While my blog was down, i was stoked to see Clay write about visualizing social networks. He references a great, albeit older (2000), overview article about visualizing social networks. In comments, folks also bring up Tamara Munzner’s thesis.

I’m in awe of all of the efforts to visualize social networks, but not surprisingly, i have my biases on this topic. The big question for me about visualizations is WHY? Most answers to this question fall into two camps: to efficiently understand massively complex data sets or because it’s cool. Both are super valid reasons, but the approaches that evolve almost always focus on visualizing data for some outside third-party, unrelated to the data. Of course, all of us who do visualize are also obsessed with visualiing our own data, but we don’t count. Although we weren’t able to deploy our visualizations to too many people, Fernanda/David and myself/Jeff were interested in what it means to visualized data for the people visualized. What would people do with these artifacts? How could ethnography be done with such tools?

The folks at Info@Vis! emphasize four basic elements of social network representations: presence, identity/affiliation, interaction, and communication. Personally, i find it peculiar that there is no discussion about the audience of the visualizations. Perhaps they are presuming that they are only visualizing for social scientists. But, even for social scientsits, another purpose of visualizing data is to engage those being visualized. It operates as a mirror and having that artifact provides you with such a grounding artifact upon which stories can be told.

Although i was unable to go to Hawaii to present out paper, Fernand tells me that it was quite well received there which makes me super happy.

So, as you may have noticed, my blog has been down. For a while. In typical danah style, i managed to figure out how to break things in a weird configuration that tormented everyone. So, you see, the CGI processes on MT last for a long time, taking up a lot of memory and time. Due to a really bad situation with spam bots who were running CGI scripts on my server, the admin decided to limit scripts, figuring that anything that was running too long was probably a big bad ugly mistake or a cruel bot. They weren’t prepared for MT. Or for my use of it as i tried to merge two blogs and rebuild >1000 entries. Oops. So, down and down the spiral went.

Bless Boris, Glenn and Ben for putting the pieces together.

Today, i had the joyous opportunity to speak at Storm Sessions, a local conference of San Francisco collectives trying to understand how to think about community and relationships. The conference is particularly valuable because so many cross-collective relationships are built.

The morning started out with a Ethan Watters sharing his thoughts on Urban Tribes with the crowd. Even when i disagree with him, i really love listening to Ethan. He’s so articulate and so interested in hearing dissenting opinions. It’s clear that he loves this topic, that it’s personal and that he really wants to understand it from all perspectives. That’s quite refreshing.

The next two sections were split between different panels and i sat in on the panel on polyamory and the one on cooperative housing. It was interesting to hear people that i know talk about topics that i have once lived…

Finally, Howard Rheingold and i wrapped up the day with a discussion about digital technologies and community. I think we were supposed to focus on online communities, but i quickly derailed us into a discussion based on what i felt was missing by some of the other talks: the issues that emerge when communities try to form cross-generationally because of the differences in communication structure. We talked about SMS, IM, the Well, meetup, Friendster/Tribe.net, etc. But more than anything, we took questions from the audience and had a group discussion. It was really nice. I’m so used to talking to public audiences that it was great to sit on a couch that was part of a household that i know well and talk to a group of friends and friends-of-friends. And it was fantastic to have Howard there, sharing his experience with folks who have the same goals, but come from different eras and experiences. It made me thrilled! A giddy girl bringing together friends with common threads.

Leave it to the Onion to bring together Friendster and issues around race classification for diversity validation.

OMG.

This kills me. If only i hadn’t heard this rhetoric before…

My so-called blog is a brilliant NYTimes article that came out while my blog was down. It’s a fantastic journalist treatment on how youth are using blogs (mostly of the LJ sort) to negotiate social relationships. Even better, it supports everything that i’ve been hearing from those studying youth culture about their relationship with different channels of communication.

Continue reading →

I’ve been meaning to put together a web page for my research project: Articulated Social Networks. Normally, i put together a page that collects all of my materials. Lately, things have been uber scattered so i’ve begun to consolidate. (Yes, this is in prep for actually writing a real ethnographic document.)

Every time i make a webpage, i start out motivated to make it elegantly designed. And i actually get color theory – know when to mess with the hues and when to mess with the saturations. But try as i might, i always end up just wanting to put up a LOT of color and it quickly becomes as hideously eclectic as my bedroom (although always with a lot less pink… 5 years of V-Day and i can’t really do pink websites any more).

A dear friend of mine has a little boy. I remember when he was small, he refused to put on any outfit with less than 5 colors in it. He didn’t want matching socks.

Perhaps i should not be allowed to choose colors in either my digital or physical domain because i tend to choose ALL.

There are times in my life when i feel like i’m flowing with life, in tune, aware. Moments of synchronicity appear everywhere. Two situations emerged in the last 24 hours that just hit me.

…

First, i was wandering through Amoeba Records buying downtempo. I decided i needed to get out of the downtempo section because i am not allowed to purchase more CDs than i can carry. Wandering around, waiting for my friends, i asked the information person if early releases of Ani’s new album. No luck. No worries.

Tonight, i arrived home to a package from Scot Fisher (the head of Righteous Babe). Inside was a copy of the album and a handwritten note suggesting that i might appreciate this. I was totally taken aback with deep appreciation and love. I’ve been hosting the lyrics site for so many years kind of tangentially to RBR. To be acknowledged just felt so heartwarming.

….

Last night, i was addressing all of these pent up emotions and Eve kept coming into my head. She used to tell me that crying was a wonderful release and it’s good for me. I miss her dreadfully and realized it had been a long time since we talked. But i channelled her and let out my tension, as hard as that is for me. Tears of joy, tears of release. And into the world, i sent my love towards Eve.

This morning, she called me. It had been months. She told me that she did all of these interviews with trans women and had written an amazing piece for the V-Day Los Angeles all-trans cast production. I cried. I honored her. I shared my love, my appreciation.

If you haven’t ever seen “The Vagina Monologues” you must. Go to a V-Day near you. It’s V-Season.

And if you’re in Sundance on Saturday, go see the new V-Day film: Until the Violence Stops.

As i sit here in awe of the synchronicity, i am so very thankful for all of the opportunities and situations that continue to emerge in my life. So very thankful.

As everyone i know is panicking because of the job market and heading back to school, our f%#king governor is _yet again_ hiking the tuition (by 40%), reducing services and making it harder for California citizens to get an education. Of course, i will acknowledge that he’s quite constrained because 3/4 of the State’s budget is allocated by Propositions. One thing i learned living in California is how ridiculous it is to do budgeting by voting.

Take a scenario that i witnessed at Brown. A survey went out. How many of you think that cable TV should be freely accessible in dorms? Well, most people shrugged their shoulders. Even if they didn’t watch TV, why not, right? Of course, implementing this meant that money got cut for computing services. No one told us what would be lost based on our decisions.

::grumble::grumble:: At least Piled Higher and Deeper made me smile about the situation:

So, i decided to mess with my blog a bit. I’m trying to merge connected selves & this blog and i’m making a bit of a mess out of it. My apologies for screwing up any RSS feeds. And a HUGE apology because i’m going to break practically every link and trackback out there. 🙁 Sorry hoor!