Thanks, Liz, for setting this up (what a good idea) and hi Alex and Joi! I'm a bit short for time, but I'll just briefly introduce my interest in this: I'm in Bergen, Norway, and I've been doing some research on blogging, in parallel with a phd on digital narrative (due to be finished in a month). I'm interested in blogging as a tool in academic research (and I co-authored a paper on that with Torill Mortensen: Blogging Thoughts (pdf)). I'm also really interested in the ways in which blogs connect, and the networks that appear. I'm fascinated by what the ways in which we use links to connect affects power (I wrote a short paper about that, actually) and I'd like to continue researching these connections - the way the blogosphere works or could work, and how connections are made, and how collaborative thinking happens, and so on.
There's a funding program (KIM: Kommunikasjon, IKT og Medier - sorry, no English description here) from the Norwegian Research Council coming up (applications due January 31) which would suit a project about this kind of stuff, and I'm interested in being part of a larger Norwegian project which would relate to this, and I'm interested in that project collaborating with other, international projects. I need to talk with the people who'll actually be leading the Norwegian project about this, so perhaps I should invite them here.
Very cool. The dynamics of emergent networks are also one of my areas of interest, and it is exciting to see interest in this area explode in the last year or so, with two or three bestselling books coming out and the blogosphere emerging as the perfect testbed for asking questions about structure and change.
I've done some work on hyperlink networks in the web generally. The work on the Zapatista web (there's an MS Word version here looks at hyperlink structures.
More recently, some colleagues and I wanted to look at whether this could be done with those working in gene therapy. We began by looking for those with papers published in the area (ISI) to see if we could find home pages for them. Nada. Not only were there the difficult names (Andrew Smith), but when anything looking like a home page was located, it was never more than an antiseptic bio. Then thought we'd look at the major research centers, but (and this may be no surprise), they had few, if any, external links. The whole thing was a dead end. Maybe if we had either started with homepages instead of with disciplines, or had looked at physics, we would have been more successful.
Posted by: Alex on November 26, 2002 10:22 AMI think the Web penetrates academia more slowly than other areas because academics already have a communication network in place (conferences, journals...), so in a sense they may have less to gain from colonizing the web than people who are not already connected.
Posted by: Seb on November 29, 2002 05:26 PM