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Online Democratic Deliberation in a Time of Information Abundance

September 14, 2007 at 11:17 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, deliberation, design, digital humanities, gemeinschaft, governance, humanities computing, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

This article of mine recently appeared in the journal, Fast Capitalism.

The intensified use of the Internet by civil society groups and governments for political purposes has left many questions unexplained—especially in terms of the Internet’s effects upon deliberative democratic processes. The Internet was first imagined as a means to revitalize deliberative processes. However, poor design and lack of usability research meant that many ambitions went largely unrealized. With a new wave of Internet technologies, ‘deliberative design’ has become even more important to stem what many claim is a trend towards political fragmentation and disaggregation. In a time of ‘information abundance’ mounting political communication online may also undermine collectivist, deliberative democratic processes, distinct from the ambition to renew these processes. There is therefore a pressing need to design Internet technologies that serve deliberative democracy, rather than unwittingly undermine it (link)

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The (Opensource) Economy of Regard

August 3, 2007 at 2:09 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, open source, software, technology, web2.0

An excellent article about why the open source software movement works by Dalle, David, Ghosh, and Wolak and presented 2 years ago at the Oxford Internet Institute.

http://siepr.stanford.edu/programs/OpenSoftware_David/Economy-of-Regard_8+_OWLS.pdf

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Australian Conservatives give MySpace a wide berth

July 18, 2007 at 9:56 am · Filed under media, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

From the Melbourne Age. And Ironic considering that MySpace is owned by the biggest Australian Conservative of them all.

The Federal Liberal Party appears to be snubbing MySpace, after the social network publicly criticised the Liberals’ response to its new Impact political channel.

The channel - which MySpace says facilitates direct communication between politicians, non-profit organisations and voters - officially launched last Thursday, with profiles for 20 individual politicians.

It is understood the Prime Minister, John Howard, refused to create his own profile page because he did not want to lend his identity to a commercial organisation. (link)

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Towards an institutional typology of digital humanities centres

May 11, 2007 at 1:07 am · Filed under communuity informatics, digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, social media, software

Thanks to John Unsworth for the link…

This Wiki presents a structured list of departments, centres, institutes and other institutional forms that variously instantiate humanities computing. For each entry a link is provided to the relevant site on the WWW and a brief description given. This list represents an ongoing attempt to derive a basic typology from a complex variety of activities and so to provide institutional models for the field. Despite the fact that national academic conventions vary quite widely and cultural differences make comparisons difficult if not hazardous, no attempt has been made here to account for them. The intention is not to define what is happening in the field world-wide, rather it is to provoke discussion leading either to consensus or at least to an improved understanding of the conditions under which computing humanists work. Constructive criticisms and clarifications are not merely welcome, they are to the point.

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Democratisation and the Networked Public Sphere

April 12, 2007 at 8:32 pm · Filed under events, political communication, social media, software, web2.0

* Panel Discussion with dana boyd, Trebor Scholz, and Ethan Zuckerman

Friday, April 13, 2007, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
New York City
Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff, and alumni with valid ID

This evening at the Vera List Center for Art & Politics will discuss the potential of sociable media such as weblogs and social networking sites to democratize society through emerging cultures of broad participation.

danah boyd will argue four points. 1) Networked publics are changing the way public life is organized. 2) Our understandings of public/private are being radically altered 3) Participation in public life is critical to the functioning of democracy. 4) We have destroyed youths’ access to unmediated public life. Why are we now destroying their access to mediated public life? What consequences does this have for democracy?

Trebor Scholz will present the paradox of affective immaterial labor. Content generated by networked publics was the main reason for the fact that the top ten sites on the World Wide Web accounted for most Internet traffic last year. Community is the commodity, worth billions. The very few get even richer building on the backs of the immaterial labor of very very many. Net publics comment, tag, rank, forward, read, subscribe, re-post, link, moderate, remix, share, collaborate, favorite, write. They flirt, work, play, chat, gossip, discuss, learn and by doing so they gain much: the pleasure of creation, knowledge, micro-fame, a “home,” friendships, and dates. They share their life experiences and archive their memories while context-providing businesses get value from their attention, time, and uploaded content. Scholz will argue against this naturalized “factory without walls” and will demand for net publics to control their own contributions.

Ethan Zuckerman will present his work on issues of media and the developing world, especially citizen media, and the technical, legal, speech, and digital divide issues that go alongside it. Starting out with a critique of cyberutopianism, Zuckerman will address citizen media and activism in developing nations, their potential for democratic change, the
ways that governments (and sometimes corporations) are pushing back on their ability to democratize.

About the Panelists:

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communications. Her dissertation focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. In particular, she is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts amidst invisible audiences. This work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a broader grant on digital youth and informal learning.
http://www.zephoria.org/

Trebor Scholz is a media theorist, artist, and activist who is interested in the economics of sociable media and networked social life in relation to politics and education. As founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), he contributed essays to several books, journals, and periodicals and co-edited “The Art of Free Cooperation” (forthcoming). He is currently professor and researcher in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo and research fellow at the Hochschule fuer Kunst und Gestaltung, Zurich (Switzerland).
http://collectivate.net/journalisms

Ethan Zuckerman is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His research focuses on the distribution of attention in mainstream and new media, and on the use of technology for international development. With Rebecca MacKinnon, he leads a project called “Global Voices” which focuses on using weblogs around the world to close gaps in mainstream media coverage. In 2000, Ethan founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer corps that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa.
http://ethanzuckerman.com/

* This event is presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “The Public Domain.”

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What is Annodex (hypertextual video)?

February 27, 2007 at 2:28 am · Filed under digital humanities, humanities computing, media, social media, software, video, web2.0

This fantastic film annotation (ie. hypertextual video) project is being developed by the CSRIO in Australia and other institutions.

When http, html and URIs were invented, the World Wide Web took its shape. With the technology provided here, we extend the Web to audio-visual data: Annodex, cmml and temporal URIs allow the creation of Webs of Videos. They also enable Web search engines to crawl and index audio-visual content. Just apply anything you know from the Web to audio-visual content - that’s Annodex (link).

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UK Government Restrictions on Street Photography

February 27, 2007 at 1:51 am · Filed under governance, political communication, politics, social media, software, technology, web2.0

(the software for No 10 was developed by MySociety.org)
Signing up to ask the Prime Minister to Stop proposed restrictions
regarding photography in public places

The UK Govt are about to propose restrictions on photography in
public places which could make street photography and documentary
photography against the law. There's a petition on the Downing St
website against the Government's proposals to restrict the use of
photography in public areas. Sign up to the petition now. (thanks to Nettime for the link)

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Photography/

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Vidipedia

February 21, 2007 at 11:37 pm · Filed under media, social media, software, technology, video, web2.0

After 640-802, many professionals think that it is of no use to write 70-290 as well. This is why they skip it and go for 646-204 directly. Although this makes them eligible for 642-901 , but majority flunks the real exam.

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A wiki for video…check out this research at the the University of Newcastle (UK) in the field of ‘media computing’ within computer science (thanks to Tobias for the Link)

Releasing the hidden value contained in the tens of millions of hours of the world�s media archives is dependent on the widespread of these collections in order to facilitate access. However, archive owners are reluctant to commit to the costs of digitization until two key enablers occur: (a) A cost effective mechanism to annotate the collection such that potential users can search audio/video content to identify items that will satisfy their information need; and (b) A working business model that supports the costs of digitization by demonstrating new revenue streams as a result of making the collection available. The Vidipedia project seeks to address these needs by examining the potential for community based annotation and identifying a business model that supports it. The project will create a tool that will address the challenges of archiving, search and discovery for producers and consumers of multimedia content. Vidipedia will also enable interoperability at the semantic level between services and systems that support inter-enterprise.

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timeXchange Project

February 20, 2007 at 7:45 pm · Filed under software, web2.0

Another interesting application from the Web 2.0 world is timeXchange.net based in Chicago. For the increasing number of us whose work is project oriented, this system offers a easy way to manage and track expenses. Thanks to Joe PieKarz for the (Link).

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What is the Haystack Project?

February 20, 2007 at 4:00 am · Filed under social media, software, web2.0

The Haystack Project is investigating approaches designed to let people manage their information in ways that make the most sense to them. By removing arbitrary application-created barriers, which handle only certain information “types” and relationships as defined by the developer, we aim to let users define their most effective arrangements and connections between views of information. Such personalization of information management will dramatically improve everyone’s ability to find what they need when they need it. We are currently exploring these ideas…(link)

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Summit on Digital Tools in the Humanities

February 16, 2007 at 11:35 pm · Filed under design, e-science, education, events, humanities computing, software, technology, web2.0

This site from IATH (the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) at the University of Virginia contains the findings of a summit held in 2006 about digital tools in the humanities. The report is excellent reading; and points to the need for innovations in the humanities such as ICT Guides (link)

Digital tools are enabling and enriching scholarship in the humanities to a great extent. Within the past few years, humanities scholars have begun to design, develop, and apply digital tools for their own scholarship. Both the tool-building and tool-using communities are growing, and there is a need for a summit that can assess the state of development of digital tools for humanities research, as well as the effectiveness of the supporting and integrating cyberinfrastructure.

What defines a digital tool? How are they used by the humanities community? What are the best tools? What tools are missing? How can we develop a common vocabulary so that we can develop and share tools across various communities? What does the community need to do so that these tools are more interoperable? What are the grand challenges for building digital tools for humanities research?

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What is ReDRess?

February 1, 2007 at 8:12 pm · Filed under humanities computing, software

ReDress is a project from the University of Lancaster here in England. It is within the field of E-Social Science (more on that later) and is focused upon building online collaborative tools for Social Science researchers through the application of the Open-Source software called Sakai. They are funded by JISC; an organisation that funds and promotes ICTs in education and has a diverse portfolio of projects in various academic fields in the UK.

ReDress have built a repository of academic presentations by Social Scientists (video) that can be searched via the matching textual transcripts and Power Point presentations (it is a mountain of work to do this).

They have also built a video conferencing system for Sakai and a couple of other tools that are useful for online collaborations by researchers. Online collaborative tools are generally referred to as Virtual Research Environments (or VREs) and JISC has funded a number of initiatives throughout the UK. It is hoped to include a VRE of some description on the project that I am working on (ICT Guides) so Digital Humanists can discuss and share ideas around some of the tools and resources on the guide. I will keep you informed.

 

 

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What is CivicSpace?

January 25, 2007 at 9:36 pm · Filed under deliberation, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

This service used the Drupal content management system?

The CivicSpace On Demand service provides any individual a simple, web-based solution to the problem of bringing individuals and groups together on the internet. Communicate with supporters via a website and e-newsletters. Offer them opportunities to act in support of your cause by making an online donation, volunteering or attending an event. Keep track of your supporters in a powerful, integrated central database. No software to install or maintain: all it takes is your web browser (link).

 

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What is Drupal?

January 25, 2007 at 9:30 pm · Filed under deliberation, political communication, politics, social media, software, web2.0

One of the best content management systems around; especially for civic applications.

Drupal is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to set up scores of different kinds of web sites, including

  • community web portals and discussion sites
  • corporate web sites/intranet portals
  • personal web sites
  • aficionado sites
  • e-commerce applications
  • resource directories  

 

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Mobile Social Software Applications

December 11, 2006 at 9:20 am · Filed under mobile, social media, software, web2.0

Here is a list of Mobile phone social software applications. (Thanks to Timo Arnall for the link)

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