Posts Tagged: people

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25
Mar 09

John Hope Franklin, 94

Esteemed historian John Hope Franklin has passed away.  I got to know a little about John Hope while visiting ISIS and working with HASTAC in the building that bears his name (I even passed him in the halls a few times).  NPR put together a great piece on him which aired during All Things Considered.

I wanted to pass along this link from Simon Spero.  This is a transcript from Grutter v Bollinger, et al., the landmark case where the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action.  In it, Franklin recounts his academic training and encounters with institutionalized racism in his work.  Franklin tells the story with a historian’s knack – it is hard to imagine this happened so recently.

Read the full transcript.

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27
Jan 09

Nancy Baym on Social Practice in Online Media

Nancy Baym has released the slides and writeup of a smart talk she recently gave regarding social practice and online music fandom.  She highlights a number of the key activities of online fandom, drawing the themes out to show how producers can leverage fans and technologies to increase engagement.  While the talk is rooted in music fandom, Baym’s advice is applicable across multiple domains.  If you’re producing online content, read Baym’s talk.

I identify 5 key social practices in fandom, 5 reasons the internet has superpowered fans, and make 4 suggestions for how artists and those who represent them can make this work for everyone. I argue that the key to fostering fans’ strong connections to artists is fostering their connections to one another by understanding and nurturing the activities that bind them together in their fandom.

via Online Fandom » Relating to Fans Means Helping Them Relate to Each Other.

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15
Jan 09

Scott Golder on Peter Kollock

Scott Golder, formerly of HP Labs and now Cornell Sociology, is blogging.  One of his first posts is about the untimely passing of Peter Kollock:

I never got to meet Peter Kollock in person, but my decision to pursue sociology was influenced by his sharp work on social dilemmas and virtual communities, the latter being something few sociologists were thinking of at the time.  He was a role model for me in the Mertonian sense; I’m just at the beginning stages of a sociology career, and Peter has been an example of what to aspire to.

In particular, his 1998 Annual Review of Sociology paper on social dilemmas was huge for me. It’s a clear discussion of many kinds of collective action problems, and demonstrated an approach to the study of cooperation and competition that I preferred immensely to the more formal and abstract treatments I’d read by economists. I still go back to this paper all the time.

Often with his former student Marc Smith, Kollock showed why virtual communities are amenable to sociological study (Marc posted a touching memorial on his blog, connectedaction).  Kollock and Smith’s 1996 chapter [1] on Usenet presciently tackled bandwidth as a common good, as well as socialization, monitoring and sanctioning in virtual groups.  Kollock also did some of the earliest work on eBay; [2], looking at how reputation works in a world with near-infinite exchange partners and few channels for sharing social information.

Like Scott, I never met Peter (I don’t think I’ve ever even been in the same room as him), but his work was tremendously influential (a sentiment echoed by everyone doing net research).  The Smith and Kollock Communities in Cyberspace book was one of my earliest acquisitions in my research and has always stayed within a few feet of my desk.  This is a tremendous loss.

via Peter Kollock, role model « Scott Golder.

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26
Nov 08

StatSheet, The FiveThirtyEight of Hoops

Late November in North Carolina is a very special time of year, as it marks the beginning of a period of deep religious reflection.  That’s right, it’s college basketball season.  For those of you who are fans and/or stats junkies, I wanted to point you towards a great website – StatSheet.com.  StatSheet is the product of (the amazing) Robbie Allen, a friend and fellow collaborator on BarCampRDU and other RDU-area projects.

What is StatSheet?  It’s the FiveThirtyEight.com of College Basketball (as well as the NFL, NBA, and High School Basketball).  The site boasts a terrific, clean interface, with a focus on stats and graphs – for wonks, Bill James-heads, and fantasy fans.  I particularly like the embeddable graphs – check out the GameFlow graph from last night’s UNC-Oregon game:

Robbie’s blogged about his statistical forumla for calling a game over at the StatSheet Changelog.  And for the die-hards, StatSheet also list information about referees.  As noted by Robbie in the disclaimer, “Boxscores list three officials per game. I have no way of associating specific foul calls to specific refs. As a result, I associate the number of fouls called in a game with each ref.”  This presents an interesting statistical problem – could we devise a technique to break down this collective data and provide an estimate prediction of fouls/game?

Since the data is coupled, we could employ analysis of variance to analyze the groups, looking for referrees that significantly vary.  For example, if we have nine referees who rotate through three pairs, we would be able to use analysis of variance to target and identify a referee that consistently delivers more or less fouls than the standard interval (i.e. look for the common outlier).  But what if we wanted a predictive model?  In that case, we might wish to apply a fixed-effects or hierarchical linear model.  Looking at the pseudo-interactions between the groups of referees, we would be able to predict an estimate of fouls/game for the combination.  This would be most interesting to explore from a historical perspective, to identify games with significantly more or less fouls.  Potential interactors in that model would include TV broadcast, team rankings, and Duke status (if the team is Duke, the number of fouls called on Duke is generally two standard deviations below the ref’s mean).

My disclaimer is that I don’t know the first thing about sports stats, so pay no attention to me.  However, I’m loving StatSheet, it has become my go-to stats site (edging out both ESPN and Yahoo Sports), and I thought I’d pass it on to you.