Digital preservation has significantly expanded over the past few decades, renewing old and creating new challenges related to provenance, integrity, completeness, and context in memory and ...preservation practices. In this paper we explore how, perhaps counterintuitively, a more extensive digital historical record offers greater opportunities to misrepresent reality. We first review a set of concepts and socio-cultural approaches to memory and preservation. We then focus on the multiplicity of digital memory and preservation practices today, examining their limits, possibilities, and tensions; specifically, we explore the challenges of decontextualized data, personal versus institutional preservation, and “outsider” digital collections that are willingly and/or forcibly excluded from official accounts. Through these discussions, we review examples of what we consider good digital memory and preservation practices that take new approaches to context and collaboration. Lastly, we explore the optimism inherent in seeking to preserve human knowledge over the long term and to make it accessible to all.
This paper presents findings of a Mellon Foundation-funded study conducted at Penn State University in University Park during Fall 2012 that explored scholars' information practices across ...disciplines encompassing the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Drawing on results of the Web-based survey and ethnographic interviews, we present findings related to academics' practices in discovering, storing, citing, and archiving information, as well as their views on the role of library in the digital age. The paper harvests a comparative multidisciplinary perspective of our study, identifying principles and technical architecture that support digital scholarship and facilitate the development of literacies for faculty personal information management.
In this paper, we use trust as an interpretive lens through which we consider a set of challenges that remain crucial across decades and socio-technical phases of Internet development. Looking ...through this particular lens highlights several specific factors, which have persisted throughout the history of the Internet and are amplified in today's environment: identity, privacy, and collective online social action. We examine these factors in a diachronic perspective, comparing attitudes dominant in the 1990s with the attitudes dominant today. We argue that the socio-technical environment of the Internet has become so complex that our established ways and resources for making trust decisions are no longer adequate. In such circumstances, trust decisions increasingly become a collaborative effort between the user and a set of outside institutional actors. Yet, assisting users in navigating the progressively complex web of online interactions with human and nonhuman actors can easily turn into a detrimental level of institutional control, with "unsupervised users" perceived as potential victims of untrustworthy Internet sources. Trust thus becomes one of the key driving forces of Internet development and regulation, significantly redefining the relationships between individuals and institutions, and further destabilizing aspects of Internet trust analyzed in this paper.
A transition from text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) to online interaction that includes both textual and nonverbal discourse represents a new development in online communication and a ...significant challenge to prevailing models for the analysis of CMC. This paper presents results of a six-month-long ethnographic research of nonverbal communication (NVC) in the Second Life (SL) virtual environment. A set of 108 SL locations selected in a non-structured manner provided a wide range of communicative contexts for the analysis of naturally occurring user interaction. The study was focused on the analysis of proxemic and kinesic cues. The results have pointed to a significant difference between user-defined and predefined nonverbal cues, indicating that user-defined NVC has stronger potential to enhance online interaction.
This paper presents findings from a set of contextual inquiry sessions completed in 2016 as part of the four year Digital Scholarly Workflow project (2012-2016) conducted at the Pennsylvania State ...University and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Studying humanists’ workflows through contextual inquiry enabled us to gain valuable empirical insights into digital scholarship from the perspective of individual scholars. This small-scale observational study (N=8) supplemented findings from our larger scale (N=196) and medium scale (N=23) studies previously completed in the project, allowing us to develop deeper qualitative understanding of how humanists’ research practices change in the encounter with digital technologies. Through close contextual analysis of information-based research activities we illustrate how humanists build rich personal collections of digital sources, which become important information resources in their work. We also examine how adoption of digital tools transforms the established methods of managing primary and secondary sources, bringing hastier digital workflows to traditionally more methodical work. Finally, we show that efficiency cannot be qualified as a neutral or inherent characteristic of digital tools, independent of scholars’ practices, since scholars’ interaction with digital artifacts determines what constitutes efficiency of a tool in the context of a scholar’s workflow. We conclude that in humanists’ workflows digital and analog tools and resources do not necessarily replace one another or vie for the dominant position. They rather supplement each other in an interconnected, hybrid workflow that comes to our respondents as an organic manifestation of their work, and as an illustration of the bricolage character of humanists’ digital workflows.
The Psychology of Blogging Gurak, Laura J.; Antonijevic, Smiljana
The American behavioral scientist (Beverly Hills),
09/2008, Volume:
52, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The phenomenon and practice of blogging offers a rich environment from which to look at the psychology of the Internet. By using blogging as a lens, researchers can see that many predictions and ...findings of early Internet research on social and psychological features of computer-mediated communication have held true, whereas others are not as true, and that the psychology of the Internet is very much a sense of the one and the many, the individual and the collective, the personal and the political. Blogs illustrate the fusion of key elements of human desire—to express one's identity, create community, structure one's past and present experiences—with the main technological features of 21st century digital communication. Blogs can serve as a lens to observe the way in which people currently use digital technologies and, in return, transform some of the traditional cultural norms—such as those between the public and the private.
Today we are witnessing dramatic changes in the way scientific and scholarly knowledge is created, codified, and communicated. This transformation is connected to the use of digital technologies and ...the virtualization of knowledge. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines consider just what, if anything, is new when knowledge is produced in new ways. Does knowledge itself change when the tools of knowledge acquisition, representation, and distribution become digital? Issues of knowledge creation and dissemination go beyond the development and use of new computational tools. The book, which draws on work from the Virtual Knowledge Studio, brings together research on scientific practice, infrastructure, and technology. Focusing on issues of digital scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, the contributors discuss who can be considered legitimate knowledge creators, the value of "invisible" labor, the role of data visualization in policy making, the visualization of uncertainty, the conceptualization of openness in scholarly communication, data floods in the social sciences, and how expectations about future research shape research practices. The contributors combine an appreciation of the transformative power of the virtual with a commitment to the empirical study of practice and use.
In this paper, we use trust as an interpretive lens through which we consider a set of challenges that remain crucial across decades and socio-technical phases of Internet development. Looking ...through this particular lens highlights several specific factors, which have persisted throughout the history of the Internet and are amplified in today’s environment: identity, privacy, and collective online social action. We examine these factors in a diachronic perspective, comparing attitudes dominant in the 1990s with the attitudes dominant today. We argue that the socio-technical environment of the Internet has become so complex that our established ways and resources for making trust decisions are no longer adequate. In such circumstances, trust decisions increasingly become a collaborative effort between the user and a set of outside institutional actors. Yet, assisting users in navigating the progressively complex web of online interactions with human and nonhuman actors can easily turn into a detrimental level of institutional control, with “unsupervised users” perceived as potential victims of untrustworthy Internet sources. Trust thus becomes one of the key driving forces of Internet development and regulation, significantly redefining the relationships between individuals and institutions, and further destabilizing aspects of Internet trust analyzed in this paper.
Results of research on role of a virtual community within the Belgrade-based online system "SezamPro" during wartime, based on analysis of an anonymous poll; compares number of participants in a ...given chat, frequency of chat visits, time spent in a chat, and motives for participating; 1999.
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