Alex drove in from Buffalo today, to meet with me and a few colleagues about the proposal. We had a nice lunch, then found an empty room with a whiteboard and had an excellent brainstorming session.
I've transcribed the crazy whiteboard scribblings into an outline, and will post that later this week (after I've gotten it into some form of reasonable organization). Alex took pictures of the whiteboard before he left, so I'm guessing (hoping...) he'll post those here.
One thing we talked about at lunch that didn't make it onto the whiteboard was the "why RIT? why us?" aspect of the proposal. Lots of good reasons for that. One is our ability--as a "PUI," or primarily undergraduate university--to incorporate significant undergraduate and graduate student research into the project. Another is our richness of faculty research interests, ranging from database/data mining expertise to HCI to information science to virtual worlds. We've already begun integrating blogs into our curriculum--using/customizing blog environments in web design classes, writing blog software in web programming. It feels like a perfect fit--let's hope NSF agrees!
The NSF ITR grant deadline is 2/12, so we've got to get a move on. But today's meeting was very positive, with a lot of good content coming out of the brainstorming. It's amazing how much more bandwidth is available in a face-to-face meeting of five people than there is in a text-based simulation of same. That's one of the strong justifications for building workshops/seminars/colloquia into the proposal ("blogshops," as one colleague called them), so that those interested in research and tool development can meet like this more often.
Spent the weekend reading NSF grant materials, and the evening collecting my thoughts about the NSF proposal. Feedback is welcome, publicly or privately.
The links I've been using as reference are:
The full (one-page, 582-word) proposal summary draft follows...
ITR: Microcontent Research Center Project Summary
This is a proposal to establish a Microcontent Research Center housed jointly at the Rochester Institute of Technology and SUNY-Buffalo. The center would sponsor and collect research on the topic of microcontent publishing--in particular, weblogs (or "blogs")--as tools for teaching, learning, and dissemination of scholarly and research-related information. It would sponsor regular workshops and colloquia on the topic of microcontent publishing in specific academic and pedagogical contexts, and would engage in collaborative activities with organizations in other countries currently pursuing related research (specifically Norway, Australia, and Japan).
The intellectual merit of the proposed activity is based in its exploration of a new publishing environment that shows signs of having a significant impact on scientific communication, education, and publication. The collaborative and knowledge-sharing impact of weblogs and similar personal publishing tools are quickly reshaping not just traditional journalism, but publications in a wide variety of scholarly fields. However, the sudden appearance and popularity of these technologies has resulted in somewhat of a research vacuum--very little systematic research is being done on the effects and impact of these technologies, and what little has been done has not been organized and made accessible to those most likely to benefit from it. Additionally, little support currently exists for the development of tools to improve the filtering, data mining, archiving, and distribution of materials published in these microcontent formats. Better understanding and management of this growing field of content publication will be increasingly important for scholars in all scientific disciplines.
Few scholars and scientists have addressed or explored the innovative and ?? nature of this method of publishing and communication. The bibliography of related works that we have included lists only one peer-reviewed conference paper specifically on the topic, and a handful of magazine articles and books that address the topic somewhat tangentially. The PIs on this project bring an ideal mix of research and educational experience, as well as institutional affiliation, to the project. Dr. Lawley has a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science, and teaches in a large Information Technology department with excellent laboratory facilities and commitment to undergraduate research. She brings knowledge of scholarly publishing, information organization & architecture, and extensive undergraduate and graduate teaching experience to the project. Dr. Halavais has extensive experience in studying collaborative online communication and publishing environments, and [blah blah blah - Alex, need your input here. Toot your horn.]
The broader impacts of the proposed activity lie in its examination of an important but until now overlooked communication and publishing environment. The potential of weblogs and other microcontent tools are only beginning to be addressed, and the proposed research center would bring together those scholars best able to explore the technology, as well as scientists able to develop tools that extend the power of current authoring and publishing environments. The proposed center would sponsor and collect research on use of weblogs in classrooms, use of weblogs by educators--for communication not just with their students, but with the larger academic community, and use of weblogs by researchers.
[A little more room here, to address..."How well does the proposed activity broaden the participation of underrepresented groups (e.g., gender, ethnicity, disability, geographic, etc.)? To what extent will it enhance the infrastructure for research and education, such as facilities, instrumentation, networks, and partnerships? Will the results be disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological understanding? What may be the benefits of the proposed activity to society?"]
My department chair graciously agreed to pay for domain registration on microcontent.info, microcontent.org, and microcontent.net, all of which now point to a dummy page I've set up for brainstorming purposes. I'll keep modifying it as we go, to reflect the direction we're headed in.
It will be a database backended site, so the next step is to get the content skeleton solid enough that the database design can be done.
Feel free to stop by the site and then give feedback to me at ell at mail dot rit dot edu.
I've been thinking about the difference between a "resource center" and a "center of excellence." I think Alex is right that it wouldn't be that difficult, nor require a lot of funding to build a simple resource center. But a big list o' links is not what I have in mind.
I want a center that sponsors workshops and conferences, brings in scholars and/or developers in residence, and offers regular classes. The center should certainly include a "resource center" of well-organized and maintained links to resources, but that's only a piece of what I'm imagining.
What might be ideal is to begin the resource center as part of the grant application--it's my understanding that NSF tends to like funding things where people have already started on the work, rather than waiting for funding before they consider jumping in.
Most of what turns up when you search on the topic of "microcontent" is e-mail related. Jakob Nielsen wrote an oft-cited Alertbox column in 1998 on microcontent, which is a list of guidelines rather than the results of research. WebWord did some limited research on e-mail as microcontent to verify Nielsen's assertions.
Corante has a site on microcontent, which is subtitled "the online magazine for weblogs, webzines, and personal publishing"--but which focuses primarily on blogs.
Preliminary searches of academic databases (excluding ACM, whose "portal" doesn't seem to work properly) show no published research on the topic of "microcontent," and only informational pieces on blogs (as opposed to research), so there seems to be a real opportunity here.
I had the pleasure of meeting Alex Halavais and his wife, Jamie, in person on Friday. We had a lovely discussion on the direction this research might take, and I hope that will lead to this blog being revived and a grant proposal taking shape.
We decided to focus in on one aspect of blogs/microcontent, and that was the creation of a resource center for blogging tools and information. We also decided that while the term "blog" works well for those of us using the tools now, it's not ideal for grant language and explaining to non-believers the power of the medium, so we're going with the more academic-sounding "microcontent publishing" for now.
The working concept is to create a "Microcontent Publishing Resource Center," or "Microcontent Publishing Center of Excellence." This would be home to a digital library of resources, from blogging tools to subject catalogs of existing blogs. It would also be a logical source for blogging workshops/conferences like the ones Dave Winer is trying to put together.
The NSF Information Technology Research grant program deadline for "medium" proposals is February 12th...we may try to shoot for that, but we'll also be exploring other possible funding sources.
Because Jill Walker isn't sure she'll be able to commit to the grant itself, we're open to the idea of someone from a third institution to participate along with us. Please let us know--via comments here, or e-mail to me or to Alex--if you're interested!