New JITP Publication on Political Blogging

The Infoscape Research Lab has a new publication on Canada's political blogosphere in the Summer 2009 issue of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics:

"Blogs I Read": Partisanship and Party Loyalty in the Canadian Political Blogosphere. Greg Elmer, Ganaele Langlois, Zachary Devereaux, Peter Malachy Ryan, Fenwick McKelvey, Joanna Redden, and A. Brady Curlew.

http://www.jitp.net/m_archive.php?p=10


The JITP issue also has a rather balanced review of Jonathan Zittrain's book (it's tough on the work in some parts, but I might say fair overall from a quick read):

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.
Reviewed by Jeremy Malcolm

Update: Shane Schick Article on my Research

Someone just sent this link to me from one of my interview respondents, Shane Schick. I must have missed its launch during my busy year-end activities in late 2008:

http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/shane/2008/03/10/what-literary-fiction-has-to-tell-us-about-the-it-industry/


http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/031108-what-fiction-has-to-tell.html

http://www.cio.de/news/cio_worldnews/851826/

The dissertation is before my committee right now, and I will have an update on when final drafts can be sent to the respondents in the next few weeks for any last changes.

Until then,

Peter

Update: Infoscape Lab Canadian Federal Election Tracking

The Infoscape Lab has been tracking the Canadian Federal election on-line in conjunction with CBC's Susan Ormiston on-line:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canadavotes/campaign2/ormiston/

I do not plan to post anything more until after the election is completed because my work will mostly appear on the page above under lab director Greg Elmer's care or through the lab directly:

www.infoscapelab.ca

The lab's efforts are collectively aggregated in both places, so a third blog is a bit redundant until October 14, 2008.

Remember to get political folks.

Update: I'll be offline until the end of August

Thanks to those who have sent in comments about my blog and questions wondering why I've stopped posting things over the past two months. I'll be off-line until the end of August working on my dissertation, so I'll post no new content until the Fall.

For now, here are some quick observations on Google Analytics blog tracking after not posting anything for a few months:

1) Direct and referring traffic to a blog drops off significantly on Google Analytics without increasing the content during a month.

2) Google search traffic goes through the roof though, and the most read story on this blog right now is the Bruno Latour lecture at U of T (posted below) because of this phenomenon. It seems people do a lot of searching for two main things listed on this blog: "Bruno Latour" and "Facebook".

3) Generally, for a blog like mine, it gets at least 150-200 hits a month even if no new content is placed on it.

I'll write more in month!

Cheers,

Peter

Jonathan Zittrain on Colbert

Here's a link for Jonathan Zittrain's discussion of his book "The Future of the Internet" with Colbert:

http://www.spike.com/episode/27765/st/2994516

Also, here's his new blog for the book:

http://futureoftheinternet.org/blog/

Dissertation Update: Author Interview List Complete

So, I’m in the final writing phase of the dissertation at this point. I’ll just be writing away to get the document finished this summer, and this update is meant to confirm my complete list of author interviews at this point, as promised for those on the project:

1. Elizabeth Bear, Author of Science Fiction and Fantasy (U.S.)
2. Greg Bear, Science Fiction Author and Sigma Group Consultant (U.S.)*
3. Julie E. Czerneda, Science Fiction and Science Education Author (Can.)
4. Cory Doctorow, Science Fiction Author and Activist (Can.)
5. Jack McDevitt, Science Fiction Author (U.S.)
6. Derryl Murphy, Author of Science Fiction and Short Stories (Can.)
7. Shannan Palma, Author of Fantasy, Fiction and Short Stories (U.S.)
8. Robert J. Sawyer, Science Fiction Author (Can.)
9. Karl Schroeder, Science Fiction Author (Can.)
10. Peter Watts, Science Fiction Author (Can.)

* Greg and Elizabeth are not related, for those that are wondering.

As you can see, I have quite a range of North American authors involved in the project, just like my ICT professional interviews. The Science Fiction community really helped out, and I do have even more of a mix when I include the survey sample.

I’ll keep my survey open if anyone would like to participate in that aspect of the project or if anyone else has some thoughts to add (and increase the sample size too) before my dissertation is completed: Survey.

I’ll shut down the survey at the end of July as I’m pretty sure I’ll just be revising the dissertation at that point, and hopefully getting it ready for defense before the end of the summer if all goes on schedule.

Also, I’m heading off to the Congress of the Humanities in Vancouver next week, and I’ll be presenting some of my early findings there to get some feedback on the project before it is formally completed.

Other than that, one of my interview respondents Shane Schick has written his own thoughts on this research already, and hopefully this will further generate interest in the project as it winds down:

1) A Local Link to his Article.

2) A Link in Germany: "http://www.cio.de/news/cio_worldnews/851826/"

Bruno Latour's Keynote at Reclaiming the World: the Future of Objectivity

I just attended Bruno Latour's keynote address at “Reclaiming the World: the Future of Objectivity”.

It was a packed house at the U of T's Bahen Centre, and they will be putting a video recording of the event on-line shortly.

They said there was no problem if I made an audio recording, so I've attached my handheld audio recording to this blog post in case anyone can't wait for the official video copy. It's a Latour bootleg! If they ask me to take it down for any reason, I will... But they gave me the green light in person, so here it is (see the attached 1 hour itunes/QuickTime M4a clip; it's about 22 MBs -- I hope the sampling frequency is audible and the file size isn't too large for folks):

* Bruno Latour Keynote

If you're up to date with Latour's work, there wasn't much new in his talk on political epistemologies. He mostly developed ideas from his two recent works Reassembling the Social and Making Things Public for a North American audience. He also provided numerous examples of new data visualization tools and projects such as:

1) http://www.demoscience.org/
2) http://mapofscience.com/

Perhaps the most interesting part of the talk for Latour fans were the reactions to it. For example, Ian Hacking critiqued Latour's work as being an "insane phenomenology" with too many examples and not enough of a through line. Others from the more traditional and perhaps not so cutting edge U of T crowd similarly critiqued Latour’s work for not going into enough depth to develop a sense of how new data visualization projects are in fact “new” or leading to a redesign of society that is different from classical epistemologies. Also, many did not understand how networked technologies provided any resistance to dominant epistemologies.

My thoughts on the topic would be that if people are not seeing in Latour's work that new data visualization tools are "new", then they should stop using them and see what happens to their research. I believe other network theorists, like Yochai Benkler for example, would definitely support Latour’s analysis. Google, the military, and other big industries are banking on these “new” visualization tools, so there must be some reason behind it. To spell it out explicitly, beyond Latour's justifications which you can hear in the audio recording or find in his works, I would say that “new” data visualizations are "new" because of:

1) Massive Public Data Interaction: Open data access allow individuals to interact with massive networks that were not publicly available and at scales that have never before been studied, at such an instant speed of investigation (e.g. Just watch CNN's coverage of the Presidential race).

2) Automated Political-Technological Agents: The amount of technological penetration in Western society also increasingly has technology making decisions for us in our research as politically invested agents with their own in-built epistemologies that reflect particular dominant political groups. These epistemologies must be questioned and understood, especially when they do not fit into traditional epistemologies or ways of knowing.

3) On-line Discourse Domination: Decision making processes are moving on-line, and if different cultures want to be invested in science and technological decisions of "objectivity", then they have to become a part of this game, which is increasingly exclusionary.

That's my quick take on the topic. I'll write more as debate arises or time allows me to offer up more insights.

Overall, I was happy to finally hear the work of someone I have been studying for the past five years in person, and his slideshow was definitely very impressive. One of the main things that will stick with me from the talk is how the Maps of Science group and other scientometric tracking projects are demonstrating that globally there are about 12 major research clusters in the new knowledge economy of any discipline. That’s a fairly powerful data visualization of the realignment of social agents.

Okay, that's my final word, for now...