So, now that the proposal is out there, we should get to work. If it is funded, we will be able to hit the ground running. If not... well, we'll still be hitting things running. I've found that the best way of doing things is to say "I'm doing this, help me if you like, but if you don't want to, that's cool too." (I wonder how much of this comes from the 8 minutes of Survivor I watched last night.)
So, here's some stuff I'm working on. Not so much research, mind you, but organizationally:
> Have a great panel in the works for the Association of Internet Researchers [link fixed 2/23] conference in Toronto this October. Possibly even two panels, at this stage. Very excited about the abstracts so far. This will be a great opportunity to get together with some folks who are already doing bloggy stuff and those who have done other things related to "Internet Studies" and are interested in working on microcontent.
> I teach a class called "Media in the Information Age." I designed it mainly as an overview of the traditional media industries and fields (advertising, PR, drama, news, etc.) and how they relate to new ICTs, but I had planned on working on things a little differently next year. I will be offering it as a joint class for graduate students and undergraduates. The aim was to take a program approach to the class, and have students specialize in various areas to produce a web zine. This would mean talking about everything from the economics of new media and advertising, to writing for the web, to the basics (and not-so-basics) of content production, design, image manipulation, and the like. I figured I would let the students decide on the topic of the site: anything from a regional focus to media convergence to ???. I'm now thinking about how to integrate this with my research on blogging and microcontent, either by rewriting the course to focus more on the nature and effects of blogging, or (more likely) by making this the focus of the web zine they will produce. It would be great, especially if someone is doing something similar, to do a multi-campus class. Fall is probably too soon for that, but maybe by spring or the following fall.
> I've heard now of at least one other grant that went in during our proposal cycle for blogging and it differed in that it was far more focused. I think it's too early to focus too much at this point, but it might be worthwhile to look more specifically, say, at the blogosphere as a semantic web. Our resources would then would have a more heavily tools & tech focus.
Most of the above is just thinking out loud. Any ideas?
Seb Paquet points to this W3C paper on "Semantic Blogging and Bibliographies." Very cool stuff.
Web logging, or blogging [ESSENTIAL_BLOGGING], is a well known phenomenon that has a number of attractive features. It provides a very low barrier to entry for personal web publishing and yet these personal publications are automatically syndicated and aggregated via centralized servers (e.g. blogger.com) allowing a wide community to access the blogs. Blogs have a simple to understand structure and yet links between blogs and items (so called blog rolling) supports the decentralized construction of a rich information network. While we want to extend the blogging metaphor, we also want to preserve its key values, especially its simplicity. We want to build on blogging's proven potential for publishing, syndication & discovery, and community formation.
This is the kind of thing that the proposed microcontent research center would want to follow--pointing to it, sponsoring similar research, and bringing folks like this to the workshops.
When this quarter is over (end of February), I'll starting working on the microcontent.info web site--even if we don't get funding, I'd like to start moving forward on a repository of information about blog-related research.
Uploaded the files to NSF today; the grants office will push the magic button tomorrow to finalize it. I'm done, I'm free, woohoo!
Here's the narrative,, in PDF form. And here's the reference list, also in PDF. (NSF requires them as separate pages.)
The final version of the project summary reads like this:
This is a proposal to establish a Microcontent Research Center housed at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in collaboration with faculty at the University at Buffalo. The center would sponsor, collect, and disseminate research on the topic of microcontent publishing—in particular, weblogs (or “blogs”)—as a tool for collaborative teaching, learning, and research. 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 other US-based educational institutions, as well as organizations in other countries currently pursuing related research (specifically Norway, Austria, 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.
The PIs on this project bring an ideal mix of research and educational experience, as well as institutional affiliation, to the project. Elizabeth 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 and architecture, and extensive undergraduate and graduate teaching experience to the project. Alexander Halavais, has extensive experience in studying collaborative online communication and publishing environments, including work that examines the effects of micropublishing on traditional journalism and methods of automatically analyzing content and hyperlink structures within collaborative micropublishing environments. They are joined by a research team at both institutions who represent the cutting edge in content analysis, social network analysis, information visualization, and technical publishing.
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.
The project has several goals. The first is to establish new research directions and tool development related to microcontent publishing. This would be accomplished through the workshop series, as well as through the virtual visiting scholar program. The second is to attract students to the field of information technology, by involving them in the use and development of innovative communication technologies and offering them the opportunity to participate in both the workshop series and ongoing research activities. The third is to encourage extensive collaboration and communication between researchers and technologists in the US, Europe, and Asia. The participants in the workshops are expected to come from diverse industrial, academic and government institutions. The links forged in the intensive workshop environment will, we hope, establish a shared research environment and community of practice to support ongoing collaborative work.