Lawrence Lessig on the Google Book Search Settlement - "Static goods, dynamic bads"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Svytkew5qPI

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

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...

Fallout from Facebook Decision at Ryerson

A blogger on the AoIR listserv posted this summary of the University's decision not to expel Chris Avenir, the Ryerson student who was up to be expelled for using Facebook:

http://onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/03/ryerson-facebook-study-group-student.html

Overall, the student won't be expelled, will receive zero for the assignment, and will have to take an Academic Integrity course: http://www.ryerson.ca/academicintegrity/

Avenir is still going to appeal the decision, and as of yet, Ryerson has not made any formal announcements from its own university portal, and have not addressed if anything would happen to other students in the group.

For more see on the back story: http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/03/university-facebook-policies-breakfast.html

Tools from MaRS and other places

Happy post-St. Patty’s Day to ye all,

I hope everyone is still feeling the luck of the Irish today, and are not too under the weather from the cheer last night.

I thought I’d just quickly post some new interesting tools coming down the pipe and also some other items that people might find interesting. First off, here are some of the tools that were demonstrated at the MaRS “Permanent Campaign” event that the Infoscape Lab attended today with Greg Elmer being the keynote:

1) aideRSS: http://www.aiderss.com/

This seems like a generally useful tool for those who read a large number of blogs. However, at the moment, aideRSS are keeping their ranking heuristics hidden, and they do not allow readers to set up their own advanced ranking methods. For instance, it would be useful for someone to just choose to read blogs that have a lot of comments, or that have a large number of blogs linking to them. It would also be useful for the aideRSS tool to present such information as comments and links in an easily readable manner along with the other statistics they offer. Test it out to see what I mean exactly, of course.

2) Blogscope.net: http://www.blogscope.net/

Blog surveillance technology from the U of T. These folks have even automated tone judgments of the postings on blogs in the beta version, which sounds pretty sketchy to me, especially since once again they do not share their heuristics for how they judge tone. Their plan so far is to also make it the blogger’s individual duty to de-list their personal information from their network tracking software, which profiles every blogger on the web. This could be potentially very controversial.

The company linked with Blogscope is: www.Sysomos.com

3) Iotum: http://iotum.com/

Free conference calls for everyone, using Facebook or otherwise. This might be useful, especially if they add video calls some day. It appears to be a step up from plain old Skype.

************************************************

Here are some other items not connected with the MaRS event, but connected with political tools in general:

1) Microsoft’s Blews: http://research.microsoft.com/projects/blews/blews.aspx

This software seems similar to the Blogscope.net platform above, but it appears to have a more elegant user interface. However, the team that has worked on it does not include any political scientists or sociologists, so I’m not sure how well it will target specific user needs to drill into political blogs and news ("blews") in the social media space.

2) Gapminder.org: Interesting use of data visualization software, and there is a TED video of Hans Rosling from the Gapminder.org group on their powerful use of data visualization here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUwS1uAdUcI

3) Morningside Analytics: http://morningside-analytics.com/
John Kelly from Columbia University who was at the OII SDP this summer has officially launched his company with the help of Leonard Lidov, who is a Torontonian. Their business looks interesting, and I wish them well.

4) Michael Zimmer’s bibliography of ethical and privacy dimensions of web
search engines: http://michaelzimmer.org/2007/06/30/scholarship-on-privacy-and-search-engines/

More to come on the MaRS talk when I get a second to write in April.

The Breakfast Club 2.0: University Facebook Policies

Here's a link to a Ryerson Student newspaper article on the changing Facebook policy that’s been circulating in the news and is currently a hot topic nationally and internationally:

http://www.theeyeopener.com/article/3816

I truly think it's going to be difficult for students to change the policy proceeding along the lines that this author is arguing. Students need to understand when on-line activity is "public" -- we've never been able to defame our bosses, openly cheat on examines and assignments, steal content and call it our own, and then document those crimes for all to see in an easily traceable manner back to the individual. Many of the acts they’re documenting here are the equivalent of cheating on an exam, and taking a picture of it, then showing it to the professor... How do they expect a school to react?

I think the school administration will definitely listen to arguments about voices of protest being stifled, academic freedom being infringed, and intellectual innovation issues along the lines of the Creative Commons movements, Open Source and other such things, especially if there are pertinent cases to draw upon. I think though what is more at issue in the above article is the draconian punishments that are being handed out, and the lack of using those opportunities to teach students about what does and does not cross respectable and lawful student or citizen activity. Completely destroying a student's life because they're exploring the possibilities of a new technology is different from using the moment to guide the student's poor decisions into a more productive activity within reasonable limits.

Some people were asking for some background on the Ryerson case, so here goes. Every university has a Student Code of Non-Academic Conduct, and here are some links to Ryerson's:

1) http://www.ryerson.ca/calendar/2007-2008/pg28.html
2) http://www.ryerson.ca/undergraduate/currentstudents/rr/pol61NonACCode.pdf

These codes serve as blanket liability protection for, among other things, cases when a student does something in public that makes his or her university look bad in some way and the university wants to distance themselves from the student (or expel the student completely). Some general examples of when this code might be used is if criminal behaviour occurs off of the campus or destruction of university property occurs while the student is not actively engaged in "academic" behaviour, which would be covered by the Student Code of Academic Conduct. Most professors list links to these codes on their course syllabi, but many students don't know what their actual rights are on campus because like the plagiarism policy, those sections are often glossed over. In truth, these codes also exist for Faculty, and students and instructors alike should know that they overlap in many ways to create community panopticon to favour the university administration, but at the other end of the spectrum they also protect all of the academic community.

All universities have been trying to reformulate these codes in light of the Web 2.0 challenges. At Ryerson in 2006, a business professor, was "owned" on YouTube, and the university admin moved fast to squash the video, which was taken off YouTube fairly quickly, but they never delivered any universal university statement about the event and they only dealt with the event internally to that business class from what I know. However, they have been working on this policy since that time.

Most recently, at Oxford students have been fined for posting incriminating pictures of "disorderly" behaviour on Facebook, and the university has warned students to set their settings to friends only privacy levels:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/jul/17/digitalmedia.highereducation

In other words, the Student Code of Non-Academic Conduct has always had protections against any negative forms of university publicity which could affect the "value" and "reputation" of a university's degree conferring status. After all, who would want to go to a university where “x” happened? While that seems to be the line universities use in these cases, the code has obviously been abused in the past, and perhaps is being abused in these current cases.

I hope this background helps. I believe Ryerson’s code at this point is at a nascent phase, and if the university will ever be at a point where they will consider student input, it will be now.

Good to hear people are interested in these policy issues! I would definitely recommend writing your own response to the admin, and formulating how the code should be used if you want to change things now.

Here are two links to some previous posts on this topic from last year where I was harder on High School students for abusing Facebook for similar things, but having been familiarized with High School suspensions myself (for artistic reasons, of course), I believe university suspensions are of a whole different degree because they can affect a student for the rest of his or her life, whereas High School suspensions really never affect a person again afterward, unless of course, it’s The Breakfast Club:

1) Michael Geist:
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2007/05/geist-on-facebook-in-toronto-star.html

2) Supplement:
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2007/05/suspending-students-supplement.html

Ryan Bigge’s “Road-testing the $100 laptop's 'appropriate technology'”

Ryan Bigge continues to write thought provoking and insightful inquiries into our current technological situation. His most recent piece in the Ideas section of The Toronto Star (January 20, 2008) is unique for his interesting use of journalism across media. See:

1. Bigge’s original article in The Star (with an extra movie clip on how to use the laptop):
http://www.thestar.com/article/295647

2. Bigge’s Blogge (Yes, that’s humour) -- Extra excerpts from his article which were not included in the print piece are included on his blog:
http://thebiggeidea.blogspot.com/2008/01/one-more-underperformer.html

Bigge’s story is about the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC). The charitable act of being able to purchase a laptop for $400, also provides a laptop for a child in a developing country. Despite the feel good nature of the project, I feel there are two further conversations that need to be opened up here:

1) About media use in general.
2) About the $100 laptop as a solution to the digital divide.

I’ll tackle the first item as follows: In the print version of his article, Bigge wasn’t able to fit his entire story, and so he includes extra excerpts on his Blog which add a more balanced tone to what originally read more like a McLuhanesque, techno-humanist piece in favour of the technology. The Blog remarks offer more of critical perspective to the piece with discussion of some of the issues the project has created and faced.

Another interesting point in terms of media is that the print format couldn’t offer a complete tutorial on how the laptop works, so the article provided a hyperlink to the digital video explanation starring Bigge himself (as seen at the link above). This coordination of media may in fact entice some of the techno-phobic into spending more time on-line because of the limitations and technical constraints of the print product. I know it worked for me.

This extra mediated experience only increases the use of our limited resources in terms of time and the resources of the natural environment, but offers a moment on which to comment during our current in-between media period, where we straddle several media options at once in the West. These coordinated media strategies are becoming more prevalent, and offer many narrative threads to trace for the interested, while also allowing more points of access to grab the attention of a potential audience.

I’ll develop this thought further as a part of my discussion on the $100 laptop. I was fortunate to get to visit the OLPC headquarters in Boston over the summer. Here’s some pictures from my visit:

1) One of the $100 Laptops (photographed at MIT):





2) Laptop display table at the OLPC HQ:






3) The Testing Lab at OLPC HQ:






When I read Bigge’s article, I had some rare quibbles with his description of the OLPC project based on my experiences during my own OLPC visit. As I said, I usually agree whole heartedly with Bigge, but here's a few things that I didn't find in either his article or Blog:

If one were to read only the print version of his work, Bigge seems to sit on the fence a bit when mentioning the problem of the new cheap laptop market that's formed because of Negroponte’s brainchild. In his piece, he mentions a bias for ‘appropriate technology’ that performs the logical tasks that a device should, without any useless or superfulous features that are currently being marketed. I've become a bit more Naomi Klein-ish about liberal markets since visiting the OLPC though, instead of just hoping technology will change the world. Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine talks about the entrenchment of neo-liberal markets during crises, like wars and natural disasters. Basically the idea is that when a crisis hits, big business moves in (e.g. Iraq and Haliburton).

I think something that could be added to her list is "the digital divide" crisis. Specifically, we can ask do agrarian societies need to be (or want to be) attached to the Internet?

Further, is an abundance of cheap laptops without a cradle to grave waste management solution just another environmental disaster waiting to happen? Like the billion cell phones dying in landfills, these $100 laptops aren't bio-degradable...

NB - Clarification from SJ's comment below: The OLPC Project is trying to make the laptops 100% recyclable and have a minimum impact on the environment, but they are still in the process of accessing how to ensure proper disposal according to the following site: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Environmental_Impact

I know it's all high and mighty of me writing this on my own computer, but when we were down at the OLPC they talked about how kids in the developing world were already using laptops (perhaps, not the OLPC laptops yet) in rare situations to make pornography (to make money), or selling them (for money), or hacking (for money), or being beaten by adults who would then steal the laptops (to again sell for money) – that’s just to name a few issues. Overall, in terms of liberalization, could these laptops just be a way of creating armies of third world call centre employees out of a young, cheaply trained labour force, while also taking time away from children's time learning skills they need to survive in a non-digital society? Think scary, Kittlerian style discourse networks here of the variety that occurred around the creation of the typewriter (and now, of course, the laptop).

During my visit to the OLPC, we had a number of problems on the technical side as well. For example, getting the laptops to work in the mesh network never occurred, and obviously Bigge’s own laptop all alone here in Canada will have problems linking to other mesh-network-ready computers since there are none (until other people purchase them).

Another problem during our visit included the laptop’s operating system freezing on a number of the computers we were testing. To their credit, the OLPC project admitted openly they were working on all of these issues, and the system Bigge demonstrates in his video is definitely a bit different from the one that I remember playing with. Hopefully the bugs have been worked out.

The one thing that I was hopeful about with the OLPC project was their commitment to on-going maintenance of the technology, and their focus on going to places and educating people about use and care of the laptop. However, without sustained money, the laptops do break and the issues listed above develop when there is no money to fix them. Several of my peers during the visit were emphatic about embedding the laptops in an educational environment to create a vital culture of care. Without a care network, if (or when) those developing regions become emblazoned with other problems, which they often do, the child cannot eat the laptop, which most would consider a more pressing need, but the laptop could instead be used by others to download bomb making instructions.

I thought I'd write and see what others thought, especially those who have connections to the OLPC project?

Specifically, I know that some other SDP-ers have blogged about this previously, and one of you has done the same as Ryan Bigge and contributed to the give-one-get-one campaign -- hopefull informed discussion can assuage such fears and issues as those listed above:

- Give-one-get-one: http://dpignett.blog.usf.edu/2007/11/21/give-one-get-one

- Law Professor Wendy Seltzer on the project (A comment in this post talks about Korean Laptop Boot Camps for helping Koreans get over Internet addiction): http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2007/11/14/one-laptop-per-child-plus-one.html

- Other links and pictures from people during the summer visit to OLPC:

1. http://dpignett.blog.usf.edu/2007/07/21/mit-one-laptop-per-child

2. http://www.lexferenda.com/25072007/closing-the-loop-zuckerman-and-best-on-africa-and-technology/

3. http://ictlogy.net/2007/07/

4. http://www.jorisvanhoboken.nl/?p=66

Open CourseWare Consortium

I recommend taking a peak at the Open CourseWare Consortium site to see some of the interesting courses available there. The site is useful to see what is happening in different disciplines around the world from instructors who have the time and ability to post their entire course content and lecture notes on-line, without having a negative impact on their careers.

Open CourseWare Consortium:

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/

MIT Open CourseWare:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm

Social Networking Technologies

I've been developing a few lists of on-line tools for Informational Politics researchers and the Digital Humanities from various listservs that I'm on. Here are some recommendations for people to check out:

Oxford Internet Institute / Berkman Center Tools List:

1) Tools listed at the Oxford Internet Institute (July 2007): http://toujoursdeja.blogspot.com/2007/08/tools-for-humanities-researchers.html


Social Networking and Tracking Tools:

1) Infoscape Lab’s list of research centers and tools (including the Webivore): http://www.infoscapelab.ca/node/311
2) Pajek: http://iv.slis.indiana.edu/lm/lm-pajek.html
3) Builtwith.com: Identifies what codes are used in creating a website.
4) Trackmenot: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot
5) TechPresident.com: offers some interesting visualizations.
6) Dapper: http://www.dapper.net/
7) Many Eyes: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/
8) Dopplr: http://www.dopplr.com/main/login
9) Tubemogul: http://www.tubemogul.com/
10) Issuecrawler: http://www.govcom.org/Issuecrawler_instructions.htm and their tool section --http://tools.issuecrawler.net/beta/
11) Presidential Watch: http://presidentialwatch08.com/index.php/map/
12) Web Scraping Tool: http://www.merchantos.com/makebeta/php/scraping-links-with-php/
13) Gregarius (Blog tracker): http://gregarius.net/



Digital Humanities

1) Textual Analysis Portal (TAPoR) of Tools: http://tapor.humanities.mcmaster.ca/
2) NORA: http://noraproject.org/
3) Mandala: http://mandala.humviz.org/


Concept Mapping Software: From the ComPrac Listserv

1) John D. Smith’s del.icio.us list: http://del.icio.us/smithjd/mindmap
2) Cmap: http://cmap.ihmc.us/
3) Explore Brain: www.thebrain.com
4) MindJet MindManager (compatibility with the MS office products):
http://www.mindjet.com/us/
5) Mindmeister: http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/show/1171895
6) PersonalBrain
7) Freemind



The Real News

Also, if you haven’t heard about this new media initiative check it out. They’re hoping to launch before the next Presidential election.

http://www.therealnews.com/web/index.php

Congress of the Humanities 2007: CCA Conference

I recently attended the CCA Conference 2007 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan as a part of the Congress of the Humanities. The conference definitely demonstrated the vibrant nature of Communication scholarship in Canada. The field is alive and well. Most panels had an average of 15 – 20 people at each, despite having concurrent panels, and that was also with the competing nice weather during the latter half of the conference. A strong contingent from the York/Ryerson Joint Programme in Communication and Culture was also evident, which demonstrates the quality of research coming from our Programme. I jotted down some notes here on some highlights from some of the sessions I attended:

International Communication and Development: Beyond Mimicry?
Session 1: Communication : entre l’international et le local / Communication : Between the Global and the Local

Chair / Président(e) : Christian Agbobli

> David Harmes, Joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture, Ryerson & York Universities
International Broadcasting and Political Development in Afghanistan: A Case for Diasporic Nationalism

David Harmes gave a great summary of Canadian efforts in Afghanistan to build radio communities. His firsthand experience on the ground there always offers an interesting and critical view into the Canadian militaries efforts there. He noted the efforts to help democratize the media there, and have voices from the local community use the airwaves to improve their lives, while very much under the threat of openly sharing who they are on the air.


> Gordon Gow, University of Alberta
Hi-Tech Dreams, Local Tech Realities: Achieving Socially Sustainable Tsunami Warning in Sri Lanka

Gordon Gow’s research was a highlight of the conference for me. His work is very practical and explained some of the main issues in building sustainable communication systems to support a Tsunami warning network in Sri Lanka. The project he was working on used a variety of international Internet, cell phone messaging services, and satellite services. Some of the issues the project faced included the fact that there was a limited budget and that many agrarian societies do not feel the need to maintain technology. The diffusion or monetization of the technology was not a priority for many of the communities.

He offered the example that many communities stopped using their communication devices after the batteries died, and they did not have money to buy new ones or did not know how to replace the old ones. One method that definitely helped people to protect themselves was through shared narratives of how to deal with a Tsunami (in other words, good old fashion word of mouth). On one island a narrative had been passed down through the generations that if the waves in the ocean started to pull back from the shore, then you should run for cover. Nearly everyone survived the Tsunami on that island, except for a mentally challenged hippopotamus. Meanwhile an island only a few miles away had a high death rate, and did not possess this shared narrative.

Needless to say, sometimes technologies are not the solutions required, and in communities of low technological uptake, they have been using stories to educate the people on how to prepare against potential Tsunamis and other natural disasters.


> Jeremy Shtern, PhD, Département de communication, Université de Montréal
Communication for Development as Subject for Global Public Policy, as Site of International Institutional Reform: The First Internet Governance Forum (IGF)

Jeremy Shtern’s insights into the slow paced world of WSIS’s offspring the IGF were informative and helpful for understanding how the United States is still waffling on how to democratize the Internet internationally.



Political Economy of Communication, Cultural Industries and Public Policies
Économie politique de la communication, industries culturelles et politiques publiques

Chair / Président(e) : Abu Bhuiyan

> Jeremy Morris, PhD Student, Communications Studies, McGill University
MySpace.com: Political Economy and Social Network Sites

Jeremy continues to do some interesting stuff studying MySpace and other music sharing websites. I wish he’d do some more political economic studies of these sites, but he knows that. :-)


> Abu Bhuiyan, PhD Candidate, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
Internet: A Global Public Good or an Enabler of Digital Divides?

He raised some pertinent questions about the Internet, but he tended to played fast and loose in diagnosing the digital divide by arguing that net neutrality issues could be solved by creating public transmission lines. Most people argued with him that public transmission lines had been lost a longtime ago to the service providers.


> Jaleen Grove, Independent Scholar, Ryerson University
The Impact of Illustrators’ Online Communities on Recent Visual Communication

This panel had a bit of everything: music, the Internet, and a return to static images. Jaleen’s work offered a great summary of illustration history, which many in the room may not have been familiar with, but were definitely educated about after they left.


Status of knowledge / Statut du savoir

Chair / Président(e) : Darin Barney

> Darin Barney, Professor, McGill University
You Asked for It, You Got It: The Politicization of Science and Technology in Canada

Barney's work was on the four main ways Science is under attack by the Conservatives in Canada. It is a part of a larger work that he is currently developing, and he looked at recent changes with NSERC and SSHRC among other things. Always an engaging speaker, and I definitely will have to track to the copy of this work afterward.


> Meera Nair, Doctoral Candidate, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
Fair Dealing: Resisting Monopolies of Knowledge

Nair offered a well-researched review of Fair Dealing laws in Canada. I wish she focused on newer versions of these laws, especially in terms of digital issues, like Bill C-60, but of course time limited the talk.


> Paul Tiessen, Professor, English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University
Extending McLuhan: Sheila Watson and Media Theory in Canada, 1957 – 87

Tiessan’s work described the theme of amputation in Sheila Watson’s work, and provided a little known (by me) contrast to McLuhan’s work on the amplification of the human senses through technology.


Beyond those sessions, I attended my own, of course, which was another mixed bag that ended with my discussion of the developing "Narrative Network" theory, and the use of the spectrum to think through analytic problems. This paper is the developing methods section of my dissertation, and I think it was probably too abstract for the time of day that I presenting -- after lunch when everyone has the blood rush to their bellies:


Mouvements sociaux, médias, TIC et résistance / Social movements, media, ICTs and resistance

Chair / Président(e) : Dale Bradley

> Marian van der Zon, Instructor, Media Studies, Malaspina University College
Beyond Bridging: Community Creation through Micro-Radio

van der Zon's talking highlighted the activist nature of Micro-Radio, and offered a very practical how-to guide into this world.


> Dale Bradley, Professor, Communications, Popular Culture, and Film, Brock University
Hacking Craft: Design, Labour, and Resistance in the Open Source Software Movement and Morris’ Arts and Crafts Movement.

Bradley created a very laid back atmosphere for this panel, and his research on the Open Source Software movement provided some historical grounding for this panel. His looking back definitely complemented van der Zon's practical research and my leap into the theoretical stratosphere.


> Peter Malachy Ryan, PhD Candidate, Communication and Culture, York/Ryerson Universities
Network Aesthetics: Evaluating the Rhetoric of Distributed Structures

I usually feel that when I’m talking about theory that I’m far too abstract, and I have to cover too much information to properly engage with complex debates, so in this talk I came prepared with some diagrams and summaries. I had presented an earlier version of this paper in Ottawa at the Future of Communication Studies Conference, and I received some great feedback there. John Durham Peters argued at that time that he didn't see the power of narrative as being able to re-situate politics in the current digital age, calling that attitude "provincial". He saw Communication Studies becoming more rooted in the technological, with network-centric power continuing to take centre stage, and he looked to Germany for some of the more interesting research that is currently being done. In my research I am critical of Kittler's work, because I think the network can only take us so far. If people do care about the messages that are circulating on the network, there can be no consensual power. As such, I try to move away from Kittler's discourse networks to narrative networks, which focus on the subject and agency, without forgetting the materialities of the network.

Infoscape Lab and YouTube Analysis

Jean Burgess on the AoIR Listserv has put together a quick summary of people doing research on YouTube:

http://creativitymachine.net/2007/06/15/youtube-research-gazette/

Another good discussion on the "Layers of the Net" is also taking place. Here are some of the sources for the "original" discussion of the layers of the net (this list is pasted here more so I don't forget too):

1) Abbate's Inventing the Internet

2) M. A. Padlipsky's The Elements of Networking Style:
http://www.lafn.org/~ba213/mapstuff.html

3) Yochai Benkler talks about a Physical, Logical and Content layer:
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php?title=11._The_Battle_Over_the_Institutional_Ecology_of_the_Digital_Environment

4) The 5 layer TCP/IP model is defined in the early 1970's at ARPA (Vint Cerf):

Cerf, V., and R. Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication", IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. COM-22, No. 5, pp 637-648, May 1974.

5) The 7 layer OSI model: http://www.comsoc.org/livepubs/50_journals/pdf/RightsManagement_eid=136833.pdf


Here's another book I should read too (from the AoIR list):

Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines, by Steve Talbott http://www.knowprose.com/node/17646

Congress of the Humanities 2007: Society for Digital Humanities Sessions

At the Congress of the Humanities in Saskatchewan, I attended several sessions at the Society for Digital Humanities (SDH) conference: http://www.sdh-semi.org/conference2007.php. I was actually in Saskatoon to present at Canadian Communication Association sessions, but that didn't stop me from hitting the Digital Humanities and the Canadian Political Science Association conference before I presented later in the week at the CCA. I like to keep up on what is happening in those areas during my spare time, because my MA was in Humanities Computing and I'm now teaching in a Politics Department.

The SDH conference started earlier than the CCA conference, so I was able to see most of its presenters on the last day. The fact that there were no concurrent panels also helped.

Geoffrey Rockwell and Sean Gouglas (who was channeling Stéfan Sinclair because he was unable to attend) described some threats that are facing the Digital Humanities as a developing research field. Google was one of the more pressing threats that were mentioned on a few occasions. Google's ability to create textual tools and their massive server farm are making digitization projects question how to proceed into the future when GoogleBooks is pretty much taking on the project of digitizing everything; however, Google's commercialization imperative limits the tools they are developing, and how public's access to the digitized works are being filtered.

I'm more inclined to believe that this "crisis" narrative is the same one that is facing the Arts, Computer Sciences, and Information Studies, as well as many other newer disciplines and fields as a general malaise of the interdisciplinary shift in the university. The new media shift is placing all fields into technology's house, so to speak. I'm inclined to think what is unique about the Digital Humanities is the community of scholars and their tool platforms. The group of people are the discipline, and the social network is reflected in the tools they create and share -- perhaps the Digital Humanities is one of the first "new" disciplines that reflects the digital social network paradigm shift (like the Association of Internet Researchers), rather than the traditional physical space of a department in a university.

Also, for the moment, Google will most likely keep developing and mostly digitizing the commercial books as their focus, before targeting the Humanities in my opinion. They may have the storage capacity to digitize and save texts, but the process of digitizing books will slow them down for some time, despite their nifty digitizaing machines. Google Analytics may also be offering some textual analysis tools, but I believe the Digital Humanities will always need to develop their own set of tools and be critical of the commercial tools that exist.

Something else that differed in the Digital Humanities Conference from the CCA and CPSA was the fact that I did not hear any talk of supporting Net Neutrality here; however, the support for Open Source code and Open documents was apparent. Geoffrey Rockwell, indeed, ended his talk by emphasizing the opportunity to work with Google so that some the Digital Humanities might be able to coordinate tools that would help in the analysis of literary and artistic texts. This is something the other conferences would never consider.

Again, in contrast, the CPSA is still very traditional in its political science focus, and I saw no informational politics covered at the conference. There were scholars interested in IP Law and Net Neutrality, but this was more attached to SSHRC issues of developing research, not technologically themed papers. This looks like an opportunity for the CPSA to open up their doors to a new generation of research.

Other sessions at the SDH focused on new techniques of annotating texts using database techniques and how to prepare books for digitization. Geoffrey Rockwell's blog covers these sessions well. I found the Gouglas and Rockwell talk to be the most engaging in terms of my own research on narrative networks though.

Infoscape Lab Media Coverage

The Toronto Star's Susan Delacourt included a nice section in the Saturday paper on the Infoscape Lab's findings from last week: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/220723

Suspending Students: Supplement

I guess I could supplement my previous comment with an actual case of student free speech:

York settles with student who was banned over protest
By ELIZABETH CHURCH [Education Reporter]
The Globe and Mail [Toronto]
Tue 8 May 2007, Page A10
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070508.SETTLEMENT08/TPStory/
National

YouTube Revenue Sharing

YouTube has started to offer revenue sharing with its prolific original content creators -- see the story here:
http://www.youtube.com/blog

Does this mean that Political Parties and Bloggers will now begin to make some money for their actions (or were they already a part of "YouTube's professional content partners")?

Geist on Facebook (in the Toronto Star)

I agree with most of Micheal Geist's Toronto Star article http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1925/135/; however, I have to quibble with the point concerning the students being suspended. I think the point of their suspension was that their "conversation" was not out of earshot, and what a better time to let them know in life that on-line documents can easily be made public, unlike conversations (unless they are recorded). Also, we do not know the full extent of these students' school files, so that leaves the reason for their suspensions open to some speculation. My point is that all K-12 schools and universities have Student Codes of Conduct, and one of the key components is that students can not make their school look bad.

When I was in high school, I certainly remember students being suspended for things they said in conversations, especially if the school administration was in earshot. I can't see how this is any different, or how it should be a protected part of free speech, especially when education, in many ways, aims to foster civilized and respectful cultural behaviour acceptable for life and success beyond the walls of the institution. In this instance, a warning and an apology might have sufficed, but really the suspension is not something out of line with previous practices given that the students were on a network with the schools name on it. In fact, I can’t think of a better way for students to learn this lesson en masse than a harsh penalty being made to ensure that they understand what the limits and boundaries are of privacy, and also how principles are used to ensure a safe, secure, open and inclusive learning environment.

A story on this issue can be found here: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=479f0b59-d37a-4797-9aff-b99bf3957fec&k=65802

My First Blog Post Finally Recovered: Why I Blog

I’ve been meaning to re-post this final popular entry from my old blog on the topic “Why I Blog”, and I’ve finally got around to recovering it completely. I’ve even updated it at this point, and I think it’s rather interesting that I’ve come to terms with my old blog through recovering and putting it to rest about the time that my dissertation is starting to be wrapped up.

In short, the main reasons that I blog are as follows:

* To archive effective research and teaching resources that I come across
* To openly share my research because it is publicly funded
* To network with other scholars from around the world with similar research interests
* To connect with potential research subjects since my research has an on-line component
* To explore this relatively new medium via formal practice and engagement with the technology and the social agents who use it
* To present alternative views on political issues and critically question events that the mainstream media often ignores

I have found that blogging has been a great asset for all of these above reasons. Overall, it has allowed me to connect with many people that I would have possibly never come into contact with before, and has enhanced all aspects of my life through honing my technology and research skills, as well as frequently providing me with academic opportunities and employment contacts. After using a blog for a few years now, I truly think people can ill afford not to use such a valuable tool in today’s networked world to communicate with people, especially if your career requires you to connect with others.

For another example of the uses of a Blog: In the Google Analytics age I’m able to even quantify some of this value in that my blog has attracted regularly between 300-400 unique visitors each month, from countries around the world, including (in order of most unique views):

1. Canada
2. United States
3. United Kingdom
4. Ireland
5. Thailand
6. India
7. Australia
8. Palestinian Territory
9. Philippines
10. Japan
11. France
12. Netherlands
13. Turkey
14. Singapore
15. Malaysia
16. South Africa
17. Sweden
18. Nicaragua
19. Guatemala
20. Germany
21. Finland
22. Russia
23. Indonesia
24. Venezuela
25. Ukraine
26. Vietnam
27. Spain
28. Slovenia
29. Poland
30. Algeria
31. Bahrain
32. Italy
33. South Korea
34. Iran
35. Jordan
36. Norway
37. Mexico
38. Brazil
39. Portugal
40. Nigeria
41. Egypt
42. Botswana
43. Ghana

I’ve only been using Google Analytics since January, so at this rate I’ll hopefully have had a visitor to my site from every country on the planet by the end of the year (hey, you gotta have goals, even if they don’t necessarily have any substance behind them). I’m confident that I’ll at least be able to get New Zealand, Greenland, Iceland, and China added to the list shortly, but really that’s just my virtual ego talking. :-)

Jokes aside, the Google Analytics tracking tools are interesting in how they present the blogosphere as a large lurking space; Bloggers tend to link and comment on one another’s work, but the predominant Internet behaviour for the average Internet user is not to interact or leave a proclaimed trace, instead voyeurism rules. In other words, without the Internet Protocol address tracking of Google Analytics, or a similar tool, I might not know how useful to others particular blog entries are, beyond word of mouth feedback, personal e-mails, blogger links and comments posted on the blog. However, even without these tools, the blog is useful for archiving and networking, of course.

The Google Analytics tools simply help a blogger, or any writer for that matter, begin to identify how to craft better stories that others might be interested in. For instance, the top blog entries that people have been reading on this blog are listed as follows:

1. Facebook Policies:
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/03/university-facebook-policies-breakfast.html

2. My Dissertation Proposal:
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2007/10/phd-dissertation-proposal-sshrc.html

3. ICT Tools:
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/03/tools-from-mars-and-other-places.html

4. Comprehensive Exam Questions:
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2007/05/comprehensive-exams-questions-actual.html

5. Getting a Job in the Public Service:
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/02/jean-mcnulty-talk-getting-job-in-public.html

danah boyd's insight that she found any topic she wrote on Facebook would start to attract attention to her blog is quite evident in the above list. These insights into what kind of information people are looking for can only help to improve a researcher’s abilities to craft and engage with pertinent social issues that can affect others in a public space.

You don’t have to take my word for it though; here are some other bloggers thoughts on why they blog which I have found quite eloquent:

* Stefan Sinclair: http://stefansinclair.name/node/83
* Ismael Pina Lopez: http://ictlogy.net/20070729-oii-sdp-2007-epilogue-last-thoughts-about-web-sciences-and-academic-blogging-or-why-did-not-academia-came-up-with-wikipedia-and-some-acknowledgments-too/
* Daithí Mac Síthigh has a bit of a humourous take on Blogging: “I use it as a shoebox, as a sandpit, and for various research-related purposes. My non-law interests include politics, music, baseball, radio, libraries and more - all get the occasional mention. I also post speeches, papers and presentations, where possible.”
* danah boyd's warning "Blogging isn't safe": To limit my enthusiasm for blogging though, I think boyd's warning about the potential pitfalls to blogging is a good balance here.

Thinking through boyd's arguments, I know that I am definitely constructing a particular social space in my work that focuses on the following themes: post-secondary education, ICT tools, innovation, narrative analysis, social networks and politics. Beyond those few topics, I don't let much of my personal life appear on these pages, because I hope to focus the discussion on public matters, without having too much crossover with my private life (although the two are, of course, linked intimately). Generally though, I hope that others do find this blog useful (within safe limits, of course), because I know I sure have!

Okay, from now on, I will be posting only on my dissertation research as I get to work wrapping that up over the next few months.