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Summary:

We have seen RoSE grow into a linked collection of references to documents and people of various eras, and we know intuitively that each of these entities, living or not, has a story, has significance. Or more precisely, we can study and ascribe meaning to them separately and in clusters. Doing so might also be called a form of storytelling, or making sense of the data by tracing a certain vantage point or line of inquiry. The very acts of telling and seeing have deep ties to narratology. (more…)

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Summary:
Richard Price, who recently earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy at All Souls College, Oxford, launched Academia.edu on September 16, 2008. The website seeks to answer the question “Who’s researching what?” by taking a social networking approach to academic relationships. Academia.edu illustrates these relationships as a genealogy in which users are grouped by university, then department, then their position within their department. Users add content based on their research, including what papers they have written, their research interests, and their advisors.

Description:
Academia.edu uses a tree-like genealogical structure to organize academic relationships. Colleges and Universities are listed in a row along the top of the page – clicking the background and dragging it left or right allows a user to scroll through other universities. Using the search box in the middle of the page, a user finds their college or university and, if the school is not found, adds it to the list of universities and colleges. Once the user finds his or her university, s/he will see departments organized alphabetically on a tree that stems from his or her university. The user then locates his or her department or adds the department if it is not already part of the tree. (more…)

The Ontological Problem of Social Computing

At the UCSB’s Bluesky Social Computing Group, part of the University of California’s Transliteracies Project, we are tasked with the problem of researching the impact of social computing as a tool for collaborative research and to explore new ways in which social computing might be used in the future. We have been confronted with the problem of how to conceptualize what social computing means and what we mean when we talk about collaborative research. This issue is further exacerbated by the variety of social computing experiences; broadly considered, anything related to the internet, by definition, is a form of social computing. Recent efforts have focused on developing and applying a deeper understanding of ontological meaningfulness of concepts like a “person” and “relationships”. Most realizations of digital social networks have trivial and naive answers to these questions, a situation which fundamentally limits their usefulness. To this end, it has been suggested by Bluesky project leader and English department chair, Dr. Alan Liu, that new metaphors for social computing are needed.

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Summary
MONK, which stands for “Metadata Offer New Knowledge,” is a single digital environment of literary texts that endeavors to make “modern forms of text analysis and text mining accessible to humanities scholars” {1}. The metadata associated with any given document in the MONK environment ranges from data about individual words, to data about discursive organization, to bibliographic data. MONK offers the ability to read back and forth between these different levels of data and, therefore, to read as closely or as distantly as one wants. The current collection of texts in the MONK prototype consists of about 1200 works, including approximately 500 texts of various genres published between 1533 and 1625, alongside about 700 works of English and American fiction from about 1550 to 1923. Fundamentally, MONK assumes that operating through “coarse but consistent encodings across many texts in a heterogeneous document environment” offers significant scholarly benefit. The single environment that will bundle these operations for this large collection of texts will be housed at http://monkproject.org. (more…)

Summary
The Institute for the Future of the Book officially launched CommentPress 1.0 on July 25, 2007 as a theme for WordPress. The initial project developed in 2006 when the Institute approached Mackenzie Wark about creating an online version of his book Gamer Theory. In order to emphasize conversation about the book, the Institute departed from the typical blogging structure by placing comments next to the text rather than directly beneath the text. The online project, called GAM3R 7H30RY was so successful that it sparked similar projects, among them Mitchell Stephen’s “Holy of Holies: On the Constituents of Emptiness,” and Lewis Lapham’s “The Iraq Study Group Report.” (more…)

Summary
Open Journal Systems (OJS) is an online management and publishing system for peer-reviewed journals developed by the Public Knowledge Project, a partnership among the University of British Columbia, the Simon Fraser University Library, the School of Education at Stanford University, and the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University. Open Journal Systems’s open source software is designed with the purpose of “making open access publishing a viable option for more journals, as open access can increase a journal’s readership as well as its contribution to the public good on a global scale”{1} and provides tools to aid with every stage of the publishing process. Additionally, OJS offers a set of reading tools which can optionally be added to the journal. As of January 2009, OJS was currently used by over 2000 journals {2}. (more…)

Summary:

CommentPress was developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book as part of their ongoing experiments with “networked books”. First instituted in 2006 as part of McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H3ORY 1.1 publication, the software was developed to work with WordPress and intended to reconfigure the nature of blog discussions. CommentPress allows respondents to post comments in the margin of the text, on a paragraph-by-paragraph or “whole page” basis. This breaks down the top-down hieararchy typical of blogs whereby a main post is positioned vertically above any commentary. Instead a reader may view the text and commentary at the same time.

Version 1.0 of CommentPress was released to the general public in July 2007 and the software has been used to generate discussion around Master’s Theses, scholarly articles, and books. (more…)

Summary:
LibraryThing is an online knowledge base and social networking tool for bibliophiles. The website allows users to catalog their personal libraries. By entering in their own books, users can locate others with similar libraries, find suggestions for books they might like, or even get “unsuggestions” for the books that are least like their own. Users can organize their collections according to self-defined tags and also view how others have tagged the same books. (more…)

Summary:
First launched in February of 2004, Facebook.com (initially known as Thefacebook.com) is an online networking website that allows users to create their own profiles and link to and view the profiles of others. Facebook is unique in that its online communities are based on offline university communities and membership is restricted to users with a .edu email address.

Facebook is the second fastest growing website and is particularly popular with young adults currently enrolled in or recently graduated from college. Because Facebook users are organized by college affiliation, users have a clear offline presence. The site thus offers the opportunity to investigate the relationship between offline communities and their online counterparts. (more…)

Summary:
The wiki is an increasingly popular content management system for organizing widely distributed collaborations over the internet. This report will describe the relevant history and evolution of the wiki, and then consider the technology, interface, and design of MediaWiki as an example of what a wiki is today. While there are literally dozens of implementations of the wiki format, MediaWiki is unique as the engine responsible for the operation of Wikipedia — currently the largest wiki—and as the software supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation Inc. (more…)

Summary:
Blogdex is a research project from the MIT Media Laboratory that traces the diffusion of content, represented in the form of hypertext links, over time, through blogs.

Programs such as Blogdex offer a window into the networking structure of the blogging community, an opportunity to systematically analyze large textual datasets, and a way to think about meaning in the online environment. (more…)

Summary:
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, the content of which is contributed by users. The site describes itself in eleven words stating, “Wikipedia is a neutral and unbiased compilation of notable, verifiable facts.” While articles are not subjected to peer review, per se, the fundamental philosophy behind Wikipedia is similar to many “open” projects in that the expectation is that collaboration results in improvement over time. (more…)

Summary:
MySpace, as one of the top five most popular English-language websites in the world, is an increasingly influential part of teen popular culture in North America. As of March 2006, MySpace was more popular than the websites of CNN, The New York Times, and Amazon, and – unlike “the news” – MySpace embodies an emerging breed of Internet communication in which individuals both create and consume content, freely blend text, images, video and audio, and easily transition between online and real-world social interaction. (more…)