[Air-L] Sad News: Death of Brenda Danet
Nancy Baym
nbaym at ku.edu
Mon Nov 24 09:07:21 PST 2008
I am very sorry to hear of Brenda's passing and appreciate Naomi
conveying the sad news to this group. Brenda was a keynoter at the
second Internet Research conference, and a major figure in the
origins of this field.
Brenda was -- and still is -- ahead of her time. She was a major
inspiration to me in many ways. The first paper I ever wrote about
the internet (in 1991) was presented on a panel she organized at the
American Folklore Society, and it was she who urged me to publish the
work.
There are many things to appreciate about her scholarship. One was
her keen sense of the importance of history in understanding the
internet. For instance, when she wrote about graphic play in IRC, she
connected it to folkloric graphic phenomena centuries old for ten
times the insight. Maybe 100 times the insight.
When everyone seemed to be comparing online interaction to
face-to-face communication, she was among the first to articulate its
relationship to writing, ponder the potential loss of the aura of the
book, and note that email bore many resemblances to mail delivery in
nineteenth century London.
When most people were (are still) focused on the English language
internet, with Susan Herring, she encouraged and collected work about
"the multilingual internet" that has been extremely helpful in
globalizing our field.
Methodologically, she exemplified how to conduct excellent
qualitative research.
Perhaps best of all, as David Silver once said of her, she "put the
funky back in internet research."
If you haven't read her book Cyberpl at y, you must.
She was also a kind and gracious woman. Her voice in our
conversations will be missed.
Nancy
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