[Air-l] Web Science a Field of Study

[Daithí Mac Síthigh]

Please forgive me for sending this out of sync; I had an error with my
email setup which led to me replying to the list from the wrong
address.

I don't think anyone (Berners-Lee included!) would suggest that:

On 6 Nov 2006, at 20:56, Sam Tilden wrote:

>He should know because he single handed gave us a gift of the world
we are supposed to be researching

I think we know enough by now (whether from a
social-shaping-of-technology base [1] or indeed from one of the
excellent Web histories [2]) to drop the idea of the deus ex machina
meets Eureka model of studying the Internet!

This is not to criticise TBL in any way - he is certainly an important
figure and his writings are useful - but it is work *in context* that
interests academic researchers, right?

Daithí

[1] e.g. Carolyn Marvin's "When Old Technologies Were New" (1988)
gives lots of examples, backed up with sources, that assist in
understanding how popular understandings of discovery and adoption are
flawed.

[2] e.g. James Gillies & Robert Caillau "How The Web Was Born" (2000)
is the history I relied upon the most in past studies.

--
Daithí Mac Síthigh
School of Law
Trinity College
Dublin 2
Ireland

school: www.tcd.ie/law
blog: www.lexferenda.com
sms/tel: +353 86 8193881