'm nervous a bit. I've done presentations weekly for the last 10 years on a whole range of topics, with large and small groups, executives and students alike. I would normally tell you that I'm just fine with public speaking, no stage fright, no maam, not me. But this one intimidates me a bit - I admit I didn't expect to get accepted.

Now I have to write the paper and it's due June 15. What's that hoary saying? Nothing hurts like success? I'm feeling the success.

Another addition to the digital fear rhetoric

Wonder what my gameCODE pals would think of this latest intiative by a big-shot US politician to reduce or eliminate violence in video games and apparently save their oh-so-impressionable youth?

Don't these politicians read the academic thinking and research on these topics? Or do they just act on their gut instincts?

I find it laughably sad. Do we hear about the violence, blood, gore and realism we see in the movies and on television? Not anymore. Video games seem to be the new favourite whipping boy of the media and politicians. More digital fear rhetoric.

Happy bunny day

To celebrate this weekend of bunnies and rabbits, pastels and baskets, chocolate eggs and brightly coloured jellybeans, here's a little hip-hopping cheer for you.

Happy Easter to you and yours!
[found via a favourite friendly mailing list]

Creating public spaces for collaboration

Some of my fellow students have been introducing me via email in the apparently ongoing debate about how much of the academic research process should be publicly accessible by any interested in the topic. The argument for the idea is that there is more to research than the finished polished product and so the actual process itself should be observable by the public.

While I agree that it can work, it usually requires the controlled space of something like the Wikipedia. When those types of social networks are absent, as they usually are in smaller scale academic research teams, disastrous results can occur. This group's public Wiki is a sad example of what happens when you attempt to put this high-minded ideal into practice.

This isn't the first time I've seen this happen. It makes me wonder what the actual benefit is to the public of areas like this. From what I've seen, they force the research group in question to play vigilant content cop and janitor, when they should be focused on thought creation and group collaboration.

Game economies get real

Were I to join Kelly's world by getting heavily into game studies as an academic career, this is one of the topics I'd look into - how does the ability to buy your way to success in the explicit goals of the game affect the tacit goals (i.e. sociability)? Microsoft seems to believe it doesn't matter if it affects those tacit ones so long as they're making money off of it.

Internet = medium?

While I don't always agree with Internet Week editor Antone Gonsalves, I do enjoy reading his takes on life in the wires. His most recent editorial nails down part of a phenomenon that people are ignoring among the blare of the trumpets heralding the wonders of the wired age. He points out that though Americans are getting more and more of their political news and information electronically, they are starting to treat the Internet more as a medium than as a place or space in which to get informed. As access to the net becomes conversely unwired through the use of Blackberries, cellphones, wireless laptops, etc, he asserts that people are using it more as a tool than ever before.

Anyone who reads this space of mine regularly knows what I think of this concept and it is becoming a prevailing one as even academics seem to be striving to continue this articulation of a binary opposition between the so-called "real" and the "virtual", between the "actual" and the "digital". I see Antone's opinion as falling into this line, because after all, his employer is all about broadcasting infromation, no matter how interactive they think they when they provide their email addresses so that readers may give feedback.

Even that term, readers, is telling. Are we readers? Something to think about.

Richness of silence

In between reading my sociology stats and my intro to politics textbooks, I've been reading a collection of excellent short stories called The Ivory and the Horn by the acclaimed Canadian urban fantasy writer, Charles de Lint. One of the things I enjoy about de Lint is his evocative style of writing about the mythic and the mundane. His style moves between various voices that are each lyrical, poetic or snappy in turn.

But one passage in the last quarter of this book has drawn me back time and again and I can't stop thinking about it.

The best artists know what to leave out. They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren't necessary. They suggest, and let the viewer fill in whatever else is needed to make the communication complete. They aren't afraid to work with a smaller palette, to delete excess verbiage or place rests on the musical staff, for they know that almost every creative endeavor can be improved with a certain measure of understatement. For isn't it the silence between the notes that often gives music its resonance? What lies between the lines of a poem or store, the dialogue the actor doesn't speak, the pauses between the dancer's steps? The spaces can be just as important as what is distinctly portrayed.

In a world like ours that is filled up with information, activity, movement, purpose, I must remember this passage and remember to live as much in the richness of silence and absence as I do in the fullness of noise and bustle.

Happy birthday Yahoo

To celebrate their 10th birthday, Yahoo has put up a mosaic retrospective of 10 years in the life of the net. It's quite well done. Check it out.

Mass media musing

Bart from GameCODE sent out a link to this thought piece and I watched it with Kelly last night. While I found it interesting, I guess I don't find it that scary simply because we've set ourselves on this path already. Having been in communications and employee/business portal design and management in the last dozen years, I've looked often into that future to consider its ramifications. A few thoughts of mine....

The recommendation software that is out there hasn't changed all that much since 1994. I remember being agog with the concept of Amazon back then, when we were still using v2.0 of Netscape Navigator and trying to ignore the coming of Microsoft's own browser. The software is still almost as crude and is based on everything people buy, with no context. Thus, if I have a friend who is pregnant and has no credit card and I buy a book on pregnancy for her, for the next few months I will be deluged by Amazon with book recommendations about pregnancy, breast-feeding, child-rearing etc. I have no way of telling it that I have no interest in such books.

I find Epic no scarier actually than the idea of concentrating and consolidating all news, entertainment media and literary publishing in the hands of a few mega-conglomerates, an alternate path that is also already well under way. Truth is no more assured in that path than it is in the Epic style.

And the latter is perhaps scarier because the human tendency to not bother personalizing and to simply allow yourself to be spoon-fed information based on what someone else thinks you ought to know is well ingrained. Personalization systems and personalized "portals" were all the rage in IT in the mid-1990s but they never took off because they overestimated individuals' desire to be proactive about their information needs.

Who here remembers Open Sesame? Excite? The Globe.com? Exactly my point.

So, for me, the interesting thing under all of this is the power plays, the effects of such information dissemination tactics on our feelings of agency. But then again, I too may be guilty of overstating people's desire to have agency and individuality.

And ultimately it is that which I find the most scary.

February Frivolity

So it's been how long since I"ve posted here? My oh my I have been letting my piece of the I-space languish hmm? But if you were expecting my first post in ..oh...two months, to be an intensive thought piece on digital culture, I'm afraid I have to disabuse you of the notion. I'm in the mood to be frivolous so I'm posting a joke that I found on one of my favourite online communities, which shall remain nameless, given that this is supposed to be an academically-focused thought blog.

So enjoy this piece of February frivolity from yours truly. I'll try to get back to my regular serious self later next week after my statistics mid-term is over.

Having Mom over for Dinner

Brian Hester invited his mother over for dinner. During the course of the meal, Brian's mother couldn't help but keep noticing how beautiful Brian's roommate, Stephanie, was. Mrs. Hester had long been suspicious of a relationship between Brian and Stephanie, and this had only made her more curious.

Over the course of the evening, while watching the two react, Mrs. Hester started to wonder if there was more between Brian and Stephanie than met the eye. Reading his mom's thoughts, Brian volunteered, "I know what you must be thinking, but I assure you Stephanie and I are just roommates."

About a week later, Stephanie came to Brian saying, "Ever since your mother came to dinner, I've been unable to find the beautiful silver gravy ladle. You don't suppose she took it, do you?" Brian said, "Well, I doubt it, but I'll send her an e-mail just to be sure."

So he sat down and wrote:

Dear Mother: I'm not saying that you "did" take the gravy ladle from the house, I'm not saying that you "did not" take the gravy ladle. But the fact remains that one has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.

Love, Brian

Several days later, Brian received a letter from his mother that read:

Dear Son: I'm not saying that you "do" sleep with Stephanie, and I'm not saying that you "do not" sleep with Stephanie. But the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her own bed, she would have found the gravy ladle by now.

Love, Mom

Blanketing the defense

No, I'm not talking about how surprisingly well the Bills are playing this year.

Rather, I'm talking about how the supposedly sensitive and endangered nation of the US needs to be so careful about itself that it can't produce the appropriate constitutionally-required evidence against John Perry Barlow in order to prove or disprove his claim of being duped.

I know I believe him, but believing isn't enough. They're supposed to give up the evidence in court and so far, his attempts to get them to produce evidence and testimony have met with the blanket statement that it is all so "sensitive" that it threatens "national security".

Yeah right. Reason 326 I'm glad I'm Canadian right now.

Missing online shopping

Despite the depressing media doomsday dialogue about online shopping, hackers, fraud, theft, blah blah, I'm not afraid to do it. I like the convenience of it, the selection, the fact I can do it in my bunny slippers at home (or would if I actually owned bunny slippers).

Since Canada is finally starting to get it and more and more stores are putting up an online presence complete with shopping cart ability, I'd love to do more and more of my shopping online through real stores rather than just eBay.

Don't get me wrong - I still love eBay. But when you're trying to buy a gift for someone and don't necessarily want to have to worry about whether it will cross the border in time for the big day, you'd much rather keep your money north of the 49th and buy from a store with a true money-back guarantee and liberal return policy.

So why don't I? Because the lack of a simple little piece of plastic prevents me. A credit card.

Used to have one, but ran it up scarily high. The stress of the debt was too much for me. So it got paid off and cancelled. And I'm now CC-less. Feels good...until I go try and shop online.

What I don't understand is why the Canadian banks don't get together and offer an online form of debit payment like the Interac system used in stores, restaurants and even for at-home pizza delivery now too. Heck, apparently 2/3 of the population of this country now use debit cards instead of cash.

Paypal is nice, but few large reputable etailers really want you to "wire" them cash like that. Switch-style debit-cards unwritten by Visa would be even nicer. I had these in Bermuda when I lived there in 1996 and adored it. I could use it as a Visa in places where debit cards don't tread, but the effect was still the same - money direct from my account, rather than ringing up a debt I'd have to pay off eventually.

It's not like it would be that difficult - Canada's banking system is much more homogenized than the US, given banking regulations here. But alas! The banks haven't yet figured out we'd depend on them even more if they offered this kind of service and thus I must live without access to the clicks-and-bricks shopping for the foreseeable future. And they wonder why Canadians lag behind the US in online shopping? Humph!

So when people ask me this year why I didn't do my Christmas shopping online this year, I'll end up mumbling something about the lack of plastic in my life and changing the subject quickly.

Google keeps its eye on search

Google is planning on scanning the collections of a variety of huge libraries in the US, including Harvard and Stanford universities and the wonderful New York Public Library and making them searchable through it.

Think it will let me take out books online using my Concordia U student card and have them USPSd to me? I'd certainly get much better access to digital culture books than I do here - Concordia has only 73.