[Air-l] suggestions for lurking researcher?

[Denise N. Rall]

Dear Charles & student -

For aspects of learning, this is an interesting paper
-have to search online for the .pdf or contact the
author directly.

Taylor, J. C. (2002?). "Teaching and learning online:
the workers, the lurkers and the shirkers. "pdf file.
Taylor was either at the University of Southern
Queensland or gave the paper there. 
	
This should work as an overall text, but see part II
chapter 4 - Jenny Preece on lurkers.

Lueg, C. and D. Fisher, Eds. (2003). From Usenet to
CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces.
London, Springer-Verlag.
	
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

Denise N. Rall, Ph.D. submitted for review, School of Environ. Science,
Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA
At SCU: Room T2.12, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Tuesdays or Mobile 0438 233 344
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html
Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK
http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html