Today, the British Library announces its Growing Knowledge exhibition, a nine-month project from October 2010 that I’m involved with as its Researcher in Residence. It’s an exciting role for me; I have the opportunity to help develop the content of what visitors will see when they visit the library’s showcase of the research tools of the future, and I am involved in on-the-ground analysis of what researchers in the field currently use and seek from digital technologies across the academic spectrum.
Current Research
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[Event] Why Study the Web? (Royal Society)
Friday March 05, 2010 @ 08:34 AM (UTC)This Monday evening, I’ll be chairing a panel of esteemed web academics at the Royal Society, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Northwestern’s Prof Noshir Contractor, Southampton’s Prof Nigel Shadboldt and Dame Wendy Hall and – my external examiner - Oxford’s Prof Bill Dutton. We’ll be discussing Web Science, the multi-disciplinary arena of study that looks at the web holistically – from a social, economic, political, psychological point of view – rather than approaching it within a purely technical framework.
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[Academic] To publish or not to publish online: redux
Monday January 11, 2010 @ 07:11 PM (UTC)Academics are divided about the use of the web for (re-)publishing findings and articles they’ve authored in peer-reviewed journals on their own websites. Some are open and free about it, distributing their raw and analysed results online pre- and post- publication, while others are concerned with information ownership issues and fear that their work will be mis-represented or devalued if released online. May 2008’s Scientific American has an excellent summary of the issues.
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[Academic] Be ethical to each other (online)
Wednesday January 06, 2010 @ 05:06 PM (UTC)The issue of ethical human subjects research in online communities has been a particular interest of mine since I started my academic career. I’ve written book chapters on it, presented papers at various public and academic events on it, and sat on BPS committees supporting it. And now, I’m doing some pre-emptive research for some writing and editing I’ll be doing on the subject in 2010.
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[PhD] Viva date is set
Tuesday October 06, 2009 @ 07:45 PM (UTC)Gulp. It’s 23 November, right as I’m coasting to a close in the Digital Revolution project.
What on earth shall I do when it’s all done?
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[PhD] How do you spell relief? S-u-b-m-i-s-s-i-o-n.
Monday October 05, 2009 @ 08:09 PM (UTC)I’ve not yet had a moment of gratuitous PhD image pr0n based on the final product that I submitted on 14 August. I guess I’ve not wanted to jinx my viva. Ah, to hell with it. Here are a few key images that give you an idea of what it ended up looking like on the day.
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[PhD] Draft 3: the last one before the big one
Friday August 07, 2009 @ 09:19 PM (UTC)PhD Draft 3: 82,495 words (without footnotes). 85,107 (with).
Pleased to see not much has changed in the process (even though i can assure you that loads has…)
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[PhD] Introduction to the Literature Review
Thursday August 06, 2009 @ 09:22 AM (UTC)Let’s get meaty. Here’s the introduction to the background chapter, in which I set out my stall.
The Internet is a communication medium that has revolutionised information sharing, knowledge ownership and interpersonal interactions (Lazer, 2007). Highly inter-connected social software networks like weblogs, forums and other collaborative online entities like virtual worlds have challenged traditional notions of information ownership, resulting in a reconsideration of online contributors’ involvement in news reporting and other forms of citizen participation. In the four decades since the original ARPAnet was established between four universities, the Internet has transformed from an exclusive technology with few gatekeepers into an open technology that can be used and contributed to by anyone. This brings to bear new questions about existing approaches to social influence that focus on interpersonal attributes like trust and credibility, and group processes like normative influence and social identity, as physically distributed networks of individuals who engage with one another in virtual communities – from different cultures and perspectives – consider which innovative attitudes and behaviours to adopt or to reject.
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[PhD] Introduction to Discussion
Monday August 03, 2009 @ 06:40 PM (UTC)Pulling it all together. It’s only 11 pages tho. It was 22. Hrmm…
This research was carried out to gain insight into the unique contribution social network analytic concepts offer to the prediction of influence above those observed by social psychological analyses. The results of three studies confirmed that network strength, network density, network position and network exposure predicted attitudes and behaviours in the online community Second Life, and that they explained the variance in these outcomes in different ways and at different times than psychological predictors like interpersonal and normative source attributes, perceived attitudes and perceived experiences.
This thesis set out to explore this question by focussing on three component parts: why network strength features have been effective at predicting influence, why the density of a network and the positions of an individual within it predicted personal attitudes and why an individual’s position in a network relative to his/her Friend and the amount of exposure s/he had to an innovation via his/her direct contacts predicted when an individual would adopt the innovation as it diffused through the online community.
To assess these questions, this research tested the relationships between network strength and measures of interpersonal trust, credibility, social comparison and prototypicality, it identified how network density and network position affected perceived attitudes and it followed the interpersonal pathway of an innovation across a nine month period through the Second Life community.
From these analyses, two themes emerged. The first dealt with how social network attributes related to psychological predictors, including the features of network analysis that were proxies for psychological measures that have been associated with social influence in the literature.
The second theme that emerged considered the complimentary relationship between network and psychological measures that went some way in explaining why influence occurred when a social system’s structure did not support it, and when interpersonal and normative features of influence did not predict it. It also explored how network measures established the foundations for psychological influence and the implications for network measures on the development of the perception of norms.
Throughout the thesis, special attention has been paid to the context of the analysis. The literature has argued that the unique interpersonal and structural features of online communities challenge many of the assumptions of offline social psychological theories, which has led to the emergence of influence theories that have focussed on the impact of the leanness of cyberspace on group processes (e.g., Spears & Lea, 1994). However, although this research found that there were some contextual differences, in general, the psychological processes of social influence appeared to function in the same ways as offline. It is argued that researchers should adapt their tools and practices to consider the context, but that the interpersonal and normative experiences in online communities, on the whole, remain the same. -
[PhD] Introduction to Study 3 (Draft 3): why people adopt an online innovation
Saturday August 01, 2009 @ 09:49 AM (UTC)Friends title: The one about what influenced people to use a new service on the Web.
If you’ve followed the line of thought that I’ve laid out in my thesis based on the Study 1 and Study 2 introductions, you might like to complete the set with this introduction, from Study 3. It’s notably different from the previous version of this introduction. That’s what you get for re-writing it (re-imagining it?) x 3…
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