[Air-l] (was no subject) internet research

[Denise N. Rall]

Internet research, or more exactly internet
scholarship is the topic of my PhD.

So I rather assume it exists, at least for the 200
pages or so of work I have written to describe it.

It is controversial about whether it is a field of
study. David Silver has usefully called it a
meta-field 
 - Silver, D. 2004. Internet/cyberculture/digital
culture/new media/fill-in-the-blank studies. New Media
& Society, 6(1), 55-64.


The special issue of TIS (below) should cover or at
least list a few of the major perspectives on it
 - Baym, N. (Guest editor) 2005. Special issue of The
Information Society: ICT research and disciplinary
boundaries: Is Internet research a virtual field, a 
proto-discipline, or something else? The Information
Society, 21(4).

I examine it from a perspective of hybridized
disciplinarity plus operational challenges and refer
to internet studies as an emergent field of study with
roots in many other fields. 

Web studies has not become the acceptable term at
least so far (Silver 2004) but see 
 - Gauntlett, D. (Ed.). 2000. Web.studies. London:
Arnold. I believe there is an updated version of this
book.

For "HOW TO BECOME" an internet researcher, I would
recommend the following, at least for academic work:

- Thelwall, M. 2004. Link Analysis: An Information
Science Approach. San Diego: Academic Press.

At least it explains what link analysis is and what it
is used for.  Other types of internet research have
been usefully explained in several books:
- Batinic, B., Reips, U.-D., & Bosnjak, M. (Eds.).
2002. Online Social Sciences. Seattle: Hogrefe &
Huber.

- Jones, S. (Ed.). 1999. Doing internet research:
Critical issues and methods for examining the Net.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 

- Mann, C., & Stewart, F. 2000. Internet communication
and qualitative research: A handbook for researching
online. London: Sage.

- Hine, C. (Ed.). 2005. Virtual methods: Issues in
social research on the Internet. Oxford: Berg
Publishers.

Cheers, Denise












Denise N. Rall, PhD thesis submitted, School of Environ. Science,
Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA
Tuesdays: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 or Mobile 0438 23 33 44
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/
Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK
http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html


 
____________________________________________________________________________________
Low, Low, Low Rates! Check out Yahoo! Messenger's cheap PC-to-Phone call rates 
(http://voice.yahoo.com)