[Air-L] Graduate programs for "internet studies"?

[danah boyd]

Who do you admire?  Who do you want to work with?  PhD programs especially (less so for Master's) are all about your advisor and your committee, your ability to connect with your peers, and your ability go get a solid foundation in various intellectual traditions that you can bring to the table when talking about Internet dynamics.  My advice to all potential grad students is to start by making a list of the scholars that you respect.  Go to conferences in fields that you want to engage with (like AOIR) and meet people.  Figure out who you think you could get along with.  And then build out from there.  Programs are important but less so than individual mentors that can help you through your intellectual inquiry. 

If it helps at all, I wrote this long post for folks interested in going to grad school: http://www.danah.org/GradSchoolAdvice.html

Personally, I didn't know what an information school was when I applied to Berkeley.  (Heck, I still don't.)  But as soon as I met Peter, my beloved advisor, I knew that it was the perfect place for me.  And I never would've imagined that learning about how information is organized by librarians would be at all relevant to my studies, but OMG has it been surprisingly useful.  I should also note that what I admired about Peter had nothing to do with Internet studies.  I admired his ability to think critically and turn any idea upside down to see it from a different direction.  We talked Gramsci and the role of activism in scholarship.  I taught him about the Internet; he taught me how to look at it critically.  And he taught me the value of playing good cop/bad cop in academia.   (May he RIP.)

When I went to grad school, I didn't need someone to teach me about the Internet; I needed someone to give me the room to study the Internet.  It wasn't about the classes or the reading. It was about the critical thinking apparatus.  And it was about having an advisor and a committee who provided the intellectual backbone to do new research.  

So while there are great internet studies programs out there - and I encourage you to investigate them - don't limit yourself by topic.  Focus on who you want to work with, who you want to learn from.  

Good luck!

danah


On Sep 29, 2010, at 12:52 PM, Devin Gaffney wrote:

> Hey all,
> 
> I just finished an exhilarating undergraduate program that gave me enough flexibility in order to study the impact/efficacy of Twitter during the Iran Election(http://www.devingaffney.com/-iranelection-quantifying-online-activism), but in order to pull it off, I had to really bend some of the institutions rules, and just barely got the necessary advisorship in order to study it in a reasonable way. I am looking to jump right back into school for the following academic year, and am trying to figure out which schools have which programs - it seems that the information/websites for all the programs that do exist are well ensconced within their respective institutions websites, which tend towards labyrinthine. Does anyone have a good list of institutions (US/elsewhere) where a Masters/PhD in fields either directly or otherwise closely related to "internet studies" (or "web science," or whatever term you use, as this even seems to be up in the air, as far as I can tell)? Obviously, there are places like Citizenlab, Berkman, and OII, which all seem to at least offer classes in some capacity, but are there any others i just haven't found?
> 
> Thanks much,
> 
> Devin Gaffney
> http://www.devingaffney.com
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------

"taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani
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