So far there are just four public lectures available (most on foreign affairs) but more are promised. See this page about podcasts.
PS While on the subject of podcasting I recently came across an extensive podcast archive of audio and video lectures from Indiana University’s School of Library and Information Science.
My first degree back in the 80s was in English so from time to time I enjoy dipping back into literature. In this case I combined my interest in social Internet applications with literature by listening to Conrad’s Lord Jim as an audiobook thanks to a reading by a volunteer at Librivox (which recruits volunteers to read public domain books).
I am obviously moving away from the literary criticism of my first degree towards a more sociological mindset - I found myself thinking “Conrad’s minute observation of the way people interact and behave is so impressive. It reminds me of Erving Goffman“. I wonder what my favourite English prof Sandy Leggatt would think of me now…
David Brake
I went looking just now for references to two highly influential books about the media - Thompson, J. B. (1995) The Media and Modernity : A Social Theory of the Media, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No Sense of Place : The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York.
For the former, Google Scholar found 442 references. For the latter it found 486 references.
I also tried looking up references to those books in four leading academic reference databases the Web of Knowledge, Elseviers normally-excellent Scopus, the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences and Communication Abstracts (all four require academic subscriptions to access).
Whether searching for author name or title, the first two found very few records, almost all of them to do with academic papers these authors had written rather than the books in question. The IBSS at least found some reviews of the books in academic journals which was some help and Communication Abstracts contained a short summary of the Meyrowitz book but neither was much help in finding books referenced by other books either.
Admittedly, these databases are primarily aimed at indexing and cross-referencing papers, but for better or worse much of the scholarship in media studies is published in books (or book chapters).
It could be that I failed to use the right syntax to bring up the references I needed Web of Knowledges can be a little tricky in places - and the Google Scholar citations dont give you as much information (eg abstracts) once you have found them - doubtless many of them are of little utility - but considering the short length of time Google Scholar has been working I am impressed at the speed with which it is closing the distance to its competition.
Is there a trick I have missed?
A while back I wrote about Questionpro as part of a posting about tools academics might find useful and (on my personal blog) as part of a roundup of online questionnaire tools. They do indeed have lots of features and a free academic trial but be warned - if you need to go back to the survey you used after the six month trial is over - even just to get at your existing data - you’ll have to pay. Not only that but you’ll have to give them your credit card details and agree to monthly payments (at least $15) which you will then have to remember to cancel when you’ve got what you need.
Admittedly all of this is documented on their site but it’s still annoying that they couldn’t cut me some slack to get at my data.
I hope someone out there can tell me of a service which is web-based, hosted, reasonably powerful and free for unlimited academic use…
David Brake
A fellow blog researcher has provided a handy list of her own favourite Internet and software productivity tools and has invited me (and some colleagues) to respond (one has already given her own list).To be honest though I think of myself as a near-compulsive collector of this kind of stuff, almost everything I use is already on one or the other of the two lists already. To their collection I would add:
I hope this collection of goodies helps someone out there…
Variation in English Words and Phrases (VIEW) is a search engine for the British National Corpus of words. Among its many functions it lets you find out the kinds of words that are frequently associated with other words. The adjective most commonly found with "nerd" is "computer", for example. Unfortunately, it is a corpus of late 20th century words and does not contain the words that would be most interesting to me - "blog" or "blogger". It also turns out if you go to Google.com and type "define:yourword" it will offer you "related phrases" (the related phrase for "blogger" was "Baghdad Blogger".
Danah alerted me to the fact that Stanford has its own spot in the iTunes music store. It features a small but growing series of lectures on US foreign policy, other public speeches and discussions of books among other things (all free). I wish that UK universities had the funding to play around with this kind of stuff. We certainly have enough public lectures here at the LSE to make a similar project worthwhile.
Update: Princeton also has a very similar offering (tilted more towards foreign policy). I couldn’t find anything similar by Harvard or Yale yet…
Neighbornode is an interesting new project that encourages neighborhood-based virtual communities by providing messageboards that are associated with local wireless networks. Nobody who is not actually connected to that wireless node can read what is on that bulletin board, but ‘nodes’ that are adjacent to each other are linked together.
I often thought that one of the things standing in the way of neighborhood-based virtual communities was simply the problem of 1) getting a "critical mass" of people in a neighborhood online and 2) making a space online where there was a reasonable likelihood that your neighbors would also hang out. This new scheme seems to neatly solve both problems…
The insularity of American web publishers has long been a pet peeve of mine so the launch of the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers with accompanying American-style logo struck a sore nerve. It’s true that in their overview of common issues FAQ they point out that laws vary between countries but several of the sub-FAQs fail to make this point and some of them could therefore actually mislead the unwary. Like their guide to defamation law which says, “If the plaintiff is a public figure, he or she must also prove actual malice” - not true in the UK, for example, I believe. I think in Europe people also have more rights to privacy than here (eg I think you in theory have to get permission from people you take pictures of if you want to publish them though I am not sure about this).
Simply calling it the Legal Guide for American Bloggers would help a lot here, and if they encouraged other major blogging countries’ policy wonks to produce similar guides (and linked to them) that would help a lot too. Meanwhile, serious UK and European bloggers might want to look at The Legal and Regulatory Environment for Electronic Information by Charles Oppenheim which I picked up some time ago though it is now four years old (can anyone suggest anything more recent and/or cheaper?). Suggestions via comments of websites and other online resources relevant to other countries would be welcome.
Of course, I should add, the EFF’s publication of a guide like this is, on the whole, a Good Thing, they have produced lots of other good stuff both for Americans and for the wider Internet-using public and if you are in the US and a blogger (or just want to see how their law affects ordinary members of the American web publishing public) this guide is well worth reading. Also see their guide to How to Blog Anonymously…
It is possible to get published in for-profit journals and still publish on your own website as well, depending on what the policies of individual publishers are. The SHERPA project brings together the copyright policies of the major publishing houses in one place so you can see what your rights are. I am certainly glad that so many of my fellow Internet studies academics have made much of their scholarship available online - often pre-publication and fairly often even post-publication (usually in a ‘draft - not for citation’ form, but still…)