Internet meets Society (politics on the web links)

August 9, 2010 at 10:48 pm · Filed under political communication, politics, web2.0

I gave a lecture today in a first year breath subject at the University of Melbourne on the web and its use within politics. I have listed the sites shown here (from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 approaches) (link to ppt. presentation)

• Melbourne Indymedia
• http://indymedia.org.au/melbourne
• S11.org(ant-globalisation protest movement website…on the Pandora Archive)
• http://pandora.nla.gov.au/parchive/2000/S2000-Sep-14//www.s11.org/
• Realjeff.com (1999 Victorian State Election…on the Pandora Archive)
• http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nph-arch/1999/Z1999-Sep-24/http://www.realjeff.com/index.htm
• Engage Media (Local Melbourne activist group using ‘Web 2′ techniques)
• http://www.engagemedia.org/
• The Death of Ian Tomlinson (London 2009)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HECMVdl-9SQ
• Mash-up Australia (data sources)
• http://mashupaustralia.org/data-sources/
• Suburban Trends (one of the winners from Mash-up Australia)
• http://mashupaustralia.org/mashups/suburban-trends/
• They work for you (UK Mash-up of Hansard)
• http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
• GetUp (Melbourne activist group)
• http://www.getup.org.au/
• Major Parties
• http://www.alp.org.au
• http://www.greens.org.au
• http://www.liberal.org.au

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TED Talks: How to make the data look interesting…

February 16, 2010 at 10:08 am · Filed under web2.0

You’ve never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called “developing world.”

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Clay Shirky on social media, communities, and Open Hack Day

October 21, 2009 at 9:29 am · Filed under collaboration, social media, web2.0

New York University professor Clay Shirky, an expert on social media, kicked off Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day NYC 2009 with a thoughtful keynote on what motivates people to participate in online communities (Thanks to Leigh B. for the link)

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Social Media vs the Dictator – Clay Shirky

September 22, 2009 at 1:02 pm · Filed under political communication, politics, social media, web2.0

Lessons learned. The social context of technological-use is as important as the technology itself (try telling that to the practical minded Dictator!)

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Quick Response: Oxford Social Media Convention 2009 #oxsmc09

September 21, 2009 at 5:14 pm · Filed under conferences, events, internet, political communication, video, video diary, web2.0

(Transcript below if you can’t follow my polemical prose; and sorry but the synchronisation in this clip has a mind of its own).

I attended the Oxford Social Media Convention 2009 on Friday (18 September) at the Said Business School. The theme of the Convention was ‘assessing the evolution, impact and potential of social media’; a fairly monumental tasks for a one day convention with speakers from both sides of the Atlantic and from the Academy, business, media, and politics. The Convention was ordered around panel discussion with a lot of participation from the audience. At times subversive and always humorous ‘tweets’ from the audience were also projected on the wall behind the speakers (we voted to do this earlier in the day).

Rather than divide my time between all the speakers, I will concentrate on two of the most distinctive speakers that hopefully convey the timbre of the conference. The first speaker is Mathew Hindman, an academic at the University of Phoenix and author of the recently published ‘The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton University Press; 2009). The other speaker I will discuss is Kara Swisher, the Technology Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
Read the rest of this entry »

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State of the Blogosphere

September 13, 2009 at 5:36 pm · Filed under blogs, web2.0

Here is the annual Technorati State of the Blogosphere (2008) report:

Welcome to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially. Our bloggers were generous with their thoughts and insights. Thanks to all of the bloggers who took the time to respond to our survey (link).

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EngageMedia

September 7, 2009 at 3:04 pm · Filed under politics, projects, video, web2.0

EngageMedia is a video sharing site about social justice and environmental issues in the Asia Pacific, located in Melbourne in Australia, just a few doors up from my old house in Napier Street, Fitzroy. They also distribute their own developed plug-ins. This is a sophisticated crew that know their social software.!

EngageMedia uses the power of video, the internet and free software technologies to affect social and environmental change. We believe independent media and free and open technologies are fundamental to building the movements needed to challenge social injustice and environmental damage, as well as to provide and present solutions.

EngageMedia works with independent filmmakers, video activists, technologists, campaigners and social movements to generate wider audiences for their vital messages and move people to action (link).

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‘Tools for Collaborative Scholarly Editing over the Web’

September 7, 2009 at 12:41 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, digital humanities, digitisation, web2.0

University of Birmingham,24-25 September, 2009.

This workshop will review and address the making of tools for collaborative scholarly editing over the web. The workshop leaders joins partners in the COST-ESF Interedition project (http://www.interedition.eu), which is focussing – as is the JISC-funded Virtual Manuscript Room project — on Europe-wide creation of infrastructure and tools for collaborative scholarly editing. The Australian Aust-e-Lit project will bring advanced experience of the making and working of collaborative tools with in for a national scholarly digital library. The workshop will allow key participants in Interedition, Aust-e-Lit, and in similar enterprises outside Europe to exchange information with UK scholars active in the area, and to explore common problems and possibilities for further collaboration (link).

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eResearch Australasia Newsletter

September 7, 2009 at 10:20 am · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, eresearch, web2.0

The eResearch field in Australasia produces a monthly newsletter to inform punters of developments in the field. It is published online and via email.

A monthly newsletter carrying items of interest to the Australasian eResearch community is published via the mailing list eresearch-announce@eresearch.edu.au and archived here.  If you would like to subscribe, send a plain text message to majordomo@eresearch.edu.au with the words subscribe eresearch-announce in the message body. You can unsubscribe at any time.

If you have an item you would like to include in the newsletter, please send it to newsletter@eresearch.edu.au.  The newsletter is published the first business day of each month, and submissions are due two business days prior to that.  Each item should be no more than 150 words of plain text with a link for further information (link to newsletter)

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Probing questions in the Digital Humanities?

September 6, 2009 at 11:35 am · Filed under digital humanities, web2.0

The ‘Digital Humanities’ is a very difficult field partly because is traverses that very treacherous chasm between the academic and non-academic. Here is a polemic I wrote on Arts-humanities.net on a forum for the DRHA Conference that starts in Belfast today (and if you ask me nicely I will give examples).

____________________________-

<soapbox>

The essence of the humanities is rational and informed debate. It is about divergent positions of narrative based authorial argument, both political and interpretative, as a means of understanding the human condition. I am very concerned that the field of ‘Digital Humanities’; if this is what DRHA is about, has become separated from the broader concerns and methods of the humanities. I am also worried that the field lacks the academic confidence and conceptual sophistication needed to engage with the complexities of the human condition and has become technocratic, neutral, managerial, and increasingly socially irrelevant.

Where is the passion in the field, where is the esteem, where is the fields sense of social justice, academic merit, and purposeful academic direction? And where is the energy for academic debate focussed upon meaningful and non-trivial, probing questions posed to plum the dark mysteries of humanity? What sort of empirical trivia have we allowed to colonise the humanities through our digital experiments, to usurp the more challenging academic ‘methods’ of synthesis, empathy, and judgement? Where is the conceptual innovation in the field?

I have been to the past 2  DRHA conferences and have generally enjoyed them, but I am increasingly frustrated with ‘technological parochialism’ and the increasing computerisation of what is already know. I wish I was coming this year so I could critically challenge and perhaps applaud some of the assumptions and claims in your work; this is after all our jobs, but I can only manage a few online posts here this year.

Good luck, go hard, and keep engaging with significant questions and if the computer cant help you on this journey, throw it in the Lagen River and get on with it.

<soapbox/>

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NINES Project: Ninteenth Century Scholarship Online (Peer Review system)

September 2, 2009 at 11:13 am · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, web2.0

The Peer review system for the NINES project may be of interest to punters.

Digital humanities projects have long lacked a framework for peer review and thus have often had difficulty establishing their credibility as true scholarship. NINES exists in part to address this situation by instituting a robust system of review by some of the most respected scholars in the field of nineteenth-century studies, British and American.

NINES provides peer-review of digital resources and archives created by scholars in nineteenth-century studies. Our Editorial Boards locate reviewers to evaluate both the intellectual content and the technical structure of each project submitted for inclusion in NINES. See below for a set of General Guidelines and Peer Review Criteria.

As part of the peer-review process, NINES requires the submission of metadata describing the objects within the resource. This metadata (in the form of RDF) is largely based on fields such as author, title, data, and course. It also includes a set of genres relevant to nineteenth-century studies (link)

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Humanities text-mining in the Digital Library (MONK)

August 26, 2009 at 1:37 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, web2.0

Abstract

MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) is a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study. It supports both micro analyses of the verbal texture of an individual text and macro analyses that let you locate texts in the context of a large document space consisting of hundreds or thousands of other texts. Shuttling between the “micro” and the “macro” is a distinctive feature of the MONK environment, where you may read as closely as you wish but can also practice many forms of what Franco Moretti has provocatively called “distant reading.”

Website

http://www.monkproject.org/

Principal Investigator
John Unsworth
Funding
$999,883, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

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Survey: Virtual Reseach Environment Collaboartive Landscape Study

August 25, 2009 at 1:47 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, collaboration, web2.0

What is a VRE?

“…a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is an an online framework of collaborative tools and resources that allow researchers to share and re-use data, combine services, and undertake tasks to promote new collaborative research practices….”

The VRE Collaborative Landscape Study project is one of several studies commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to research on-line research collaboration in Virtual Research Environments (VREs). The focus of our study is to scope developments in VREs around the world and set them in relation to the activities in the UK.

The study aims to stimulate debate about the benefits of research collaboration facilitated by Virtual Research Environments so as to assist the JISC to provide services and strategies to support it.

The project is being undertaken by the Centre for e-Research at King’s College London and the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford.

If you are a user, developer, or provide technical support for VREs, your input would be most welcome .

http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/kcl/vrelandscape

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New videos show how researchers use Virtual Research Environments

August 18, 2009 at 4:09 pm · Filed under Virtual Reseach Environments, web2.0

Press release

New videos show how researchers use advanced technology

New videos showing how JISC is helping researchers achieve faster, better
and different research through virtual research environments have just been
released.

The videos feature projects from JISC’s virtual research environment (VRE)
programme, which is trying to find ways to connect people and speed up
research processes across disciplines. These include astronomy, physics,
electronics, chemistry and the study of ancient documents.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Oxford Internet Surveys

August 12, 2009 at 2:50 pm · Filed under governance, internet, web2.0

(Another important ‘big picture’ Internet impact study from the Oxford Internet Institute).

Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS) research is designed to offer detailed insights into the influence of the Internet on everyday life in Britain. Launched in 2003 by the Oxford Internet Institute, OxIS is an authoritative source of information about Internet access, use and attitudes. Some of the areas covered include: digital and social inclusion and exclusion; regulation and governance of the Internet; privacy, trust and risk concerns; social networking and entertainment; and online education (link).

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