[Air-l] web science, or AoIR by any other name

[Amy S. Bruckman]

> Do folks here see "Web Science" becoming a part of AoIR?

We're starting a Web Science initiative in the College of Computing at
Georgia Tech.  We interpret the term broadly to mean "the
interdisciplinary study of the Web."  (Not just semantic web stuff.)
Compared to the kinds of things the AoIR community usually addresses,
I would say we're a bit broader because we include more core computer
science.  Part of our reason for calling it "web science" instead of
"Internet research" is to appeal to the folks coming from the hard side
of computer science.

One of our goals is to increase communication across disciplines.  For
example, we had a great conversation at a faculty meeting yesterday
about the "interestingness" algorithm on flickr, and how this might
reflect a new view of algorithms that draws together our social
computing and theoretical computer science faculty in a new way.  And
if we can draw in our economics, public policy, "new media",
etc. folks too... then this starts to look interesting!

So basically I see "Internet research" and "web science" becoming synonyms in
the long run.

YMMV :-)

-- Amy


Amy Bruckman
Associate Professor
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA  30332-0760

Tel: 	404-894-9222
Fax: 	404-894-3146
Email: 	asb at cc.gatech.edu
Web:	http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/