[Air-L] AoIR Awards

[Michael T Zimmer]

Congrats to all, and many thanks to the volunteer committee members, too!

And don’t forget to register for IR16 before the early-bird deadline of 1 August 2015: http://aoir.org/ir16/registration/

-- 
Michael Zimmer, PhD
Associate Professor and PhD Program Director, School of Information Studies
Director, Center for Information Policy Research
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
e: zimmerm at uwm.edu
w: www.michaelzimmer.org


> On Jul 29, 2015, at 11:39 AM, Kendall, Lori <loriken at illinois.edu> wrote:
> 
> Each year, AoIR presents three awards for outstanding scholarship on topics related to internet research. I am pleased to announce this year’s winners.
> 
> The recipient of the Nancy S. Baym Book Award is Robert W. Gehl for his book Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014). The committee--which included Adi Kuntsman and Kylie Jarrett and was chaired by Andrew Herman--found this book to be theoretically sharp and elegantly written, with a rich sense of historicity. By taking into account software engineering and the power inscribed into its socio-technical affordances, the book articulates a valuable method and model for further analysis of social media. The committee was particularly impressed with Gehl’s presentation of alternative scenarios and alternative possibilities for social media.
> 
> The AoIR Dissertation Award goes to Nora Draper for her dissertation: "Reputation, Inc.: Assessing the industrialization of self-presentation and privacy in the digital era." The committee felt her topic was a very strong choice. The dissertation expertly attended to commercial exploitation of the tensions between the desire to share/self-present and the desire for privacy, as well as the commercialization of the internet in general. Through her industry study, Draper traces shifts from a right to privacy to concerns about reputation management, providing an original and rigorous contribution to the field.
> 
> The dissertation committee was comprised of André Brock, Helen Kennedy, Guillaume Latzko-Toth, and was chaired by Kate O'Riordan. They reviewed 30 dissertations and report that the field was incredibly strong, making their choice a difficult one. They have awarded honorary mentions to three additional dissertations: Lisa Silvestri's, "Friended at the Front: Social Media and 21st Century War," Nicole Grove's "Gamers, Hunters, Provocateurs: Digital Mediations of Violence, Gender and Faith in the Arab World," and Tero Jukka Karppi's, "Disconnect.Me - User Engagement and Facebook."
> 
> The Best Student Paper award goes to Lillian Boxman-Shabtai, for “User-Generated Parody as Negotiation over Meaning: A Typology of Frame Alignment in Musical Renditions”. The committee--which included Jeff Hemsley and Daren Brabham, and was chaired by Sun Sun Lim--found that the paper provides a fresh and innovative perspective to audience studies through an analysis of user-generated music video parodies on YouTube. It was methodologically robust and analytically elegant, offering an illuminating taxonomy of the frames employed by parodists, capturing their meaning-making and acts of subversion.
> 
> Please join me in congratulating our award winners, who have demonstrated the breadth and strength of internet research. I invite you all to attend their presentations at the conference in October in Phoenix. Please also give your thanks to all of our committee members. Their task was time-consuming but very important.
> 
> Lori Kendall
> President, AoIR
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