academia

This week I spent some time in one of the largest advertising agencies in the UK. I always love going to agencies. There is a lot of energy - people rush around - there is a lot of laughing. How could you not find that motivating. The downside, for the agencies, is that the people that work there are, with very, very few exceptions, half the age of most of the people that buy the products they are trying to promote.

As a small business working in knowledge-intensive, research-driven areas, I've got first-hand experience of the frustrations caused by mainstream research publishing: you find a research paper that looks useful, but it costs $30 to read the 15 pages if you haven't got some kind of institutional subscription. These costs keep going up, and even institutions are having to look critically at what they can afford, in what is known as the serials crisis. Recently George Monbiot stirred up a small storm by drawing attention to this — see one angry reaction, for example.

Scott Golder recently wrote blog post at Cloudera entitled “Scaling Social Science with Hadoop” where he accounts for “how social scientists are using large scale computation.” He begins with a delightful quote from George Homans: The methods of social science are dear in time and money and getting dearer every day. He then turns to talk about the trajectory of social science:

by: danah boyd

by: danah boyd

Alice Marwick has recently put together a topical, semi-annotated bibliography of academic research on LiveJournal: LiveJournal Academic Research Bibliography. She has tried to surface all known scholarly research concerning LiveJournal. This bibliography was commissioned by LiveJournal (where I'm on the advisory board and played a role in making this happen). This is a great resource for all scholars who are interested in LJ-related issues.

by: Idris Mootee

by: danah boyd

On one hand, I'm excited to announce that my article "Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence" has been published in Convergence 14(1) (special issue edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze). On the other hand, I'm deeply depressed because I know that most of you will never read it.

by: Danah Boyd

by: Danah Boyd

by: danah boyd