I thought I would look up the stats on weblog production in the US to see whether they appear to justify the conventional wisdom that blogging continues to increase in popularity. Well it turns out that the picture according to Pew Internet’s longitudinal data don’t appear to back that point of view - in fact, the graph of American Internet users having ‘ever created a weblog or ‘blog’” appears to peak in Jan 05 at 10% and decline to between 7 and 9% since. In principle of course the number who have ever created a blog can only rise. But the survey has a precision of +-3% so almost all of the variation is within that range. The best we can therefore say is that in January 2005 between 7 and 13% of Americans had created a weblog and by April 2006 that number had likely not changed much (the range being between 5 and 11% at that point - though the question asked had slightly changed).

 David Brake

She shared this overheard conversation snippet in this blog post:

Are you a teacher?
Yes.
What subject?
I am a sociologist.
Then you must be good at making friends.

I only wish that my doctorate (when it comes) would give me that power

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

The British Academy has produced a report on Copyright and research in the humanities and social sciences which concludes inter alia while the law itself gives academics sufficient ability to use copyright work, “risk averse publishers, who are often themselves rights holders, demand that unnecessary permissions be obtained, and such permissions are often refused or granted on unreasonable terms” and “there are well-founded concerns that new database rights and the development of digital rights management systems (DRMs) may enable rights holders to circumvent the effects of the copyright exemptions designed to facilitate research and scholarship”.

David Brake

Sonia Livingstone has asked me to pass this on. Please respond to her directly (as below) but it would be interesting if you could share your favourite new media papers here in the comments as well (and comment on my choices - at the bottom - if you wish):

My colleague Leah Lievrouw and I have been asked to develop and edit a major compilation of “classic” must-read articles in new media studies - a sort of “desert island” collection that will be published as a (rather hefty) four-volume reference.

Leah and I have made our own preliminary list. However, our experience with the Handbook of New Media has taught us that this field is a very big umbrella, covering everything from media law and regulation, to studies of communities and social networks, to education and the workplace, to digital arts and culture (and more). The challenge is to assemble a collection that fairly and comprehensively covers the field as we specialists understand it.

So, we are seeking your help! We’d love you to tell us about up to three nominations for journal or proceedings articles, key book chapters, or other publications of similar length that you would consider essential reads for anyone wanting to know what new media studies (broadly construed) is about.

These might be readings you always assign to students, items you consistently cite in your own work, or pieces that have made a difference in the way you think about and study new media yourself. We are particularly interested in items that have historical value, tend to be overlooked, or concisely capture a writer’s most important ideas. We’re also keen to make this an international list, since this is an international field. You may suggest your own publications, BUT we are more interested to know what or who has influenced you.

Leah and I will select the final list for the collection, but we will be happy to summarize and share everyone’s nominees after we get feedback, which itself should be a very interesting resource. We’d like your suggestions and ideas by October 1 if possible - we’re also eager to see if this exercise generates any discussion!

Thanks very much for your time and interest!

Sonia Livingstone - please reply to s.livingstone@lse.ac.uk

For myself (David Brake) I must admit I haven’t been as conscientious as I could be in keeping track of which papers and books I have found most useful or thought provoking but here are three that I thought were excellent and which others might not have run across:

Browne, K. D. and C. Hamilton-Giachritsis (2005) “The Influence of Violent Media on Children and Adolescents: A Public-Health Approach“, Lancet, 365 pp. 702-710.
A clear and concise overview of the extensive scientific debate on this contentious issue.
Bruckman, A. (2001) “Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet”. in Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiries, Lancaster, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html

Nuanced discussion of different ways of ethically treating people whose texts and other works appear online ranging from full disclosure of their identities to complete concealment.

Crawford, A. (2002) “The Myth of the Unmarked Speaker” in Critical Perspectives on the Internet, (Elmer, G. ed.) Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., pp. 89-104.
An excellent and thoughtful debunking of the notion that text-based Internet communication eliminates status differentials because of the lack of visual or verbal cues.

I’ve been listening to an interesting BBC radio history series The Idea of a University and just heard about a satirical book (not seemingly still in print) “Redbrick and these Vital Days” by a Liverpool academic, E Allison Peers. It includes this marvellous descriptive passage about a typical day in the life of ‘Professor Deadwood’ (based apparently on the author’s view of Alan Dorward).

He has a leisurely breakfast at half-past-eight, followed by pipe and paper; reaches the University between ten and half-past; reads his letters and perhaps writes one; saunters into the Common Room for a cup of coffee; calls on a colleague, or the Bursar, or the Clerk to the Senate; returns to his room, glances through the latest issue of a learned review, has a few words with a pupil - and lo, it’s lunch-time. After lunch in the refectory, followed by a chat about the day’s news in the Common Room, he gives a lecture at half-past-two, and immediately afterwards hurries home lest he should be late for tea. After tea comes the day’s exercise (unless it happens to be a day when he has no lecture, in which case he plays golf in the afternoon) and after dinner he spends a couple of hours with a new book on his special subject (or a book from the circulating library on something else), after which, the paper again, a nightcap, and bed at eleven after a somewhat tiring but thoroughly well-spent day.

They don’t make jobs like that any more - do they?

P.S. It seems I am not alone in thinking that what I will be doing in part when I teach is what the founder of Keele University, Lord Lindsay, saw as the purpose of university education: “to enable everyone to read the Times intelligently”.

David Brake

Roger Silverstone, head of this department, died suddenly and unexpectedly earlier this month at the untimely age of 61. His death is a tremendous loss to scholarship as he was at the peak of his form, but it was also a great blow to those of us who worked with him and benefited not just from his wisdom but also from his generosity of spirit and good humour. The department has now produced a memorial website which includes tributes from many of us and those who knew him from across the world (you can still add your own memories by emailing tributes@lse.ac.uk).

I’ve been listening to this podcast of a conference presentation by Anil Dash at MeshForum 2006 where he (one of the earliest weblog developers) makes a number of interesting statements including this snippet relevant to my upcoming thesis about personal weblogging, 4 minutes, 57 seconds in to his talk:

You have to know who the audience is that you care about. One of the assumptions that a lot of us that have been in technology make is that if we just let them everybody would want to talk to 100 people around the world and tell them how they feel. That’s actually not true and for most people they consider those of us that do that to be somewhere between strange and psychopathic.

Now how would you cite that? At the moment I guess that it should be treated as a conference proceeding:

Dash, A. (2005) “Scale Social Networks and Livejournal.Com “. in MeshForum, San Francisco, California,May 7, IT Conversations. http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1069.html

But that doesn’t tell you it is a podcast and crucially it doesn’t tell you that the part you want to hear is around 5 minutes in. This useful guide to Harvard citation says BS:5605:1990 (whatever that is) doesn’t include recommendations for electronic sources. Is there an advanced Harvard Style Lab somewhere coming up with standards for this stuff? What would you do? Should I just make up my own style?

David Brake

I just read about a new program called Kip which lets Mac users easily add tags to their PDFs and enter them in an easily-scannable database. It’s still at a fairly early stage (it’s free to use now and will be commercial later) but it struck me this is the kind of thing any Mac-using academic might find really really handy…

It was recently announced on the blog that (the leading journal) Nature runs that:

Nature is conducting a peer review trial of its own. From today, submitters to the journal are being offered the option of having their manuscripts posted on a preprint server to solicit public comments. At the same time, their work will go through the usual anonymous peer review process, and both sets of comments will be considered by the editors in making their decisions.At the end of the trial, which will last for about three months, Nature editorial staff will assess the overall value of comments from self-selected public contributors versus those from invited anonymous reviewers.

It was Nature you might recall that also tested Wikipedia against the Encyclopedia Britannica and, controversially, found them to be roughly equivalent, so this latest move is consistent. Since the administration of the peer review process is one of the reasons advanced by commercial journals to explain why they are still necessary it will be interesting to see whether Nature really does have the courage to undermine its own business model…

I thought I had written my own robust defence of Google Book Search and book digitisation in general but it seems I haven’t - at least I haven’t found any on this blog or my personal one (though I posted enthusastically about meeting Brewster Kahle who runs the Internet Archive and briefly mentioned my own experience of using Google Books).

Kevin Kelly has had a go at providing a popular account of the potential importance and utility of the widespread availability of books online in Scan This Book! in the New York Times. He rehearses many of the good arguments against the ever-lengthening text copyright regime and for the social utility of book scanning programmes but unfortunately his argument is somewhat spoiled by his need to “epater les bourgeois”.

First by hyperbolic statements: “The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.” Inventions? Talmudic scholars (for one) would be surprised to learn we had just invented annotation.

Secondly, and more importantly, by un-necessarily sweeping and apocalyptic predictions about the way technology will (must?) change existing businesses (like publishing).

Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library.

Much of what he says is arguably valid for non-fiction and particularly scientific research but less so for fiction where (as Updike says) we actually seem to like reading (or viewing) self-contained narratives (though we may then go on to comment on them or construct other self-contained narratives based on them).
He usefully points out that academic science is heading faster than other fields towards the universal library but doesn’t think through the implications. Academics need to publish freely to advance and do so happily but only because there is a state system in place that pays them to be experts because society benefits from their creation and dissemination of knowledge. It is hard to imagine the same model being applied to the writers of cookbooks, say, but in the UK we pay authors a (very) modest sum when their books are checked out of the public library.

Could some form of super-UNESCO (or a number of national government initiatives) help to fund freely-available fiction (or other creative works) to be added to the universal Internet library of the future? Perhaps paid for through a levy on broadband subscriptions as suggested by some in France - the Global License? This is approximately the way the BBC works, for example (though it is not as free as it should be in sharing the content that our license fees have paid for). Surely this is a more attractive proposition for artists than having to individually flog “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, ads, sponsorship or periodic subscriptions” which KK suggests are the options that will be available to artists in the brave new world when their individual works themselves are no longer saleable.

KK anticipates some of the hostile reaction that followed from John Updike (speaking predominantly on behalf of fiction authors) and by Nicholas Carr (among others) more generally:

Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

I for one am in the young enthusiast camp but I don’t think it means that the way things work in the creative industries has to be swept away in order to bring the (near)-universal Internet library about.

If we could reduce the term of copyright to 14 years, renewable for another 14 (as Creative Commons suggests) and if copyright could be easily asserted at a central database but the default for works where the ownership was unclear was that such work would be in the public domain, authors would still be able to get paid for their works during their most valuable commercial life but we would have a huge public domain of useful information instead of the stunted one we have now.

The above suggestions still radical (more radical than many authors and publishers would like, I am sure) but are consistent with the new potentials technology offers without requiring the total restructuring of publishing…

I’ve not provided as fully thought-through or well-ordered set of arguments here as I’d like (and not perhaps a particularly original point of view either - it draws heavily on Lawrence Lessig’s thinking, for example) but there’s as much polishing here as I can spare considering the £0 I am getting paid to write this! What do you think?

Update: As if in answer to my wishes, I have just heard about a very promising bill in the US House of Representatives - the Orphan Works Act which would release into the public domain works where the owner is no longer known. Someone should set up a campaign to support Lamar Smith (the bill’s sponsor).

David Brake

Blog scholar Alex Halavais recently wrote an entertaining blog post about his experience of cheaters - how to cheat good - culminating in this gem:

When you copy things from the web into Word… don’t just ‘Edit > Paste’ it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on.

By an odd coincidence the New York Times has an article on the increasing use of technology by students to enable in-class cheating. I hope that it is no. 6 on the most emailed list because of appalled professors not because students are looking for new cheating ideas!

Who are the scholars who have written most about the social function of phatic speech? (For example, “turned out rainy again today” - a favourite British expression). I have a feeling it’s something Goffman or Garfinkel or Harvey Sacks might have studied but I am not sure which texts to look in. I am not so much interested in the structure of such speech but why people do it, what they expect from people who they talk to and perhaps something about the power relations implied.

Jan Schmidt brought my attention to the recently-launched International Journal of Internet Science which will publish twice a year online, readable by anyone, with 5-7 papers in each ‘issue’. It’s not clear yet how it will differ from First Monday, JCMC and Gnovis among others, but perhaps the first sample issue will give a clue. And certainly any new entrant to publishing is to be welcomed - particularly one that is open access.

This weblog posting by Lilia Efimova about the difficulty of categorising data during analysis tickled me since I am experiencing some of the same difficulties at this point in my own research, particularly as she refers in her post to Borges’ own musings on the subject. I am half tempted to group my bloggers using the ‘ancient Chinese’ method including:

• Bloggers that are included in this classification
• Innumerable ones
• Others
• Those that resemble flies from a distance

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:

• Netvouz, a more feature-packed way to share and store bookmarks than any of the others I have looked at including del.icio.us - my collection now numbers 6540 - the public version is here and my collection of bookmarks tagged “academic” may be worth browsing.
• Scopus from Elsevier is a better journal searching tool than Web of Knowledge with a much easier to use interface (though you need a subscription to be able to use either)
• A9 from Amazon is a handy way to access the ‘read inside the book’ features offered by Amazon with fewer clicks.
• I find Bloglines’ search seems to find links to blogs on a given subject area that other blog search engines miss but in truth I haven’t experimented extensively with the wide range of blog search tools available.
• I did the survey that formed part of my thesis work using QuestionPro which has lots of handy features and offers academics one free unlimited use survey (though eventually your access to the results will expire so don’t forget to download them to SPSS!).
• Go Digital and other “techtalk” podcasts (see the podcast section of the extensive resources along the right side of my personal blog). Primarily because they enable me to keep up with the tech news including blog-related stuff while I am doing the dishes or cycling around town rather than reading until my eyeballs bleed (though actually I do both!).
• On that resources list you will also find a number of free PC software tools like anti-virus software and a link to a blog posting I made, gathering all the useful cheap and free Mac software I use (academic and otherwise).
• Update: If you want to manage your thesis like you would a business project, you could use a web based project management tool like Basecamp or open source software like GanttProject 2
• Not strictly a research tool but something absolutely necessary to the future of my research nonetheless - Synk - a piece of Mac software which helps me back my entire hard drive to a separate drive which I keep at the LSE so if our flat burns to the ground with my laptop in it I will still have a thesis to complete!

I hope this collection of goodies helps someone out there…

I haven’t had a chance to read David Horowitz’s new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America but I have followed with fascinated/horrified interest the ensuing furore. I was finally moved to comment when I read Todd Gitlin’s response to being one of the 101 in which he notes in passing that he is accused by Horowitz of "immersing" his students in the "obscurantist texts of leftist icons like Jurgen Habermas."

It’s beyond me to conceive of teaching courses about the place of the media in society (for example) without ensuring some familiarity with Habermas‘ absolutely crucial work on the public sphere (even if only to critique it whether from the left or from the right). There’s a reason why the guy’s an icon. If that makes me a "dangerous academic"-in-training number 102, so be it!

Be particularly careful when using computer software that lets you move or delete whole files at a time - Windows Explorer and the Mac Finder certainly but also programs like NVivo (or Microsoft Office) that have file deletion features built in. Don’t ignore the warning dialogue boxes that come up when making changes or deletions and - particularly - be careful if you take your eyes off the screen when you are typing. I was typing in NVivo, I looked down at my transcript and somehow I must have typed a sequence of keys that deleted one of my interview transcripts and confirmed it because that transcript vanished! The only way I could think to get it back was to revert to what I had saved earlier.

Update: It happened again - and this time I think I know why. If you are working in NVivo on a transcript and type control-D (right beside control-F which is "find") you will delete that document! And there is no ‘undo’!! That’s a feature they are adding in NVivo 7, coming up shortly. And not a minute too soon…

You are backing up your fieldwork and documents regularly, right? To a separate hard disk or removable disk? And preferably taking that backup to a location far away from where your primary work machine is (in case of fire, flood etc)? Data disasters do happen, and it costs very little to protect yourself from them these days.

According to a recent study in the December issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which is summarised here:

people overestimate both their ability to convey their intended tone?be it sarcastic, serious or funny?when they send an e-mail, as well as their ability to correctly interpret the tone of messages others send to them.

So be careful out there!

Today marks the launch of Harm and Offence in Media Content by Andrea Millwood Hargrave and Sonia Livingstone (I was one of the book’s contributors). You can find the press release and a link to an executive summary of the book here and if you are in the UK you can order it online via Amazon for ?18.95 (?1 saving).

Briefly, the book breaks new ground we believe because it looks at recent research across the whole gamut of available medias - television, radio, music, press, film, games, internet, telephony and advertising - as well as the regulation associated with each medium. Something there for everyone we hope! Do let us know what you think of the book if you’ve had a look and I will endeavour to answer any questions that may arise.