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Academic Blogging Bulletin |
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Monday, 27 November 2006 |
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As usual if you wait long enough between blog posts you end up with a whole pile of potential ideas for publication. The following are some of the key ones recently across the BlogScholar desk:
- A big discussion in the social sciences these days is the ways and means of conducting online or virtual ethnographies. It is one of those exsciting times when the theory of a research method is taking shape through practice. It is inspired by the need for a real-time response from researchers with access to mountains of real time data about how people are living their lives. According to anthropologist Kambiz Kamrani as people "around the world proactively post to their blogs, stream if not lead parts of their lives online, virtual anthropologists now vicariously live amongst them, at home, at work, out on the streets".
- It is more and more common in research seminars here at the University of London to encounter projects based on the emerging Internet of Things. It describes a world where users of the Internet are numbered in the billions with humans in the minority. It seems like ages ago that we first started to here of how our fridge was going to order the milk when it is empty but there may be a far greater epochal shift underway with the arrival of a ubiquitos network society.
- BlogScholar posted a while back about the project to Google Bomb Egypt in an effort to draw attention to political activism and arrests in the country. Recent posts from inside the country indicate academics continue to run the highest risk of arrest for experssing political views: "When a politically active person is a blogger as well as an academic, the odds are increased exponentially that they will get detained".
- Meanwhile World-Wide-Web founder Tim Berners Lee is leading a team investigating models for the future of the Web. It sounds, at least in principle, as if an olive branch is offered from computing to social science as the growing recognition that use of the Web is both a practice of technical skills and a social practice gathers steam: "The Web is an engineered space created through formally specified languages and protocols. However, because humans are the creators of Web pages and links between them, their interactions form emergent patterns in the Web at a macroscopic scale. These human interactions are, in turn, governed by social conventions and laws. Web science, therefore, must be inherently interdisciplinary; its goal is to both understand the growth of the Web and to create approaches that allow new powerful and more beneficial patterns to occur".
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