[Air-l] migration literature?

[Denise N. Rall]

Dear Greg -

This book was posted here in January 03.
>From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social
Information Spaces
Christopher Lueg and Danyel Fisher, eds.
London: Springer-Verlag. January, 2003
Price: US$49.95
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~danyelf/projects/book.html

This book appears to have sections that are germane to
the migration discussion. Also, we had some
conversation on dying networks (PLATO) etc. earlier
this year. I would search the archives for this
discussion as it was linked specifically to what
allows networks to migrate onto the WWW and/or what
causes them to die. Lots has been written on the
USENET migration that the following book alludes to.

Apologies if you are the person who posted these notes
previously, I wasn't paying too much attention to the
author.

Denise

(LONG POST NOT WELL EDITED FOLLOWS RE: THE BOOK TITLE
ABOVE)

This list has periodically discussed ways of dealing
with data online: at the end of last year, for
example, we talked about ways of extracting
usenet data, and what one might do with it.

I believe that this book might help address some of
these questions, and gives an overview of some of the
techniques now available.

>From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social
Information Spaces
Christopher Lueg and Danyel Fisher, eds.
London: Springer-Verlag. January, 2003
Price: US$49.95
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~danyelf/projects/book.html


FROM THE INTRODUCTION

This volume explores ways to look at, and instrument,
spaces for social awareness. We want to learn how to
look at a space, and understand what is going on with
the group that inhabits it. We want to come to a space
to learn what it has to offer. We want to build new
spaces that open  themselves to productive
exploration, both to researchers and to participants. 
These are tasks for statisticians and designers,
sociologists,  anthropologists, and technologists to
work together to explore, characterise, and build 
these spaces.

Through this book, we ask what aspects of an online
group are important  to its participants. What tools
do we have to measure online groups, and  what
do those measurements mean? What are appropriate tools
for the  researcher to use to examine the group? What
tools might be brought to the group to examine itself?

We also try to understand a second question: How can
we take advantage of the specific characteristics of
social information spaces to build new  or
enhance existing interfaces to these spaces? Different
kinds of spaces have been built with different
attributes: some are highly controlled 
spaces, carefully limiting what sorts of contributions
can be made to the  space,
while others grant a high degree of freedom to their
users. These  technical attributes partially drive the
social abilities of users. Because  software
can be used to restrict certain types of use, software
drives the culture, norms, and understandings in the
groups. Differences in user interfaces 
can be affect the participants' experience of the
space-as well as the  ability to study the groups, and
the ability to collect data from them. These
differences will delineate some of the abilities to
measure and 
understand
the spaces, and will shape the conversation happening
within the 
spaces.

Researchers have enjoyed extensive access to social
information spaces.
Usenet is publicly accessible and discussion lists are
often easy to 
join,
so an anthropologist can lurk quietly, asking
questions of a few key
informants but remaining largely hidden. Online spaces
have been a 
popular
domain of study:  a researcher of virtual worlds once
commented half in
jest, "every MUD has its own ethnographer." The longer
tradition of 
formal
online research has been dominantly qualitative, as
those public spaces
allowed for close examination. From this tradition has
emerged a rich
variety of projects, from examinations of individuals
and their social
interaction, to larger-scale issues of group overload
and crises of
filtering.

Our emphasis in this volume, however, is with an eye
to fine-grained,
quantitative studies. Quantitative researchers take
advantage of the 
fact
that online spaces are easily amenable to computer
analysis. Of course, 
some
aspects of online interaction can be invisible to
quantitative 
techniques.
Although these types of studies may never fully convey
the texture of a
space, they can be powerful tools for describing many
of the important 
group
behaviours and attributes. They have the ability to
process large 
amounts of
data at once, allowing visualizations to interactively
compare 
different
data sets. Quantitative methods can therefore be very
good at 
highlighting
potentially interesting sites for closer future study.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I: Introduction to Online Studies and Usenet

1 Introduction: Studying Social Information Spaces --
Danyel Fisher

2 "A Standing Wave in the Web of Our Communications":
Usenet and the 
Socio-
Technical Construction of Cyberspace Values  -- Bryan
Pfaffenberger

Part II: Studying Spaces

1 Measures and Maps of Usenet -- Marc Smith

2 The Dynamics of Mass Interaction -- Steve Whittaker,
Loren Terveen, 
Will
Hill, Lynn Cherny

3 Conversation Map: A Content-Based Usenet Newsgroup
Browser -- Warren 
Sack

4 Silent participants: Getting to know lurkers better
-- Blair Nonnecke 
and
Jenny Preece

Part III: Enhancing Spaces

1 Computer Mediated Communication among Teams: What
are "Teams" and how 
are
they "Virtual"? -- Erin Bradner

2 CoWeb - Experiences with Collaborative Web spaces 
-- Andreas 
Dieberger
and Mark Guzdial

3 From PHOAKS to TopicShop: Experiments in Social Data
Mining -- Brian
Amento, Loren Terveen, and Will Hill

4 GroupLens for Usenet: Experiences in Applying
Collaborative Filtering 
to a
Social Information System -- Bradley N. Miller, John
T. Riedl and 
Joseph A.
Konstan

5 Exploring Interaction and Participation to Support
Information 
Seeking in
a Social Information Space -- Christopher Lueg

Appendix: Studying Online Newsgroups




=====
"Stupidity is not just a lack of content; it's also a process" 
Denise N. Rall, Sustainable Forestry Mentoring Coordinator &
PhD student, School of Education, Southern Cross University,
PO Box 157, Lismore, NSW, 2480 Australia
Phone +61-2-6624-8627 Fax +61-2-6624-8637
Office (Tuesdays) (02) 6620 3577 Mob 0438 233 344
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