[Air-L] Sad News: Death of Brenda Danet

[Nancy Baym]

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