[Air-l] web campaigning book & digital scholarship tools

[Kirsten A. Foot]

Folks, 
Steve Schneider and I are happy to announce the publication of our book *Web Campaigning* by MIT Press. The book examines trends in U.S. candidates’ use of the Web between 2000 and 2004, and offers a roadmap to look at how candidates are using the Web in 2006. The analyses center on the inherent tension between the desire of campaigns to maintain control over messages and resources and the generally decentralizing dynamic of Web-based communication.

For anyone interested in digital scholarship, the digital supplement we produced to accompany the book might be of interest (see http://mitpress.mit.edu/webcampaigning). Our intent was to develop a new way to represent digital scholarship digitally. The tiddlywiki platform we employed has some interesting affordances, and we’d like feedback on it. The supplement illustrates core concepts discussed in the book and provides screenshots of hundreds of examples of campaign Web pages, with links directly to the archived copies of the Web sites in their hypertextual context. To our knowledge, this is the most extensive scholarly use of materials available in Web archives to date. As this is a new approach to representing scholarship in the digital realm, we’d certainly appreciate hearing what you think of it.

In addition to the Web Campaigning Digital Supplement, Meghan Dougherty has developed a new tool called Wayfinder (http://wayfinder.webarchivist.org), that is available as a personalizable entry into the Web Campaigning archive. Wayfinder is an exhibit aid, a teaching tool, and a research tool that provides access to an expertly annotated collection of archived Web artifacts, and opens the collection up to non-expert interpretation. Collection visitors can become curators, creating and sharing their own interpretative lenses among members of the Wayfinder community. Participants leave traces of their own lenses, and challenge others' narratives to generate multiple interpretations. With Wayfinder, visitors can browse and tag the archive to build their own representations and find their way through others' ideas. Meghan would appreciate your feedback too.

-Kirsten

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Kirsten A. Foot
Associate Professor, Communication
University of Washington
Box 353740
Seattle, WA 98195
206-543-4837
kfoot at u.washington.edu
http://www.com.washington.edu/Program/Faculty/Faculty/foot.html