[Air-L] History of AIR-L

Stuart Shulman stuart.shulman at gmail.com
Sat Feb 17 08:08:19 PST 2018


2001 – IR 2: InterConnections (Minneapolis)

I sort of remember this meeting the way I sort of remember my first rock
concert: it is a warm and fuzzy feeling that I cannot quite put specific
words to keyboard on.

It did have a huge impact on me to see interdisciplinarity have an
Internet-infused birth moment. Just a few years out of grad school in
political science, in a pre-Perestroika moment for the discipline, the free
spirited Association of Internet Researchers represented an alt-academic
space where I could meet boundary-breakinging, path-breaking, people who
liked to work on novel data, using new theories, and slap-dash tools. It
was a baling wire and bubblegum moment, but we all got inspired to study
things that might get us in trouble someday.

I remember being told before my tenure review that I studied the wrong
data, for the wrong reasons, using the wrong theory. That stung. However,
nobody from the AoIR ever told me anything like that. Instead, at this
early meeting, it became clear that most of what was presented at AoIR
could not, at that time, be presented at the APSA national meetings. Nor
could the interdisciplinary papers we wanted to write be published in top
tier political science journals.

Reading this thread and thinking back, I would say AoIR played a huge
inspirational role at the time we converted the Journal of Electronic
Government into the explicitly interdisciplinary Journal of Information
Technology & Politics (JITP). If you look at the original Senior Editorial
Board, as well as the full Editorial Board, you will find not only a
diverse list of scholars, but a good number of folks who brought to life
the early meetings of AoIR. I personally will always be grateful for the
safe and encouraging space to try new things.





On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 10:21 AM, Jennifer Stromer-Galley <jstromer at syr.edu>
wrote:

> One daydream I have in my role as Past President is to compile these
> stories into a brief history of the Association for the aoir.org website.
> Thanks to everyone for surfacing these memories and sources! If there are
> other recollections of the early conferences and organizings, please
> continue to share them!
>
> ~Jenny
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Air-L [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Jones,
> Steve
> Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2018 11:19 AM
> To: air-l <air-l at aoir.org>
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] History of AIR-L
>
> The air-l list started in late 1998 after the conference (organized by
> Andrew Herman and Them Swiss) that Jeremy mentions. I ran it on a server in
> my office until Jeremy thankfully came along and provided services via the
> CDDC at Virginia Tech University. There were meet ups in NYC and SF (one or
> the other tied to the National Communication Association conference) that
> served as de facto organizational meetings, it was at one of those that
> Nancy stepped up to the plate and offered to host the first conference at
> the University of Kansas. I remember having meet ups at other conferences
> that came through Chicago in the first few years of AoIR. I probably have
> some of this information written somewhere from which I could provide a
> more accurate timeline, if that were necessary. I kind of like, perhaps
> prefer, the golden haze of gratitude, teamwork and nostalgia that I fall
> into when I think back to those times.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Steve
>
> > On Feb 15, 2018, at 10:03 AM, Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki <
> tkach at japan.email.ne.jp> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Thanks, Jeremy, for correcting me. The first AoIR wasn't in 2001, it was
> in the fall of 2000.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki,
> > University of Tsukuba, Japan
> >
> > On 2018/02/16 0:38, Jeremy Hunsinger wrote:
> >> I was slightly before 2000 as I think my first email message was in
> 1999, and we organized the conference for 2000, which is why the conference
> number was always off by 1 year, because we counted conference in 2000 as
> 1.0  thus 2001's conference was 2.0 and apparently people found that to be
> too irritating to sustain after 16 in 15.
> >> The founding story is found the proceedings of AoIR's first few
> conferences.  and It goes back to a conference at Drake University by Thom
> Swiss and colleagues.  Many of the founders were there.
> >> AIR-l was founded after that  conference.  the
> https://web.archive.org/web/19991012214940/http://aoir.org:80/  is the
> famous bumblebee page with some of this information on it also.
> >> https://web.archive.org/web/20010204100100/http://aoir.org:80/ is the
> first organizational AoIR page, designed by Charlie.
> >> as you'll see air-l was always there:) However, we don't have permanent
> archives on archive.org <http://archive.org> until we migrated to
> mailman, steve ran it on his office computer with listserv and i ran it at
> the cddc on mailman.
> > _______________________________________________
> > The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the
> > Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change
> > options or unsubscribe at:
> > http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
> >
> > Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> > http://www.aoir.org/
>
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association
> of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or
> unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/
> listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>



More information about the Air-L mailing list