Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
Posts by Tags
AAAS
ANT
The ethnography of robots: interview at Ethnography Matters
Published:
This was an interview I did with the wonderful Heather Ford, originally posted at Ethnography Matters (a really cool group blog) way back in January. No idea why I didn’t post a copy of this here back then, but now that I’m moving towards my dissertation I’m thinking about this kind of stuff more and more. In short, I argue for a non-anthropocentric yet still phenomenological ethnography of technology, studying not the culture of the people who build and program robots, but the culture of those the robots themselves. Read more
Andrew Lih
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia Administrators / Arbcom Panel
Published:
This panel was at Wikimania 2008, and featured James Forrester, Andrew Lih, Kat Walsh, and Charles Matthews. Everyone except for Lih is or has been on the Arbitration Committee, and this turned into a discussion about admins. Read more
Arthur Bochner
Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner
Published:
An outright ban on technology in the classroom - which may or may not include the pen and paper - is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive. Read more
Benjamin Wiker
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
Benkler
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
CSCW
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
Charles Matthews
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia Administrators / Arbcom Panel
Published:
This panel was at Wikimania 2008, and featured James Forrester, Andrew Lih, Kat Walsh, and Charles Matthews. Everyone except for Lih is or has been on the Arbitration Committee, and this turned into a discussion about admins. Read more
Deleuze
Words and Things: A De-Re-Sub-Post-Construction of Rhizomatic and Non-Arborescent Stratum in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
Published:
This was my final project for an Information Studies class I took back in 2006, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Our assignment was to transform information from one form to another, and I chose to perform this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I scanned and OCRed the entire book and did a visual frequency representation of certain words. I analyzed by chapter and comprehensively with certain core themes in the work. I also did a comprehensive analysis with more general or common words. It is intended to look the way it does, as I am going for a “1960s IBM goes to the academy” look. Take what you will from it: it is about 35% art, 25% snarky pastiche, 15% pretending to be linguistics, and -5% serious intellectual critique. Here is a sample: Read more
Digg
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
Dr. Ahmed Darwish
Wikimania 2008: Opening Keynote with Egyptian Minister Ahmed Darwish
Published:
The official theme or slogan for this year’s Wikimania is “the knowledge revolution that is changing wisdom.” I think this phrase – especially the difference between knowledge and wisdom – was chosen very carefully and I think it is an excellent distinction to make. This morning’s opening ceremony began with a speech from the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Ahmed Darwish. I will relay his comments here, without much analysis – that will come later, when I have the time. Read more
Dr. Ahmed Tantawi
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
Ethics
User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
Published:
I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad? Read more
Foucauldian
The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
Published:
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Read more
God
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
HICSS
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
Habermas
Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
Published:
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him. Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories. And it feels good, I know. Read more
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
Habermasian
Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
Published:
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him. Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories. And it feels good, I know. Read more
Hitler
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
IBM
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
James Forrester
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia Administrators / Arbcom Panel
Published:
This panel was at Wikimania 2008, and featured James Forrester, Andrew Lih, Kat Walsh, and Charles Matthews. Everyone except for Lih is or has been on the Arbitration Committee, and this turned into a discussion about admins. Read more
Kat Walsh
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia Administrators / Arbcom Panel
Published:
This panel was at Wikimania 2008, and featured James Forrester, Andrew Lih, Kat Walsh, and Charles Matthews. Everyone except for Lih is or has been on the Arbitration Committee, and this turned into a discussion about admins. Read more
Linux
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
MMORPG
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
MMORPGs
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Martin Heidegger
Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson
Published:
William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities. Read more
Marx
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
Max Weber
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Networked City
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
Neuromancer
Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson
Published:
William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities. Read more
Nietzsche
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
Rheingold
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
Technorati
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
Thesis
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
Wikisym Poster: The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools
Published:
This project investigates various software programs as non-human social actors in Wikipedia,
Read moreSenior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
Thomas Kuhn
Response: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Published:
A response to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which his work is applied to a personal vignette of experimentation practices in a High School Physics class. When in the course of scientific education should students be allowed to modify scientific theories to fit experimental data instead of modifying experiments to fit the theories? Read more
Trobriand
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
Weber
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
Wikis
Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account
Published:
In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era. Read more
Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia. Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
Wikisym
Wikisym Poster: The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools
Published:
This project investigates various software programs as non-human social actors in Wikipedia,
Read moreWilliam Mitchell
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
Xerox
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
academia
Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution
Published:
In the Wikipedia research community — that is, the group of academics and Wikipedians who are interested in studying Wikipedia — there has been a pretty substantial and longstanding problem with how research is published. Academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty, are deeply invested and entrenched in an system that rewards the publication of research. Publish or perish, as we’ve all heard. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of publications which are recognized as ‘academic’ require us to assign copyright to the publication, so that the publisher can then charge for access to the article. This is in direct contradiction with the goals of Wikipedia, as well as many other open source and open content creation communities — communities which are the subject of a substantial amount of academic research. Read more
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
WebCite: An On-Demand Internet Archive
Published:
As someone who studies Internet culture, one of my biggest problems is “link rot,” or broken links. I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive, but they are usually six to eight months behind on even the most popular sites. I also applaud sites like Wikipedia for providing stable version histories so that I can point to a specific revision of a page. However, for all other websites, the only option is self-archiving, which is technically difficult and fraught with problems. What I have found incredibly useful is WebCite, a free webpage archiving service that fills in this gap. Read more
Video: Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
The good folks at the Library of Alexandria and Kaltura have made available videos of a good number of presentations from Wikimania 2008. Luckily, mine was one of the ones up! So without further ado: Read more
Wikimania 2008: Collaborative research on Wikiversity with Cormac Lawler
Published:
Collaborative research on Wikiversity by Cormac Lawler (user Cormaggio on Wikimedia projects) at the University of Manchester. Wikiversity is a relatively young project in the Wikimedia umbrella, but I think it is a natural development and a great space to realize the potential of all the educators currently on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and all the other projects. Read more
Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia. Read more
actor-network theory
The ethnography of robots: interview at Ethnography Matters
Published:
This was an interview I did with the wonderful Heather Ford, originally posted at Ethnography Matters (a really cool group blog) way back in January. No idea why I didn’t post a copy of this here back then, but now that I’m moving towards my dissertation I’m thinking about this kind of stuff more and more. In short, I argue for a non-anthropocentric yet still phenomenological ethnography of technology, studying not the culture of the people who build and program robots, but the culture of those the robots themselves. Read more
agency
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
Published:
I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad? Read more
algorithms
A dynamically-generated robots.txt: will search engine bots recognize themselves?
Published:
I built a script that dynamically generates a robots.txt file for search engine bots, who download the file when they seek direction on what parts of a website they are allowed to index. By default, it directs all bots to stay away from the entire site, but then presents an exception: only the bot that requests the robots.txt file is allowed full reign over the site. Read more
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
Wikisym Poster: The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools
Published:
This project investigates various software programs as non-human social actors in Wikipedia,
Read moreannette markham
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
anthropology
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
anti semitism
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
archaeology
The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
Published:
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Read more
archaeology of knowledge
The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
Published:
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Read more
archive
WebCite: An On-Demand Internet Archive
Published:
As someone who studies Internet culture, one of my biggest problems is “link rot,” or broken links. I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive, but they are usually six to eight months behind on even the most popular sites. I also applaud sites like Wikipedia for providing stable version histories so that I can point to a specific revision of a page. However, for all other websites, the only option is self-archiving, which is technically difficult and fraught with problems. What I have found incredibly useful is WebCite, a free webpage archiving service that fills in this gap. Read more
art
Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology
Published:
I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription. As someone who studies ubiquitous socio-technological infrastructures (and Helvetica is certainly one), I know how hard it is to seriously pay attention to something that which we see every day. It may seem counter-intuitive, but as Susan Leigh Star reminds us, the more widespread an infrastructure is, the more we use it and depend on it, the more invisible it becomes — that is, until it breaks or generates controversy, in which case it is far too easy. But to actually say something about what well-oiled, hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures are, how they came to have such a place in our society, and why they won out over their competitors is a notoriously difficult task. But I came to realize that the film is less of a history of fonts, and more of an anthropology of design. Read more
Words and Things: A De-Re-Sub-Post-Construction of Rhizomatic and Non-Arborescent Stratum in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
Published:
This was my final project for an Information Studies class I took back in 2006, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Our assignment was to transform information from one form to another, and I chose to perform this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I scanned and OCRed the entire book and did a visual frequency representation of certain words. I analyzed by chapter and comprehensively with certain core themes in the work. I also did a comprehensive analysis with more general or common words. It is intended to look the way it does, as I am going for a “1960s IBM goes to the academy” look. Take what you will from it: it is about 35% art, 25% snarky pastiche, 15% pretending to be linguistics, and -5% serious intellectual critique. Here is a sample: Read more
The Facticity of Art
Published:
This is a piece of web art or net art, with an included work of art criticism about the piece. The work makes the argument that while interactive digital art can be considered user-centered, this new style and medium is only centered around those possibilities that the creator wishes to make available to the user. You can see The Facticity of Art at http://stuartgeiger.com/art/art-intro.shtml. Read more
art criticism
The Facticity of Art
Published:
This is a piece of web art or net art, with an included work of art criticism about the piece. The work makes the argument that while interactive digital art can be considered user-centered, this new style and medium is only centered around those possibilities that the creator wishes to make available to the user. You can see The Facticity of Art at http://stuartgeiger.com/art/art-intro.shtml. Read more
assimilation
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
automation
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
bell hooks
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
bibliometrics
Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ‘1990 Effect’
Published:
Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990? Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and searching by topic or keyword? If so, don’t make the same mistake I did: these results aren’t because of some sea change or paradigm shift, but rather result from a poorly-documented shift in how ISI began indexing articles after 1990. Read more
blogosphere
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
botany
Wikimania 2008: Collaborative research on Wikiversity with Cormac Lawler
Published:
Collaborative research on Wikiversity by Cormac Lawler (user Cormaggio on Wikimedia projects) at the University of Manchester. Wikiversity is a relatively young project in the Wikimedia umbrella, but I think it is a natural development and a great space to realize the potential of all the educators currently on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and all the other projects. Read more
bots
A dynamically-generated robots.txt: will search engine bots recognize themselves?
Published:
I built a script that dynamically generates a robots.txt file for search engine bots, who download the file when they seek direction on what parts of a website they are allowed to index. By default, it directs all bots to stay away from the entire site, but then presents an exception: only the bot that requests the robots.txt file is allowed full reign over the site. Read more
Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms
Published:
This is a new article published in Information, Communication, and Society as part of their annual special issue for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This year’s special issue was edited by Lee Humphreys and Tarleton Gillespie, who did a great job throughout the whole process. Read more
When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes?
Published:
I’ve written a number of papers about the role that automated software agents (or bots) play in Wikipedia, claiming that they are critical to the continued operation of Wikipedia. This paper tests this hypothesis and introduces a metric visualizing the speed at which fully-automated bots, tool-assisted cyborgs, and unassisted humans review edits in Wikipedia. In the first half of 2011, ClueBot NG – one of the most prolific counter-vandalism bots in the English-language Wikipedia – went down for four distinct periods, each period of downtime lasting from days to weeks. Aaron Halfaker and I use these periods of breakdown as naturalistic experiments to study Wikipedia’s quality control network. Our analysis showed that the overall time-to-revert damaging edits was almost doubled when this software agent was down. Yet while a significantly fewer proportion of edits made during the bot’s downtime were reverted, we found that those edits were later eventually reverted. This suggests that human agents in Wikipedia took over this quality control work, but performed it at a far slower rate. Read more
About a bot: reflections on building software agents
Published:
This post for Ethnography Matters is a very personal, reflective musing about the first bot I ever developed for Wikipedia. It makes the argument that while it is certainly important to think about software code and algorithms behind bots and other AI agents, they are not immaterial. In fact, the physical locations and social contexts in which they are run are often critical to understanding how they both ‘live’ and ‘die’. Read more
Bots and Cyborgs: Wikipedia’s Immune System
Published:
My frequent collaborator Aaron Halfaker has written up a fantastic article with John Riedl in Computer reviewing a lot of the work we’ve done on algorithmic agents in Wikipedia, casting them as Wikipedia’s immune system. Choice quote: “These bots and cyborgs are more than tools to better manage content quality on Wikipedia—through their interaction with humans, they’re fundamentally changing its culture.” Read more
The ethnography of robots: interview at Ethnography Matters
Published:
This was an interview I did with the wonderful Heather Ford, originally posted at Ethnography Matters (a really cool group blog) way back in January. No idea why I didn’t post a copy of this here back then, but now that I’m moving towards my dissertation I’m thinking about this kind of stuff more and more. In short, I argue for a non-anthropocentric yet still phenomenological ethnography of technology, studying not the culture of the people who build and program robots, but the culture of those the robots themselves. Read more
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
Wikisym Poster: The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools
Published:
This project investigates various software programs as non-human social actors in Wikipedia,
Read morebritish colonialism
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
capitalism
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
citation
Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ‘1990 Effect’
Published:
Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990? Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and searching by topic or keyword? If so, don’t make the same mistake I did: these results aren’t because of some sea change or paradigm shift, but rather result from a poorly-documented shift in how ISI began indexing articles after 1990. Read more
WebCite: An On-Demand Internet Archive
Published:
As someone who studies Internet culture, one of my biggest problems is “link rot,” or broken links. I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive, but they are usually six to eight months behind on even the most popular sites. I also applaud sites like Wikipedia for providing stable version histories so that I can point to a specific revision of a page. However, for all other websites, the only option is self-archiving, which is technically difficult and fraught with problems. What I have found incredibly useful is WebCite, a free webpage archiving service that fills in this gap. Read more
citation analysis
Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ‘1990 Effect’
Published:
Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990? Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and searching by topic or keyword? If so, don’t make the same mistake I did: these results aren’t because of some sea change or paradigm shift, but rather result from a poorly-documented shift in how ISI began indexing articles after 1990. Read more
classroom
Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner
Published:
An outright ban on technology in the classroom - which may or may not include the pen and paper - is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Education and the Wiki Paradigm: A Tug of War?
Published:
This was part of the opening keynote in Wikimania 2008, given by the Egyptian Deputy Minister of Communication and IT, Hoda Baraka. Here are my notes, again without any commentary – I apologize for them not being cleaner. Read more
cms
Wikimania 2008: State of the Mediawiki
Published:
State of the Mediawiki, a presentation give at Wikimania by some developers of Mediawiki and maintainers of the Wikimedia installation of it Read more
co-option
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
collaboration
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
Published:
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Read more
collective intelligence
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
collective knowledge
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
colonialism
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
communication
A dynamically-generated robots.txt: will search engine bots recognize themselves?
Published:
I built a script that dynamically generates a robots.txt file for search engine bots, who download the file when they seek direction on what parts of a website they are allowed to index. By default, it directs all bots to stay away from the entire site, but then presents an exception: only the bot that requests the robots.txt file is allowed full reign over the site. Read more
An apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious things
Published:
I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season, humanity’s historical record will be dangerously impoverished.” While it got quite a number of retweets and equally snarky responses, he is far from the first to make such a flippant critique of the vapid nature of social media. It also seriously upset me for reasons that I’ve been trying to work out, which is why I found myself doing one of those shifts that researchers of knowledge production tend to do far too often with critics: don’t get mad, get reflexive. What is it that makes such a sentiment resonate with us, particularly when it is issued over Twitter, a platform that is the target of this kind of critique? The reasons have to do with a fundamental disagreement over what it means to interact in a mediated space: do we understand our posts, status updates, and shared photos as representations of how we exist in the world which collectively constitute a certain persistent performance of the self, or do we understand them a form of communication in which we subjectively and interactionally relate our experience of the world to others? Read more
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner
Published:
An outright ban on technology in the classroom - which may or may not include the pen and paper - is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive. Read more
A Communicative Ethnography of Argumentative Strategies in a Wikipedian Content Dispute
Published:
This presentation was adapted from a chapter in my Senior thesis on Wikipedia’s legal system that focused on a dispute over the inclusion of images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an article about him, using a methodology of communicative ethnography. Most who opposed the image were not familiar with Wikipedia’s unique method of content regulation and dispute resolution, as well as its editorial standards and principles. However, most who argued in favor of keeping the image knew these and initially used them to their advantage. This ethnographic study of the communicative strategies used by the parties involved in the dispute shows how new editors to the user-written encyclopedia first emerged in a hostile communicative environment and subsequently adapted their argumentative strategies. This conflict is an excellent example of how disputes are resolved in Wikipedia, showing how this new media space regulates its own content. Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
communicative strategies
A Communicative Ethnography of Argumentative Strategies in a Wikipedian Content Dispute
Published:
This presentation was adapted from a chapter in my Senior thesis on Wikipedia’s legal system that focused on a dispute over the inclusion of images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an article about him, using a methodology of communicative ethnography. Most who opposed the image were not familiar with Wikipedia’s unique method of content regulation and dispute resolution, as well as its editorial standards and principles. However, most who argued in favor of keeping the image knew these and initially used them to their advantage. This ethnographic study of the communicative strategies used by the parties involved in the dispute shows how new editors to the user-written encyclopedia first emerged in a hostile communicative environment and subsequently adapted their argumentative strategies. This conflict is an excellent example of how disputes are resolved in Wikipedia, showing how this new media space regulates its own content. Read more
communism
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
communist manifesto
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
communities
Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
community
Come to the Trace Ethnography workshop at the 2015 iConference!
Published:
We’re organizing a workshop on trace ethnography at the 2015 iConference, led by Amelia Acker, Matt Burton, David Ribes, and myself. See more information about it on the workshop’s website, or feel free to contact me for more information. Read more
An apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious things
Published:
I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season, humanity’s historical record will be dangerously impoverished.” While it got quite a number of retweets and equally snarky responses, he is far from the first to make such a flippant critique of the vapid nature of social media. It also seriously upset me for reasons that I’ve been trying to work out, which is why I found myself doing one of those shifts that researchers of knowledge production tend to do far too often with critics: don’t get mad, get reflexive. What is it that makes such a sentiment resonate with us, particularly when it is issued over Twitter, a platform that is the target of this kind of critique? The reasons have to do with a fundamental disagreement over what it means to interact in a mediated space: do we understand our posts, status updates, and shared photos as representations of how we exist in the world which collectively constitute a certain persistent performance of the self, or do we understand them a form of communication in which we subjectively and interactionally relate our experience of the world to others? Read more
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
WikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account
Published:
In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era. Read more
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
Virtual Worlds in 1996: The More Things Change…
Published:
I came across this 1996 review published in Entertainment Weekly of The Palace, Worldsaway, and Worlds Chat. These were the first graphical chat programs, a genre which became virtual worlds a half-decade later. The entire article is fascinating from a historical perspective, but the last paragraph in particular shows us how some things really do stay the same: Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia. Read more
Real, Virtual Communities: A Response to Brian Williams
Published:
Brian Williams talked about how this year’s primary season has shown that even in the age of the Internet, we still have a longing for real communities. I take issue with his use of “virtual community” and claim that most political communities are virtual. Read more
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
computer science
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
computer supported cooperative work
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
conference
Come to the Trace Ethnography workshop at the 2015 iConference!
Published:
We’re organizing a workshop on trace ethnography at the 2015 iConference, led by Amelia Acker, Matt Burton, David Ribes, and myself. See more information about it on the workshop’s website, or feel free to contact me for more information. Read more
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
WikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
consensus
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia Administrators / Arbcom Panel
Published:
This panel was at Wikimania 2008, and featured James Forrester, Andrew Lih, Kat Walsh, and Charles Matthews. Everyone except for Lih is or has been on the Arbitration Committee, and this turned into a discussion about admins. Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
construction
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
content regulation
A Communicative Ethnography of Argumentative Strategies in a Wikipedian Content Dispute
Published:
This presentation was adapted from a chapter in my Senior thesis on Wikipedia’s legal system that focused on a dispute over the inclusion of images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an article about him, using a methodology of communicative ethnography. Most who opposed the image were not familiar with Wikipedia’s unique method of content regulation and dispute resolution, as well as its editorial standards and principles. However, most who argued in favor of keeping the image knew these and initially used them to their advantage. This ethnographic study of the communicative strategies used by the parties involved in the dispute shows how new editors to the user-written encyclopedia first emerged in a hostile communicative environment and subsequently adapted their argumentative strategies. This conflict is an excellent example of how disputes are resolved in Wikipedia, showing how this new media space regulates its own content. Read more
context
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
context collapse
An apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious things
Published:
I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season, humanity’s historical record will be dangerously impoverished.” While it got quite a number of retweets and equally snarky responses, he is far from the first to make such a flippant critique of the vapid nature of social media. It also seriously upset me for reasons that I’ve been trying to work out, which is why I found myself doing one of those shifts that researchers of knowledge production tend to do far too often with critics: don’t get mad, get reflexive. What is it that makes such a sentiment resonate with us, particularly when it is issued over Twitter, a platform that is the target of this kind of critique? The reasons have to do with a fundamental disagreement over what it means to interact in a mediated space: do we understand our posts, status updates, and shared photos as representations of how we exist in the world which collectively constitute a certain persistent performance of the self, or do we understand them a form of communication in which we subjectively and interactionally relate our experience of the world to others? Read more
conversation analysis
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
copyleft
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Attribution-ShareAlike
Published:
Content on my website and my Flickr account has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license for a while. I was pretty proud of myself. But then I got to thinking: why don’t I choose Attribution-ShareAlike? Obviously, it was product of two kneejerk reactions: I don’t want someone else to make money off my stuff, and I don’t want someone messing with my stuff. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
copyright
Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution
Published:
In the Wikipedia research community — that is, the group of academics and Wikipedians who are interested in studying Wikipedia — there has been a pretty substantial and longstanding problem with how research is published. Academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty, are deeply invested and entrenched in an system that rewards the publication of research. Publish or perish, as we’ve all heard. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of publications which are recognized as ‘academic’ require us to assign copyright to the publication, so that the publisher can then charge for access to the article. This is in direct contradiction with the goals of Wikipedia, as well as many other open source and open content creation communities — communities which are the subject of a substantial amount of academic research. Read more
Wikimania 2008: New Paradigms for New Tomorrows with Ismail Serageldin
Published:
Director of the Library of Alexandria, Dr. Ismail Serageldin gave a keynote speech on the first day of Wikimania 2008 titled, New Paradigms for New Tomorrows. It was quite thoughtful and inspiring – the man is one of the most amazing individuals I have heard. He is learned in so many different areas of academic and cultural knowledge, as well as incredibly wise. I would recommend watching the video of his speech, but if you are pressed for time you can read my notes. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
corporate adoption
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
creative commons
Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution
Published:
In the Wikipedia research community — that is, the group of academics and Wikipedians who are interested in studying Wikipedia — there has been a pretty substantial and longstanding problem with how research is published. Academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty, are deeply invested and entrenched in an system that rewards the publication of research. Publish or perish, as we’ve all heard. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of publications which are recognized as ‘academic’ require us to assign copyright to the publication, so that the publisher can then charge for access to the article. This is in direct contradiction with the goals of Wikipedia, as well as many other open source and open content creation communities — communities which are the subject of a substantial amount of academic research. Read more
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Attribution-ShareAlike
Published:
Content on my website and my Flickr account has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license for a while. I was pretty proud of myself. But then I got to thinking: why don’t I choose Attribution-ShareAlike? Obviously, it was product of two kneejerk reactions: I don’t want someone else to make money off my stuff, and I don’t want someone messing with my stuff. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
cricket
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
critical theory
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
Published:
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him. Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories. And it feels good, I know. Read more
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
css
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
Web Design: Blueprints on the CSS Zen Garden
Published:
This was a CSS stylesheet I wrote for the CSS Zen Garden, which is a really cool concept in web design. There is a standard HTML page in which all the content is wrapped up in div tags, and the idea is to write a CSS stylesheet that makes it pretty. Mine was based on blueprints, and can be accessed here. It turns out that I didn’t make into the accepted designs, but I did get on the list of those that didn’t make the cut. I can see why – it needs some cleaning up around the lines which I might do if I have some time. But I’ll take being top of that list. Read more
cyberspace
Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson
Published:
William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
cybertext
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
cyborg
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
danah boyd
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
darwinism
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
decisionmaking
User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
Published:
I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad? Read more
deconstruction
Words and Things: A De-Re-Sub-Post-Construction of Rhizomatic and Non-Arborescent Stratum in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
Published:
This was my final project for an Information Studies class I took back in 2006, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Our assignment was to transform information from one form to another, and I chose to perform this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I scanned and OCRed the entire book and did a visual frequency representation of certain words. I analyzed by chapter and comprehensively with certain core themes in the work. I also did a comprehensive analysis with more general or common words. It is intended to look the way it does, as I am going for a “1960s IBM goes to the academy” look. Take what you will from it: it is about 35% art, 25% snarky pastiche, 15% pretending to be linguistics, and -5% serious intellectual critique. Here is a sample: Read more
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
delegation
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
deleuze and guattari
Words and Things: A De-Re-Sub-Post-Construction of Rhizomatic and Non-Arborescent Stratum in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
Published:
This was my final project for an Information Studies class I took back in 2006, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Our assignment was to transform information from one form to another, and I chose to perform this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I scanned and OCRed the entire book and did a visual frequency representation of certain words. I analyzed by chapter and comprehensively with certain core themes in the work. I also did a comprehensive analysis with more general or common words. It is intended to look the way it does, as I am going for a “1960s IBM goes to the academy” look. Take what you will from it: it is about 35% art, 25% snarky pastiche, 15% pretending to be linguistics, and -5% serious intellectual critique. Here is a sample: Read more
democracy
Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
Published:
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him. Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories. And it feels good, I know. Read more
Wikimania 2008: New Paradigms for New Tomorrows with Ismail Serageldin
Published:
Director of the Library of Alexandria, Dr. Ismail Serageldin gave a keynote speech on the first day of Wikimania 2008 titled, New Paradigms for New Tomorrows. It was quite thoughtful and inspiring – the man is one of the most amazing individuals I have heard. He is learned in so many different areas of academic and cultural knowledge, as well as incredibly wise. I would recommend watching the video of his speech, but if you are pressed for time you can read my notes. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
derrida
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
design
Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology
Published:
I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription. As someone who studies ubiquitous socio-technological infrastructures (and Helvetica is certainly one), I know how hard it is to seriously pay attention to something that which we see every day. It may seem counter-intuitive, but as Susan Leigh Star reminds us, the more widespread an infrastructure is, the more we use it and depend on it, the more invisible it becomes — that is, until it breaks or generates controversy, in which case it is far too easy. But to actually say something about what well-oiled, hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures are, how they came to have such a place in our society, and why they won out over their competitors is a notoriously difficult task. But I came to realize that the film is less of a history of fonts, and more of an anthropology of design. Read more
digital governance
Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account
Published:
In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era. Read more
digital humanities
Wikimania 2008
Published:
I am currently in Egypt for Wikimania 2008, which is being held this year at the Library of Alexandria. On Sunday, I will be presenting my ethnographic analysis of conceptions and misconceptions academics hold about Wikipedia. This presentation was going to be about old, computer-illiterate professors but has turned into something much more interesting: a commentary on Wikipedia’s status in the so-called postmodern digital humanities. I will update the post on this site as I finalize my presentation. Read more
discipline
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner
Published:
An outright ban on technology in the classroom - which may or may not include the pen and paper - is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive. Read more
discourse
A dynamically-generated robots.txt: will search engine bots recognize themselves?
Published:
I built a script that dynamically generates a robots.txt file for search engine bots, who download the file when they seek direction on what parts of a website they are allowed to index. By default, it directs all bots to stay away from the entire site, but then presents an exception: only the bot that requests the robots.txt file is allowed full reign over the site. Read more
Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms
Published:
This is a new article published in Information, Communication, and Society as part of their annual special issue for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This year’s special issue was edited by Lee Humphreys and Tarleton Gillespie, who did a great job throughout the whole process. Read more
An apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious things
Published:
I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season, humanity’s historical record will be dangerously impoverished.” While it got quite a number of retweets and equally snarky responses, he is far from the first to make such a flippant critique of the vapid nature of social media. It also seriously upset me for reasons that I’ve been trying to work out, which is why I found myself doing one of those shifts that researchers of knowledge production tend to do far too often with critics: don’t get mad, get reflexive. What is it that makes such a sentiment resonate with us, particularly when it is issued over Twitter, a platform that is the target of this kind of critique? The reasons have to do with a fundamental disagreement over what it means to interact in a mediated space: do we understand our posts, status updates, and shared photos as representations of how we exist in the world which collectively constitute a certain persistent performance of the self, or do we understand them a form of communication in which we subjectively and interactionally relate our experience of the world to others? Read more
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
Published:
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Read more
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
dispute resolution
A Communicative Ethnography of Argumentative Strategies in a Wikipedian Content Dispute
Published:
This presentation was adapted from a chapter in my Senior thesis on Wikipedia’s legal system that focused on a dispute over the inclusion of images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an article about him, using a methodology of communicative ethnography. Most who opposed the image were not familiar with Wikipedia’s unique method of content regulation and dispute resolution, as well as its editorial standards and principles. However, most who argued in favor of keeping the image knew these and initially used them to their advantage. This ethnographic study of the communicative strategies used by the parties involved in the dispute shows how new editors to the user-written encyclopedia first emerged in a hostile communicative environment and subsequently adapted their argumentative strategies. This conflict is an excellent example of how disputes are resolved in Wikipedia, showing how this new media space regulates its own content. Read more
disruptive behavior
Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner
Published:
An outright ban on technology in the classroom - which may or may not include the pen and paper - is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive. Read more
distributed cognition
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
domination
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
dual power
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
e government
Wikimania 2008: Opening Keynote with Egyptian Minister Ahmed Darwish
Published:
The official theme or slogan for this year’s Wikimania is “the knowledge revolution that is changing wisdom.” I think this phrase – especially the difference between knowledge and wisdom – was chosen very carefully and I think it is an excellent distinction to make. This morning’s opening ceremony began with a speech from the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Ahmed Darwish. I will relay his comments here, without much analysis – that will come later, when I have the time. Read more
education
Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution
Published:
In the Wikipedia research community — that is, the group of academics and Wikipedians who are interested in studying Wikipedia — there has been a pretty substantial and longstanding problem with how research is published. Academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty, are deeply invested and entrenched in an system that rewards the publication of research. Publish or perish, as we’ve all heard. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of publications which are recognized as ‘academic’ require us to assign copyright to the publication, so that the publisher can then charge for access to the article. This is in direct contradiction with the goals of Wikipedia, as well as many other open source and open content creation communities — communities which are the subject of a substantial amount of academic research. Read more
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
Response: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Published:
A response to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which his work is applied to a personal vignette of experimentation practices in a High School Physics class. When in the course of scientific education should students be allowed to modify scientific theories to fit experimental data instead of modifying experiments to fit the theories? Read more
Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner
Published:
An outright ban on technology in the classroom - which may or may not include the pen and paper - is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Collaborative research on Wikiversity with Cormac Lawler
Published:
Collaborative research on Wikiversity by Cormac Lawler (user Cormaggio on Wikimedia projects) at the University of Manchester. Wikiversity is a relatively young project in the Wikimedia umbrella, but I think it is a natural development and a great space to realize the potential of all the educators currently on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and all the other projects. Read more
education management
Wikimania 2008: Education and the Wiki Paradigm: A Tug of War?
Published:
This was part of the opening keynote in Wikimania 2008, given by the Egyptian Deputy Minister of Communication and IT, Hoda Baraka. Here are my notes, again without any commentary – I apologize for them not being cleaner. Read more
egalitarianism
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
egypt
Wikimania 2008: New Paradigms for New Tomorrows with Ismail Serageldin
Published:
Director of the Library of Alexandria, Dr. Ismail Serageldin gave a keynote speech on the first day of Wikimania 2008 titled, New Paradigms for New Tomorrows. It was quite thoughtful and inspiring – the man is one of the most amazing individuals I have heard. He is learned in so many different areas of academic and cultural knowledge, as well as incredibly wise. I would recommend watching the video of his speech, but if you are pressed for time you can read my notes. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Education and the Wiki Paradigm: A Tug of War?
Published:
This was part of the opening keynote in Wikimania 2008, given by the Egyptian Deputy Minister of Communication and IT, Hoda Baraka. Here are my notes, again without any commentary – I apologize for them not being cleaner. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Opening Keynote with Egyptian Minister Ahmed Darwish
Published:
The official theme or slogan for this year’s Wikimania is “the knowledge revolution that is changing wisdom.” I think this phrase – especially the difference between knowledge and wisdom – was chosen very carefully and I think it is an excellent distinction to make. This morning’s opening ceremony began with a speech from the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Ahmed Darwish. I will relay his comments here, without much analysis – that will come later, when I have the time. Read more
electronic space
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
empirical data
Response: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Published:
A response to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which his work is applied to a personal vignette of experimentation practices in a High School Physics class. When in the course of scientific education should students be allowed to modify scientific theories to fit experimental data instead of modifying experiments to fit the theories? Read more
encyclopedia dramatica
The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
Published:
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Read more
epistemology
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
ethical demands
User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
Published:
I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad? Read more
ethical framework
User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
Published:
I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad? Read more
ethnography
Come to the Trace Ethnography workshop at the 2015 iConference!
Published:
We’re organizing a workshop on trace ethnography at the 2015 iConference, led by Amelia Acker, Matt Burton, David Ribes, and myself. See more information about it on the workshop’s website, or feel free to contact me for more information. Read more
About a bot: reflections on building software agents
Published:
This post for Ethnography Matters is a very personal, reflective musing about the first bot I ever developed for Wikipedia. It makes the argument that while it is certainly important to think about software code and algorithms behind bots and other AI agents, they are not immaterial. In fact, the physical locations and social contexts in which they are run are often critical to understanding how they both ‘live’ and ‘die’. Read more
The ethnography of robots: interview at Ethnography Matters
Published:
This was an interview I did with the wonderful Heather Ford, originally posted at Ethnography Matters (a really cool group blog) way back in January. No idea why I didn’t post a copy of this here back then, but now that I’m moving towards my dissertation I’m thinking about this kind of stuff more and more. In short, I argue for a non-anthropocentric yet still phenomenological ethnography of technology, studying not the culture of the people who build and program robots, but the culture of those the robots themselves. Read more
Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology
Published:
I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription. As someone who studies ubiquitous socio-technological infrastructures (and Helvetica is certainly one), I know how hard it is to seriously pay attention to something that which we see every day. It may seem counter-intuitive, but as Susan Leigh Star reminds us, the more widespread an infrastructure is, the more we use it and depend on it, the more invisible it becomes — that is, until it breaks or generates controversy, in which case it is far too easy. But to actually say something about what well-oiled, hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures are, how they came to have such a place in our society, and why they won out over their competitors is a notoriously difficult task. But I came to realize that the film is less of a history of fonts, and more of an anthropology of design. Read more
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia. Read more
A Communicative Ethnography of Argumentative Strategies in a Wikipedian Content Dispute
Published:
This presentation was adapted from a chapter in my Senior thesis on Wikipedia’s legal system that focused on a dispute over the inclusion of images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an article about him, using a methodology of communicative ethnography. Most who opposed the image were not familiar with Wikipedia’s unique method of content regulation and dispute resolution, as well as its editorial standards and principles. However, most who argued in favor of keeping the image knew these and initially used them to their advantage. This ethnographic study of the communicative strategies used by the parties involved in the dispute shows how new editors to the user-written encyclopedia first emerged in a hostile communicative environment and subsequently adapted their argumentative strategies. This conflict is an excellent example of how disputes are resolved in Wikipedia, showing how this new media space regulates its own content. Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
ethnography of work
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
ethnomethodology
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
evolution of education
Wikimania 2008: Education and the Wiki Paradigm: A Tug of War?
Published:
This was part of the opening keynote in Wikimania 2008, given by the Egyptian Deputy Minister of Communication and IT, Hoda Baraka. Here are my notes, again without any commentary – I apologize for them not being cleaner. Read more
experimentation
Response: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Published:
A response to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which his work is applied to a personal vignette of experimentation practices in a High School Physics class. When in the course of scientific education should students be allowed to modify scientific theories to fit experimental data instead of modifying experiments to fit the theories? Read more
An apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious things
Published:
I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season, humanity’s historical record will be dangerously impoverished.” While it got quite a number of retweets and equally snarky responses, he is far from the first to make such a flippant critique of the vapid nature of social media. It also seriously upset me for reasons that I’ve been trying to work out, which is why I found myself doing one of those shifts that researchers of knowledge production tend to do far too often with critics: don’t get mad, get reflexive. What is it that makes such a sentiment resonate with us, particularly when it is issued over Twitter, a platform that is the target of this kind of critique? The reasons have to do with a fundamental disagreement over what it means to interact in a mediated space: do we understand our posts, status updates, and shared photos as representations of how we exist in the world which collectively constitute a certain persistent performance of the self, or do we understand them a form of communication in which we subjectively and interactionally relate our experience of the world to others? Read more
falsificationism
Response: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Published:
A response to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which his work is applied to a personal vignette of experimentation practices in a High School Physics class. When in the course of scientific education should students be allowed to modify scientific theories to fit experimental data instead of modifying experiments to fit the theories? Read more
film
Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology
Published:
I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription. As someone who studies ubiquitous socio-technological infrastructures (and Helvetica is certainly one), I know how hard it is to seriously pay attention to something that which we see every day. It may seem counter-intuitive, but as Susan Leigh Star reminds us, the more widespread an infrastructure is, the more we use it and depend on it, the more invisible it becomes — that is, until it breaks or generates controversy, in which case it is far too easy. But to actually say something about what well-oiled, hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures are, how they came to have such a place in our society, and why they won out over their competitors is a notoriously difficult task. But I came to realize that the film is less of a history of fonts, and more of an anthropology of design. Read more
flagged revisions
WikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
Wikimania 2008: State of the Mediawiki
Published:
State of the Mediawiki, a presentation give at Wikimania by some developers of Mediawiki and maintainers of the Wikimedia installation of it Read more
Wikimania 2008: Flagged Revisions with Philipp Birken
Published:
From “Flagged Revisions,” a presentation at Wikimania 2008 by Philip Birken. In my opinion, flagged revisions realize the concept of stable versions without making the article actually stable. It is not a system of voting to approve new revisions – a new revision is approved when only one autoconfirmed user says it is vandalism-free. Yes, it won’t solve everything, but it will make things much better. We can get rid of protecting articles that are experiencing heavy vandalism if we do this, because an edit only updates to the public when it is flagged as not-vandalism by a trusted user. However, vandals (or any other user) immediately sees the results of their edit for an hour, which is just ingenious. Also, you can choose whether the most recent revision is shown by default, or make it so that certain users (like anonymous users) only see the most recent reviewed revision. For those who feel that it threatens “the wiki way,” I suggest making the most recent version appear by default and giving people the option to see the latest reviewed version. Read more
foucault
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
Published:
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
free culture
WikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
free software
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
free software foundation
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
free software movement
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
games
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
gaming
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
gaming communities
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
gender
Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
Published:
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him. Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories. And it feels good, I know. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
gfdl
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
globalization
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Opening Keynote with Egyptian Minister Ahmed Darwish
Published:
The official theme or slogan for this year’s Wikimania is “the knowledge revolution that is changing wisdom.” I think this phrase – especially the difference between knowledge and wisdom – was chosen very carefully and I think it is an excellent distinction to make. This morning’s opening ceremony began with a speech from the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Ahmed Darwish. I will relay his comments here, without much analysis – that will come later, when I have the time. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
gnovis
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
gnu
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Attribution-ShareAlike
Published:
Content on my website and my Flickr account has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license for a while. I was pretty proud of myself. But then I got to thinking: why don’t I choose Attribution-ShareAlike? Obviously, it was product of two kneejerk reactions: I don’t want someone else to make money off my stuff, and I don’t want someone messing with my stuff. Read more
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
Google Search for “Phenomenology of Spirit” Suggests “Nebraska State Flower”
Published:
As you may know, Google often thinks it knows what you are looking for better than you do. It will suggest different search queries and display them underneath the top three results for your original query. So I did a simple Google search for “Phenomenology of Spirit,” an 1807 book written by German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel today and found a very interesting suggestion. Read more
governance
Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms
Published:
This is a new article published in Information, Communication, and Society as part of their annual special issue for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This year’s special issue was edited by Lee Humphreys and Tarleton Gillespie, who did a great job throughout the whole process. Read more
When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes?
Published:
I’ve written a number of papers about the role that automated software agents (or bots) play in Wikipedia, claiming that they are critical to the continued operation of Wikipedia. This paper tests this hypothesis and introduces a metric visualizing the speed at which fully-automated bots, tool-assisted cyborgs, and unassisted humans review edits in Wikipedia. In the first half of 2011, ClueBot NG – one of the most prolific counter-vandalism bots in the English-language Wikipedia – went down for four distinct periods, each period of downtime lasting from days to weeks. Aaron Halfaker and I use these periods of breakdown as naturalistic experiments to study Wikipedia’s quality control network. Our analysis showed that the overall time-to-revert damaging edits was almost doubled when this software agent was down. Yet while a significantly fewer proportion of edits made during the bot’s downtime were reverted, we found that those edits were later eventually reverted. This suggests that human agents in Wikipedia took over this quality control work, but performed it at a far slower rate. Read more
Bots and Cyborgs: Wikipedia’s Immune System
Published:
My frequent collaborator Aaron Halfaker has written up a fantastic article with John Riedl in Computer reviewing a lot of the work we’ve done on algorithmic agents in Wikipedia, casting them as Wikipedia’s immune system. Choice quote: “These bots and cyborgs are more than tools to better manage content quality on Wikipedia—through their interaction with humans, they’re fundamentally changing its culture.” Read more
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
WikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account
Published:
In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era. Read more
Wikimania 2008: New Paradigms for New Tomorrows with Ismail Serageldin
Published:
Director of the Library of Alexandria, Dr. Ismail Serageldin gave a keynote speech on the first day of Wikimania 2008 titled, New Paradigms for New Tomorrows. It was quite thoughtful and inspiring – the man is one of the most amazing individuals I have heard. He is learned in so many different areas of academic and cultural knowledge, as well as incredibly wise. I would recommend watching the video of his speech, but if you are pressed for time you can read my notes. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia Administrators / Arbcom Panel
Published:
This panel was at Wikimania 2008, and featured James Forrester, Andrew Lih, Kat Walsh, and Charles Matthews. Everyone except for Lih is or has been on the Arbitration Committee, and this turned into a discussion about admins. Read more
gpl
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
graphical chat
Virtual Worlds in 1996: The More Things Change…
Published:
I came across this 1996 review published in Entertainment Weekly of The Palace, Worldsaway, and Worlds Chat. These were the first graphical chat programs, a genre which became virtual worlds a half-decade later. The entire article is fascinating from a historical perspective, but the last paragraph in particular shows us how some things really do stay the same: Read more
growth markets
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
heidegger
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson
Published:
William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
hermeneutics
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
history
Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology
Published:
I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription. As someone who studies ubiquitous socio-technological infrastructures (and Helvetica is certainly one), I know how hard it is to seriously pay attention to something that which we see every day. It may seem counter-intuitive, but as Susan Leigh Star reminds us, the more widespread an infrastructure is, the more we use it and depend on it, the more invisible it becomes — that is, until it breaks or generates controversy, in which case it is far too easy. But to actually say something about what well-oiled, hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures are, how they came to have such a place in our society, and why they won out over their competitors is a notoriously difficult task. But I came to realize that the film is less of a history of fonts, and more of an anthropology of design. Read more
Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ‘1990 Effect’
Published:
Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990? Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and searching by topic or keyword? If so, don’t make the same mistake I did: these results aren’t because of some sea change or paradigm shift, but rather result from a poorly-documented shift in how ISI began indexing articles after 1990. Read more
Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account
Published:
In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era. Read more
Virtual Worlds in 1996: The More Things Change…
Published:
I came across this 1996 review published in Entertainment Weekly of The Palace, Worldsaway, and Worlds Chat. These were the first graphical chat programs, a genre which became virtual worlds a half-decade later. The entire article is fascinating from a historical perspective, but the last paragraph in particular shows us how some things really do stay the same: Read more
html
WebCite: An On-Demand Internet Archive
Published:
As someone who studies Internet culture, one of my biggest problems is “link rot,” or broken links. I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive, but they are usually six to eight months behind on even the most popular sites. I also applaud sites like Wikipedia for providing stable version histories so that I can point to a specific revision of a page. However, for all other websites, the only option is self-archiving, which is technically difficult and fraught with problems. What I have found incredibly useful is WebCite, a free webpage archiving service that fills in this gap. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
The Facticity of Art
Published:
This is a piece of web art or net art, with an included work of art criticism about the piece. The work makes the argument that while interactive digital art can be considered user-centered, this new style and medium is only centered around those possibilities that the creator wishes to make available to the user. You can see The Facticity of Art at http://stuartgeiger.com/art/art-intro.shtml. Read more
Web Design: Blueprints on the CSS Zen Garden
Published:
This was a CSS stylesheet I wrote for the CSS Zen Garden, which is a really cool concept in web design. There is a standard HTML page in which all the content is wrapped up in div tags, and the idea is to write a CSS stylesheet that makes it pretty. Mine was based on blueprints, and can be accessed here. It turns out that I didn’t make into the accepted designs, but I did get on the list of those that didn’t make the cut. I can see why – it needs some cleaning up around the lines which I might do if I have some time. But I’ll take being top of that list. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
humanism
User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
Published:
I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad? Read more
humanistic ethics
User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
Published:
I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad? Read more
hutchins
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
hypertext
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
hypertext novel
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
identity
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
information
Bots and Cyborgs: Wikipedia’s Immune System
Published:
My frequent collaborator Aaron Halfaker has written up a fantastic article with John Riedl in Computer reviewing a lot of the work we’ve done on algorithmic agents in Wikipedia, casting them as Wikipedia’s immune system. Choice quote: “These bots and cyborgs are more than tools to better manage content quality on Wikipedia—through their interaction with humans, they’re fundamentally changing its culture.” Read more
WikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
Words and Things: A De-Re-Sub-Post-Construction of Rhizomatic and Non-Arborescent Stratum in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
Published:
This was my final project for an Information Studies class I took back in 2006, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Our assignment was to transform information from one form to another, and I chose to perform this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I scanned and OCRed the entire book and did a visual frequency representation of certain words. I analyzed by chapter and comprehensively with certain core themes in the work. I also did a comprehensive analysis with more general or common words. It is intended to look the way it does, as I am going for a “1960s IBM goes to the academy” look. Take what you will from it: it is about 35% art, 25% snarky pastiche, 15% pretending to be linguistics, and -5% serious intellectual critique. Here is a sample: Read more
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson
Published:
William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities. Read more
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
information network
Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson
Published:
William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities. Read more
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
infrastructure
A dynamically-generated robots.txt: will search engine bots recognize themselves?
Published:
I built a script that dynamically generates a robots.txt file for search engine bots, who download the file when they seek direction on what parts of a website they are allowed to index. By default, it directs all bots to stay away from the entire site, but then presents an exception: only the bot that requests the robots.txt file is allowed full reign over the site. Read more
Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms
Published:
This is a new article published in Information, Communication, and Society as part of their annual special issue for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This year’s special issue was edited by Lee Humphreys and Tarleton Gillespie, who did a great job throughout the whole process. Read more
When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes?
Published:
I’ve written a number of papers about the role that automated software agents (or bots) play in Wikipedia, claiming that they are critical to the continued operation of Wikipedia. This paper tests this hypothesis and introduces a metric visualizing the speed at which fully-automated bots, tool-assisted cyborgs, and unassisted humans review edits in Wikipedia. In the first half of 2011, ClueBot NG – one of the most prolific counter-vandalism bots in the English-language Wikipedia – went down for four distinct periods, each period of downtime lasting from days to weeks. Aaron Halfaker and I use these periods of breakdown as naturalistic experiments to study Wikipedia’s quality control network. Our analysis showed that the overall time-to-revert damaging edits was almost doubled when this software agent was down. Yet while a significantly fewer proportion of edits made during the bot’s downtime were reverted, we found that those edits were later eventually reverted. This suggests that human agents in Wikipedia took over this quality control work, but performed it at a far slower rate. Read more
About a bot: reflections on building software agents
Published:
This post for Ethnography Matters is a very personal, reflective musing about the first bot I ever developed for Wikipedia. It makes the argument that while it is certainly important to think about software code and algorithms behind bots and other AI agents, they are not immaterial. In fact, the physical locations and social contexts in which they are run are often critical to understanding how they both ‘live’ and ‘die’. Read more
Bots and Cyborgs: Wikipedia’s Immune System
Published:
My frequent collaborator Aaron Halfaker has written up a fantastic article with John Riedl in Computer reviewing a lot of the work we’ve done on algorithmic agents in Wikipedia, casting them as Wikipedia’s immune system. Choice quote: “These bots and cyborgs are more than tools to better manage content quality on Wikipedia—through their interaction with humans, they’re fundamentally changing its culture.” Read more
Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology
Published:
I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription. As someone who studies ubiquitous socio-technological infrastructures (and Helvetica is certainly one), I know how hard it is to seriously pay attention to something that which we see every day. It may seem counter-intuitive, but as Susan Leigh Star reminds us, the more widespread an infrastructure is, the more we use it and depend on it, the more invisible it becomes — that is, until it breaks or generates controversy, in which case it is far too easy. But to actually say something about what well-oiled, hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures are, how they came to have such a place in our society, and why they won out over their competitors is a notoriously difficult task. But I came to realize that the film is less of a history of fonts, and more of an anthropology of design. Read more
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
inkblot
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
innovation
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
An apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious things
Published:
I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season, humanity’s historical record will be dangerously impoverished.” While it got quite a number of retweets and equally snarky responses, he is far from the first to make such a flippant critique of the vapid nature of social media. It also seriously upset me for reasons that I’ve been trying to work out, which is why I found myself doing one of those shifts that researchers of knowledge production tend to do far too often with critics: don’t get mad, get reflexive. What is it that makes such a sentiment resonate with us, particularly when it is issued over Twitter, a platform that is the target of this kind of critique? The reasons have to do with a fundamental disagreement over what it means to interact in a mediated space: do we understand our posts, status updates, and shared photos as representations of how we exist in the world which collectively constitute a certain persistent performance of the self, or do we understand them a form of communication in which we subjectively and interactionally relate our experience of the world to others? Read more
intellectual property
Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution
Published:
In the Wikipedia research community — that is, the group of academics and Wikipedians who are interested in studying Wikipedia — there has been a pretty substantial and longstanding problem with how research is published. Academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty, are deeply invested and entrenched in an system that rewards the publication of research. Publish or perish, as we’ve all heard. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of publications which are recognized as ‘academic’ require us to assign copyright to the publication, so that the publisher can then charge for access to the article. This is in direct contradiction with the goals of Wikipedia, as well as many other open source and open content creation communities — communities which are the subject of a substantial amount of academic research. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
interdisciplinarity
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
internet
A dynamically-generated robots.txt: will search engine bots recognize themselves?
Published:
I built a script that dynamically generates a robots.txt file for search engine bots, who download the file when they seek direction on what parts of a website they are allowed to index. By default, it directs all bots to stay away from the entire site, but then presents an exception: only the bot that requests the robots.txt file is allowed full reign over the site. Read more
Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms
Published:
This is a new article published in Information, Communication, and Society as part of their annual special issue for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This year’s special issue was edited by Lee Humphreys and Tarleton Gillespie, who did a great job throughout the whole process. Read more
An apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious things
Published:
I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season, humanity’s historical record will be dangerously impoverished.” While it got quite a number of retweets and equally snarky responses, he is far from the first to make such a flippant critique of the vapid nature of social media. It also seriously upset me for reasons that I’ve been trying to work out, which is why I found myself doing one of those shifts that researchers of knowledge production tend to do far too often with critics: don’t get mad, get reflexive. What is it that makes such a sentiment resonate with us, particularly when it is issued over Twitter, a platform that is the target of this kind of critique? The reasons have to do with a fundamental disagreement over what it means to interact in a mediated space: do we understand our posts, status updates, and shared photos as representations of how we exist in the world which collectively constitute a certain persistent performance of the self, or do we understand them a form of communication in which we subjectively and interactionally relate our experience of the world to others? Read more
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
Published:
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him. Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories. And it feels good, I know. Read more
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
WebCite: An On-Demand Internet Archive
Published:
As someone who studies Internet culture, one of my biggest problems is “link rot,” or broken links. I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive, but they are usually six to eight months behind on even the most popular sites. I also applaud sites like Wikipedia for providing stable version histories so that I can point to a specific revision of a page. However, for all other websites, the only option is self-archiving, which is technically difficult and fraught with problems. What I have found incredibly useful is WebCite, a free webpage archiving service that fills in this gap. Read more
Wikimania 2008: New Paradigms for New Tomorrows with Ismail Serageldin
Published:
Director of the Library of Alexandria, Dr. Ismail Serageldin gave a keynote speech on the first day of Wikimania 2008 titled, New Paradigms for New Tomorrows. It was quite thoughtful and inspiring – the man is one of the most amazing individuals I have heard. He is learned in so many different areas of academic and cultural knowledge, as well as incredibly wise. I would recommend watching the video of his speech, but if you are pressed for time you can read my notes. Read more
Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Opening Keynote with Egyptian Minister Ahmed Darwish
Published:
The official theme or slogan for this year’s Wikimania is “the knowledge revolution that is changing wisdom.” I think this phrase – especially the difference between knowledge and wisdom – was chosen very carefully and I think it is an excellent distinction to make. This morning’s opening ceremony began with a speech from the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Ahmed Darwish. I will relay his comments here, without much analysis – that will come later, when I have the time. Read more
Real, Virtual Communities: A Response to Brian Williams
Published:
Brian Williams talked about how this year’s primary season has shown that even in the age of the Internet, we still have a longing for real communities. I take issue with his use of “virtual community” and claim that most political communities are virtual. Read more
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
A Communicative Ethnography of Argumentative Strategies in a Wikipedian Content Dispute
Published:
This presentation was adapted from a chapter in my Senior thesis on Wikipedia’s legal system that focused on a dispute over the inclusion of images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an article about him, using a methodology of communicative ethnography. Most who opposed the image were not familiar with Wikipedia’s unique method of content regulation and dispute resolution, as well as its editorial standards and principles. However, most who argued in favor of keeping the image knew these and initially used them to their advantage. This ethnographic study of the communicative strategies used by the parties involved in the dispute shows how new editors to the user-written encyclopedia first emerged in a hostile communicative environment and subsequently adapted their argumentative strategies. This conflict is an excellent example of how disputes are resolved in Wikipedia, showing how this new media space regulates its own content. Read more
The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
Published:
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
Web Design: Blueprints on the CSS Zen Garden
Published:
This was a CSS stylesheet I wrote for the CSS Zen Garden, which is a really cool concept in web design. There is a standard HTML page in which all the content is wrapped up in div tags, and the idea is to write a CSS stylesheet that makes it pretty. Mine was based on blueprints, and can be accessed here. It turns out that I didn’t make into the accepted designs, but I did get on the list of those that didn’t make the cut. I can see why – it needs some cleaning up around the lines which I might do if I have some time. But I’ll take being top of that list. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
internet archive
WebCite: An On-Demand Internet Archive
Published:
As someone who studies Internet culture, one of my biggest problems is “link rot,” or broken links. I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive, but they are usually six to eight months behind on even the most popular sites. I also applaud sites like Wikipedia for providing stable version histories so that I can point to a specific revision of a page. However, for all other websites, the only option is self-archiving, which is technically difficult and fraught with problems. What I have found incredibly useful is WebCite, a free webpage archiving service that fills in this gap. Read more
internet communities
Virtual Worlds in 1996: The More Things Change…
Published:
I came across this 1996 review published in Entertainment Weekly of The Palace, Worldsaway, and Worlds Chat. These were the first graphical chat programs, a genre which became virtual worlds a half-decade later. The entire article is fascinating from a historical perspective, but the last paragraph in particular shows us how some things really do stay the same: Read more
Real, Virtual Communities: A Response to Brian Williams
Published:
Brian Williams talked about how this year’s primary season has shown that even in the age of the Internet, we still have a longing for real communities. I take issue with his use of “virtual community” and claim that most political communities are virtual. Read more
internet inquiry
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
internet studies
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
ip
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Attribution-ShareAlike
Published:
Content on my website and my Flickr account has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license for a while. I was pretty proud of myself. But then I got to thinking: why don’t I choose Attribution-ShareAlike? Obviously, it was product of two kneejerk reactions: I don’t want someone else to make money off my stuff, and I don’t want someone messing with my stuff. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
isi
Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ‘1990 Effect’
Published:
Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990? Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and searching by topic or keyword? If so, don’t make the same mistake I did: these results aren’t because of some sea change or paradigm shift, but rather result from a poorly-documented shift in how ISI began indexing articles after 1990. Read more
kant
User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
Published:
I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad? Read more
knowledge
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
Response: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Published:
A response to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which his work is applied to a personal vignette of experimentation practices in a High School Physics class. When in the course of scientific education should students be allowed to modify scientific theories to fit experimental data instead of modifying experiments to fit the theories? Read more
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
knowledge production
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
Video: Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
The good folks at the Library of Alexandria and Kaltura have made available videos of a good number of presentations from Wikimania 2008. Luckily, mine was one of the ones up! So without further ado: Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia. Read more
latour
The ethnography of robots: interview at Ethnography Matters
Published:
This was an interview I did with the wonderful Heather Ford, originally posted at Ethnography Matters (a really cool group blog) way back in January. No idea why I didn’t post a copy of this here back then, but now that I’m moving towards my dissertation I’m thinking about this kind of stuff more and more. In short, I argue for a non-anthropocentric yet still phenomenological ethnography of technology, studying not the culture of the people who build and program robots, but the culture of those the robots themselves. Read more
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
law
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
legal anthropology
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
legal culture
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
legal philosophy
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
liberal
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
linguistics
Words and Things: A De-Re-Sub-Post-Construction of Rhizomatic and Non-Arborescent Stratum in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
Published:
This was my final project for an Information Studies class I took back in 2006, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Our assignment was to transform information from one form to another, and I chose to perform this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I scanned and OCRed the entire book and did a visual frequency representation of certain words. I analyzed by chapter and comprehensively with certain core themes in the work. I also did a comprehensive analysis with more general or common words. It is intended to look the way it does, as I am going for a “1960s IBM goes to the academy” look. Take what you will from it: it is about 35% art, 25% snarky pastiche, 15% pretending to be linguistics, and -5% serious intellectual critique. Here is a sample: Read more
logs
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
machiavelli
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
malinowski
Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology
Published:
I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription. As someone who studies ubiquitous socio-technological infrastructures (and Helvetica is certainly one), I know how hard it is to seriously pay attention to something that which we see every day. It may seem counter-intuitive, but as Susan Leigh Star reminds us, the more widespread an infrastructure is, the more we use it and depend on it, the more invisible it becomes — that is, until it breaks or generates controversy, in which case it is far too easy. But to actually say something about what well-oiled, hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures are, how they came to have such a place in our society, and why they won out over their competitors is a notoriously difficult task. But I came to realize that the film is less of a history of fonts, and more of an anthropology of design. Read more
marx and engels
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
mary shelly
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
materiality
About a bot: reflections on building software agents
Published:
This post for Ethnography Matters is a very personal, reflective musing about the first bot I ever developed for Wikipedia. It makes the argument that while it is certainly important to think about software code and algorithms behind bots and other AI agents, they are not immaterial. In fact, the physical locations and social contexts in which they are run are often critical to understanding how they both ‘live’ and ‘die’. Read more
media
Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology
Published:
I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription. As someone who studies ubiquitous socio-technological infrastructures (and Helvetica is certainly one), I know how hard it is to seriously pay attention to something that which we see every day. It may seem counter-intuitive, but as Susan Leigh Star reminds us, the more widespread an infrastructure is, the more we use it and depend on it, the more invisible it becomes — that is, until it breaks or generates controversy, in which case it is far too easy. But to actually say something about what well-oiled, hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures are, how they came to have such a place in our society, and why they won out over their competitors is a notoriously difficult task. But I came to realize that the film is less of a history of fonts, and more of an anthropology of design. Read more
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
WikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account
Published:
In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era. Read more
media environment
Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account
Published:
In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era. Read more
mediawiki
Wikimania 2008: State of the Mediawiki
Published:
State of the Mediawiki, a presentation give at Wikimania by some developers of Mediawiki and maintainers of the Wikimedia installation of it Read more
meme
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
metadata
WebCite: An On-Demand Internet Archive
Published:
As someone who studies Internet culture, one of my biggest problems is “link rot,” or broken links. I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive, but they are usually six to eight months behind on even the most popular sites. I also applaud sites like Wikipedia for providing stable version histories so that I can point to a specific revision of a page. However, for all other websites, the only option is self-archiving, which is technically difficult and fraught with problems. What I have found incredibly useful is WebCite, a free webpage archiving service that fills in this gap. Read more
methodology
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Collaborative research on Wikiversity with Cormac Lawler
Published:
Collaborative research on Wikiversity by Cormac Lawler (user Cormaggio on Wikimedia projects) at the University of Manchester. Wikiversity is a relatively young project in the Wikimedia umbrella, but I think it is a natural development and a great space to realize the potential of all the educators currently on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and all the other projects. Read more
middle east
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
militarism
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
mind and body
Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson
Published:
William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities. Read more
modernism
Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology
Published:
I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription. As someone who studies ubiquitous socio-technological infrastructures (and Helvetica is certainly one), I know how hard it is to seriously pay attention to something that which we see every day. It may seem counter-intuitive, but as Susan Leigh Star reminds us, the more widespread an infrastructure is, the more we use it and depend on it, the more invisible it becomes — that is, until it breaks or generates controversy, in which case it is far too easy. But to actually say something about what well-oiled, hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures are, how they came to have such a place in our society, and why they won out over their competitors is a notoriously difficult task. But I came to realize that the film is less of a history of fonts, and more of an anthropology of design. Read more
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
multiplicity
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
myth
Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology
Published:
I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription. As someone who studies ubiquitous socio-technological infrastructures (and Helvetica is certainly one), I know how hard it is to seriously pay attention to something that which we see every day. It may seem counter-intuitive, but as Susan Leigh Star reminds us, the more widespread an infrastructure is, the more we use it and depend on it, the more invisible it becomes — that is, until it breaks or generates controversy, in which case it is far too easy. But to actually say something about what well-oiled, hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures are, how they came to have such a place in our society, and why they won out over their competitors is a notoriously difficult task. But I came to realize that the film is less of a history of fonts, and more of an anthropology of design. Read more
nancy baym
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
nebraska state flower
Google Search for “Phenomenology of Spirit” Suggests “Nebraska State Flower”
Published:
As you may know, Google often thinks it knows what you are looking for better than you do. It will suggest different search queries and display them underneath the top three results for your original query. So I did a simple Google search for “Phenomenology of Spirit,” an 1807 book written by German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel today and found a very interesting suggestion. Read more
net art
The Facticity of Art
Published:
This is a piece of web art or net art, with an included work of art criticism about the piece. The work makes the argument that while interactive digital art can be considered user-centered, this new style and medium is only centered around those possibilities that the creator wishes to make available to the user. You can see The Facticity of Art at http://stuartgeiger.com/art/art-intro.shtml. Read more
network
The ethnography of robots: interview at Ethnography Matters
Published:
This was an interview I did with the wonderful Heather Ford, originally posted at Ethnography Matters (a really cool group blog) way back in January. No idea why I didn’t post a copy of this here back then, but now that I’m moving towards my dissertation I’m thinking about this kind of stuff more and more. In short, I argue for a non-anthropocentric yet still phenomenological ethnography of technology, studying not the culture of the people who build and program robots, but the culture of those the robots themselves. Read more
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
Published:
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Read more
Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson
Published:
William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities. Read more
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
networked public sphere
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
normativity
User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
Published:
I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad? Read more
norms
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
north africa
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
objectivity
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
obligation
User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
Published:
I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad? Read more
oligopticons
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
online role playing games
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
ontology
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
open access
Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution
Published:
In the Wikipedia research community — that is, the group of academics and Wikipedians who are interested in studying Wikipedia — there has been a pretty substantial and longstanding problem with how research is published. Academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty, are deeply invested and entrenched in an system that rewards the publication of research. Publish or perish, as we’ve all heard. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of publications which are recognized as ‘academic’ require us to assign copyright to the publication, so that the publisher can then charge for access to the article. This is in direct contradiction with the goals of Wikipedia, as well as many other open source and open content creation communities — communities which are the subject of a substantial amount of academic research. Read more
open conference
WikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
open source
WikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
open source software
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
open to interpretation
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
order
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
organization
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
organizational communication
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
organizational theory
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
paradigm
Response: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Published:
A response to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which his work is applied to a personal vignette of experimentation practices in a High School Physics class. When in the course of scientific education should students be allowed to modify scientific theories to fit experimental data instead of modifying experiments to fit the theories? Read more
participant observation
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
participatory democracy
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
patchwork girl
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
phenomenology of spirit
Google Search for “Phenomenology of Spirit” Suggests “Nebraska State Flower”
Published:
As you may know, Google often thinks it knows what you are looking for better than you do. It will suggest different search queries and display them underneath the top three results for your original query. So I did a simple Google search for “Phenomenology of Spirit,” an 1807 book written by German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel today and found a very interesting suggestion. Read more
philosophy
A dynamically-generated robots.txt: will search engine bots recognize themselves?
Published:
I built a script that dynamically generates a robots.txt file for search engine bots, who download the file when they seek direction on what parts of a website they are allowed to index. By default, it directs all bots to stay away from the entire site, but then presents an exception: only the bot that requests the robots.txt file is allowed full reign over the site. Read more
About a bot: reflections on building software agents
Published:
This post for Ethnography Matters is a very personal, reflective musing about the first bot I ever developed for Wikipedia. It makes the argument that while it is certainly important to think about software code and algorithms behind bots and other AI agents, they are not immaterial. In fact, the physical locations and social contexts in which they are run are often critical to understanding how they both ‘live’ and ‘die’. Read more
Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
Published:
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him. Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories. And it feels good, I know. Read more
User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
Published:
I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad? Read more
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
photocopiers
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
photography
An apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious things
Published:
I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season, humanity’s historical record will be dangerously impoverished.” While it got quite a number of retweets and equally snarky responses, he is far from the first to make such a flippant critique of the vapid nature of social media. It also seriously upset me for reasons that I’ve been trying to work out, which is why I found myself doing one of those shifts that researchers of knowledge production tend to do far too often with critics: don’t get mad, get reflexive. What is it that makes such a sentiment resonate with us, particularly when it is issued over Twitter, a platform that is the target of this kind of critique? The reasons have to do with a fundamental disagreement over what it means to interact in a mediated space: do we understand our posts, status updates, and shared photos as representations of how we exist in the world which collectively constitute a certain persistent performance of the self, or do we understand them a form of communication in which we subjectively and interactionally relate our experience of the world to others? Read more
play
Google Search for “Phenomenology of Spirit” Suggests “Nebraska State Flower”
Published:
As you may know, Google often thinks it knows what you are looking for better than you do. It will suggest different search queries and display them underneath the top three results for your original query. So I did a simple Google search for “Phenomenology of Spirit,” an 1807 book written by German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel today and found a very interesting suggestion. Read more
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
political theories
Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
Published:
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him. Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories. And it feels good, I know. Read more
politics
Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
Published:
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him. Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories. And it feels good, I know. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia Administrators / Arbcom Panel
Published:
This panel was at Wikimania 2008, and featured James Forrester, Andrew Lih, Kat Walsh, and Charles Matthews. Everyone except for Lih is or has been on the Arbitration Committee, and this turned into a discussion about admins. Read more
Real, Virtual Communities: A Response to Brian Williams
Published:
Brian Williams talked about how this year’s primary season has shown that even in the age of the Internet, we still have a longing for real communities. I take issue with his use of “virtual community” and claim that most political communities are virtual. Read more
postmodern
Wikimania 2008
Published:
I am currently in Egypt for Wikimania 2008, which is being held this year at the Library of Alexandria. On Sunday, I will be presenting my ethnographic analysis of conceptions and misconceptions academics hold about Wikipedia. This presentation was going to be about old, computer-illiterate professors but has turned into something much more interesting: a commentary on Wikipedia’s status in the so-called postmodern digital humanities. I will update the post on this site as I finalize my presentation. Read more
postmodernism
Words and Things: A De-Re-Sub-Post-Construction of Rhizomatic and Non-Arborescent Stratum in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
Published:
This was my final project for an Information Studies class I took back in 2006, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Our assignment was to transform information from one form to another, and I chose to perform this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I scanned and OCRed the entire book and did a visual frequency representation of certain words. I analyzed by chapter and comprehensively with certain core themes in the work. I also did a comprehensive analysis with more general or common words. It is intended to look the way it does, as I am going for a “1960s IBM goes to the academy” look. Take what you will from it: it is about 35% art, 25% snarky pastiche, 15% pretending to be linguistics, and -5% serious intellectual critique. Here is a sample: Read more
poststructuralism
Words and Things: A De-Re-Sub-Post-Construction of Rhizomatic and Non-Arborescent Stratum in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
Published:
This was my final project for an Information Studies class I took back in 2006, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Our assignment was to transform information from one form to another, and I chose to perform this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I scanned and OCRed the entire book and did a visual frequency representation of certain words. I analyzed by chapter and comprehensively with certain core themes in the work. I also did a comprehensive analysis with more general or common words. It is intended to look the way it does, as I am going for a “1960s IBM goes to the academy” look. Take what you will from it: it is about 35% art, 25% snarky pastiche, 15% pretending to be linguistics, and -5% serious intellectual critique. Here is a sample: Read more
power
Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms
Published:
This is a new article published in Information, Communication, and Society as part of their annual special issue for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This year’s special issue was edited by Lee Humphreys and Tarleton Gillespie, who did a great job throughout the whole process. Read more
Bots and Cyborgs: Wikipedia’s Immune System
Published:
My frequent collaborator Aaron Halfaker has written up a fantastic article with John Riedl in Computer reviewing a lot of the work we’ve done on algorithmic agents in Wikipedia, casting them as Wikipedia’s immune system. Choice quote: “These bots and cyborgs are more than tools to better manage content quality on Wikipedia—through their interaction with humans, they’re fundamentally changing its culture.” Read more
Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
Published:
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him. Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories. And it feels good, I know. Read more
Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account
Published:
In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era. Read more
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia Administrators / Arbcom Panel
Published:
This panel was at Wikimania 2008, and featured James Forrester, Andrew Lih, Kat Walsh, and Charles Matthews. Everyone except for Lih is or has been on the Arbitration Committee, and this turned into a discussion about admins. Read more
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
Published:
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
propaganda
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
psychology
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
psychosocial
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
public sphere
Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
Published:
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him. Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories. And it feels good, I know. Read more
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
pumpkin spice lattes
An apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious things
Published:
I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season, humanity’s historical record will be dangerously impoverished.” While it got quite a number of retweets and equally snarky responses, he is far from the first to make such a flippant critique of the vapid nature of social media. It also seriously upset me for reasons that I’ve been trying to work out, which is why I found myself doing one of those shifts that researchers of knowledge production tend to do far too often with critics: don’t get mad, get reflexive. What is it that makes such a sentiment resonate with us, particularly when it is issued over Twitter, a platform that is the target of this kind of critique? The reasons have to do with a fundamental disagreement over what it means to interact in a mediated space: do we understand our posts, status updates, and shared photos as representations of how we exist in the world which collectively constitute a certain persistent performance of the self, or do we understand them a form of communication in which we subjectively and interactionally relate our experience of the world to others? Read more
pundits
Real, Virtual Communities: A Response to Brian Williams
Published:
Brian Williams talked about how this year’s primary season has shown that even in the age of the Internet, we still have a longing for real communities. I take issue with his use of “virtual community” and claim that most political communities are virtual. Read more
qualitative
Come to the Trace Ethnography workshop at the 2015 iConference!
Published:
We’re organizing a workshop on trace ethnography at the 2015 iConference, led by Amelia Acker, Matt Burton, David Ribes, and myself. See more information about it on the workshop’s website, or feel free to contact me for more information. Read more
qualitative research
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
quality
Wikimania 2008: Flagged Revisions with Philipp Birken
Published:
From “Flagged Revisions,” a presentation at Wikimania 2008 by Philip Birken. In my opinion, flagged revisions realize the concept of stable versions without making the article actually stable. It is not a system of voting to approve new revisions – a new revision is approved when only one autoconfirmed user says it is vandalism-free. Yes, it won’t solve everything, but it will make things much better. We can get rid of protecting articles that are experiencing heavy vandalism if we do this, because an edit only updates to the public when it is flagged as not-vandalism by a trusted user. However, vandals (or any other user) immediately sees the results of their edit for an hour, which is just ingenious. Also, you can choose whether the most recent revision is shown by default, or make it so that certain users (like anonymous users) only see the most recent reviewed revision. For those who feel that it threatens “the wiki way,” I suggest making the most recent version appear by default and giving people the option to see the latest reviewed version. Read more
quantative research
Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ‘1990 Effect’
Published:
Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990? Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and searching by topic or keyword? If so, don’t make the same mistake I did: these results aren’t because of some sea change or paradigm shift, but rather result from a poorly-documented shift in how ISI began indexing articles after 1990. Read more
quantitative
When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes?
Published:
I’ve written a number of papers about the role that automated software agents (or bots) play in Wikipedia, claiming that they are critical to the continued operation of Wikipedia. This paper tests this hypothesis and introduces a metric visualizing the speed at which fully-automated bots, tool-assisted cyborgs, and unassisted humans review edits in Wikipedia. In the first half of 2011, ClueBot NG – one of the most prolific counter-vandalism bots in the English-language Wikipedia – went down for four distinct periods, each period of downtime lasting from days to weeks. Aaron Halfaker and I use these periods of breakdown as naturalistic experiments to study Wikipedia’s quality control network. Our analysis showed that the overall time-to-revert damaging edits was almost doubled when this software agent was down. Yet while a significantly fewer proportion of edits made during the bot’s downtime were reverted, we found that those edits were later eventually reverted. This suggests that human agents in Wikipedia took over this quality control work, but performed it at a far slower rate. Read more
racism
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
racism and colonialism
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism
Published:
Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize. Read more
real utopia
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
reference
WebCite: An On-Demand Internet Archive
Published:
As someone who studies Internet culture, one of my biggest problems is “link rot,” or broken links. I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive, but they are usually six to eight months behind on even the most popular sites. I also applaud sites like Wikipedia for providing stable version histories so that I can point to a specific revision of a page. However, for all other websites, the only option is self-archiving, which is technically difficult and fraught with problems. What I have found incredibly useful is WebCite, a free webpage archiving service that fills in this gap. Read more
reification
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
representation
Words and Things: A De-Re-Sub-Post-Construction of Rhizomatic and Non-Arborescent Stratum in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
Published:
This was my final project for an Information Studies class I took back in 2006, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Our assignment was to transform information from one form to another, and I chose to perform this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I scanned and OCRed the entire book and did a visual frequency representation of certain words. I analyzed by chapter and comprehensively with certain core themes in the work. I also did a comprehensive analysis with more general or common words. It is intended to look the way it does, as I am going for a “1960s IBM goes to the academy” look. Take what you will from it: it is about 35% art, 25% snarky pastiche, 15% pretending to be linguistics, and -5% serious intellectual critique. Here is a sample: Read more
research
Come to the Trace Ethnography workshop at the 2015 iConference!
Published:
We’re organizing a workshop on trace ethnography at the 2015 iConference, led by Amelia Acker, Matt Burton, David Ribes, and myself. See more information about it on the workshop’s website, or feel free to contact me for more information. Read more
Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution
Published:
In the Wikipedia research community — that is, the group of academics and Wikipedians who are interested in studying Wikipedia — there has been a pretty substantial and longstanding problem with how research is published. Academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty, are deeply invested and entrenched in an system that rewards the publication of research. Publish or perish, as we’ve all heard. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of publications which are recognized as ‘academic’ require us to assign copyright to the publication, so that the publisher can then charge for access to the article. This is in direct contradiction with the goals of Wikipedia, as well as many other open source and open content creation communities — communities which are the subject of a substantial amount of academic research. Read more
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ‘1990 Effect’
Published:
Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990? Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and searching by topic or keyword? If so, don’t make the same mistake I did: these results aren’t because of some sea change or paradigm shift, but rather result from a poorly-documented shift in how ISI began indexing articles after 1990. Read more
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Collaborative research on Wikiversity with Cormac Lawler
Published:
Collaborative research on Wikiversity by Cormac Lawler (user Cormaggio on Wikimedia projects) at the University of Manchester. Wikiversity is a relatively young project in the Wikimedia umbrella, but I think it is a natural development and a great space to realize the potential of all the educators currently on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and all the other projects. Read more
rhetoric
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
rhizomatic
Words and Things: A De-Re-Sub-Post-Construction of Rhizomatic and Non-Arborescent Stratum in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
Published:
This was my final project for an Information Studies class I took back in 2006, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Our assignment was to transform information from one form to another, and I chose to perform this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I scanned and OCRed the entire book and did a visual frequency representation of certain words. I analyzed by chapter and comprehensively with certain core themes in the work. I also did a comprehensive analysis with more general or common words. It is intended to look the way it does, as I am going for a “1960s IBM goes to the academy” look. Take what you will from it: it is about 35% art, 25% snarky pastiche, 15% pretending to be linguistics, and -5% serious intellectual critique. Here is a sample: Read more
sartre
The Facticity of Art
Published:
This is a piece of web art or net art, with an included work of art criticism about the piece. The work makes the argument that while interactive digital art can be considered user-centered, this new style and medium is only centered around those possibilities that the creator wishes to make available to the user. You can see The Facticity of Art at http://stuartgeiger.com/art/art-intro.shtml. Read more
science
Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ‘1990 Effect’
Published:
Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990? Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and searching by topic or keyword? If so, don’t make the same mistake I did: these results aren’t because of some sea change or paradigm shift, but rather result from a poorly-documented shift in how ISI began indexing articles after 1990. Read more
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
Response: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Published:
A response to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which his work is applied to a personal vignette of experimentation practices in a High School Physics class. When in the course of scientific education should students be allowed to modify scientific theories to fit experimental data instead of modifying experiments to fit the theories? Read more
science wars
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
scientific education
Response: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Published:
A response to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which his work is applied to a personal vignette of experimentation practices in a High School Physics class. When in the course of scientific education should students be allowed to modify scientific theories to fit experimental data instead of modifying experiments to fit the theories? Read more
semiotic
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
semiotics
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
shelly jackson
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
signifier
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
social actors
Wikisym Poster: The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools
Published:
This project investigates various software programs as non-human social actors in Wikipedia,
Read moresocial aggregation
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
social construction
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
social constructionism
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
social media
An apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious things
Published:
I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season, humanity’s historical record will be dangerously impoverished.” While it got quite a number of retweets and equally snarky responses, he is far from the first to make such a flippant critique of the vapid nature of social media. It also seriously upset me for reasons that I’ve been trying to work out, which is why I found myself doing one of those shifts that researchers of knowledge production tend to do far too often with critics: don’t get mad, get reflexive. What is it that makes such a sentiment resonate with us, particularly when it is issued over Twitter, a platform that is the target of this kind of critique? The reasons have to do with a fundamental disagreement over what it means to interact in a mediated space: do we understand our posts, status updates, and shared photos as representations of how we exist in the world which collectively constitute a certain persistent performance of the self, or do we understand them a form of communication in which we subjectively and interactionally relate our experience of the world to others? Read more
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
social networks
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
social order
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
social power structures
Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account
Published:
In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era. Read more
social software
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
social structures
Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
Published:
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him. Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories. And it feels good, I know. Read more
sociology
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
software
Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms
Published:
This is a new article published in Information, Communication, and Society as part of their annual special issue for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This year’s special issue was edited by Lee Humphreys and Tarleton Gillespie, who did a great job throughout the whole process. Read more
When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes?
Published:
I’ve written a number of papers about the role that automated software agents (or bots) play in Wikipedia, claiming that they are critical to the continued operation of Wikipedia. This paper tests this hypothesis and introduces a metric visualizing the speed at which fully-automated bots, tool-assisted cyborgs, and unassisted humans review edits in Wikipedia. In the first half of 2011, ClueBot NG – one of the most prolific counter-vandalism bots in the English-language Wikipedia – went down for four distinct periods, each period of downtime lasting from days to weeks. Aaron Halfaker and I use these periods of breakdown as naturalistic experiments to study Wikipedia’s quality control network. Our analysis showed that the overall time-to-revert damaging edits was almost doubled when this software agent was down. Yet while a significantly fewer proportion of edits made during the bot’s downtime were reverted, we found that those edits were later eventually reverted. This suggests that human agents in Wikipedia took over this quality control work, but performed it at a far slower rate. Read more
About a bot: reflections on building software agents
Published:
This post for Ethnography Matters is a very personal, reflective musing about the first bot I ever developed for Wikipedia. It makes the argument that while it is certainly important to think about software code and algorithms behind bots and other AI agents, they are not immaterial. In fact, the physical locations and social contexts in which they are run are often critical to understanding how they both ‘live’ and ‘die’. Read more
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ‘1990 Effect’
Published:
Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990? Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and searching by topic or keyword? If so, don’t make the same mistake I did: these results aren’t because of some sea change or paradigm shift, but rather result from a poorly-documented shift in how ISI began indexing articles after 1990. Read more
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
WikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
software agent
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
software programs
Wikisym Poster: The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools
Published:
This project investigates various software programs as non-human social actors in Wikipedia,
Read moresoverignty
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
stable versions
Wikimania 2008: Flagged Revisions with Philipp Birken
Published:
From “Flagged Revisions,” a presentation at Wikimania 2008 by Philip Birken. In my opinion, flagged revisions realize the concept of stable versions without making the article actually stable. It is not a system of voting to approve new revisions – a new revision is approved when only one autoconfirmed user says it is vandalism-free. Yes, it won’t solve everything, but it will make things much better. We can get rid of protecting articles that are experiencing heavy vandalism if we do this, because an edit only updates to the public when it is flagged as not-vandalism by a trusted user. However, vandals (or any other user) immediately sees the results of their edit for an hour, which is just ingenious. Also, you can choose whether the most recent revision is shown by default, or make it so that certain users (like anonymous users) only see the most recent reviewed revision. For those who feel that it threatens “the wiki way,” I suggest making the most recent version appear by default and giving people the option to see the latest reviewed version. Read more
standardization
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
stratum
Words and Things: A De-Re-Sub-Post-Construction of Rhizomatic and Non-Arborescent Stratum in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
Published:
This was my final project for an Information Studies class I took back in 2006, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Our assignment was to transform information from one form to another, and I chose to perform this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I scanned and OCRed the entire book and did a visual frequency representation of certain words. I analyzed by chapter and comprehensively with certain core themes in the work. I also did a comprehensive analysis with more general or common words. It is intended to look the way it does, as I am going for a “1960s IBM goes to the academy” look. Take what you will from it: it is about 35% art, 25% snarky pastiche, 15% pretending to be linguistics, and -5% serious intellectual critique. Here is a sample: Read more
structure of scientific revolutions
Response: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Published:
A response to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which his work is applied to a personal vignette of experimentation practices in a High School Physics class. When in the course of scientific education should students be allowed to modify scientific theories to fit experimental data instead of modifying experiments to fit the theories? Read more
student behavior
Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner
Published:
An outright ban on technology in the classroom - which may or may not include the pen and paper - is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive. Read more
subculture
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
surveillance
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
technician
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
technicians
Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr
Published:
This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job. Read more
technoepistemics
Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere
Published:
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere. They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action. However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere. The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those. The abstract is after the jump. Read more
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
technological determinism
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
technology
A dynamically-generated robots.txt: will search engine bots recognize themselves?
Published:
I built a script that dynamically generates a robots.txt file for search engine bots, who download the file when they seek direction on what parts of a website they are allowed to index. By default, it directs all bots to stay away from the entire site, but then presents an exception: only the bot that requests the robots.txt file is allowed full reign over the site. Read more
Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms
Published:
This is a new article published in Information, Communication, and Society as part of their annual special issue for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This year’s special issue was edited by Lee Humphreys and Tarleton Gillespie, who did a great job throughout the whole process. Read more
When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes?
Published:
I’ve written a number of papers about the role that automated software agents (or bots) play in Wikipedia, claiming that they are critical to the continued operation of Wikipedia. This paper tests this hypothesis and introduces a metric visualizing the speed at which fully-automated bots, tool-assisted cyborgs, and unassisted humans review edits in Wikipedia. In the first half of 2011, ClueBot NG – one of the most prolific counter-vandalism bots in the English-language Wikipedia – went down for four distinct periods, each period of downtime lasting from days to weeks. Aaron Halfaker and I use these periods of breakdown as naturalistic experiments to study Wikipedia’s quality control network. Our analysis showed that the overall time-to-revert damaging edits was almost doubled when this software agent was down. Yet while a significantly fewer proportion of edits made during the bot’s downtime were reverted, we found that those edits were later eventually reverted. This suggests that human agents in Wikipedia took over this quality control work, but performed it at a far slower rate. Read more
About a bot: reflections on building software agents
Published:
This post for Ethnography Matters is a very personal, reflective musing about the first bot I ever developed for Wikipedia. It makes the argument that while it is certainly important to think about software code and algorithms behind bots and other AI agents, they are not immaterial. In fact, the physical locations and social contexts in which they are run are often critical to understanding how they both ‘live’ and ‘die’. Read more
The ethnography of robots: interview at Ethnography Matters
Published:
This was an interview I did with the wonderful Heather Ford, originally posted at Ethnography Matters (a really cool group blog) way back in January. No idea why I didn’t post a copy of this here back then, but now that I’m moving towards my dissertation I’m thinking about this kind of stuff more and more. In short, I argue for a non-anthropocentric yet still phenomenological ethnography of technology, studying not the culture of the people who build and program robots, but the culture of those the robots themselves. Read more
Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology
Published:
I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription. As someone who studies ubiquitous socio-technological infrastructures (and Helvetica is certainly one), I know how hard it is to seriously pay attention to something that which we see every day. It may seem counter-intuitive, but as Susan Leigh Star reminds us, the more widespread an infrastructure is, the more we use it and depend on it, the more invisible it becomes — that is, until it breaks or generates controversy, in which case it is far too easy. But to actually say something about what well-oiled, hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures are, how they came to have such a place in our society, and why they won out over their competitors is a notoriously difficult task. But I came to realize that the film is less of a history of fonts, and more of an anthropology of design. Read more
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner
Published:
An outright ban on technology in the classroom - which may or may not include the pen and paper - is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Education and the Wiki Paradigm: A Tug of War?
Published:
This was part of the opening keynote in Wikimania 2008, given by the Egyptian Deputy Minister of Communication and IT, Hoda Baraka. Here are my notes, again without any commentary – I apologize for them not being cleaner. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Opening Keynote with Egyptian Minister Ahmed Darwish
Published:
The official theme or slogan for this year’s Wikimania is “the knowledge revolution that is changing wisdom.” I think this phrase – especially the difference between knowledge and wisdom – was chosen very carefully and I think it is an excellent distinction to make. This morning’s opening ceremony began with a speech from the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Ahmed Darwish. I will relay his comments here, without much analysis – that will come later, when I have the time. Read more
Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson
Published:
William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities. Read more
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
Published:
Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist. Read more
technology in schools
Wikimania 2008: Education and the Wiki Paradigm: A Tug of War?
Published:
This was part of the opening keynote in Wikimania 2008, given by the Egyptian Deputy Minister of Communication and IT, Hoda Baraka. Here are my notes, again without any commentary – I apologize for them not being cleaner. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Opening Keynote with Egyptian Minister Ahmed Darwish
Published:
The official theme or slogan for this year’s Wikimania is “the knowledge revolution that is changing wisdom.” I think this phrase – especially the difference between knowledge and wisdom – was chosen very carefully and I think it is an excellent distinction to make. This morning’s opening ceremony began with a speech from the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Ahmed Darwish. I will relay his comments here, without much analysis – that will come later, when I have the time. Read more
technology in the classroom
Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner
Published:
An outright ban on technology in the classroom - which may or may not include the pen and paper - is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive. Read more
technology standards
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
technology studies
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
text
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Published:
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda. Read more
Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson
Published:
This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson. It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel. Read more
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
timeline
An apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious things
Published:
I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season, humanity’s historical record will be dangerously impoverished.” While it got quite a number of retweets and equally snarky responses, he is far from the first to make such a flippant critique of the vapid nature of social media. It also seriously upset me for reasons that I’ve been trying to work out, which is why I found myself doing one of those shifts that researchers of knowledge production tend to do far too often with critics: don’t get mad, get reflexive. What is it that makes such a sentiment resonate with us, particularly when it is issued over Twitter, a platform that is the target of this kind of critique? The reasons have to do with a fundamental disagreement over what it means to interact in a mediated space: do we understand our posts, status updates, and shared photos as representations of how we exist in the world which collectively constitute a certain persistent performance of the self, or do we understand them a form of communication in which we subjectively and interactionally relate our experience of the world to others? Read more
trace data
Come to the Trace Ethnography workshop at the 2015 iConference!
Published:
We’re organizing a workshop on trace ethnography at the 2015 iConference, led by Amelia Acker, Matt Burton, David Ribes, and myself. See more information about it on the workshop’s website, or feel free to contact me for more information. Read more
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
trace ethnography
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
truth
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
unconference
WikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
user-generated content
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation
Published:
I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad? Read more
vandalism
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Flagged Revisions with Philipp Birken
Published:
From “Flagged Revisions,” a presentation at Wikimania 2008 by Philip Birken. In my opinion, flagged revisions realize the concept of stable versions without making the article actually stable. It is not a system of voting to approve new revisions – a new revision is approved when only one autoconfirmed user says it is vandalism-free. Yes, it won’t solve everything, but it will make things much better. We can get rid of protecting articles that are experiencing heavy vandalism if we do this, because an edit only updates to the public when it is flagged as not-vandalism by a trusted user. However, vandals (or any other user) immediately sees the results of their edit for an hour, which is just ingenious. Also, you can choose whether the most recent revision is shown by default, or make it so that certain users (like anonymous users) only see the most recent reviewed revision. For those who feel that it threatens “the wiki way,” I suggest making the most recent version appear by default and giving people the option to see the latest reviewed version. Read more
virtual
Come to the Trace Ethnography workshop at the 2015 iConference!
Published:
We’re organizing a workshop on trace ethnography at the 2015 iConference, led by Amelia Acker, Matt Burton, David Ribes, and myself. See more information about it on the workshop’s website, or feel free to contact me for more information. Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson
Published:
William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities. Read more
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
virtual communities
Virtual Worlds in 1996: The More Things Change…
Published:
I came across this 1996 review published in Entertainment Weekly of The Palace, Worldsaway, and Worlds Chat. These were the first graphical chat programs, a genre which became virtual worlds a half-decade later. The entire article is fascinating from a historical perspective, but the last paragraph in particular shows us how some things really do stay the same: Read more
Real, Virtual Communities: A Response to Brian Williams
Published:
Brian Williams talked about how this year’s primary season has shown that even in the age of the Internet, we still have a longing for real communities. I take issue with his use of “virtual community” and claim that most political communities are virtual. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
virtual community
Real, Virtual Communities: A Response to Brian Williams
Published:
Brian Williams talked about how this year’s primary season has shown that even in the age of the Internet, we still have a longing for real communities. I take issue with his use of “virtual community” and claim that most political communities are virtual. Read more
virtual ethnography
Capital ‘I’ for Internet?
Published:
Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes. Read more
virtual reality
Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
Published:
In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++. Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
virtual world
Virtual Worlds in 1996: The More Things Change…
Published:
I came across this 1996 review published in Entertainment Weekly of The Palace, Worldsaway, and Worlds Chat. These were the first graphical chat programs, a genre which became virtual worlds a half-decade later. The entire article is fascinating from a historical perspective, but the last paragraph in particular shows us how some things really do stay the same: Read more
Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
Published:
The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self. Read more
web 2.0
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Education and the Wiki Paradigm: A Tug of War?
Published:
This was part of the opening keynote in Wikimania 2008, given by the Egyptian Deputy Minister of Communication and IT, Hoda Baraka. Here are my notes, again without any commentary – I apologize for them not being cleaner. Read more
Memetic Inkblots
Published:
I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Read more
web art
The Facticity of Art
Published:
This is a piece of web art or net art, with an included work of art criticism about the piece. The work makes the argument that while interactive digital art can be considered user-centered, this new style and medium is only centered around those possibilities that the creator wishes to make available to the user. You can see The Facticity of Art at http://stuartgeiger.com/art/art-intro.shtml. Read more
web design
Web Design: Blueprints on the CSS Zen Garden
Published:
This was a CSS stylesheet I wrote for the CSS Zen Garden, which is a really cool concept in web design. There is a standard HTML page in which all the content is wrapped up in div tags, and the idea is to write a CSS stylesheet that makes it pretty. Mine was based on blueprints, and can be accessed here. It turns out that I didn’t make into the accepted designs, but I did get on the list of those that didn’t make the cut. I can see why – it needs some cleaning up around the lines which I might do if I have some time. But I’ll take being top of that list. Read more
web of science
Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ‘1990 Effect’
Published:
Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990? Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and searching by topic or keyword? If so, don’t make the same mistake I did: these results aren’t because of some sea change or paradigm shift, but rather result from a poorly-documented shift in how ISI began indexing articles after 1990. Read more
wiki
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
Wikisym Poster: The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools
Published:
This project investigates various software programs as non-human social actors in Wikipedia,
Read moreWikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
A Communicative Ethnography of Argumentative Strategies in a Wikipedian Content Dispute
Published:
This presentation was adapted from a chapter in my Senior thesis on Wikipedia’s legal system that focused on a dispute over the inclusion of images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an article about him, using a methodology of communicative ethnography. Most who opposed the image were not familiar with Wikipedia’s unique method of content regulation and dispute resolution, as well as its editorial standards and principles. However, most who argued in favor of keeping the image knew these and initially used them to their advantage. This ethnographic study of the communicative strategies used by the parties involved in the dispute shows how new editors to the user-written encyclopedia first emerged in a hostile communicative environment and subsequently adapted their argumentative strategies. This conflict is an excellent example of how disputes are resolved in Wikipedia, showing how this new media space regulates its own content. Read more
The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
Published:
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
wikimania
Video: Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
The good folks at the Library of Alexandria and Kaltura have made available videos of a good number of presentations from Wikimania 2008. Luckily, mine was one of the ones up! So without further ado: Read more
Wikimania 2008: New Paradigms for New Tomorrows with Ismail Serageldin
Published:
Director of the Library of Alexandria, Dr. Ismail Serageldin gave a keynote speech on the first day of Wikimania 2008 titled, New Paradigms for New Tomorrows. It was quite thoughtful and inspiring – the man is one of the most amazing individuals I have heard. He is learned in so many different areas of academic and cultural knowledge, as well as incredibly wise. I would recommend watching the video of his speech, but if you are pressed for time you can read my notes. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Collaborative research on Wikiversity with Cormac Lawler
Published:
Collaborative research on Wikiversity by Cormac Lawler (user Cormaggio on Wikimedia projects) at the University of Manchester. Wikiversity is a relatively young project in the Wikimedia umbrella, but I think it is a natural development and a great space to realize the potential of all the educators currently on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and all the other projects. Read more
Wikimania 2008: State of the Mediawiki
Published:
State of the Mediawiki, a presentation give at Wikimania by some developers of Mediawiki and maintainers of the Wikimedia installation of it Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Closing Ceremony
Published:
Here are my notes from the closing ceremony of Wikimania. It was really an amazing conference and I was very honored to be there. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Flagged Revisions with Philipp Birken
Published:
From “Flagged Revisions,” a presentation at Wikimania 2008 by Philip Birken. In my opinion, flagged revisions realize the concept of stable versions without making the article actually stable. It is not a system of voting to approve new revisions – a new revision is approved when only one autoconfirmed user says it is vandalism-free. Yes, it won’t solve everything, but it will make things much better. We can get rid of protecting articles that are experiencing heavy vandalism if we do this, because an edit only updates to the public when it is flagged as not-vandalism by a trusted user. However, vandals (or any other user) immediately sees the results of their edit for an hour, which is just ingenious. Also, you can choose whether the most recent revision is shown by default, or make it so that certain users (like anonymous users) only see the most recent reviewed revision. For those who feel that it threatens “the wiki way,” I suggest making the most recent version appear by default and giving people the option to see the latest reviewed version. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia Administrators / Arbcom Panel
Published:
This panel was at Wikimania 2008, and featured James Forrester, Andrew Lih, Kat Walsh, and Charles Matthews. Everyone except for Lih is or has been on the Arbitration Committee, and this turned into a discussion about admins. Read more
Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East
Published:
Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa. Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference. He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during. That is open content, yes?” Everyone laughed. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Education and the Wiki Paradigm: A Tug of War?
Published:
This was part of the opening keynote in Wikimania 2008, given by the Egyptian Deputy Minister of Communication and IT, Hoda Baraka. Here are my notes, again without any commentary – I apologize for them not being cleaner. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Opening Keynote with Egyptian Minister Ahmed Darwish
Published:
The official theme or slogan for this year’s Wikimania is “the knowledge revolution that is changing wisdom.” I think this phrase – especially the difference between knowledge and wisdom – was chosen very carefully and I think it is an excellent distinction to make. This morning’s opening ceremony began with a speech from the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Ahmed Darwish. I will relay his comments here, without much analysis – that will come later, when I have the time. Read more
Wikimania 2008
Published:
I am currently in Egypt for Wikimania 2008, which is being held this year at the Library of Alexandria. On Sunday, I will be presenting my ethnographic analysis of conceptions and misconceptions academics hold about Wikipedia. This presentation was going to be about old, computer-illiterate professors but has turned into something much more interesting: a commentary on Wikipedia’s status in the so-called postmodern digital humanities. I will update the post on this site as I finalize my presentation. Read more
wikimania2008
Wikimania 2008
Published:
I am currently in Egypt for Wikimania 2008, which is being held this year at the Library of Alexandria. On Sunday, I will be presenting my ethnographic analysis of conceptions and misconceptions academics hold about Wikipedia. This presentation was going to be about old, computer-illiterate professors but has turned into something much more interesting: a commentary on Wikipedia’s status in the so-called postmodern digital humanities. I will update the post on this site as I finalize my presentation. Read more
wikimedia foundation
Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution
Published:
In the Wikipedia research community — that is, the group of academics and Wikipedians who are interested in studying Wikipedia — there has been a pretty substantial and longstanding problem with how research is published. Academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty, are deeply invested and entrenched in an system that rewards the publication of research. Publish or perish, as we’ve all heard. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of publications which are recognized as ‘academic’ require us to assign copyright to the publication, so that the publisher can then charge for access to the article. This is in direct contradiction with the goals of Wikipedia, as well as many other open source and open content creation communities — communities which are the subject of a substantial amount of academic research. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Closing Ceremony
Published:
Here are my notes from the closing ceremony of Wikimania. It was really an amazing conference and I was very honored to be there. Read more
Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Opening Keynote with Egyptian Minister Ahmed Darwish
Published:
The official theme or slogan for this year’s Wikimania is “the knowledge revolution that is changing wisdom.” I think this phrase – especially the difference between knowledge and wisdom – was chosen very carefully and I think it is an excellent distinction to make. This morning’s opening ceremony began with a speech from the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Ahmed Darwish. I will relay his comments here, without much analysis – that will come later, when I have the time. Read more
Wikimania 2008
Published:
I am currently in Egypt for Wikimania 2008, which is being held this year at the Library of Alexandria. On Sunday, I will be presenting my ethnographic analysis of conceptions and misconceptions academics hold about Wikipedia. This presentation was going to be about old, computer-illiterate professors but has turned into something much more interesting: a commentary on Wikipedia’s status in the so-called postmodern digital humanities. I will update the post on this site as I finalize my presentation. Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
wikipedia
Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms
Published:
This is a new article published in Information, Communication, and Society as part of their annual special issue for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This year’s special issue was edited by Lee Humphreys and Tarleton Gillespie, who did a great job throughout the whole process. Read more
When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes?
Published:
I’ve written a number of papers about the role that automated software agents (or bots) play in Wikipedia, claiming that they are critical to the continued operation of Wikipedia. This paper tests this hypothesis and introduces a metric visualizing the speed at which fully-automated bots, tool-assisted cyborgs, and unassisted humans review edits in Wikipedia. In the first half of 2011, ClueBot NG – one of the most prolific counter-vandalism bots in the English-language Wikipedia – went down for four distinct periods, each period of downtime lasting from days to weeks. Aaron Halfaker and I use these periods of breakdown as naturalistic experiments to study Wikipedia’s quality control network. Our analysis showed that the overall time-to-revert damaging edits was almost doubled when this software agent was down. Yet while a significantly fewer proportion of edits made during the bot’s downtime were reverted, we found that those edits were later eventually reverted. This suggests that human agents in Wikipedia took over this quality control work, but performed it at a far slower rate. Read more
About a bot: reflections on building software agents
Published:
This post for Ethnography Matters is a very personal, reflective musing about the first bot I ever developed for Wikipedia. It makes the argument that while it is certainly important to think about software code and algorithms behind bots and other AI agents, they are not immaterial. In fact, the physical locations and social contexts in which they are run are often critical to understanding how they both ‘live’ and ‘die’. Read more
Bots and Cyborgs: Wikipedia’s Immune System
Published:
My frequent collaborator Aaron Halfaker has written up a fantastic article with John Riedl in Computer reviewing a lot of the work we’ve done on algorithmic agents in Wikipedia, casting them as Wikipedia’s immune system. Choice quote: “These bots and cyborgs are more than tools to better manage content quality on Wikipedia—through their interaction with humans, they’re fundamentally changing its culture.” Read more
Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution
Published:
In the Wikipedia research community — that is, the group of academics and Wikipedians who are interested in studying Wikipedia — there has been a pretty substantial and longstanding problem with how research is published. Academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty, are deeply invested and entrenched in an system that rewards the publication of research. Publish or perish, as we’ve all heard. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of publications which are recognized as ‘academic’ require us to assign copyright to the publication, so that the publisher can then charge for access to the article. This is in direct contradiction with the goals of Wikipedia, as well as many other open source and open content creation communities — communities which are the subject of a substantial amount of academic research. Read more
The Lives of Bots
Published:
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon. My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below: Read more
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
Published:
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors. Read more
The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
Published:
With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network. Read more
Wikisym Poster: The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools
Published:
This project investigates various software programs as non-human social actors in Wikipedia,
Read moreWikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
Published:
Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0
Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
Published:
While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. Read more
Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account
Published:
In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era. Read more
Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
Published:
I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality? Read more
Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
Published:
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia. Read more
Video: Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
The good folks at the Library of Alexandria and Kaltura have made available videos of a good number of presentations from Wikimania 2008. Luckily, mine was one of the ones up! So without further ado: Read more
Wikimania 2008: State of the Mediawiki
Published:
State of the Mediawiki, a presentation give at Wikimania by some developers of Mediawiki and maintainers of the Wikimedia installation of it Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot
Published:
Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments. The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement. I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Closing Ceremony
Published:
Here are my notes from the closing ceremony of Wikimania. It was really an amazing conference and I was very honored to be there. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Flagged Revisions with Philipp Birken
Published:
From “Flagged Revisions,” a presentation at Wikimania 2008 by Philip Birken. In my opinion, flagged revisions realize the concept of stable versions without making the article actually stable. It is not a system of voting to approve new revisions – a new revision is approved when only one autoconfirmed user says it is vandalism-free. Yes, it won’t solve everything, but it will make things much better. We can get rid of protecting articles that are experiencing heavy vandalism if we do this, because an edit only updates to the public when it is flagged as not-vandalism by a trusted user. However, vandals (or any other user) immediately sees the results of their edit for an hour, which is just ingenious. Also, you can choose whether the most recent revision is shown by default, or make it so that certain users (like anonymous users) only see the most recent reviewed revision. For those who feel that it threatens “the wiki way,” I suggest making the most recent version appear by default and giving people the option to see the latest reviewed version. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia Administrators / Arbcom Panel
Published:
This panel was at Wikimania 2008, and featured James Forrester, Andrew Lih, Kat Walsh, and Charles Matthews. Everyone except for Lih is or has been on the Arbitration Committee, and this turned into a discussion about admins. Read more
Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
Published:
As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia. Read more
Wikimania 2008: Opening Keynote with Egyptian Minister Ahmed Darwish
Published:
The official theme or slogan for this year’s Wikimania is “the knowledge revolution that is changing wisdom.” I think this phrase – especially the difference between knowledge and wisdom – was chosen very carefully and I think it is an excellent distinction to make. This morning’s opening ceremony began with a speech from the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Ahmed Darwish. I will relay his comments here, without much analysis – that will come later, when I have the time. Read more
Wikimania 2008
Published:
I am currently in Egypt for Wikimania 2008, which is being held this year at the Library of Alexandria. On Sunday, I will be presenting my ethnographic analysis of conceptions and misconceptions academics hold about Wikipedia. This presentation was going to be about old, computer-illiterate professors but has turned into something much more interesting: a commentary on Wikipedia’s status in the so-called postmodern digital humanities. I will update the post on this site as I finalize my presentation. Read more
Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?
Published:
Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them? Read more
A Communicative Ethnography of Argumentative Strategies in a Wikipedian Content Dispute
Published:
This presentation was adapted from a chapter in my Senior thesis on Wikipedia’s legal system that focused on a dispute over the inclusion of images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an article about him, using a methodology of communicative ethnography. Most who opposed the image were not familiar with Wikipedia’s unique method of content regulation and dispute resolution, as well as its editorial standards and principles. However, most who argued in favor of keeping the image knew these and initially used them to their advantage. This ethnographic study of the communicative strategies used by the parties involved in the dispute shows how new editors to the user-written encyclopedia first emerged in a hostile communicative environment and subsequently adapted their argumentative strategies. This conflict is an excellent example of how disputes are resolved in Wikipedia, showing how this new media space regulates its own content. Read more
The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
Published:
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Read more
There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
Published:
An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture. Read more
Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
Published:
My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. Read more
wikiquality
Wikimania 2008: Flagged Revisions with Philipp Birken
Published:
From “Flagged Revisions,” a presentation at Wikimania 2008 by Philip Birken. In my opinion, flagged revisions realize the concept of stable versions without making the article actually stable. It is not a system of voting to approve new revisions – a new revision is approved when only one autoconfirmed user says it is vandalism-free. Yes, it won’t solve everything, but it will make things much better. We can get rid of protecting articles that are experiencing heavy vandalism if we do this, because an edit only updates to the public when it is flagged as not-vandalism by a trusted user. However, vandals (or any other user) immediately sees the results of their edit for an hour, which is just ingenious. Also, you can choose whether the most recent revision is shown by default, or make it so that certain users (like anonymous users) only see the most recent reviewed revision. For those who feel that it threatens “the wiki way,” I suggest making the most recent version appear by default and giving people the option to see the latest reviewed version. Read more
wikiversity
Wikimania 2008: Collaborative research on Wikiversity with Cormac Lawler
Published:
Collaborative research on Wikiversity by Cormac Lawler (user Cormaggio on Wikimedia projects) at the University of Manchester. Wikiversity is a relatively young project in the Wikimedia umbrella, but I think it is a natural development and a great space to realize the potential of all the educators currently on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and all the other projects. Read more
william gibson
Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson
Published:
William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities. Read more
zen garden
Web Design: Blueprints on the CSS Zen Garden
Published:
This was a CSS stylesheet I wrote for the CSS Zen Garden, which is a really cool concept in web design. There is a standard HTML page in which all the content is wrapped up in div tags, and the idea is to write a CSS stylesheet that makes it pretty. Mine was based on blueprints, and can be accessed here. It turns out that I didn’t make into the accepted designs, but I did get on the list of those that didn’t make the cut. I can see why – it needs some cleaning up around the lines which I might do if I have some time. But I’ll take being top of that list. Read more