apophenia :: academia

March 30, 2008

seeking research intern

Connected to my role in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, I'm seeking a research intern. The intern would be responsible for:

1. Creating an annotated bibliography of all scholarly research related to the issues taken up by the Task Force (e.g., Internet sexual predators, bullying, identity theft, COPPA, etc.)
2. Creating an annotated list of scholars and institutes working in the field and reaching out to them to see if new research is about to be published
3. Writing the first draft of a literature review of the relevant research
4. Other things that might come up...

The ideal intern will have strong research skills, strong writing skills, and an interest in the topic. Timeliness is also crucial - much is needed to be done by mid-June. The ability to self-motivate/self-direct is also critical; I will be doing virtually no micromanagement and the deadline is not movable.

The intern would officially be an intern at the Harvard Berkman Center and will receive the standard Harvard intern wage; living in Cambridge is not a requirement - most interactions with me will take place through email/AIM. The intern must be a student at a university (either undergrad or graduate level) and have full library access. Preference will be given to those in social science fields who are familiar with and can evaluate quantitative methods. The most ideal candidate would probably be a pre-quals graduate student who is working in this area and would love to be paid to do the literature review they have to do anyhow, but I'm not sure that this person exists.

This position will start the moment I find the right person. It will definitely last through June and can last much longer depending on the person's interest (there's plenty of related work through December). Hours are flexible; all that matters is getting the job done.

To apply, send me an email to zephoria at zephoria dot org. Include your CV, the names and emails of 2 professors who can attest to your research skills, a sample piece of writing (class assignments are fine) and a cover letter that includes: why you are interested in this internship, some background on your research skills, and whatever else you think that I might want to know.

Feel free to forward this announcement to anyone you think might be interested.

Update: This position has been filled. To my shock and excitement, there was an absolute plethora of amazing candidates that I had to turn down. Of course, that makes it really hard. But thank you to everyone who applied!

If you are a scholar who is publishing in this area who is jumping up and down with excitement, feel free to add citations and names to the comments. I will do a proper call for biblio bits and researchers a bit down the road.

Category: academia

Tags: internship

   

Posted by zephoria at 10:28 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

September 22, 2007

why I am not going on the academic job market

I have decided not to go on the academic job market this year. I've wanted to be a professor for a long time. I still want to be a professor. Just not now.

Making that decision was quite hard for me. If all goes well, I will have my PhD next summer. Thus, it is this fall when I should go on the academic job market. To be proper, I signed up to go to every academic conference in my field this fall. (For those not in academia, academic job opportunities are posted in the fall, with applications due throughout the fall, and interviews taking place in the winter/spring. Finishing graduate students normally go on the market during their final year. Academic conferences are key places for being seen and feeling out different departments and practicing job talks.)

Before he passed away, my advisor and I had many long conversations about whether or not I belonged in academia. He told me that I had too much energy to do research and that I would find academia maddening at this stage in my career. The more I thought about it, the more I agreed with his logic. My reasons for wanting to go on the job market were simple: I *love* teaching, I *love* students, I *love* research. Peter kindly reminded me that this is not what academia is about - he used to joke that the University paid him to attend meetings so that he could keep up his hobby of teaching. Peter was infinitely patient about most things, but boy did he hate bureaucracy.

I feel the need to explain why I'm not going on the job market in a public way, mainly because everyone keeps asking and I expect that it'll be ten times worse at 4S, AOIR, ASIS&T, and the smaller academic things I'm doing this fall. By no means am I rejecting academic research. Last time I quit academia, I published more academic papers and attended more academic conferences as a non-academic than ever before. I love scholarship and I love the research that academics do and I love academics, especially when they wear tweed coats. I have every intention of doing research when I finish my PhD. I just don't think that I can stomach doing it as a 1st year assistant professor right now.

There are multiple reasons for which I think that going on the academic job market doesn't make sense for me right now. The major ones are:

1. IRB/human subjects. I am a huge supporter of ethics in research, but my experiences with IRBs (at multiple universities) have been nothing short of miserable. I feel extremely claustrophobic right now because of it. I will save the details of my anti-IRB rant for another time, but the short synopsis is that I think that IRBs are destroying social scientists' ability to do good qualitative research and ethnographic research in particular. In theory IRBs are about ethics; in reality, they are about protecting universities from being sued. Qualitative (and especially ethnographic) research is seen as risky because it's not controlled and structured and formulaic. I do not believe you can do true ethnography under an IRB and it depresses me to think about all of the data that I've collected that I cannot use in my dissertation because it didn't fit into an IRB-approved protocol. I'm told that not all IRBs are as bad as the ones that I've faced, but "not as bad" is not good enough right now. I want to do research that is guided by ethics, not institutions.

2. The tenure process. I have been watching friends go through the tenure process and it makes me sick. There's no room for innovation, for playing outside of the rules. You have 7 years to publish X articles in the *right* journals in the *right* way. My favorite phrase associated with this is "Least Publishable Unit." In other words, what's the minimum contribution you can make to get a good publication out of it. I don't write like that and I don't want to. I also think that most of the "respected" journals are so locked down as to be inaccessible to broader audiences. I want to be an academic, not a hermit. I believe that academia is an institution built on knowledge creation AND dissemination. My goal is to write for public audiences, to make knowledge palatable and interesting and accessible. I want to contribute big ideas that will make a difference, and to leave the mini-contributions for my blog.

3. Overhead. I had this intense conversation with a young professor about the hells of starting up a new lab, applying for grants, starting new syllabuses, advising students, attending meetings, being stuck on the shitty committees, constantly reviewing, etc. He lamented that there was no time for research. I've heard this over and over and over again. Becoming a professor at a top tier university seems to mean death to research. Being a professor at less prestigious institutions seems to mean unengaged or unmotivated students. I'm not ready for either. I do a lot of "community service" right now (Nicole and my JCMC special issue will be done next month!), but I need to do research. I have too much energy to do research right now. And I need to work with brilliant students who are just as enthusiastic as I am.

4. Geography. One of the hardest lessons that I learned was that geography *really* matters to my sanity. I need to live in a city, where I can go dancing at 2AM just to work out some raw energy or grab sushi at midnight. I like to joke that I need the people around me to be more crazy, most intense than me, just so that I feel calm. Living near a major international airport increases my sanity tremendously. And having a beach nearby is extremely important for helping me feel grounded. I need sun because being seasonally affective isn't so good for being productive. I also want to be surrounded by Big Industry both for consulting reasons and to remind myself of what the corporate world looks like. Right now, I can't imagine living anywhere in the U.S. outside of NY or LA. That's not very useful for going on the academic job market. And besides, there's a part of me that wants to live abroad for a while anyhow.

5. Lack of flexibility. I want to do research - fieldwork - outside of the U.S. This means traveling and having the flexibility to travel. I want to consult and speak whenever it'll be interesting and helpful to do so. I want to run to DC whenever a bill gets proposed that is nightmarish. I don't see how this is manageable as a first-year prof. To complicate matters, academia is all about long-term. That's why tenure is seen as such a reward. I'm not sure that I'm ready to be in a single place for the rest of my life, or even for 5 years in a row. I want the flexibility to jump around and that's just not fair to academic colleagues.

These are the major issues. The worst is really the IRB. I can't tell if the pain in my stomach when I think about IRBs is nausea or a murderous desire. Either way, it ain't pleasant. But any which way you read it, I can't imagine a full-time academic position that would make sense for me now. And I don't think that I'd be good for an academic institution right now either. I think I'd make a great advisor, teacher, and researcher. But I don't think that I'd make a good colleague right now. I need to work out some raw energy first. I still hope to go back to academia, but I need to wait. I can imagine a future where I'll find the tenure game entertaining, know tricks to manage the overhead, and need less flexibility. And maybe IRBs will one day wake up and get it. OK, maybe not. But still, I can imagine a way in which I'd be a good colleague, but right now, I fear that wouldn't be the case and I've already burnt enough bridges by being a punk-ass public grad student.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that it's academia OR industry. I think that industry research is equally FUBAR, but for different reasons and I can't imagine having my research locked down inside of one company. I just think that there has to be another way. I'm toiling with ideas of consulting, independent research, ::shrug:: I don't know. What I do know is that I've decided to let the wind take me where it will. I will focus on my dissertation this year and then I will see where I end up. My only plan post-graduation is a desperately-needed vacation. And then I will look for what's next. I will not even entertain the possibility of jobs until after a vacation. That's kinda terrifying (especially since I need to figure out health insurance), but I'm looking forward to it. Freedom...

Category: academia

Tags: professor future

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:01 PM | Comments (41) | TrackBack (0)

July 23, 2007

Berkman Fellowship

I am excited to announce that I will be a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School during the 2007-2008 school year. I will not be in-residence although I will visit Cambridge regularly. I am truly inspired by the Berkman community and honored by the fellowship. My hope is that, alongside other Fellows at Berkman, I can take some of what I've been doing concerning youth culture and figure out how to affect policy and social change.

Also, for those who aren't aware, I'm no longer a USC Annenberg Center Fellow because there is no longer a USC Annenberg Center. To the best that I can suss out, this has to do with academic politics and poor decision making on the part of the USC leadership. Regardless of why, the closure of the USC Annenberg Center has devastated (or embittered) many who were hoping that interdisciplinarity would flourish at USC. I count myself amongst that group. When it comes to mourning the loss of the Annenberg Center, I'm trying to move beyond the anger phase, so I'll stop now.

Category: academia

Tags: Harvard Berkman USC Annenberg fellowship

   

Posted by zephoria at 3:04 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)

December 16, 2006

the edublog awards

Henry Jenkins and i are honored to have been nominated for the EduBlog awards under the category "Most Influential Post, Resource or Presentation" for our Discussion: MySpace and Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). If you would like to support us, feel free to vote for us by midnight GMT tonite (December 16) from the EduBlog finalists list. Regardless, i encourage you to check out all of the great finalists in all of the categories over at the EduBlog awards. This is a community of bloggers that is often unknown in other crowds which is unfortunate.

Category: academia

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 29, 2006

::gulp:: oh shit.

So, a while back, Nicole Ellison and i got this brilliant idea ::cough::choke:: to put together a special issue of JCMC (a fantastic journal in our field) when we were plotting about a workshop for an upcoming conference (announcement on that soon). Based on our guesstimate, we figured that we could find six solid articles on social network sites and that it would help everyone to have them published. We sent a CFP around, hoping for the best. Yesterday was the deadline for proposals and we are faced with a reality that is beyond anything either of us could've imagined. We received over 100 submissions from researchers around the world doing amazing work on a wide variety of related topics. I'm sitting here, drowning in proposals, mouth wide open. I had *no* idea that this much work was going on in this space. None. Completely shocked. And then it dawned on me... No matter what i do, i'm faced with the reality of having to reject fantastic, solid research.

::eyes wide:: I have to admit that i'm speechless. Shocked dumb.

At some point, i'm going to have to wake up from this stupor and connect with Nicole so that we can start evaluating the proposals. God, this is terrifying. When we decided to do this, i never thought about what it would mean to _reject_ people whose work should be published. ::shudder:: I've had to reject people before but not like this; usually, i have to reject stuff under blind review that isn't ready for prime time. This week, i'm going to have to reject work that is ready and good. I'm also sad because i was hoping to give lots of productive feedback, but there's no way that's possible now. I feel terrible about this.

I also need to start plotting again... There needs to be another way to get more of this work out there. And i want to figure out ways to connect all of these researchers since there's so much overlap. (And the answer is not create my own journal... that would _kill_ me.) For those of you academics out there, what are other related journals that we can encourage people to submit to? I *hate* that we're going to have to reject so many people's rocking work so i want to at least provide alternative venue suggestions.

For those of you non-academics, i'm sure this seems all weird but publishing is the core of what we do. And people really want to publish in good journals with work that'll complement what they are doing. Special issues that are on your topic are the best thing in the world because it means collaborating with your peers who understand what weird work you're doing. This is also one of the major drives to put together a special issue. You don't get a lot of credit for doing it, but you get to see all of the cool relevant work in your area, engage with scholars of like minds, and learn from them. I know it's weird but i really love this stuff and it's moments like this when i'm simultaneously overwhelmed/terrified and utterly psyched.

(To all of you who submitted who are reading this, my sincerest thank you for contributing. This is going to be a very competitive issue that i think will be valuable for all of us. I'm really psyched even if i'm completely overwhelmed this morning.)

Category: academia

Tags: jcmc journal

   

Posted by zephoria at 9:06 AM | Comments (30) | TrackBack (0)

November 1, 2006

applying to graduate school

Academia has patterns and one of the ways that i know that it is November is that i'm getting lots of email from friends thinking of going to graduate school and from people who want to apply to the School of Information. Although i've been in school for forever, i'm not an expert on applying to graduate school but i do have some thoughts...

While i offer some suggestions below, i'd really like to do a call out to professors and graduate students who might have advice about applying to graduate school. Please suggest things in the comments. I know that applying to graduate school provokes all sorts of anxieties in people and i'd love to offer some guidance collectively if possible.

Anyhow, here are my top 4 rules:

Rule #1: Apply to potential advisors, not to programs. Sure, a PhD from CalTech looks uber swanky on your resume but if you aren't that interested in what you're researching and you have a poor rapport with your advisor, the likelihood of you dropping out is HIGH. In most programs (particularly engineering and sciences), your advisor is *EVERYTHING*. This is the person who will direct much of your research, the person who will fight to get you through the program, the person who will make you feel guilty about spending too much time blogging, the person who will foot your bills, and the person whose love you desperately need when you think the world sucks. You better love your advisor or you will be miserable.

So, when searching for schools, look for advisors who write like you want to write, who do the kind of work you wish to do, who generally are the kind of people you want to be. Try contacting them but don't be discouraged if they don't respond; many are too busy to field messages from potential students. If you can't get in touch with them, try contacting their students. In both cases, write a BRIEF message about who you are, why you want to study with that person/in that lab, what you think you can offer. Do your research before contacting a prof - know what they've written, what they're studying, and why. Compliment them (all academics are suckers for compliments) but don't get too sickeningly sweet. Make sure you're concise and that your email is well written but not stiff as a board. Give them something to respond to (translation: ask a question). The best questions include the future of their research, what motivates their research, an intelligent question about their findings, etc. This should be in addition to a question about what the prof is looking for in new students. While the adage is that there are no dumb questions, this simply is not true. Dumb questions, complimentary emails with no hooks, begging and pleading... these won't garner responses. Don't expect to start a conversation.

If the professor agrees to meet with you, show up on time and engage them about their research. If you didn't do your research before, you better have by this point. Bring with you a paper including a brief bio of you and a very short abstract of what you want to do in graduate school. It can't hurt to include a small, simple, elegant (i'd recommend black & white) photo on that page so that they can keep names/faces together (cuz the scattered professor stereotype exists for a reason). If you did meet with the prof, follow up via email and perhaps include similar information so that they'll recall you via search when they're looking at applications.

Note: in many programs, professors choose students so if they remember you and like you, that will be a plus for your application. Having a professor on your side is a good thing for getting in but it's also key if you want to be happy once there.

Oh, and helpful hint: don't apply to professors who have retired or gone to a different program. Websites are good first guidelines but you really need to talk to someone to find out the state of the school at the moment. Hell, at the very least, call the secretary for the department. I feel really badly every time someone contacts me saying they've applied to work for my advisor at Berkeley; he retired.

Rule #2: Programs are not generic. It's amazing the number of people who apply to programs en masse and have no idea what they're applying to. It's really obvious in the application. When you write an application for graduate school, make sure it's tailored for that program. Why are you applying THERE? Make sure to situate yourself within the broader program - what can you offer, why do you think you should be there, why do you think this is a good program? Work this stuff into your essay - make it really clear that THIS is the program for you. Reference professors explicitly, complimenting their work. This will help them understand where you think you belong within the program.

Before applying to a program, read the fine print. How much coursework will you have to do? What kind of requirements should you expect? How does the program do funding? Know what you're getting into before you apply and make sure that's soaked in and part of your application. For example, if it's a program with two years of solid coursework, don't write that you're done with coursework and can't wait to focus on research.

Rule #3: Interdisciplinary programs are not the lazy way out. In many ways, the borders of disciplinary programs are far more sane than interdisciplinary ones. To do well at an interdisciplinary place, you can't just be sorta ok at a bunch of things - you actually have to dive deep and get really knowledgeable about a bunch of things. In many ways, it can be a lot more work and at the same time, you'll never really succeed at being an expert at anything (which others will kindly remind you of constantly).

Don't choose an interdisciplinary program because you can't make your mind up about what you want to study. This is the *worst* reason to go to graduate school, especially to go to interdisciplinary programs. You need to have a vague idea of what you want to study and why. If you just want to be in graduate school, you're better off at a disciplinary place (although i think that that motivation is still terrible there). At an interdisciplinary place, you're always going to be making your own path, fighting for what you think it important, etc.

At the same time, don't go to a traditional disciplinary place if you want to do interdisciplinary work really badly. It's quite possible to stick to a discipline until after your PhD is over (and this will make it a lot easier to get jobs) but if you think you're going to be doing an interdisciplinary dissertation, don't expect a disciplinary place to support you unless you've built a relationship with an advisor. I've watched many sad graduate students push for interdisciplinary work in a disciplinary program and bloody their heads from the repeated bashing against the immovable wall that is academic bureaucracy.

Rule #4: Read Piled Higher and Deeper. Phd Comics is a fantastic procrastination tool for all graduate students and a reality check for all wannabe graduate students. Its depiction of graduate school is far better than any that i know. And it will make you laugh and laugh and laugh until you cry.

.....

Graduate school is all-encompassing. You will not have a life for years. Nor will you have money or sanity. So if you're going to go for a PhD, do so because you love what you want to study and getting that PhD will make your life easier. Passion and maschoism are the only things that will get you through this academic hazing ritual. No matter what, you have to figure out how to make the process sane and positive for yourself. It doesn't come easy but you can figure out how to make it enjoyable; i certainly have. But it takes a lot of hard work. And a good anti-depressant.

Anyhow, i'll try to offer more advice if i think of any, but in the meantime, i'd love to hear what others suggest....

Category: academia

Tags: graduateschool phd

   

Posted by zephoria at 4:02 PM | Comments (19) | TrackBack (0)

October 21, 2006

Announcing the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative

The MacArthur Foundation has been an amazing source of inspiration for me. As many of you know, my dissertation research is funded through a large grant by the MacArthur Foundation to my advisors to investigate Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media. Well, the MacArthur Foundation has decided to take it to the next step. On Thursday, i had the fortune to be in New York for the launching of MacArthur's broader initiative on Digital Media and Learning. All sorts of folks gathered at the launch - press, academics, educators, policy makers, non-profit leaders, corporations, etc. - to celebrate the new $50M launch. The President of the Foundation spoke and then three grantees - Mimi Ito, Henry Jenkins, and Nicole Pinkard - discussed the significance of this research. (I wrote up a synopsis for MacArthur if you're curious.)

The significance of this is huge. As an academic, getting no-strings grant money is becoming more and more difficult. I've been pretty opposed to making moral concessions by applying for grants from DoD, CIA or Homeland Security. There are corporate grants but that complicates things because you have to explain how your work will help them make more money. This inherently clouds research for me. With my research on youth, there's no doubt that i could get a corporation to sponsor it, but would i have the freedom to study whatever i felt was significant? Could i publish everything that i found? Would i be able to get data from competing companies? Probably not to all of the above. Because the MacArthur Foundation funds my work, no one owns it and i can speak freely.

The work that MacArthur is funding needs to happen and it crosses disciplines and institutions. We need to understand what youth are doing, not just how to control them. We need to understand from youth's perspectives, not from the perspectives of those who wish to make money off of them. There is no doubt that our research will be used by governments, parents, educators, corporations, etc. but to do the research free from the constraints of those groups is a blessing. Furthermore, by gathering hundreds of researchers investigating these issues from different angles, the Foundation is starting to build a socially conscious field of scholarship.

I can't thank MacArthur enough for recognizing the importance of this research and moving it forward. I want to publicly acknowledge their contribution and invite you to get involved as well. For those who wish to keep up with what's happening:

• Read the blog
  
• Sign up for notifications
  
• Listen to the podcast from the launch
  

Also, please spread the word about this project to those who are interested in youth, digital media, and (informal) learning.

Category: academia

Tags: youth media academia macarthur

   

Posted by zephoria at 6:13 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

October 6, 2006

Special Issue of JCMC on Social Network Sites

Six weeks ago, i asked all researchers who were publishing about social network sites to come forward and be counted. I mentioned that Nicole Ellison and i were plotting... Now i'm back to reveal what we are up to. We used that list to show that there was enough research going on in this space from a bazillion different disciplinary and methodological directions to justify a special edition of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. For those who don't know JCMC, it's a kick-ass interdisciplinary journal (with a saint as an editor). They're dedicated to being accessible. The articles published are meant for a broad audience and they make all of their issues online for EVERYONE to read.

So, anyhow, we approached JCMC with our plot... we wanted to excite the journal into letting us put together a special issue on social network sites. And guess what? It's gonna happen!

I'm here to announce a Call for Proposals for a Special Issue of JCMC on "Social Network Sites: People, Practice, and Culture." 500 word abstracts will be due 28 November 2006. Full papers will be due 28 February 2007. Read the Call for full details about the scope of this issue and the procedure to submit. Feel free to ask questions as well. We welcome previously unpublished research articles and they will be peer-reviewed. We welcome all theoretical and methodological approaches. Also, based on the confusion in my previous post, we added the following definitional clause: "While all social network sites allow participants to create a profile and publicly articulate their social connections within the system, the line between social network sites and dating sites, MMOGs, media sharing sites, blogging tools, and other social community sites can be blurry. Rather than enforcing a strict definition of what constitutes a social network site, we ask authors to explain how their site of study fits into a rubric of social network sites."

Anyhow, i'm uber uber excited about this so i hope that you pass it along to everyone you know doing research in this area. Also, while we're on the topic, Nicole and i will most likely be hosting a workshop on social network sites at the Communities and Technologies Conference next summer. These are topically connected but participation in one does not require participation in the other. More on this shortly.

::BOUNCE::BOUNCE::

Category: academia

Tags: social-network-sites

   

Posted by zephoria at 6:47 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

July 13, 2006

education and Skywalker Ranch

Yesterday, i flew up to Skywalker Ranch to meet with a bunch of people who think about/work on issues around education. It was held there because it included folks from the George Lucas Educational Foundation (and was put on by the Institute for the Future and the KnowledgeWorks Foundation). OMG... drool. That place is just ridiculously gorgeous! There were gardens and a lake and vineyards and all things pretty northern California. PLUS there were original life sabers and other movie memorabilia. Mega drool.

On top of being in an idyllic setting, the meeting was quite engaging. It was very school-focused and a small group of us came to the realization that schools need to start serving the tension between ego-centered, personalized, individualistic society and globalized society. There used to be scales - people would be part of local communities, broader communities, nation-states, etc. Networked society is altering the relationships between people and communities are suffering because of the lack of cohesion, social norms, etc. When we think about education (especially when we talk about its role in relation to civic life), we need to stop damning technology and start engaging with the shifts that have occurred in the architecture of sociality. We started toying with what that would mean as a design criteria for educational infrastructure. (I was trying really hard to think of optimistic ideas for formal education but i also realized how much i still detest the bureaucratic nature of public schools.)

Category: academia

Tags: education

   

Posted by zephoria at 9:10 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

March 5, 2006

can i have an -ist please?

At the end of any press interview, i'm inevitably asked to label myself. What they really want is an easy -ist word. Y'know - computer scientIST, anthropologIST, biologIST, psychologIST, artIST... This part of the interview always makes me squirm more the most. I don't have an ist and usually, i don't want one but it's really becoming a pain in the ass. I usually try to squeeze out of it by saying that i'm a PhD student in the School of Information at the University of California, but sometimes, that's not enough.

I often sheepishly call myself an anthropologist which, when concerning MySpace would be mostly accurate given that i'm doing a full-on ethnography of it situated in anthropological theories but i'm also not really accepted by the anthropologists as one of them. Sometimes, i think that i should call myself a cultural theorist since that's sorta right, but at the same time, i'm more of a cultural observer and documenter than a theorist. At least so far. And the observer part sounds so not professional. I've tried accepting informationist but that just sounds so wrong. While i love what information schools are trying to do, i don't think of them as creating -ists. Of course, that's true for most "schools" like law, education, business. Could you imagine being a businessist? Ugg.

So i want an -ist. Who wants to bestow me an -ist?

Category: academia

   

Posted by zephoria at 7:37 PM | Comments (56) | TrackBack (0)

February 27, 2006

no CHI for me

The workshops at CHI this year are *unbelievable* and it was hard to choose. In the end, i agreed to be a discussion leader for Social Visualization Workshop. As the registration deadline loomed, i was hoping that i would find funding, but both are kinda tangential to both my research and work. I decided to look and see if i could afford it on my own and was shocked to see that the cost of registration (including workshops) is $650. And that's the student price! ::gulp:: So, sadly, i will not be attending CHI this year.

I have to say, i'm also quite shocked at the hike in fees. [For those who are used to industry fees, this is quite expensive for an academic conference where even the presenters pay.] I thought i was going mad until i saw Jofish's visual of the registration costs over time:

I know that putting on conferences is expensive but i really wish i knew what registration fees went towards. I also wish monetary-related decisions were more transparent, particularly for conferences that are not-for-profit. Are there reasons to keep attendees in the dark about what their fees pay for?

Like Jofish, i also wonder about the implications that this fee hike has for interdisciplinary discussions when members of less-funded disciplines cannot attend. Making CHI only affordable to the CS folks is not a good thing. And i cannot even imagine what it must be like to be outside of the Euro-American corridor where most of these events occur. Or to be a graduate student who has no funding and never has the privilege to attend. It's scary to think about the ways in which the academy work creates fundamental biases in knowledge production.

Category: academia

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:48 AM | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)

February 26, 2006

what is vulgar in academia?

Last night, a friend told me about a kid who had his dissertation censored by their school. I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what on earth one could write that would get censored and failed. So i responded with puzzlement and i was told that he had written an entire chapter on how his department's drama had detrimental effects on his research (this was part of the methods section). Needless to say, this did not go over well.

Today, i was told that i could not submit an abstract with "MySpace whores" in it and was encouraged to change it to "MySpace prostitutes." Of course, i was like no no no... that's not the term people use. I think that it is wholely inappropriate to alter cultural terms when trying to talk about the culture. I unhappily agreed to remove the entire segment from my abstract but made it very clear that i had every intention of talking about "MySpace whores" given that the talk is on friending practices in MySpace and the term comes up in almost every conversation i have with people. The response? "i don't care how vulgar you get in your talk. that will be only a reflection of you and not of me."

Wow... that was harsh. Am i vulgar to be using the terms that people use? Sure, one could make an argument that their terms are vulgar to elitist ears, but i'm studying a culture filled with all sorts of shall we say... interesting... terminology. If i were speaking to an audience of anthropologists or gender studies folks, no one would bat an eye. Why am i suddenly lacking decorum when i move to disciplines filled with mostly straight white men? Because hegemonic decorum doesn't recognize the language of less privileged populations? Hrmfpt.

Category: academia

Tags: myspace language

   

Posted by zephoria at 3:23 PM | Comments (25) | TrackBack (0)

February 10, 2006

more reasons to love Jean Lave

Sometimes, people tell you what you need to hear at the exact right moment, even when they themselves do not realize it. As i mentioned before, i'm taking this amazing course this semester. What i'm beginning to realize is that it is not the brilliant readings that are of value to me so much as the ways in which it is helping me frame academia and research. As i am starting to admit that i won't be in graduate school forever and taking steps towards dissertation, all of my neuroses about the academic process are coming out full force. (Of course, this is not helped by the layers of bureaucracy and hoops that are required to move towards graduation.)

Last fall, i submitted my IRB ("human subjects") forms for approval. The stack was a small tree. On Tuesday, shortly before class, i received "conditional" approval for my work and was told that i would know what i needed to change within a month. How i love the slowness. These IRB forms have been weighing on me. In order to step through that hoop, i had to list every question i would ask my subjects in a sort of formalized script, exactly how i would recruit my subjects (including the exact wording), the hypothesis of my research that i am testing, etc. These forms fundamentally conflicted with how i believe good ethnographic research works. Sure, i could do an interview study from this but my whole project is about hanging out amongst youth, both online and off. Of course, interviewing will be a part of it, but there's so much more. But to say exactly what that will be has felt so unreasonable that it took me six months to file the damn forms because i had a complete panic attack every time i looked at them. I finally sucked it up and tried to articulate everything i could. Yet, i still felt as though i had failed. I failed to account for the times when i sat on the 22 overhearing teenagers' commentary following school. I didn't account for the invitations that i receive to sit in on people's classrooms, special programs to keep teens off the streets. I didn't account for the times when teens saw my MySpace shirt and came up to me to tell me their story. Eeek!

And then, in discussing Beamtimes and Lifetimes, we started talking about the process of doing ethnography and the dangerous assumption that ethnography is the same thing as an interview study. Having been involved in a backchannel about how Traweek's project could've possibly gotten through IRB, i piped up and said that i thought that people conflated the two because of the amount of formalism required to get through IRB. Jean's response was priceless. In essence she said that you have to submit the forms to the best of your ability but "you don't have to do what they say." IRBs are there to protect the university, to make you think about ethics, but they don't know how to handle ethnography and the most important thing is to create a list of your ethics and to stick to them, to really be accountable to yourself - "everybody ought to write their own ethics statement and follow it." I told her about the formalism of the forms and she laughed and said "gracious me, throw that stuff out the moment you're done." She reminded us that ethnography can't be done that way, that we will all fail ourselves. "Be careful, if you say you're going to do this tight-assed medical model stuff, you might end up doing it."

At one point, one of the students spoke up: "remember, you're being recorded." She laughed, smiled and said, "that's okay, send it to the committee."

Category: academia

Tags: ethnography ethics

   

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January 26, 2006

public check-in

My blog is an opportunity to expel all of the crazy thoughts going through my head, process weird intellectual concepts, note things that i'm fascinated by and all around serve as a large pensieve of my thoughts.

As you may have noticed, i'm living in the world of youth these days and a lot of my blog posts for the next four months are going to be focused on that. My apologies to those of you who are looking to me for information on social software. I am currently more interested in understanding the theoretical and historical underpinnings of youth and identity. That said, what i am doing is not removed from social software. Most youth today use social technologies as part of their coming of age processes. They have far richer social lives than most adults. What they are doing with technology is far more complex. Furthermore, they are really focused on the act of socializing, not collaboration or any other work-centric model. Youth have a lot to teach us about social software - about its strengths, weaknesses and where innovation should go. Obviously, i'm biased - this is the root of how my research is applicable to technologists.

I hope those of you building technology will enjoy my journey to the depths of youth. I certainly am. If not, i'm sorry.

I'm also not going to being as up-to-date about industry developments as i used to be. I always love when people shoot me an email with things i really should know about - articles, links, etc. Even if i don't post about it, i really do appreciate reading it. Besides, the probability of me already having seen it isn't as large as you might think.

I'm also deeply appreciative of those who point me to other reflections on youth culture, either out in blog-land, in the press, or in culture more broadly. If you find something and you happen to think of me, please send it my way. Finally, if you're writing about or thinking about youth culture, please let me know... Sometimes, i think that i'm on my own planet.

Category: academia

Tags: dissertation

   

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January 21, 2006

a brilliant class

At the end of this semester, i will take my qualifying exams. This will be a brutal 3 hour oral examination of all things that i know in conjunction with my dissertation proposal. ::gulp:: As a result, i was not going to take any classes this semester. But then i heard that Jean Lave was teaching an STS-minded ethnography course using 3 of the books that are on my qualifying exam. So i had to check it out.

There are ?25? people in the class, but all of the attention is on Jean - she has one of those auras where all respect flows her way. She explains that this is her 40th year teaching at University of California and she will be retiring at the end of the semester. When a dear friend (my advisor) asked her to teach an ethnography course for him, she agreed both because she loves my advisor and because she loves ethnography. She decided to teach her favorite books and to try something new. She was concerned that as graduate students, we've been taught to read critically - to always tear apart everything we saw. We never learned to appreciate the values of what we read, only find its flaws and how we could do better.

So, she decided that we are going to read five of her favorite ethnographies. And then we are going to read them again. And then again. We are going to watch as the books evolve through reading. We are going to learn to discuss not to destroy but to appreciate. We are going to learn to read.

Something about her presence, her way of saying all of this, her way of swearing and yet being so proper just warmed my heart. I can't say no to this class... it's just too good. And such good practice. And thus, i am off to read about how Intuit children learn social boundaries by being offered challenging moral questions....

Update: For those who are interested in the ethnographies, they are:

• Inuit Morality Play by Jean Briggs
• Learning to Labor by Paul Willis
• Beamtimes and Lifetimes by Sharon Traweek
• Plans and Situated Actions by Lucy Suchman
• Deadly Words by Jeanne Favret-Saada

Category: academia

Tags: ethnography class

   

Posted by zephoria at 11:48 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

December 14, 2005

Wikipedia, academia and Seigenthaler

For the last couple of weeks, i've been watching the Wikipedia bru-ha-ha. As folks probably know, i got really upset a while back when folks were talking about Wikipedia being the essential collection of knowledge, meant to replace school books and other refereed knowledge containers. I still strongly believe that Wikipedia will not be that. But Jimmy Wales reminded me that Wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopedia, not a library replacement. It should be the first source of information, not the last. It should be a site for information exploration, not the definitive source of facts. This convinced me and i developed a great deal of respect for the project and its intentions. Of course, i still get annoyed with Wikipedia obsessives who promote it as the panacea to all knowledge problems.

So, when i heard about Seigenthaler, i rolled my eyes. Welcome to being a public figure - people will say mean things about you on the web. None of it is guaranteed to be true - it's the web. (Of course, my view probably stems from being a native web kid - no one likes the meannies but we've gotten used to it.) Wikipedia is better than most of the web because YOU CAN CHANGE IT. And if you inform them that someone is acting in a malicious way, Wikipedians will actually track it to keep it neutral. Can you even imagine Google doing that for every webpage out there? Ha ha ha ha ha. Try getting an article that is libelous removed from the Google index, like a mean-spirited blog entry. Not going to happen (unless you're Scientology).

Seigenthaler had a very reasonable conversation with Wikipedia, telling them of the troubles. Wikipedia, in Wikipedia-form, acted immediately to remedy the situation, even volunteering to remove the history. I applauded them. And then Seigenthaler wrote a rather mean-spirited, anti-Wikipedia opinion piece in the USA Today. He went around calling for the end to Wikipedia. Uncool. I was outraged.

What pissed me off more was how the academic community pointed to this case and went "See! See! Wikipedia is terrible! We must protest it and stop it! It's ruining our schools!" All of a sudden, i found myself defending Wikipedia to academics instead of reminding the pro-Wikipedians of its limitations in academia. I kept pointing out that they wouldn't let students cite from encyclopedias either. I reminded folks that the answer is not to protest it, but to teach students how to read it and to understand its strengths and limitations. To actually TEACH students to interpret web material. I reminded academics that Wikipedia provides information to people who don't have access to books and that mostly-good information is far better than none. Most importantly, i reminded academics that the vast majority of articles on Wikipedia are super solid and if they had a problem with them, they could fix them. Academics have a lot of knowledge, but all too often they forget that they are teachers and that there is great value in teaching the masses, not just the small number of students who will help their careers progress. Alas, public education has been devalued and information elitism is rampant in an age where we finally have the tools to make knowledge more accessible. Sad. (And one of the many things that is making me disillusioned with academia these days.) I found myself being the Wikipedia promoter because i found the extreme academic viewpoint to be just as egregious as the extreme Wikipedia viewpoint.

And then, as if i couldn't be more cranky, i watched Internet Researchers take up the same anti-Wikipedia argument. I was floored. These aren't just academics, they're the academics who study the web. The academics who should know better. But they felt as though it was a problem that Wikipedia would allow for a man to be defamed. As the conversation progressed, someone pointed out that Wikipedia's policies and platform supports Seigenthaler's concern that "irresponsible vandals [can] write anything they want about anybody." Much to my complete and utter joy, Jimmy Wales responded with a fantastic structural comparison that i felt should be surfaced from the mailing list and shared to the world at large:

Imagine that we are designing a restaurant. This restuarant will serve steak. Because we are going to be serving steak, we will have steak knives for the customers. Because the customers will have steak knives, they might stab each other. Therefore, we conclude, we need to put each table into separate metal cages, to prevent the possibility of people stabbing each other.

What would such an approach do to our civil society? What does it do to human kindness, benevolence, and a positive sense of community?

When we reject this design for restaurants, and then when, inevitably, someone does get stabbed in a restaurant (it does happen), do we write long editorials to the papers complaining that "The steakhouse is inviting it by not only allowing irresponsible vandals to stab anyone they please, but by also providing the weapons"?

No, instead we acknowledge that the verb "to allow" does not apply in such a situation. A restaurant is not _allowing_ something just because they haven't taken measures to _forcibly prevent it_ a priori. It is surely against the rules of the restaurant, and of course against the laws of society. Just. Like. Libel. If someone starts doing bad things in a restuarant, they are forcibly kicked out and, if it's particularly bad, the law can be called. Just. Like. Wikipedia.

I do not accept the spin that Wikipedia "allows anyone to write anything" just because we do not metaphysically prevent it by putting authors in cages.

All too often we blame the technology for problematic human behaviors. We fail to recognize that technology makes them more visible but the human behaviors are rooted in larger issues. In turn, we treat the symptoms rather than the disease. The solution is not to bandaid the problems by taking away or limiting the technologies, but to make the world a better place from the inside out.

I am worried about how academics are treating Wikipedia and i think that it comes from a point of naivety. Wikipedia should never be the sole source for information. It will never have the depth of original sources. It will also always contain bias because society is inherently biased, although its efforts towards neutrality are commendable. These are just realizations we must acknowledge and support. But what it does have is a huge repository of information that is the most accessible for most people. Most of the information is more accurate than found in a typical encyclopedia and yet, we value encyclopedias as a initial point of information gathering. It is also more updated, more inclusive and more in-depth. Plus, it's searchable and in the hands of everyone with digital access (a much larger population than those with encyclopedias in their homes). It also exists in hundreds of languages and is available to populations who can't even imagine what a library looks like. Yes, it is open. This means that people can contribute what they do know and that others who know something about that area will try to improve it. Over time, articles with a lot of attention begin to be inclusive and approximating neutral. The more people who contribute, the stronger and more valuable the resource. Boycotting Wikipedia doesn't make it go away, but it doesn't make it any better either.

I will be truly sad if academics don't support the project, don't contribute knowledge. I will be outraged if academics continue to talk about having Wikipedia eliminated as a tool for information dispersal. Sure, students shouldn't be citing from Wikipedia instead of the primary texts they were supposed to have read. But Wikipedia is a stunning supplement to most texts and often provides pointers to other relevant material that one didn't know existed. We should be teaching our students how to interpret the materials they get on the web, not banning them from it. We should be correcting inaccuracies that we find rather than protesting the system. We have the knowledge to be able to do this, but all too often, we're acting like elitist children. In this way, i believe academics are more likely to lose credibility than Wikipedia.

Category: academia

Tags: wikipedia seigenthaler credibility

   

Posted by zephoria at 2:32 PM | Comments (24) | TrackBack (3)

November 2, 2005

Jimmy Wales speaking at Berkeley tomorrow

Who: Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia)
Where: School of Information, South Hall, UC-Berkeley, Room 110
When: November 3, 4-5:30

For those who love Wikipedia, i'm hosting Jimmy Wales to speak at my department tomorrow about Wikipedia's culture. It is free and open to the public. It should be a fun talk and question/answer discussion.

Category: academia

Tags: wikipedia

   

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October 25, 2005

Stanford at iTunes

How cool is it that Stanford is making many of its lectures available on iTunes? Yay for efforts to open up the knowledge production process! Now i want a podcast of distinguished lecturer series!

Category: academia

   

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October 4, 2005

somewhere in-between the ALA and Google is harmony

As far back as i can remember, i've found utter joy in being able to understand opposing points of view. Most of the time, this is useful in being a mediator between two warring individuals or groups; i used to wonder if should become a shrink. But, this week, i had the fortunate opportunity to hear two institutions talk past each other: American Library Association (Michael Gorman) and Google (Sergey Brin).

Let me back up... I was invited to Keynote at the ALA's Library and Information Technology Association national conference. At first, i was befuddled - why me? And then, when i looked at the other keynotes, i knew i was in trouble. I was sandwiched between someone speaking about "how librarians can still vanquish Googlezon and win back our rightful place as the guardians of the world's knowledge and all that is good" and Michael Gorman (the President of the ALA who upset quite a few people with his essay on "those blog people"). Oh shit. So, i prepared and delivered a call-to-arms-esque talk. By and large, i think it went over well. Some people were upset that i was critical of members of the community as an outsider; others were ecstatic that i was challenging the status quo. The biggest disagreement was over whether or not Google, as a corporate entity, can really do the same kind of work as librarians. I argued that money always biases and limits but librarians are more indebted to their funders than Google is to theirs. Still, i understand their point and frustration, which i tried to make clear in my talk and in answering questions afterwards.

After my talk, Michael Gorman of the ALA gave his keynote. OMG, i wanted to die. At some point, he started talking about the Tower of Babel and how we need to return humanity to a common language. So much of his idea of librarianship is focused on control and power. He talked about how Google returned terrible results that no one wanted because it was all so random. Librarians know how to give you value. Gah.

And then, today, Sergey Brin of Google appeared in my Search class as a surprise guest (webcast will be posted). I realized i had never heard him talk except for when i was working for the company and then, he could say whatever he wanted. In public, he was clearly trying to negotiate what he was and was not allowed to say. He made quite a few in the audience twitch over their response to China. Still, i understand (although don't always agree with) the stance that some in China is better than none. He really rattled some feathers though with his response to the semantic web, tagging and librarianship. He took the techno-centric point of view that is so Google. Tagging inverts the relationship between man and machine. Tagging is only of interest and valuable if machines do it. Technology is just as good as experts and it's a waste of the expert's time to bother trying. (A good quote from this section was "Experiments like Esperanto have failed.") One of my professors was really outraged by all of this - i thought his head was going to blow off. God it was painful. Will Google ever understand that culture has value? I guess not so long as technodeterminism is profitable. Gah.

So in less than a week, i got to see the most stubborn and power-hungry sides of two institutions who see no value in the other. And yet, so many of those in the trenches want to build bridges because we know that there are important lessons to learn. Yet, there are issues of prestige, power and money. The Google boys would definitely rather re-invent the field than learn from the librarians. The old skool librarians would rather stick to their ways than acknowledge that there are reasons why search companies have reached the mainstream. I understand where both side is coming from but their stubbornness and lack of foresight is excruciating. I find myself wanting to shake them both.

Somewhere in-between the ALA and Google there is harmony, but i wonder if they'll ever be able to find it. Right now, i'm so thankful to be at a school of information that revels in the possibilities of technology and a search company that understands the culture has value. If i had to deal with the top of the pyramid at either the ALA or Google, i'd want to shoot myself on a daily basis. Instead, i want to circumvent both in order to innovate.

Category: academia

Tags: librarians google hegemony lita

   

Posted by zephoria at 12:43 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack (4)

September 12, 2005

why culture matters even in math class

A friend of mine recently decided to quit his tech job and become a high school math teacher (a move that still has my jaw on the floor in awe). He's been tracking the tough lessons of being a new teacher on a blog. This morning, he posted about why culture matters and his experience has had me smiling all day. For those who are link shy, i'll summarize:

Homework question: "While in France last summer I bought a hat for 25.50. A friend bought a similar hat for 5 in the United States. What's going on here? Explain completely."

Expected answer: "something about different currencies and exchange rates. This question comes in the context of problems about length and area, so the importance of units in measurement is being emphasized."

Student answer: "Two possibilities: 1, the hat your friend bought was fake. It said similar not same. 2, you got ripped off in France because your [sic] a tourist."

ROFL! I just want to reach out and hug his student - that just rocks.

Category: academia

Tags: culture teaching

   

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September 8, 2005

upcoming conferences

I will be attending various conferences this fall/winter and i thought i'd share in case you want to join me.

• Podcasting Symposium (Duke, September 27-28) - talking on performance and podcasting
  
• ALA | LITA National Forum (San Jose, October 1) - keynote on blogging
  
• Web2.0 (San Francisco, October 5) - attending for one day
  
• State of Play (New York, October 7-8) - attending
  
• 4S (Pasadena, October 20-22) - speaking on Fakesters and moderating on new media
  
• AAA (D.C., November 29-December 3) - speaking on blogging
  
• HICSS (Hawaii, January 4-7) - speaking on Friendster
  
• AAAS (St. Louis, February 16-20) - speaking on youth culture
  

Also, a paper that i co-wrote with Jeff Heer will be present at InfoVis (Minneapolis, October 23-25) but Jeff will be doing the presenting.

Category: academia

   

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July 23, 2005

issues in quotation and citation

I know that i should love human subjects boards, but i have to admit that they are my least favorite aspect of doing research. My biggest complaint is that they do not understand the dynamics of doing research online. Thus, i've spent far too much time discussing what it means to be an ethical researcher of online material. One issue that always emerges concerns citations. As a researcher, you are required to respect the confidentiality of your subjects always. Yet, when you are quoting online material, you can easily throw the quote into Google and find the original source, revealing the person behind the quote (or at least their handle).

While this topic is frequently discussed in conversations about ethical research, it is clearly not a lesson that everyone has learned. In The New Nanny Diaries Are Online, the author thinks that she is being discrete, referencing her nanny anonymously. By throwing the quotes into Google, you can find the nanny's blog. This is particularly interesting because it gives the nanny a chance to respond in her own words.

This is an interesting dynamic and one that i'm curious about in the context of research. What would it mean if subjects of research could respond to the analysis of their practices? Historically, anthropologists did not make their analyses available to subjects because it was assumed that the subjects could not understand the analysis. Personally, i've always been of the mindset that publications should be explicitly made available to all subjects. Yet, i have taken the elitist position that i know more and while i should listen to disagreements, i should still publish what i wrote if i still believe it after the disagreements. What would it mean to bring the subject more actively into the conversation, letting them out themselves as they see fit? What if the subjects want to be referenced explicitly so that they _can_ refute my claims?

(Based on Alex Halavais)

Category: academia

   

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July 11, 2005

"bloggers need not apply": maintaining status quo in academia

In the questions, Ehud asked about the state of social software in the academy. It can probably be summed up as paranoia vs. panacea. Of course, this applies to social software with or without the academy involved. Research into how social software is being used is very raw, very new. It's hard to give meaningful reports because, mostly, people are just experimenting, not researching. That said, it's great to see the personal experimentation because it's the first step to research.

All the same, social software paranoia is definitely hitting the press. The Chronicle of Higher Education published an essay entitled Bloggers Need Not Apply. Anonymously, a humanities professor from the Midwest discusses how blogs were received during the hiring process. I agree with him in parts, but i think that his argument fails.

The reason that your blog matters is because it is part of your "brand" and you get an online identity by writing to mailing lists, writing blogs, commenting on things, etc. And yes, it's disturbing that we're moving to a culture of individual brands but that's always been true in academia. In academia, your brand is this aggregate of your eccentricities and expertise. I do think that you can soil your brand in any public or semi-public environment. This is why you put on a particular face during conferences, at dinner with like minds, etc. Certain institutions have more tolerance for eccentricities than others. My guess is that the Midwest humanities department has virtually none. But find me a prof at MIT that is not quirky as hell. In fact, i think that "normals" would be upsetting there. Academia does not have one consistent personality trait and potential faculty have to find an institution where they match, not just in terms of research, but in terms of personality and passions. In turn, quirky students seek out quirky places and quirky research happens at quirky places.

There is no doubt that all faculty searches include a Google search. Hell, i searched all applicants during mine, not just the narrowed candidates. One of the things i hear most frequently about our new hire is how disturbing it is that he doesn't have a web presence. Something must be wrong, right? Everything that we could find about him online was accidental, not controlled. Abstracts from conferences, posts to academic Yahoo Groups, etc. You worry about people like this, particularly in the more technical realms.

I feel badly for the students at the authors' university. Any institution that expects people to stifle their quirks is oppressive in many ways. Of course, it's probably good that faculty find out that they could not get along with a person before they are brought on campus - saves both groups the headache. But i worry about institutions that point blank exclude anyone who doesn't spend their lives trying to suppress quirks - institutional identities should emerge as the aggregate of the quirks, not the suppression of them. Homogeneity is not what students need and certainly not what knowledge producti