jill/txt

Look at this! I think that the symbols on the blue banner, to the left of the word “Blogging”, may spell out my name. Or part of my name.

Does anyone read Korean? I can’t even figure out how to google to find out whether there’s a Korean webpage about the book. Silly illiterate Westerner.

We recently had great news: we’ve received nearly a million euros to fund a large, European project exploring creativity in the field of electronic literature. The project is led by Scott Rettberg and involves researchers from a total of seven universities in Norway, the UK, Sweden, Slovenia, Finland and the Netherlands. I’ll be participating as a researcher here in Bergen, working with Scott, a soon-to-be-hired post.doc. and a technician. There was an article about the project in the UiB newsletter yesterday, and our research assistant Elisabeth Nesheim has made a wonderfully clear presentation of the project:

Privacy of the Self
Originally uploaded by snappybex

Quite often I receive emails from high school students writing papers about blogging who have long lists of questions they’d like me to answer. Unfortunately I don’t often have time to answer ten questions in detail, but I do try to send some general suggestions and references. This morning’s questions were about guidelines for blogging and how some of Norway’s most popular bloggers follow them. The student plans to look specifically at the blogs of Regine Stokke (she’s the 18-year-old who recently died of cancer and wrote about her illness, bringing me to tears) and Voe (the fourteen-year-old I wrote about last week).

I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly listed guidelines for bloggers - I think that’s very dependent on context and on what kind of blog you’re writing. I’ve certainly discussed various guidelines, for instance in presentations like this one.

When it comes to personal blogs, I think there are three main kinds of guideline or ethical issues you need to consider:

1. Privacy - both your own and your friends’. How much information do you want to share? How much do you think its OK to write about your friends and family? Think about your audience, and your potential audience. Will your friends and family read this? Will they be able to recognise you or themselves? Will your teacher or employer read it? Would it bother you if your (perhaps still unborn) children read this in ten or twenty or thirty years? What about photos of your friends and family? (Thanks to lskwew for reminding me of this.)
   • Dooce was the first prominent blogger to be fired for her blog. I’ve written a fair bit about this in my book Blogging, but you can also find lots about it online, including her first post about it. In this recent article from Forbes, you can read about the continuation of Dooce’s blog - and about how she among other things decided to delete anything she’d written about her family that she wouldn’t have felt comfortable saying in front of a bunch of strangers. That’s not a bad guideline for blogging and privacy: don’t publish things you wouldn’t say to a bunch of strangers.
   • Justin Hall is another famous and long-term personal blogger. In 2005 he posted an emotional video explaining that he was quitting blogging because it drove his friends away from him. Since then he has begun blogging again, but in a much less intimate manner.
2. Advertising and disclosure The FTC (Federal Trade Commission, the US equivalent, more or less, to the Norwegian forbrukerombudet) recently issued guidelines for bloggers requiring them to say so if the products they’re writing about were sent to them for free by the company, or if they have been paid to write about something. This is still not required in most countries. In fact, popular Norwegian bloggers like Voe don’t necessarily disclose that they have received products for free. For instance, it’s not entirely clear from Voe’s enthusiastic endorsement of her OnePiece suit that it was sent to her for free, as this article in Aftenposten clearly states. She does clearly feel a need to defend her integrity in writing product reviews, however, as you can see in this post, “My opinions are not for sale“. In my book, Blogging I argue that bloggers who aren’t honest about when they’re being paid will lose their credibility, meaning fewer readers and less advertising money. Anyway, if you’re a personal blogger and receiving freebies (and most personal bloggers don’t, to be honest you need a lot of readers to get to that point) you need to think about if and how you want to write about those products.
3. Honesty - how truthful do you want to be in your blog? There are plenty of examples of fictional blogs that have presented themselves as real. When readers discovered they were fictional, they felt cheated and became very angry (I’ve blogged about why readers get angry at this. On a smaller scale, most bloggers leave out the ugly bits and maybe play up the good stuff, as in the quote from Lars Tangen in this blog post. I’m not saying you need to be utterly honest (in fact, the more literary blogs get, the less factual truth matters, in my opinion, but you do need to think about this.

Do you think there are other ethical issues that personal bloggers should consider?

We have two PhD fellowships advertised right now, with a deadline of January 31. We’re particularly interested in candidates interested in researching electronic literature (perhaps in connection with our freshly-funded project on creativity in electronic literature), digital art, social media, gender and technology, the history of technology, computer games, blogging and related topics. While the positions are open to applicants within our whole department (including literature, art history, linguistics, classics and theatre studies in addition to digital culture), we should have a good chance of getting a PhD candidate accepted within the field of digital culture.

Here is the official advertisement, with a link to the online application system.

Norwegian PhD fellowships are renowned for paying as well as a normal job rather than exploiting graduate students: The fellowships are 100% positions with standard Norwegian health, social security and pension benefits (including, say, parental leave, a topic near to my heart these days) and they pay 355,400 kroner (US $55,000/€40,000) a year. You’re an employee, not a student, which gives you far better rights than a student has. You’ll have some travel/research funding assigned to you automatically - I think about 20,000 kroner ($3000/€2200) a year - and the opportunity to apply for more. These are three-year fellowships, where you do about one semester’s worth of coursework (attending conferences and seminars and writing a paper or two) and the rest of the time is reserved for dissertation research and writing. They’re open to applicants from anywhere in the world. You are required to have an MA in a relevant discipline, with a final grade of A (preferred) or B (acceptable if your dissertation proposal is excellent), or equivalent.

You’ll need to supply the following material with your application:

• Dissertation proposal, maximum 5 pages
• Bibliography for the dissertation proposal
• Time schedule for the completion of your project
• Maximum 3 page summary of your master thesis
• All diplomas achieved in higher education from university/college (scanned version)
• List of academic publications (if any)
• a cover letter

The dissertation proposal is the most important part of your application, and the main criteria for ranking applicants will be the excellence of the proposal. The committee has a list of items they’re supposed to rank from 1-4 (4 being best):

• Basic qualifications (i.e. your grade on your MA, and whether or not it was finished on time - make sure your cover letter either states clearly that it was or provides a good reason why it wasn’t)
• Project quality (originality, research question, hypotheses, is it solid, what’s the status of your knowledge at this point, etc)
• Feasibility (is there a balance between empirical material and theoretical ambitions? Are you likely to actually finish the PhD within the three years?)
• Research environment (is there support for this research topic among researchers already in the department?)
• Academic qualifications (published or accepted scholarly papers - this is not expected if you just finished your MA (though if you have anything that’s awesome), but if it’s been a while, the committee will be looking for evidence that you’re actually motivated to be a researcher and have been working at achieving this by participating in academic discourse.)
• Dissemination of research results (you’re supposed to say something about this; in practice it’s very hard to differentiate candidates based on this - but do try to say something)

It’s important to remember that the committee will have just one person from digital culture - the other members of the committee will be general humanities people, especially from literature (comparative and/or Nordic) and linguistics (comparative/Nordic/computational). That means you need to write very clearly, and work hard not to use jargon or assume that everyone already knows the field.

You’ll also need to name your supervisor at the department. This means you must contact one of us before you apply. Within digital culture, your choices are me (social media, blogging, narratives online, digital art, games), Scott Rettberg (electronic literature, digital art), Hilde Corneliussen (gender and technology, gender and computer games, history of technology) and Daniel Apollon (knowledge society, sociological approaches to digital culture, semantic web).

Internationally, it seems that the most popular blogs are about gadgets, technology, politics and weird web finds, at least if we can trust Technorati’s ranking list. In Norway, the most popular blogs are written by teenaged girls, like 14-year-old “Voe“, who’s the subject of a long and interesting article about the phenomenon in Aftenposten (if you can’t read Norwegian, you can get an idea of the content using Google Translate) Another extremely popular teenaged blogger is Lars Tangen, a sixteen year old who writes about makeup and the lifestyle of a gay, teenaged blogger.

I’m not sure why these blogs are so extremely popular in Norway. Voe apparently has 60,000 readers a day, which in a country of about 4.5 million people is astounding. There must be some kind of critical mass that builds and suddenly, hey presto, that’s what people in this culture think blogging is about. There has been a lot of media hype about the phenomenon too, and especially about how much money teens can (occasionally) make from product placement, ads and sponsorship agreements. I’m sure many teens are attracted by that possibility, no matter that most bloggers make nothing.

I love this quote from Lars Tangen in the Aftenposten article:

Det meste av det jeg skriver, er sant, men jeg forbedrer og raffinerer litt. En gang tok jeg på meg en bukse fra H&M og skrev at den var fra Gucci. Folk elsker å lese om noen som er bedre enn dem. Det er jo ikke jeg, men jeg later som. (”Most of what I write is true, but I improve and refine it a little. Once I put on a pair of trousers from H&M and wrote that they were from Gucci. People love to read about someone who’s better than them. I’m not, but I pretend to be.”)

In 2008, the Norwegian Bureau of Statistics found that 18% of 16-24 year olds had published their own blog in the last three months. That’s pretty amazing.

My belly has grown a LOT since October. Only a month left now and my little boy will be born! While he’s been growing, videos have been processed, and video of the talk I gave at the Wikipedia Academy in October is now online, nicely put together so you can see the slides and me talking. I posted a summary of the talk the day I gave it - my main argument is that the current community norms in the Wikipedia discourage experts from contributing their knowledge.

“Nobody knows you’re a dog on the internet“, right? Although many of us still engage in a little harmless identity tourism now and then, the internet in general is not an anonymous space, and current trends in social media are making it less and less so. If you can’t connect your Twitter name to a solid identity with a website and preferably a photo and CV on LinkedIn, you’ll have trouble being taken seriously. But there are still examples of people making good use of the possibility to be “anyone” on the internet. Such as “James Chartrand”, a successful freelance writer who, as it turns out, just happens to be a single mother who couldn’t make ends meet when she sold the same writing using her real name and gender.

Have you ever seen such a ridiculously over-the-top male website? Well, it worked. As James Chartrand, this woman, who still remains anonymous, launched a successful career. It wasn’t until someone who knew her secret threatened to reveal it that she admitted that “James” was a woman. She still hasn’t made it obvious on her website, although it’s there if you look.

Sounds rather he-man-ish, doesn’t it? But if you click that link labelled “pen name”, you’ll find the full story.

I’m rather shocked at this story, I must admit. Obviously it’s hard to know whether you’d have more success as a man when you always present yourself as a woman. I’ve never experienced obvious discrimination, though I’ve certainly felt uncomfortable in meetings where everyone else is male. Oh, and fumed at the difficulties of breastfeeding while travelling and noted that applications aren’t evaluated equally and that I have (had? have…?) a tendency to act like a little girl, a typical mistake women make.

And “James Chartrand” isn’t just acting like a man. She’s acting like a caricature, a parody of a man. I mean, look at that logo, an ejaculation if ever I saw one. Come on. A photo of welding below it? And on and on. Perhaps clients don’t just want male writers, they want he-men?

I feel myself sinking into that inward nestingness that happens when you’re expecting a baby. Twitter holds less fascination for me, and I forget to blog or read blogs for weeks at a time (except for my “life, not research” category in Google Reader…) But the baby won’t actually come until early February, and I’m still at work until mid-January. A few things do catch my attention. Like Regine Stokke’s blog, which had me wiping away tears. She wrote in Norwegian, but Google translates it reasonably well. Regine was an eighteen year old Norwegian girls who died of cancer last week and had blogged about her illness for the last year. (I’m pretty sure this is real, unlike the Kaycee Nicole case). Or, on a completely different note, June Breivik’s post about privacy and school students (also in Norwegian/Google translated to English), which is an issue I’ve been far more aware of after reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. June Breivik is the project leader of “Digital School” for our region in Norway, and links to a great website about privacy in schools, Personvernskolen (translated). I’m so glad this is actually being discussed - finally!

And then there’s this graphic of how big the internet is. I’m sure some will use this to fuss about how much bad quality nonsense there is on the internet. But I think I might use it anyway, in presentations or teaching somewhere.

Created by OnlineEducation.net

Here are the slides I’m speaking from today at the The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice here in Bergen today. There’s already video up from the performances and readings last night, and some ongoing discussion on the Twitter hashtag #network09. A short summary of my talk follows the slides.

Literary narrative genres develop from personal narrative practices. The first novels were based on letters and diaries, though the genre developed into something independent in time. This presentation discusses contemporary personal media and narrative practices, such as those we see in social media. Some of these practices are constrained by corporations such as Facebook or Twitter, which steer our expression in specific ways. Others appear free, yet are heavily influenced by cultural templates, copying and voluntary rules. Often, corporations or organisations provide systems to automate some of these voluntary rules. We’re also beginning to see some examples of social media sites that take our contributions and create their own visualisations and representations of an aspect of our life. For instance, Dopplr.com generates reports on your travel, Flickr.com shows you your photos on a map or as a calendar, Trixietracker.com graphs your baby’s sleep patterns and Google Web History visualises your search activity in time. What happens, then, when our personal narratives and self-documentations aren’t hand-crafted as with diaries and scrapbooks, but are automatically generated? What would literary narratives following these personal but computationally assisted practices look like?

The talk builds upon and extends an essay to be published in the European Journal of Communications in December this year (Preprint available).

Today’s class is the second day of students presenting their projects. Two students can’t make it; they’re home sick with h1n1 / swine flu, the poor things.

Many students have worried about how to define a remix. The best article we’ve found that does this is probably Eduardo Navas’ The Three Basic Forms of Remix: A Point of Entry, published in Remix Theory on April 26, 2007. He starts by looking at defining it in music: “A music remix, in general, is a reinterpretation of a pre-existing song, meaning that the “aura”� of the original will be dominant in the remixed version” - so as remixes started, they were generally only remixing a single source. Navas then argues that there are three main kinds of remixes: extended, selective, or reflexive, where the remix “allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original; material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact to be recognizable”. Extended or selective remixes might be similar to the homages we see on YouTube, where someone fawningly pastes in lots of images of their heros from a movie that are shown with a music track, while the reflexive remix would be the critical or parodic kind that’s common in political remixes. Other things than art can be remixed too - Neva found a discussion of how concepts and information can be remixed, and Elisabeth is writing about biological and genetic remixes.

[Elisabeth showed us another article with a further categorisation, which I can’t find now… will add later.]

Some students will have to discuss whether or not their examples are remixes at all - is the collaborative BlueSfear.com art worm that Neva’s writing about a remix? Is She’s the Man a remix of Twelfth Night, as Franziska wants to argue?

Next week, Maria Engberg is coming from Sweden to talk about appropriation in avantegarde art of the twentieth century and how it relates to current digital culture. I’ve posted some readings she’ll be using in Studentportalen/My Space. The following week is the conference which you’re all welcome to attend (if you want lunch and/or dinner, there’s a fee), then we’ll be looking at your videos on November 12 and November 17. Your final paper and video are due on November 20, and we’ll have a premiere party in the evening of November 20, with a screening of all the videos!

I just gave a talk for Forskning.no’s seminar about research dissemination/popularisation, Fra forskning til forside v3.0. Here are the slides:

I had to leave right after my talk, because my Remix Culture students are presentating their research projects at noon, but I was able to hear Ove Dalen’s talk before mine about how to write online. He gave an engaging presentation with some interesting points: did you know that we now read more of an article presented online than we would if it were presented on paper? Also, while Jacob Nielsen in 1997 found that 80% of us scan online texts rather than reading them, that number’s dropped to around 50% according to a study by Poynter in 2009 (I’ll have to ask Ove Dalen for a more complete source for that: luckily he’s on Twitter so that’ll be easy!). Oh, and the first thing we notice on a website? The text, not the images. Ove Dalen has written a couple of books on writing for the web, and gives classes frequently, so I’ve seen his work online regularly over the last years, but this is the first time I’ve heard him speak in person.

A couple of students are writing about how remix videos work as memes, and how they spread, and have asked whether Richard Brodie’s Virus of the Mind is an acceptable academic source to use in their essays. I haven’t read Virus of the Mind yet, but from its presentation, it’s pitched as popular science. You can certainly use it as a source, but obviously not as your only source. It seems that Virus of the Mind has a fairly extreme argument, if the first line of the Amazon.com editorial review is accurate:

If you’ve ever wondered how and why people become robotically enslaved by advertising, religion, sexual fantasy, and cults, wonder no more. It’s all because of “mind viruses,” or “memes,” and those who understand how to plant them into other’s minds.

“Robotically enslaved”? My goodness. That’s even stronger than the metaphors Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, and Ana Domb Krauskopf argued against in their report on Spreadable Media. Jenkins et.al. argue that biological metaphors such as “meme” (based on evolution and genetical replication) and “virus” cast the people who enjoy and pass on cool stuff they find as having no agency at all. I disagree with the way Dawkins’ original article about memes is portrayed here, but certainly think that thinking of regular people who enjoy cute cat videos as being “robotically enslaved” is a little over the top. Perhaps the reviewer is not describing the full argument in Virus of the Mind very well, though.

Even Dawkins, who invented the term meme, wouldn’t go with the “robotically enslaved” argument, I think. He finishes his chapter proposing the idea of memes by pointing out that humans have conscious foresight and rational minds, and are actually able to choose according to long term goals rather than just going with the short term gratification of genes and memes that, for instance, may tend not to encourage altruism and peace:

One unique feature of man, which may or may not have evolved memically, is his capacity for conscious foresight. Selfish genes (and, if you alllow the speculation of this chapter, memes too) have no foresight. They are unconscious, blind, replicators. (..) We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. (..) We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our own creators.

So sure, go ahead and use Virus of the Mind in your papers, but think critically about it, and for goodness sakes, discuss the assertions made in it, using the skepticism of Jenkins et.al. and of Dawkins and perhaps others as well. You may end up agreeing with Brodie, but you have to show that you’re doing so because you’ve thought carefully about it, and that you understand the counter-arguments and possible problems with his thesis. Also make sure you present Brodie appropriately - what are his credentials? I only quickly googled him but it looks like he developed Microsoft Word (!), is a professional poker player and has written self-help books - so he’s not exactly a scientist or researcher? If you’re going to argue strongly for Brodie you may need to find more supporting sources. He may well refer to some good ones in his book.

Nick Montfort linked to a rather wonderful new piece that poet William Gillespie (of The Unknown fame and publisher and author at Spineless Books) read from yesterday at the &Now festival: MORPHEUS 11, the story of a poet sent to Alpha Centauri to test a nuclear bomb that can destroy a plant, who returns to Earth to discover that Earth has a ring instead of a moon and that there is - perhaps - no longer life there.

The story is told linearly and lasts for about 20 minutes, with no opportunity to pause or rewind - it’s worth watching in a single setting though, both for the story itself and for the grungy space visuals created by Travis Alber: a scratched metal background with a window through which to watch the stars passing by, and dream images superimposed on or maybe reflected in the dull, stained metal.

Eerie music (composed by David Schmudde) supports the words and images. Some of the words pass by as fast as you can read them, while others wait patiently until you click the arrow leading onwards. But you’re always led onwards, and while at first this insistent linearity annoyed me, after a while I sat back and relaxed into it, accepting my temporary and voluntary capitivity as having a certain symmetry to the narrator’s - although my clock was a lot faster than that on his spaceship or that spinning round representign the Earth’s time.

The plot of the story reads a little like an echo of science fiction tales I imagine I have read before - the lonely astronaut, the world that destroys itself (over and over in fiction) but the telling is more poetic than a political commentary - America declares war on China, but no reason is given, other than the political situation being increasingly difficult. The true story is perhaps not the political allegory that characterises so much science fiction, but that of the disconnect between astronaut and earth. He looked forward to the mission, looked forward to being alone, to reading vastly and to writing poems. At first communications work well and he sends a poem to Earth every week. But as he is further and further away, contact with Earth becomes increasingly asynchronous. His wife divorces him. He dreams of a red haired woman, but later, in dreams, her son attacks his son, and he contributes to her death. And on returning to Earth, it is empty, completely changed. Even Plato’s works (on his electronic reader) have changed. There is nothing to return to.

Despite the final throbbing question left hanging in the air (until the reader decides there’s probably no more and closes the browser window) there’s more beauty than sadness to this piece. The idea that a poet would be the one sent (willingly) to explode a far-off planet leaves me smiling (bizarrely) and thinking that I might have to watch this piece again.

Definitely worth its twenty minutes.

I’m giving a talk at the Wikipedia Academy in Bergen Oct 14-15, and since it’s the Wikipedia, I thought it would be better form to plot the talk out in a blog post rather than making a shiny Powerpoint. Here’s the abstract, titled “Has Wikipedia grown up?”

[Update Jan 4, 2010: the “>video of the talk is now up]

Historically, social media sites don’t last for long. The Wikipedia has lasted far longer than most of its peers, but will it last forever?

The Wikipedia seems to have avoided the last phase - spam and monetization. Or at least, spam is largely kept at bay. Unfortunately, I think the greatest threat to the Wikipedia is its community.

I’m one of those occasional contributors who sometimes adds content about topics I’m an expert on. I find the nitty gritty editing and the debates between deletionists and inclusionists rather dull. In fact, until I started gathering links for this talk, I hadn’t logged in to my account in a few months, and was surprised to find on my talk page that one of the articles I contributed had been nominated for deletion. Fortunately nobody except the nominator wanted it deleted (one person even posted a great link to a statement by Jimmy Wales about how we should relax and accomodate someone who adds a good article about a possibly trivial thing. But really: what a wonderful confirmation of the recent articles arguing that the Wikipedia is scaring away the experts… I add information about something I’m knowledgeable about and it’s nominated for deletion by someone who calls a major research centre a “club/organization”? In both the articles I started that have been nominated for deletion, the nominator clearly knows nothing about the topic whatsoever.

My unhappy reunion with the Wikipedia easily connects to recent reports that the number of contributors to the Wikipedia is stagnating. Perhaps because there already are articles on most obvious encyclopedia topics. Or perhaps because of the Wikipedians, that tight community of copy-editors. Sue Gardner of the Wikimedia Foundation argues that the natural resource of the Wikipedia is emotion, “the rush of joy that you get the first time you make an edit to Wikipedia, and you realize that 330 million people are seeing it live”. Today most often that edit will be deleted.

And who deletes it?

The thing that surprised me the most in Jimmy Wales’ presentation on Wednesday was the extremely skewed demographics of Wikipedia contributors - 85% male, 65% or so single, almost all childless, and heavily weighted towards the under-thirties. I actually hadn’t realised how out of place I am as a contributor, old, married mother that I am. Given that the contributors are so young, male, childless and single, the idea that the Wikipedia has “grown up” seems rather out of place.

Mind you, as far as I can tell, these demographics are self-reported by heavy Wikipedia contributors, so quite likely not very representative. This preliminary survey analysis seems to be the source. Here (as a PDF) are the slides Wales spoke from, pretty much.

And the readers are a different kettle of fish. In Norway, at least, the Wikipedia is mainstream. When I tweeted about the demographics Wales presented, Petter Bae Brandtzæg, a PhD fellow at SINTEF, sent me some more info and gave me a link to slides for a talk he gave in Trondheim today with lots of statistics on Norwegian usage of social media. Slide 14 shows how huge the Wikipedia is and how fast it’s still growing. Over 2/3 of online Norwegian read it at least once a month. But slide 15 shows that daily or weekly reading is skewed by gender - 35% of men and only 21% women read the Wikipedia that often. However, Pew Internet found a far more even gender balance: in 2007, 39% of US men online read the Wikipedia, as did 34% of US women online. The differences make you wonder about the surveys’ methodologies.

[An aside: Men “define the net” Brandtzæg writes. I think that is to leave out vast portions of the net - google anything to do with children, pregnancy, home, work-life balance, crafts or fashion and you’ll find women discussing it extensively. These things are a major part of the net, though perhaps invisible to those who don’t participate in these discussions. Also, a presentation from Pew Internet given just last week gives stats showing that there are more women than men using social networking sites (see slide 8) - this is another major part of “the net” that’s left out of Brantzæg’s assertion. Regardless: I’m rather saddened that the gender differences are so traditional.]

Anyway, let’s get back to the Wikipedia. I think the question of demographics is huge. And yes, I definitely think it can scare people away. Look at any nomination for deletion, say this current nomination that the article on WoWWiki be deleted, for instance, and the bickering and aggression is really very off-putting. Someone wants it deleted because WoW is stupid. Great. Someone else thinks that numerous academic articles citing WoWWiki doesn’t show its notability because academic articles are “primary sources” and Wikipedia doesn’t allow original research in articles. Talk about misunderstanding. This discussion certainly sounds as though its being conducted by those sad 18 year old boys who can’t find girlfriends.

boyd’s law: “Adding more users to a social network [site] increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” With the Wikipedia, the problem is that it’s too good. There are so many articles out there that most of the activity is nit-picking.

Clearly we need copy-editors, which to a large extent is what “wikipedians” are. Without them, most articles would probably look like an “incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids (..) that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts”, as Nicholas Carr accused the articles on George Bush and Jane Fonda of being in 2006.

But there’s a rather dangerous balance between the copy-editors and the content-contributors. Certainly the copy-editors - the “Wikipedians” - do most of the editing. According to Aaron Schwartz in his interesting article “Who Writes Wikpedia“, Jimmy Wales has said that:

it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”

However, when Aaron Schwartz looked at several individual articles, analysing instead who had contributed the most content (i.e. words) rather than simply moved things around or formatted things, the proportions were almost reversed. Most of the content is contributed by people who have made less than 50 edits to the Wikipedia in total.

That might turn the demographics around significantly, too. Maybe 85% of the copy-editors and formatters are young, childless, single men, but occasional contributors - the people who actually write the Wikipedia - are more representative of the general population?

I love the Wikipedia, and I hate the Wikipedia. Most of what I hate about it is the bickering, the ignorance and the hidden agendas camouflaged by acronyms and templates and bragging about superior knowledge of the rules of Wikipedia. What I love about it is the content, the articles, and the freedom. I want to be able to read an article about anything I’m curious about. I’m thrilled to finally have access to a copy of something very close to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Despite the work of dedicated field researchers such as Ford Prefect, much of the contributions to the Guide are made on a strictly ad-hoc basis. With the permanent staff more likely to be on a lunch break than working, “most of the actual work got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing.”[7] This has led to the Guide being patchy in its coverage, cobbled together (Its entry on “The Universe” was copied from the back of a packet of breakfast cereal)[8] and often riddled with errors.

I want the Wikipedia to still be around in ten, fifteen, twenty years time.

The semester is more than half-done and there’s only a little over a month until research papers and videos are due. So Thursday’s class will be about figuring out where we’re up to, making sure everyone has drafted their literature review and that everyone has a plan for how to structure their paper. Students who complete their literature reviews and indicate a clear direction for their further research - and post this to their blogs before midnight on October 18 - will receive individual written feedback from me as well.

Looking at the schedule ahead this is really our only chance to work together on our projects before the presentations on Oct 27 and 29. I’ll ask students to sign up for presentation slots today. Here’s what I want you to do in these presentations:

• Prepare a five minute presentation of your research paper. You may use powerpoint or show websites if that’s helpful.
• Make sure you tell us the following:
  • What is your research question?
  • What have other researchers written about this previously?
  • What is your point of view? Your conclusion?
• This is a presentation of your research paper, not of your video. Make your video afterwards!
• You will need to blog documentation of your presentation. This can be the full text of your talk, powerpoint slides (post them to slideshare.net) or you can record your talk on video and post that to your blog.

After each presentation, we’ll have time for a little discussion and feedback.

Don’t start working on your videos until you’ve done a lot of work on your research paper. We’ll view drafts of videos in our last class, on November 12.