The last few days have been a blur of travel and family, all of which I survived, though not without some bumps along the way. I’m happily ensconced in my hotel room in Chicago now, though, awaiting what promises to be the most action-packed MLA I’ve experienced.*

If you’re around and want to say hi, you can likely find me at many of the various panels thoughtfully put together by the Association for Computers and the Humanities**, including of course my own. I’ll hope to see some of you there.

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*Not counting MLAs at which I’ve conducted interviews, I guess, but those are hard for me to characterize as action-packed, really, as sitting in a hotel room talking for hours on end hardly strikes me as action.

**[Updated, 12.27.07, 9.34 am: I must have been more tired than I thought I was last night. The panels themselves have been put together by various entities, only one of which is ACH; the list of panels was collated by ACH. Sheesh.]

This morning’s keynote speaker was one of my favorite people, John Willinsky, head of the Public Knowledge Project, which has produced both the Open Journal Systems and the Open Conference Systems, among other projects. Again, problems in the notes below the fold should be attributable to me and my conference headache, not to John.

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Yesterday’s keynote was from Henry Jenkins, entitled “The Moral Economy of Web 2.0: Reconsidering the Relations Between Producers and Consumers.” I’m posting my notes below the fold; anything goofy therein should be attributed to flaws in the notetaker rather than the talk.

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I sorta dropped the ball on conference blogging yesterday, as I got increasingly caught up in conferencing itself — but I’m going to attempt to catch up on the rest of the day:

The second panel I attended yesterday, just after lunch, was the one I moderated, entitled “youth and play.” I’m not sure that was the best mode of characterizing the collection of papers presented, three of which did have to do with youth, and a fourth of which did have overtly to do with play, after a fashion at least, but those categories aren’t really what tied the papers together. (The fifth presenter did not show, which improved the panel’s operation, in that we actually got to discuss the papers more deeply, but which I would nonetheless mark down as extremely bad form.) If anything, I’d say that issues of trust and identity connected the papers more firmly than the panel’s title terms.

The panel began with a paper from Hebatallah El-Semary on Egyptian children’s uses of the internet, and particularly the relationships they have with their parents around such use: how much do their parents regulate or monitor their internet usage (not much), and how much do children resist their parents’ attempts at filtering such exposure (significantly). The second paper, by Oren Golan, focused on Israeli youths’ negotiations of anonymity, identity construction, and trust in online communities; the issue of how much information about themselves to reveal is a significant one in a small country where the seemingly random person they’re chatting with could turn out to be the brother of their cousin’s best friend. The third paper presented the results of a study, conducted by Stepan Konecy and David Smahel, of Czech adolescents and young adults, investigating how much internet users lie about themselves online, and about what subjects. Finally, Edgar Gomez and Elisenda Ardevol presented their work, conducted with Adolfo Estalella, on what they termed “playful embodiment,” a look at the practices of a number of Mexican and other Latin American bloggers and content creators who construct their online identities not by erasing the body but by calling attention to it, photographing it, writing explicitly about its processes and desires.

The discussion afterward was quite engaging, as the audience teased out the interconnections and differences amongst these papers. The one thing that I didn’t say then — as I couldn’t quite figure out how to frame it — was my sense that, though it was really exciting to have a panel bringing together issues from such a wide range of perspectives from around the world, there was an irritating sense of the panel being explicitly marginalized as an “international” panel, as though the non-U.S., non-western-European voices were only able to speak to one another, rather than to the conference at large. There was the usual bit of exercise during the association’s general meeting later in the day about AOIR needing to include the perspectives of the developing world in the conference, but somehow these well-meaning requests fell flat for me, considering the ways that the non-western work already present at the conference is segregated.

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The first panel I made it to today (I slept in a tiny bit, and then got so irate over the Chronicle that I missed the first session) focused on the question of the openness of ostensibly open communities, including wiki contributors, YouTube users, and open-source programmers. First, Ralph Schroeder and Mattijs den Besten presented on the Pynchon wiki, started by pynchon-l denizen and Pynchon Hyperarts archive author Tim Ware; then Sheizaf Rafaeli presented his research with Yaron Ariel and Tsahi Hayat on opinion leaders in Wikipedia discussions; Alice Marwick presented a really interesting paper exploring claims of YouTube’s powers of “democratization,” comparing hype about the site with its actual use; Evangelia Berdou presented on the contributions of non-programmers to open-source projects; and Robert Mason and Karine Barzilai-Nahon presented on their research with David Hendy into the democratization of the software design process.

Reading the abstracts, I wouldn’t have thought these papers would work together as well as they did, but it proved to be a very interesting panel. The only problem was that with five papers in 90 minutes, the time keeper — for which position I volunteered — had to be pretty draconian. I’m now about to moderate another five-paper panel, so I’ve got to put the task-master hat back on…

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The last panel for me for today was a collection of papers focused on methodological questions, ranging from the formulation of research premises, through the collection of data, to the publication of results. Radhika Gajjala began with a paper on the immersive nature of online research, describing a methodology that acknowledges the researcher’s interconnection with the phenomena under study; Michelle Kazmer presented the results of her work with Bo Xie on the difficulties of using internet technologies to do qualitative interviews; Kirsten Foot talked about her work with Steve Schneider on the creation of a set of methodologies for researchers to use in archiving web objects; Dan Li spoke about her work with Gina Walejko on the difficulties of sampling blogs and bloggers; and Anders Fagerjord, finally, talked about the ways that electronic publishing promises innovation in the modes of composition and presentation for scholarly research.

Needless to say, this last was closest to my heart. Anders explored the history of the research journal, growing out of the letters once written from one scholar to another, transformed by print into letters written from one scholar to an entire learned society, before talking about the ways that multimedia, linking structures, and other network-based technologies might both speed the dissemination of research and create more engaging formats. His paper, still in progress, and being published in what he calls “stretch text format,” is, appropriately enough, available online.

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Post-lunch panel today on blogging, with four excellent papers: Sean Lawson, on milblogging in relationship to the military’s official attempts to regulate and restrict such online writing by military personnel; Gina Walejko on academic bloggers’ perceived senses of risk and reward in their blogging practices; Jia Lin on a comparative study of international blogging practices; and Clifford Tatum on the intersections of blogging and urban development in Seattle.

Happily, abstracts for all papers, and full-text for lots of papers, are available online, if you’d like to know more.

Technorati Tags: aoir8

The first keynote of the conference was from John Lester of Linden Labs, on Second Life. It was an interesting talk, for someone (like me) who has paid very little attention to what’s been going on there — a broad swath of the kind of experimentation that have been produced both by the developers and by the users (often completely unexpected by the developers). But it still wasn’t enough to get me to commit to spending the time necessary to get up to speed in SL, not enough to get me over my resistance, which is largely based on my sense that the vast majority of the SL experience is all about various forms of capitalist exchange.

On the one hand, it’s not fair to ask an industry guy — a developer — to be critical about the technology that he’s presenting. On the other hand, I find myself wanting something more. And I’m suspecting I’m not alone: the questions have been interesting, but the answers haven’t really gotten at their substance.

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First panel of the day, on sexuality and gender online; several excellent papers. I’m particularly compelled by Michele White’s exploration of the heteronormative pressures of eBay’s official discourses and the ways that individual sellers wind up rupturing the official narratives of community, and by Eszter Hargittai and Gina Walejko’s study of gender differences in online creative media production and sharing.

Wireless access here is good; I’ll hope to be posting more throughout the day.

Technorati Tags: aoir8

I’m headed here later today, for this. I’m certain to see him, and him, and no doubt a bunch of other folks, too. Look me up if you’re there.