[Air-l] AoIR communal data-database

[Nancy Baym]

Hello,

I am developing an 'available research data' section of the member 
website. The basic goals of this are to provide members with easy 
access to existing data sources that they can incorporate into their 
own analyses, to provide members with easy access to tools that will 
help them conduct research, and to foster collaborative analyses by 
providing a mechanism for people with shared interests to network 
around specific materials. I need your help to identify and generate 
resources to include, and welcome any help in building or maintaining 
this communal resource. I envision the following sorts of materials 
[these will be either links or, with permission, archived copies on 
aoir's server]:

(1) data sets that are already available online (e.g. HomeNet data, 
Pew Internet data...). If you have any suggestions of such data sets 
that we should include, please email me a brief description and a url 
for the materials.

(2) data collecting tools that are available online such as the 
recently mentioned NetMiner. If you know of any such tools for 
analysing the internet, please email me a brief description and a url.

(3) online archives such as webarchive.org, and the recent election 
and 9-11 archives built by aoir members. If you know of good 
archives, email me the urls and a blurb.

(4) data sets contributed by our members either because you are done 
with them and want to share, or because you are looking for 
collaborators to help you analyze the materials (it seems a 
characteristic of a lot of net research that we end up with a lot 
more data than we can analyze). If you might be interested in sharing 
your data, please email me a description of what you have (don't send 
me data sets yet, I'm not that far along). Depending on how free you 
want your materials to be, you could choose between giving aoir a 
copy of the data to archive (with info about it) or you could give us 
a description of the data, the sort of work you're looking for others 
to do with it, and contact information for those who want to follow 
up with you (i.e. you hang on to the data files). Our intention is 
that access to such private resources contributed by aoir members 
would be limited to aoir members.

(5) what would be useful to include that I am leaving out?

If you have any other suggestions regarding the shape of this venture 
or the specifics of what it will include or how it will be done, 
please email them to me or, better yet, raise them for discussion on 
air-l. This is in planning stages, and is open to good ideas about 
how to make it better. This will only be worthwhile if it's something 
we use, and we'll only use it if it's got things worth using there, 
so please let me know what you're aware of or what you would be 
willing to contribute. There will be plenty of work to go around in 
building and maintaining this resource, so I welcome anyone's 
participation.

Thank you in advance for your input,

Nancy

_________________________________________________________
Nancy Baym
nbaym at ku.edu
http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
102 Bailey, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
VP, Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org