[Air-L] 2019 Nancy Baym Book Award Winners

[Nancy Baym]

    It’s a great honor to announce that AoIR’s book award committee has chosen The Digital Street by Jeffrey Lane (Oxford University Press) for this year’s Nancy Baym Book Award.

    We are also recognizing Robert Gehl’s Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2P (MIT Press) with an Honorable Mention.

The Digital Street is a compelling ethnography of the interconnecting codes of disadvantaged girls and boys on the streets of Harlem and digital media. He shows the overlaps, disconnects, and, perhaps most importantly, the opportunities social media may offer for intervening in youth violence. Its combination of urban ethnography with the digital provides a model both for ethnographers unused to considering the digital, and for digital ethnographers less versed in urban approaches. Read more about it here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-digital-street-9780199381272?cc=us&lang=en&

    Weaving the Dark Web is a methodologically and theoretically rich analysis that provides insights of use to anyone concerned with alternative histories or futures of the internet. Learn more here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/weaving-dark-web

    Every year it is challenging to pick a winner, but never more so than this year. The depth and breadth of work coming from our community is extraordinary. I’m grateful for all the submissions. 

    I would also like to thank the awards committee - Jeff Hemsley, Nicholas John, and Katrin Tiidenberg, for their work reviewing this year’s nominations, and our association coordinator Michelle for keeping everything organized and tracking down the many loose ends on our behalf.