Posts Tagged: conference

Noticed / Thoughts — 5 Comments
11
Mar 08

Unit Structures Speaking in SF, March 13

This Thursday, I have the great honor of guest lecturing to David Silver’s fantastic, innovative class on Digital Literacy. This semester, David’s been bringing in a wide range of experts to meet with his class – a small group of honors students at the University of San Francisco. I’m very excited to meet this exceptional group and their prof; they’re in a very special learning environment this semester.

I’ll be talking about my research on social networks and my work with ClaimID, among other things. The talk will be informal, which is a relief after the three talks I gave at the iConference last week (note to self, 3 is too many). My goal is to leave my audience with new questions and perspectives on social networks; this is actually a significant challenge because David’s class is made up of undergraduates.

As I move towards my dissertation proposal, my interests are focusing on the role online social networks play in relational processes; how they help people make new friends, and how they help people maintain friends at distance. I’m most interested in in-transition populations – students leaving high school to attend college, or college students moving to their first job. These individuals have unique social-informational needs – think about how many friends a first-year college student makes…information overload! – and I’m interested in studying the role social networks play in aiding them. Interestingly enough, this topic – the thing that may one day be my dissertation, grew out of this blog post (these posts were also pretty influential).

My talk weaves together a number of these themes: social network use and adoption behavior, privacy and disclosure, cultural acquisition, identity formation. What I hope to get across is why social networks are so great that I get out of bed each morning to study them. If I can’t make that argument I’m in trouble!

As David notes, this talk is open to the public, so I’d like to invite you to attend. Details can be found at the USF page or the Upcoming page. The talk will be at 6:30PM on Thursday, in Fromm Hall on the USF Campus.

Thoughts — 1 Comment
3
Dec 07

Reflections on Virtual Citizenship

I had a wonderful time at the Wayne State Symposium: Virtual Citizenship and New Technologies. My thanks go to organizer Kevin Deegan-Krause, Marc Kruman and everyone at WSU’s Center for the Study of Citizenship. What really struck me about the day was how the speakers, of diverse disciplinary backgrounds, presented complimentary takes on the crucial notion of citizenship. That is not to say they thought alike, but rather to highlight the relevant interplay between the talks.

Kevin exhaustively blogged the event, so if you’re interested in reading about the day, I’d recommend you check his blog out. I believe there will also be a recording of the event posted to the symposium website. All in all, a great event, and it was wonderful to meet Professors Vinge, Chun, and Dalton, as well as everyone at WSU.

On a somewhat related note, this week I’ll be giving a talk at North Carolina State University. The talk will be at DH Hill Library, in the 2nd Floor Assembly Room, at 11AM on Thursday, the 6th. This marks the end of my 2007 talks, and I’m really excited about the fact I don’t have anything on the books for January or most of February. Maybe I’ll actually get work done on that proposal!

Research — 3 Comments
28
Nov 07

Upcoming Conferences: Detroit, Boston, New Haven

This Friday, I’ll be in Detroit, MI speaking at the Wayne State University Virtual Citizenship Symposium. I’m really honored to be part of this symposium; my fellow speakers are Russell Dalton, Wendy Chun and Vernor Vinge. I’ll be talking about collective action and participation in social networks, and I’m trying to figure out how to work some of this new Beacon stuff into my talk. If you’re interested in attending, the symposium is free, and you can find all the necessary information at the symposium’s website.

Via the Complexity and Social Networks Blog, news of a December 7 Conference on Computational Social Science. Speakers include Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Nosh Contractor, Lada Adamic and a host of other luminaries. This conference is in Cambridge, MA, and is free to attend. The next day, Yale hosts the Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace. The student fee for this great conference has been dropped to $45, and I highly recommend making the effort to attend. If I wasn’t previously scheduled for travel on these days, I’d be trying to figure out a way to attend both. If you’re in the NY/Boston corridor, this could make for a very nerdy and fun road/train trip.

Noticed — No Comments
31
Oct 07

On Your Radar: Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace

Michael Zimmer reports on the Yale Information Society Project symposium Reputation Economies in Cyberspace, to be held December 8, 2007 at Yale Law School. Michael helped put this symposium together, and the speaker list is absolutely top notch – you’ll hear from Michael Bauwens, Jonathan Zittrain, Allesandro Acquisti, Bill McGeveran, John Clippenger and many more.

If you’re in any way interested in digital identity and reputation, this is a wonderful event to attend. To find out more, visit the symposium website where you can sign up to attend.

Research — No Comments
24
Oct 07

Reactions to ASIST Panel, Save the Date

First off, thank you to danah, Raquel and Alla for trekking to Milwaukee to take part in our ASIST panel entitled “Research Directions in Social Network Webites.” I’ve received great feedback about our panel – Jeff Pomerantz shares his thougts here. (The check is in the mail, Jeff). A couple people contacted me to ask if the panel was being recorded (it wasn’t), but I did find a liveblog of the panel by Ken Varnum – thank you Ken! All in all, it was a great time and thank you again to the panelists.

In other news, mark your calendar for April 10-11 2008, as ASIST will be putting on a Social Software Summit. This Summit will run in conjunction with the IA Summit in Miami, FL – so if you’re planning on attending the IA Summit, don’t miss this. All of the details are tentative at this point – but hopefully soon we’ll have confirmed dates, a website, and a call for participation.

Research — 2 Comments
15
Oct 07

Upcoming Panel: Research Directions in Social Network Websites

If you’re planning on attending ASIST ’07 next week in Milwaukee, you might want to stop by a panel I’m putting together, entitled Research Directions in Social Network Websites. danah boyd, Raquel Recuero, Alla Zollers and I will be talking about our research, exploring the various approaches we’ve taken to studying social network sites. Here’s the abstract:

Social networking websites have played a key factor in the evolution of the “social web.” Hundreds of millions of individuals from all age-ranges have flocked to sites such as MySpace (http://myspace.com), Facebook (http://facebook.com) and Orkut (http://orkut.com) to create an online representation of identity, to manage their social lives, and to establish deep social relationships with other users of the sites. To this extent, the promise of Web 2.0 is embodied in social networking websites. Social networks both implicitly and explicitly connect individuals, enabling the representation of a rich social identity embodied in a virtual presence.

In this panel, an exciting young group of researchers will present results of their ongoing work in the analysis of social networking websites. This panel will present a number of different research methods, as well as international perspectives on the analysis of social networks. danah boyd will present some of the key challenges she has faced in her multi-year, ongoing ethnographic analysis of social networking websites. Raquel Recuero will share results of her mixed-methods international work on Fotolog, a popular photo-based social networking site. Scott Golder and Fred Stutzman will present large-network analysis of social behavior in Facebook, the leading college-based social network. Finally, Alla Zollers will present a quantitative and content-analysis of activism in social networking sites, analyzing the information architecture of the sites and the role it plays in activism.

The research and the varying methods presented in this panel will present viewers with an exciting look at the many ways social network websites can be analyzed. These sites stand at the forefront of the social web, presenting myriad opportunities to future researchers.

Unfortunately, Scott Golder will not able to attend. The panel will be on Monday at 3:30 PM.

Research / Thoughts — No Comments
18
Sep 07

SCS 2007, Congrats to techPresident

Today marks the second day of the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium – I’m here with Alice, Alla, Cliff, danah and a bunch of other fascinating academics and practitioners…many thanks to Liz Lawley for bringing us together. In the sessions, we’ve been talking about identity, presence, youth culture, deviance and a host of other topics. David Weinberger has been documenting – and I believe you can follow along with a live webcast on the SCS 2007 site. Justin.tv was also here, and it was more than a little surreal to be able to watch the room I was in on his shoulder-cam.

In other news, I wanted to pass along special congratulations to the editors and writers of techPresident. Yesterday, it was announced that techPresident was the winner of the 2007 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. A special note of congrats goes to Josh Levy and Micah Sifry, who have worked together to create the go-to source for tech coverage of the 2008 campaign. I’m proud to be associated with them. Kudos!

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