jill/txt

Gotta finish packing… See ya next year!

A US student got a visit from secret agents - for what? Ordering Mao’s little red book through interlibrary loan for a paper he was writing on communism. [Update: This turns out to be a hoax; see the comments for links.]

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a “watch list,” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

Also, Bush got rid of that nasty little law saying the government couldn’t spy on people without a warrant. Took several hours to get a warrant, you see. I don’t know whether monitoring interlibrary loans would have required a warrant in the good old days.

Such a pity Bush still has three years left. (via Badger etc)

A blog novel called Más respeto, que soy tu madre, by Hernán Casciar, was named best blog by Deutsche Welle. My hopelessness at Spanish means I can’t figure out whether it’s this site or more likely this more bloggy looking site, but translating from the French, the title means “some respect, I’m your mother!” and it’s being published as a book in multiple languages. Which is always a little disappointing - I mean it’s great that the author’s getting paid, but I like literature that is content to be online. Anyway, might be a great blog. (via Le Monde, via Daniel A.)

Huh. I just booked a hire car for while we’re in Australia, and I found this comparison shopping site called Oodles.com.au. And lo and behold they found me a car on Budget that was a couple of hundred dollars cheaper than anything I could find on budget.com.au. But I’ve never heard of oodles.com.au, and when I googled them, I couldn’t really find anyone else saying anything about them, and while the site looked thorough and well-designed and had lots of information and a link to Verisign confirming it really was secure, I suddenly got worried - cos you know, how does one know placing an order there will really result in a booking being made with Budget?

Well, I obviously haven’t got the car yet. But at least I got a confirmation email from oodles with a link to budget.com.au where I can change or edit my booking. And yes, the link works, and really goes to my real booking at budget.com.au. So I guess Oodles.com.au is cool.

Great name, anyway. And the deal was far cheaper than the alternatives. And now an actual customer has linked to them so future customers who wonder and google can find out what this customer, at least, thinks of them. I’ll update this when I’ve actually got the car…

I love talking about blogs and showing people blogs. And it was fascinating talking with the people at Södertörn, especially Anne and Hannes, who had great ideas about using blogs with students and about new media in Scandinavia. It always surprises me, though, how long it takes to come home from Sweden. Close enough that people speak a language no more different from Norwegian than Scottish from Cockney, close enough to go there and back in a day. And yet home was six hours away.

I’ve been invited to talk about research blogging in Stockholm today, at Södertörns högskola. My talk will be the last in a series that looks really cool - and that’s podcast, look! I’ll be talking in Norwegian, so Scandos only, I’m afraid. Links and a summary, in Norwegian, follow.
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I was in Stavanger today as the external examiner for an MA thesis at the department of lesevitenskap, which I think translates as literacy. (They offer an MA in literacy in English and in Norwegian) The MA thesis was written by Arne Olav Nygard, and was really interesting, proposing a combination of Eco and Aarseth as a model for analysing cybertexts. It also suggested ways of building on Aarseth’s cybertext model that might help us understand the social texts that are increasingly important today. In Stavanger they don’t have oral defences as we do, instead the candidate has to deliver a trial lecture on a set topic, and so I had the pleasure of hearing about social, digital texts (like blogs, wikipedia, SMSes) from a literacy perspective. Most promising for the future of the field in Norway.

One of the pleasures of the Norwegian system of having external examiners at all levels (it’s optional for undergrads but most still have them) is the connections made between researchers and teachers at different institutions. Arne Olav’s supervisor, Arne Apelseth, wrote his dissertation on how Norwegians learned reading and writing from 1760-1840. Now did you know, that while people in most countries learnt to read and write at the same time, Norwegians became reading-literate almost a hundred years before they became writing-literate, as a nation? If I understood Arne’s fascinating digression from what we were really talking about correctly, the church and state wanted the people to be able to read, but they specifically didn’t want them to write. The Lutheran way to salvation is through reading the bible, whereas the Catholics have a multithreaded web of possible ways to salvation - and at this point the other internal reader objected, but Arne continued, wonderfully ignoring his critic, saying (if I remember correctly) that Lutherans were supposed to be receivers of godliness and not speak back (and I suspect I exaggerate but it sounds so good) while Catholics were permitted a two-way relationship with God.

In her book on blogs, Viviane Serfaty argues that blogging is a particularly American form, grown forth from the Puritan ideal of spiritual work as self-reflection through writing in a diary (the second-last page of my paper on self-portraits has more about this). The different forms and goals and cultural meanings of diaries that she points out are really illuminating for our current understandings of blogs, I find, and I suspect that this Norwegian history might also help us understand how social writing works.

Perhaps we really should be thinking more about the ideals of writing and reading in different cultures. If Norway is built on an age-old suspicion that the people being able to write is really rather a dangerous idea (which would explain why the word formidling is such an important concept here yet impossible to translate) then what does that mean for our current support and respect for - or lack of support and respect for - people writing back online?

Torill, Hilde and I would like to start a researchers guild on a European World of Warcarft server (rumours have it Terra Nova already has one on a US server, and Joi Ito and other already have a “WoW is the new golf” guild). Torill describes our idea: contact one of us if you’re interested!

(Caveat: I actually ran out of game time so my account’s frozen. I’m insanely busy and will be away over xmas so was thinking of waiting till mid-January before reopening it… So I won’t be active in the guild myself for a while.)

Flash mobs are really cool, eh? Those riots that helped democracy in the Philippines? Or peaceful rallies, organised through SMSes rapidly spreading from individual to individual? Of course we all knew that technology isn’t good or evil in itself, but the riots in Sydney are the first example I’ve noticed of really bad uses of flash mobs and SMS rallying.

Sixteen people were charged yesterday in relations to Sunday’s violence, when a 5000-strong alcohol-fuelled mob, some waving flags and chanting racist slogans, chased and bashed people of Middle Eastern appearance at Cronulla beach.
The trouble was sparked by an attack on surf lifesavers at the beach the week before, and text messages calling for retaliation. (The Age, 13/12/05)

The violence has been fuelled by a series of text messages urging revenge attacks for the assaults on men and women of Middle Eastern appearance by a 5000-strong crowd at Cronulla on Sunday. A separate series of text messages call on locals to defend Sydney’s suburban beach strip. (The Australian, 13/12/05 - this one includes photos of more SMSes)

“All Arabs unite as one, we will never back down to anyone the aussie’s (sic) will feel the full force of the arabs as one `brothers in arms’,” the SMS said.
“Unite now lets (sic) show them who’s boss `destroy’ everything gather at cronulla . . . spread the message to all Arabs.” (Herald Sun, 13/12/05

SMS text messages circulating in Sydney have called for renewed violence. One congratulated Australians for the fight they put up against the Lebanese, but called for more attacks.
“We’ll show them! It’s on again Sunday,” the message said. (The Age, 13/12/05)

Unfortunately, these mobs don’t sound very much like Howard Rheingold’s optimistically named smart mobs.

In my ten minute break from grading (yes, I know, at 11 pm I’m still grading….but next Thursday I go to Australia for Christmas holidays! I’ll grade now, knowing that very soon, I’ll be in the summertime) I read my blogs and found dozens of posts by pseudonymous bloggers about why they blog pseudonymously, although they know their identity might be revealed. Dr Crazy and Waiting Room talk about why they like being pseudonymous. Kottke remarks that nobody, five years ago, would have predicted people would publish their secret diaries online because they were safer that way. (That’s password-protected diaries, of course, not pseudonymous and social blogs)

Then last of all, I read Stephanie’s post on her current linguistic forensics - last night she successfully used linguistic identity markers to match pseudonymous weblog authors to their real name writing. Stephanie’s conscious of the ethical concerns involved, but really, once this is out of the bag, it won’t take long for someone to write a script more conclusive than those IP matches that can track down an anonymous Wikipedian (NY Times: username jilltxt/password jilltxt).

Right. Another hour of grading, then I can hit the sack.

Ooh. I’d like to go to this conference in Oslo on women in academia - not least because Virginia Vallan is giving her Why So Slow: The Advancement of Women talk, which Hanna wrote about a while back. Also, because I keep noticing I’m the only women in situations where I don’t see why there should be so few women - in a committee at the arts and humanities faculty (which has more women than most fields) or in the university’s IT reference group or in my university’s mac user mailing list discussions. Or there was that talk I gave at the media department (the media department, not physics) where there were about forty male professors and grad students in the audience and two women, one a student. What’s up with that? Where did the women I studied with go? I’m not likely to get to the conference, though: I’m coming home from Christmas holidays in Australia just before it, so I think I’ll content myself with watching Vallan give her MIT version of the talk on video. Must put aside time to actually do that soon. (via Torill)

Oh dear. This year my lass actually has the freebie that came with a Donald Duck magazine as an advent calendar, and that’s it. Not that she doesn’t seem happy about it, but seeing Looby Lu’s makes me squirm with guilt. It’s even environmentally friendly: activities, not toys! The Donald Duck one won’t really lead to toys, just to rampant commercialism and unrealistic Christmas wishlists: turns out there are little quizzes every day and you go to the website and guess and you can win this ridiculous assortment of snowboards, game consoles and electronic guitars. And get stuck playing games on disney.no for an hour.

I’m such a bad mother. I mean, just look at that beautiful box of origami-papered activities. Oh dear. It’s almost made worse by knowing that it probably didn’t take more than 30 minutes to actually just do. And she has a Flickr set.

No, haven’t put up any decorations yet either.

I was thrilled when it was announced, a few days ago, that the next Digital Arts and Culture conference will be held in Perth!!! My home town! Yay! Andrew Hutchison will be chairing the conference, it has support from all four universities in Perth and all the administration will be done by BEAP, which will be hosting the conference. It sounds fantastic. So, DAC2007 is being held in September in Perth. Wildflower season! Spring!

Then today I noticed that the next Association of Internet Researchers conference is not being held in Europe, as I’d assumed, but in Brisbane! Yes, Australia, again! AoIR 7.0 will be held Sept 27-30 in Brisbane. Reading this note from a Brazilian about the difficulties of aquiring a visa to come to the US if you’re not lucky enough to be a citizens of the handful of rich countries with a visa waiver, I reckon it’s wonderful having the conference outside of the US. I’m not sure Australia’s visa policies are any better, but both Brisbane and Perth are close to Asia, which should lead to new people having easier access to these gathering.

I probably won’t make it to Brisbane, but certainly hope to be at DAC07.

Look out for The World of Warcraft Reader, an anthology of scholarly essays on World of Warcraft, edited by Jill Walker Rettberg and Hilde Corneliussen and coming from MIT Press, Spring 2007!

I’ve considered doing a World of Warcraft course (I don’t know whether this’ll actually happen…) so was interested to see Aaron Delwiche’s undergraduate course on ethnographical approaches to Massively Multiplayer Online Games (specifically, World of Warcraft). Some of the student papers are quite good. Well, actually I started by reading Beth C’s paper on sexism in the game, and thought oh my god, this is the standard level of all Texan undergrads? We only have some students this good. What did we do wrong? Luckily (in a rather ungenerous sense of the word, sorry) a look at the other papers confirms that Texan students probably aren’t that different from Norwegian students, though perhaps the fact that they have to write a lot more than our students probably does improve their writing. Anyway, Hilde and I have been thinking about doing something on gender and World of Warcraft, so I was interested in Beth C.’s paper on sexism in the game. Yes, unsurprisingly, players have experienced plenty.

The paper makes an interersting point about the differences between races in the game. My dwarf rarely gets sexual comments, except sometimes slurs about how someone can’t see how anyone could fall for a short, bearded, dwarven woman. (So I guess the races encourage various stereotypical sexual responses.) Me, I think my dwarven warrior is gorgeous: strong, swarthy and with a determined look on her face. She even has wonderful black plaited hair. But look at this comment from an informant who plays a female night elf:

The female Night Elf dance is a stripper dance. When I first made my character dance, I laughed at her stripper dance and then tried typing /dance again thinking she would do another dance. I was angry when I realized the only way my character could dance was in a sexually enticing manner. How is my character supposed to dance when she is happy and trying not to be sexy? There is no way. Every time my female Night Elf dances, she is being a sex object…My boyfriend plays a [male] Night Elf druid, and his character dances like Michael Jackson. That’s fun! Why are the females of the race relegated to being sex objects while the males are fun?

Yeah! My nine-year-old’s first character was a female night elf, and I was appalled when I saw her dancing. That’s worse than Barbie dolls. I was so glad when she made characters in other races so she could play with a wider range of expressions.

One interesting aspect of the paper is that it shows that male players playing female characters also experience sexism. I wonder whether that will make them more aware of it and less likely to condone it in everyday life?

Oh, anyone doing this kind of research on World of Warcraft should have a look at Nick Yee’s statistics and demographics for this and other MMOGs.

The voice on the video ad for Aperture has this accent I’ve encountered quite often recently that really confuses me. It’s obviously an American accent, yet quite often I hear what sounds just like an Australian vowel. As soon as I’ve heard it, it’s gone, until it suddenly reappears.

Is this accent from a particular part of the US, or what’s going on?