Turning an idea into a tool

jotleaf

Unless you are blessed with better party invites than I, chances are you know just as little about what goes on in the minds of our toolmakers.  All of us, at some point or another, wish that we were BFFs with a coder so that we could finally build our brilliant self-destructing media app that would erase — with the swipe of the screen — all personal messages released into the eternal preserve of digital correspondence.  Oh yeah, or RateMyDate.

Kidding aside, regardless of whether digital tools trigger your personal faculties of enthusiasm or ennui, they powerfully shape the way scholars work and the way that work enters both the scholarly and public conversation.  And while I have preferred reading little poems composed when poetry was still meant to be sung, I too, have fallen charmed by the potential of tools to shape not just the way we communicate, but the way we think.

And so, in attempt to begin bridging the gap between tool makers and tool users, I begged the kind and illustrious programmer Andrew Badr to answer a few questions via email.  Thus far, Andrew has worked on an array of interesting projects, such as the art site Your World of Text which was misattributed to Miranda July and gushed about on Reddit.  Currently, he’s working on a start up project called Jotleaf — an interactive web canvas.  Though not built specifically with academics in mind, one never knows exactly what prototypes will become tomorrow’s fork and knife.  In his answers below, Andrew kindly spills the beans on what it’s like to turn an idea into tool.

1.  What is JotLeaf?
A Jotleaf page is an interactive canvas for the web. You can click anywhere on it to starting writing, add pictures, or embed videos or music players. You can style it in different ways, with custom colors and fonts, or invite people to collaborate on a page with you. It’s like a new creative medium. (See jotleaf.com and andrewbadr.com for other descriptions.)

Some ways people are using it:

To make art:

-To talk to their friends & fans:

To some degree, we are trying to let the community guide our understanding of what this new medium is best suited for. But we also think things are possible that it isn’t being used for much yet, like creating more general-purpose websites, which guides some of the feature development.

The idea for it came out of a previous site I did, called Your World of Text. See http://yourworldoftext.com/home/ and the description on my homepage (under “Some Things I’ve Done”). Your World of Text is an art project, and I want to keep it that way. But for the past couple years, I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to turn the same kind of interactivity into a “startup”. Jotleaf is the answer to that question. And that’s just as much about my attitude towards the project, and how the site is presented and marketing, as it is about features.

I first saw Jotleaf in my mind some time in April of last year (2012). I started working on it part-time for a few months, then more seriously starting in September. In December, a friend from college joined the project, and we committed ourselves to it full-time. He lives in Italy, so in January I moved out here for three months to work more closely with him. We got some funding from friends and family — enough for a few months, to try to get the site to the next level and then raise a real round. In May, he’s moving to San Francisco for three months, and we’ll continue our work there.

2.  What does building such a tool entail?
A day’s work, at this point, is mostly writing code. Code to make the site do new things; make it look better; make it more reliable; and fix any problems that come up. There’s also marketing and customer support: Facebook and Twitter accounts, a monthly newsletter, and constantly talking to our users to see what they like and don’t like about the site.One challenge is that people can’t really tell you what they want. The best thing for your startup might be to radically change the product, but a user will never say that. Or say your site is slow — that will drive people away, but people don’t necessarily consciously realize that. So that’s where measurement and intuition come in.

3. How did you personally get involved in this line of work? Have you worked on any other similar projects?
I’ve been making websites since high school, and experimenting with the medium from the start. I didn’t know it was “what I wanted to do” until late in college though. The big appeal to me is how you can put something out there, and then the next day — you make the right thing  — the whole world could see it. You aren’t limited by who you know, or your credentials, or your hourly wage. It’s an exponential game.

4.  Tell us about what’s most exciting in digital innovation today! 
For the most exciting things today, Chris Dixon pretty much lists them out in this blog post.

But programming is always exciting, because it builds upon itself in a way that no other human endeavor has done. Something that took a year to program ten years ago is now a page of code that you could write in a day. And it’s been happening like that for decades, building layers of abstraction on top of each other, and it’s going to keep happening. The amount of leverage that one person has is amazing, and is going to keep getting more so.

5.  How might academics better collaborate with digital folk to improve upon or create new tools?
Re: academia, to be honest it’s hard to imagine new tools coming fromthat direction. The best people to create the tools are the people who use them. Academics should create tools insofar as they are practitioners. The most useful stuff I see out of academia is studies about user behavior.

6.  You’re in Turin right now.  Anything interesting to report about the international digital scene, or how exactly you started collaborating with an international partner?
I don’t know nothing about no international digital scene. I’m in Turin because my friend from college lives here. I don’t really hang out with anyone besides him, his wife, and their two year old daughter. 🙂

7. And perhaps not-relevant, but have to ask:   Are you socially-engaged with any academics in a way that influences the way you think about the potential of technology?
The only way I can think of that I’m socially involved with academics is that I follow @golan on Twitter and he posts interesting stuff sometimes.

8.  What inspires you?
What inspires me? Well, if you mean what’s my source of ideas, I’m just thinking about the web all the time. I have at least one idea. I’ve literally dreamt several website ideas. If you mean motivation… I want to push the web forward, and change people’s conception of what it could be, and create a space for new kinds of creativity and communication, and make something big.

9.  If time and money weren’t an issue, what would you build?
If money weren’t an issue, I’d hire my friend Brian. If time stopped, I’d first write a framework in which to write a framework in which to write my website. But basically I’m doing what I want to be doing right now.

Photo Credit: Joe Aranda, from JotLeaf.com.

JustPublics@365 Hosted Conference in NY Observer

National Day of Unplugging lasted from sunset on Friday, March 1 to sunset on Saturday, March 2. But judging from the smartphones, Macbooks, and tablets at the third annual Theorizing the Web conference, no attendees took them up on the challenge.

This past weekend was the first time the conference has been held in New York City, at the CUNY Graduate Center near Herald Square.

Gatherings of this sort are typically insular, academic affairs, but organizers Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey, both sociology grad students at the University of Maryland-College Park, have attempted to broaden the tent to include bloggers, writers, and journalists of all stripes. “We wanted to create the sort of conference we would want to attend,” said Mr. Rey.

In the opening remarks on Saturday, Mr. Jurgenson elaborated, “We would go to theory conferences, and nobody wanted to talk about the Internet.” What ties the two worlds together, he added, is a concern with social justice—public intellectualism rather than institutional prestige.

Friday’s panel, “Free Speech For Whom?” was a good example of that hybrid approach.

Panelists included social media scholar Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research better known as @zephoria; Gawker staff writer Adrian Chen, an editor at The New Inquiry; and University of North Carolina professor Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. CUNY Professor Jessie Daniels, author of Cyber Racism, moderated.

You can read more of Brendan O’Connor’s article in the NY Observer here.

 

Academic Conferences in the Digital Era

Academic conferences are being transformed by digital media, and that’s a very good thing.

As a co-organizer of Theorizing the Web 2013 (#TtW13), I was pleased to see this conference happen at the Graduate Center over the weekend. However, being a co-organizer also meant that I didn’t actually get to *see* or hear most of the exciting panels as they were happening because I was preoccupied with hosting duties. The good news is that because of the way academic conferences are changing in the digital era, I could do two things I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to do: have a better sense of what happened in the sessions I missed and have the opportunity to go back and listen to those sessions online when I have time. There are other advantages to academic conferences that are fluidly imbued with digital technologies.

I’ve written elsewhere about changes in the academy being wrought by social media.  Specifically, I noted that “Backchannel communications between those attending in-person conferences help academics make connections in real time. Text messaging and Twitter and blog updates allow networks of academics to coordinate in-person connections. Backchannel communications also expand knowledge distribution.”  The #TtW13 conference provides an opportunity to illustrate each of these points.

The #TtW13 Twitter Stream: Helping Academics Make Connections in Real Time

The backchannel of conferences in the digital era can be as lively as any of the discussions in session rooms. So, for the panel I moderated on Friday night, I took questions from the audience via Twitter.  Here it didn’t really matter whether you were actually in the room or if you were sitting you in your apartment in Paris, you could still ask a question.  As it happened, one of the questions I put to the panelists was from a Graduate Center student, Amanda Licastro (@amandalicastro), who was actually in the auditorium:       Tweet07_TtW13

 But it wasn’t necessary to be in the room to follow along at the conference, as Wessel Van Rensburg (@wildebees) notes in this Tweet:

Tweet01_TtW13

Van Rensburg listened to and live tweeted the David Lyon talk from his home in London:

Tweet02_TtW13

@Replies + Hugs: Enabling Academics to Have In-Person Connections

It may only be true of the academic conferences I usually attend, but they can be dreadful, unwelcoming places. My impression of academics is that we’re a socially awkward lot that prefers reading books and analyzing numbers over talking to people. One especially status-conscious conference I attend is notorious for the “name-badge-face-scan,” in which attendees routinely scan a person’s name badge, sort for ‘high-status, low-status,’ then smile and say ‘hello’ depending on the status level of the name on the badge. It can be particularly humiliating to walk through the hallways of such a conference having your name badge scanned, and your face ignored because you’re not important enough to warrant a friendly hello.

Digital media, and especially Twitter, have completely transformed my experience of academic conferences because of @replies and in-person hugs. While I’m aware of the kerfuffle happening elsewhere about the “real world” and the “digital dualism” critiques of it, that debate doesn’t diminish the fact that there’s something remarkable about meeting someone in person that you’ve only exchanged messages with via Twitter, as Whitney (@phenatypical) notes here:

Tweet03_TtW13

The @reply (“at reply”) on Twitter is the primary way that people engage there. It’s public, so it’s possible for other people to see when someone uses the @reply (if they’re following both people in the conversation). The @reply is also a way to have a meaningful conversation with another human being and feel as if you know them. And, you do, in some ways.

The in-person hug is a new feature of academic conferences for me, and it’s tied to those @reply exchanges. That happened when I was sitting next to @sava in one of the sessions. I’ve followed her on Twitter for quite awhile now, and even though we both live in NYC, we’d never met.  She’s one of my favorite people on Twitter and I always look forward to her observations about the world. As we were sitting in a session, she peaked over my shoulder as I was updating my Twitter stream, and in a moment of recognition, said “are you Jessie? I’m Sava!”  We hugged and there were smiles all around.  So much nicer than the cold name-face-badge-scan.

When David Parry (@academicdave) and I met in person for the first time at #TtW11 after following each other on Twitter for years, we agreed there should be some word for that experience.  As far as I know, no one’s come up with that word yet.

Livestreams, Recorded Videos, and Sharing Slides: Expanding Knowledge Distribution

The affordances of digital technologies that allow me to catch up on sessions I missed, also enable other people from around the globe who didn’t attend in person to participate in the conference and “feel” as if they were there in person.  Here’s what people said about that:

Tweet04_TtW13 Annamari Martinviita (@amartinviita) from Oulu, Finland joined the discussion.  Following her fabulous presentation on MOOCs in higher ed, Bonnie Stewart (@bonstewart) made her slides available for everyone, and posted a note about that on Twitter:

Tweet08_TtW13

When Jeremy Antley (@jsantley) thanked everyone for coming to his session on “Data Serfdom” – which I saw a lot of conversation about on Twitter – I moaned about not being able to attend, then mentioned the watching the video of it later.

Tweet06_Ttw13 Then, “at replying” to both of us, Shannon Sindorf (@shannonsindorf) astutely predicted a new round of comments on presentations as people got home from the conference and had a chance to watch the videos of talks we missed live.

This, really, is the point of reimagining scholarly communication, so that we can extend the interesting conversations that we (sometimes) have at conferences beyond the constraints of time and geography.

The big theme of our inaugural JustPublics@365 Summit is ‘reimagining scholarly communication in the 21st century.’  Conferences that use a variety of digital technologies the way #TtW13 did at the Graduate Center this weekend are part of a reimagined academic conference in the digital era. This transformation is, in many ways, a very good thing because it opens up previously closed spaces of academia.

 

 

Opportunities for Digital Activism: How Social Movement Repertoires, Data, & Community Partnerships Provide Them

Lessons from the Birth of the “Stop and Frisk Watch” App

I recently reached out to the New York Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) in order to find out more about their new “Stop and Frisk Watch” app for IPhones (available in English and Spanish) and Androids (only in Spanish).   This app appeared to be a perfect unison of grassroots activism and digital technology in addition to being a good example of how digital technologies can alleviate a social injustice.  As I later found out from the NYCLU Communications Director, Jennifer Carnig, the way that this app came to fruition also provides important lessons for academics trying to incorporate digital technology into their research and/or activism.

Background

The stop-and-frisk practices of the NYPD having been troubling academics, community groups, and digital activists alike.  Just two weeks ago, Dr. Michelle Fine and Dr. Maria Elena Torre spoke at the participatory, open, online course “POOC”: Reassessing Inequality and Reimagining the 21st Century: East Harlem Focus, on their participatory action research study of the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk”.

Stop and frisk raises grave concerns over racial profiling, illegal stops, and privacy rights.  You only need to take a closer look at the NYPD’s own facts and figures to notice a troubling pattern.  Looking at NYPD data reveals that among the thousands of law abiding citizens that are stopped every year, the majority of them are black and Latino.  Last year alone – of the 533,042 New Yorkers that were stopped:

  • 89% were innocent
  • 55% were black
  • 32% were Latino
  • 10% were white

“The Stop and Frisk App”

With this persistent and growing concern, NYCLU seized the opportunity to partner with a Brooklyn-based visual artist and software developer, Jason Van Anden.  Van Anden was the developer who had previously created the Occupy Wall Street app, “I’m Getting Arrested.”  Together the NYCLU and Van Anden set to create an app that would provide New Yorkers with the tools needed to monitor, report police activity, and hold the NYPD accountable for unlawful stop-and-frisk encounters and other police misconduct.

The app currently allows New Yorkers to:

(1)   Film an incident with audio which after being submitted would go to the NYCLU for review.

(2)   Receive alerts of when people in their area are being stopped by the police.  This is an important feature for community groups who monitor police activity.

(3)   Report a police interaction they saw or experienced, even if they didn’t film it.

(4)   Learn about their rights when confronted by the police through “Know Your Rights” resources that instruct people about their rights when confronted by police and their right to film police activity in public.

stop and frisk app nyclu

(cc Capital New York)

 Lessons for Seasoned and Aspiring Academic Digital Activists

1)  Pay close attention to current trends in social movement offline and digital repertoires of contention.

The New York Civil Liberties Union developed this app as a result of what they dub, “intersection between crisis and opportunity”. During the height of Occupy Wall Street, the NYCLU kept getting press calls about an app called I’m Getting Arrested, which allowed Occupy Wall Street protesters to send a text message to select people to alert them that they were getting arrested.  The NYCLU loved the app and immediately thought about all of the ways that same technology might be useful to deal with the issue of unlawful stop-and-frisk practices among young black and Latino men in New York City.  They reached out to Van Anden to discuss possible collaborations and he was immediately sold on the possibilities of bringing technology to social justice.

2) If the data presents a disturbing trend – don’t just report the trend.  Also, consider and propose ways that free and easy to use digital tools can empower your population of interest to take matters onto their own hands!

The NYCLU noticed a disturbing trend since 2011.  During this time, they saw that police street interrogations were skyrocketing. Over the course of the Bloomberg administration, stop-and-frisks had gone up more than 600% – from 97,000 in 2002 to nearly 700,000 in 2011!  Concurrently, 9 out of 10 people stopped are eventually found innocent, and as noted earlier more than 85% of people stopped are black or Latino.  The NYCLU thought it would be empowering for New Yorkers to have a free, easy way to fight back, using the one tool that most people have in their pockets all the time – a smartphone.  Stats show that two-thirds of young adults own smartphones. This technology clearly has the power to help change the way we look at and understand the world around us.

3) Always embed your research and digital activism within grassroots networks and grassroots realities

In putting this app together the NYCLU relied on their network, Communities United for Police Reform, of which they are part of the steering committee.  This allowed them to get much needed feedback and support from other member organizations who were either formally or informally involved with developing, testing or sharing information about Stop and Frisk Watch. They also noted that Justice Committee and its Cop Watch groups have been particularly helpful in testing and their members are using the app themselves as they observe the police.  At the same time, they partnered with NYC immigrant social justice group, Make the Road by Walking, who translated their app into Spanish.

4)  Although the digital divide is alive and very much real, make sure to understand the technology trend among your target population

In choosing to develop an app, the NYCLU was well aware that 2/3 of young adults own smartphones; by 2013, 3 out of 4 Americans who acquire a new mobile phone will choose a smartphone; and 72% of smartphone owners will be between 24 and 35. This age range is the perfect demographic for the NYCLU to reach as it is this same group that is being targeted by the police and as such the most likely to use the app.  They also designed the app so that it would be extremely easy to use and hope that its usability will turn passive observers or other disenfranchised by this disturbing trend to become empowered community-problem solvers.

 

Making Research More Public

I was delighted to serve as moderator of last night’s panel on “Free Speech for Whom?” with danah boyd (@zephoria), Adrian Chen (@AdrianChen), and Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) (more about which in another post).  At the end of the panel, I asked the panelists what one thing they might change if they were going to address the issue of hate speech and other forms of offensive trolling and abusive behavior online. The closing comments came from danah boyd who urged the audience of mostly academics, activists, and web-theorizers to “be more public with your work.”  As Dorothy (@deedottiedot) tweeted:

BePublic_danahboyd

I mention this here because danah’s call to action for the audience last night speaks directly to the core idea behind JustPublics@365.  As people who are committed to social justice, we see a lot that’s wrong with the world from hate speech, to growing economic inequality, to criminalization of large segments of the population.  We also know that there is a good deal of academic research that could speak to those persistent inequalities and entrenched inequalities that open up new ways of thinking about old problems.  JustPublics@365 is all about connecting academic research to social justice efforts already happening, and using digital media to do just that.  “Be public with your work,” well said, danah boyd.

An Interview With PJ Rey and Nathan Jurgenson, Co-Chairs of #TtW13

For most people, the web is now a constant part of our daily interactions.  Yet, most of us understand little about how digital technologies are changing the personal, social and political aspects of life on a broad scale. At the University of Maryland-College Park, sociology graduate students, PJ Rey and Nathan Jurgenson, have come together to examine how the web and digital technologies are changing our society, economy and culture.

Student-led conferences that are open to those beyond tight-knit academic circles are almost unheard of, and yet PJ and Nathan are pushing the norm. Using gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation, and disability lenses, PJ and Nathan have organized an innovative conference that “bring(s) together an inter/non disciplinary group of scholars, journalists, artists, and commentators” to theorize the web. Together they are building a model of tech-driven social transformations.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing PJ and Nathan about Theorizing The Web (#TtW13) which launches today at the Graduate Center as part of the JustPublics@365 Summit: Reimagining Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century.  The conference runs all day Saturday, 3/2 on the Concourse Level of the Graduate Center.  It’s open to all, and registration is required (and you’ll need photo ID to get into the building).

JustPublics@365: Can you tell us a bit about how the first Theorizing the Web conference started?

NJ: It started in frustration. PJ and I were beginning as sociology graduate students at the University of Maryland applying social theory to new technologies and went to conferences that bummed us out in a few specific ways. It was tough to get theory people to talk about the Internet and even more difficult to get the tech-researchers to take seriously theorizing, especially that which isn’t strictly instrumental. Where were the critical theories of the Web taking deeply into account the intersections of power and domination? the dangers of capitalism? critical-race, feminist, queer, post-structural, postmodern, and so on?

These were the ideas we wanted to immerse ourselves into and we wanted to find the right network of people. We had already jumped onto social media to find people. We created the Cyborgology Blog. And it was PJ who first came up with the idea of maybe hosting a small group of graduate students working on similar ideas since he had done that in his Philosophy department years ago.

PJ: Right, our goal was really to build community that we didn’t find ready-made elsewhere. We didn’t have many resources to throw a conference, but our sociology department at the University of Maryland had plenty of space available, so we figured would could put something together in a very DIY fashion and attract a few dozen people who were also passionate in thinking theoretically about digital media, particularly from a social justice bent. We basically just made a list of all the things that would make us most excited about a conference, tried to build them into our plans, and hoped people would show up. We thought an exciting conference would try to get past the jargon and focus on ideas important to a wide audience. We also thought it would be good to engage artists and to make things really fun having socials with bands and djs.

From the earliest stages of our planning, we thought it would be fantastic to have danah boyd give a talk because her willingness to engage a wide range of audiences and her focus on issues of public concern really seemed to fit the spirit of our conference well. From the moment we contacted her, she was so generous and wonderful in helping us pull things together for that first year. I really couldn’t imagine having had a better keynote to launch this whole project. Also, in the same year, Saskia Sassen contacted us after hearing what we were planning and offered to travel down to Maryland to join us and has been hugely supportive ever since. Having talks by both danah and Saskia, as well also our advisor, George Ritzer (who, also, unfailingly offers the best suggestions on tough planning decisions), really set the tone for the first event, and, frankly, just got us both super-psyched about the whole thing.

Personally, that first conference introduced me to a number of extraordinary people with whom I now regularly collaborate. For me, these relationships were the primary motivator in turning this original conference into an annual event.

JustPublics@365: Isn’t it a little unusual for graduate students to start a conference that’s not just for other grad students?

PJR: Originally, we just sort of assumed that Theorizing the Web would be a graduate-student conference. In fact, that’s how we we framed it in our initial proposal to the Maryland sociology department. Reeve Vanneman, the sociology chair at that time–who really helped get us on our feet–encouraged us to open it up to faculty too, since there was really no reason to turn away anyone interested in the topics we wanted to address. As it turns out, a lot of faculty–even senior faculty–were deeply interested in theorizing how digital technologies were both shaped by and shaping society. In fact, we received far more submissions than we anticipated. The main difficulty for us, as grad students, is that we can only feasibly organize a relatively small conference (everyone including the speakers volunteer their time and energy). So, this means we end up being forced to turn away a lot of really great submissions. Hopefully, more events will continue to develop to serve the apparent demand for the kinds of conversation that Theorizing the Web and similar events facilitate.

NJ: And as we move forward into planning for 2014, we are looking at ways to expand the conference to meet the demand, which we are simply not able to do right now. We also are looking into expanding who makes the submission decisions beyond just ourselves, something that now seems appropriate given the surprising growth of the event.

Most importantly, we could not have done the conference those first two years without the help of fellow Maryland graduate students, Tyler Crabb, Dan Greene, Rachel Guo, Zach Richer, Jillet Sam, David Strohecker, Sarah Wanenchak, Matthias Wasser, and William Yagatich. Tyler and Sarah are again helping us this year, along with two more graduate students, Whitney Erin Boesel and Tanya Lokot, who have gone above and beyond in helping to make this event happen. JustPublics@365: So, 2013 is the first year that Theorizing The Web is in New York City.  How do you anticipate that this will change the conference?

PJR: We’ve teamed up with brilliant folks at JustPublics@365 who helped reinforce our emphasis on engaging broad publics and important social issues. This partnership actually has some deep roots. Jessie Daniels helped us get Theorizing the Web off the ground by organizing a really excellent panel on race and social media at our first conference. We’re both fans of her scholarship on cyberracism, which is a perfect fit for Theorizing the Web. She introduced us to Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land, Jen Jack Gieseking, Matthew K. Gold, Wilneida Negrón, Morgane Richardson, and Emily Sherwood. Having this great contingent of CUNY folks each contributing their unique talents to the planning of the conference helped to give to give TtW13 a distinctly NYC flair. Also, we’re really excited to have an invited panel that specifically features research on the Web being done at the CUNY Graduate Center.

NJ: Agreed! One of the goals Theorizing the Web has had is to make ideas more public. The space should be open to the public (the conference registration has always been pay-what-you-can), we’ve deeply integrated the Twitter conversation and now the live stream, and we’ve also pushed and selecting for ideas to be addressed in a way that is appropriate not just for an inter-disciplinary audience but also one that may be non-disciplinary. Moving the event to New York City is helping us reach more people since there are more people working in these areas as researchers, artists, activists, and so on. For instance, there is an #OccupyData hackathon happening concurrent with the conference in the James Gallery, and the New York City-based culture mag The New Inquiry, who we’re huge fans of, is helping us promote the event outside of academic circles.

JustPublics@365: The conference is, obviously, about ‘theorizing’ the web – but how will people be ‘using’ the web during the conference?

PJR: We really try to practice what we preach with the conference: namely, getting away from the “digital dualist” conception of online and offline as separate spaces for social interaction. We set out to “augment” the conference with digital media, which we believe helps us reach the widest possible audience. We offer live streaming video of all our panels so that folks who cannot afford a plane ticket to travel to the event can still watch in real time. Even more important, we actively work to move the so-called “Twitter backchannel” onto the front stage by having “hashtag moderators” at each panel who livetweet the discussion and ask the panelists questions on behalf of those viewing the panels remotely. These tactics are aimed at making anyone who cannot be physically present still feel like a full participant in the event and also at making the role of audience member a less passive, more “prosumptive” experience. That is, after all, what social media is all about!

NJ: An example of the culture of digital-material enmeshment at Theorizing the Web was the 2012 keynote, a conversation between NPR’s Twitter journalist Andy Carvin and UNC Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, namely, Zeynep’s superhuman ability to follow the discussion face-to-face together with the very, very active Twitter feed. I think there were about 5,000 tweets that day on the conference hashtag and we were even the #2 trending Washington D.C. topic at one point when I checked. Meanwhile, Zeynep navigated the simultaneity of the various flavors of information coming at her with ease. Tellingly, when Zeynep asked for questions, the hands in the room didn’t go up, instead, they collectively checked Twitter. JustPublics@365: Can you say a little about how the Friday evening event is different from the conference on Saturday?

PJR: Friday features a set of invited speakers we think will be of broad interest to our audience. We know a lot of people will be just arriving on Friday and many will be doing last minute preparations for Saturday presentations, so we wanted to keep the Friday event pretty simple. Saturday features 3 sets of concurrent panels, each focused on specific issues. It’s pretty packed schedule with 48 total presentations and a closing keynote by David Lyon.

This is actually the 7th conference I’ve helped organize now. And, above all, I’ve learned that meeting and catching up with people is the part that conference-goers look forward to most. So, on both days, we try to provide as much opportunity for socializing as possible, while still cramming in lots of great discussion. We really hope everyone can make it to the Friday night social and the Saturday night afterparty.

NJ: We think it is fitting to open the conference with a plenary on Surveillance by Alice Marwick, which is a real juxtaposition to the closing keynote, also on surveillance. We hope attendees appreciate Marwick’s somewhat-different approach to surveillance, namely, her conceptualization of “social surveillance” that differs from traditional surveillance studies to capture the rise of social media. Next, the invited panel titled “Free Speech for Whom?” should be a lot of fun. danah and Zeynep are leaders in this line of inquiry and are well-known to most of our audience. Adrian Chen is a journalist at Gawker and wrote the article outing (aka, “doxxing”) that nasty Reddit troll, which was pretty big news and should provide a new angle. We also reached out to some folks who are more unabashedly ‘information-should-always-be-free’, but timing unfortunately didn’t work out. [note: Kate Crawford was originally on this panel but had to back out because of a conflict with another conference she is keynote-ing]. Last, we’re especially excited to have an event in the James Gallery, as art has always been central in our thinking of these issues. JustPublics@365: Right, there seems to be some effort to involve artists.  What’s that got to do with ‘theorizing the web’?

NJ: Marshall McLuhan liked to say that only artists can know the present, while, at best, the rest of us are in the near-past. I’ve always found it interesting how, contrary to what McLuhan would have wanted, art and academia are so often separated. Academics, at least in the social sciences but often beyond, rarely consider art as of equal epistemic standing to their research; that is, it isn’t equally legitimate or able to convey ideas, insights, truths (what Lyotard or Foucault might talk about as subjugated knowledges). Meanwhile, artists are often engaging cutting-edge theoretical topics, and my hope is that academics can learn from them. And perhaps the artists can benefit from the academic skill of translating the ideas for different audiences and linking the insights to other theories, research, histories, and current events. And I can’t speak of art too long without thanking the great design work we’ve been fortunate to have with this conference, Ned Drummond for 2011 and 2012, and Imp Kerr for 2013. We owe both a large debt of gratitude.

JustPublics@365: What are you most looking forward to about #TtW13?

NJ: Seeing people meeting new people, making that new connection, and striking up conversation and spinning off new ideas. Also, seeing people taking notes and tweeting ideas during the talks. And, selfishly, getting to see all those friends we’ve made through the conference, Cyborgology, and Twitter. There are those friends and colleagues I do not get to see often, and what is also exciting is meeting people in-person I have previously known only as a Twitter-handle or a name on a journal article. Oh, also, the conference after-party on Saturday night! We have a DJ (Sean Gray of Fan Death Records) and a band, Niabi, who is an excellent ambient-meets-dreampop-meets-shoegaze electronic musician.

PJR: Meeting and catching up with people is always the most exciting part for me too. And, really, that’s why we started this whole thing in the first place. I often reflect on how many of my close collaborators I’ve met through the Theorizing the Web and how different my life would be if we hadn’t started the conference. There are a several folks who I first connected up with in 2011 and who keep coming back with new and exciting observations. Also, I’m excited to be exposed to new voices and new ideas. After the event, I’ll go back and watch the archived video of all the panels I missed. The past conferences gave me so much to think about that it took a month or two to fully digest.

JustPublics@365: Can people still participate? How do they go about doing that?

PJR: The program is set at this point, but as I said before, no one at Theorizing the Web is just a passive viewer. Lively conversations have already begun on the #TtW13 hashtag and on the Cyborgology Blog. We invite anyone and everyone to jump in. Your questions, whether asked in-person or through the hashtag, will shape the conversation at the event. I’m really looking forward to seeing what emerges as the main talking points.

NJ: And we invite those inspired by what happens at the conference to write about it! The Cyborgology blog often hosts guest-posts on these topics and is a great way to “keep the conversation going”, as Richard Rorty might say.

Nathan Jurgenson(@nathanjurgenson) is a social media theorist, PhD student in sociology at the University of Maryland, musician, photographer, and co-founder of the Cyborgology blog and Theorizing the Web conference. PJ Rey (@pjrey) is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Maryland examining how social media is changing our economy and culture. In addition to being a co-chair of the Theorizing the Web conference, he is also a co-founder and editor of the Cyborgology blog.

Why tweet while someone else is talking?

Since joining twitter, my “presence” has been sparse and mostly carefully curated from the comfort of my own home. From there I can scan the internet for things that I am sure are worth sharing, mull over a clever 140 character-description, and then type it out on my laptop to avoid potential embarrassing autocorrect mistakes on my phone. As far as I can tell this is the opposite of how twitter is supposed to be used. So when I offered to livetweet from a conference last week for JustPublics@365 I was kind of throwing myself into the deep end.

What I discovered surprised me. Audience members used twitter as a space for props, critique, and documentation. Watching the thoughts of other audience members unfold on my phone screen deepened my own listening experience. It was far from being the distraction I thought it might be. (Disclaimer: I know people have been doing this livetweeting thing for a while now! I am late to the game – let this be a little “aha!” moment from one open-minded-but-not-very-tech-savy person to another).

The event was called “a Symposium on Race, Law and Justice: Strategies for Closing the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” It was organized by the Office of the District Attorney (Kings County) in collaboration with Medger Evers College (CUNY). The panelists and audience members were a fantastic array of social workers, academics, politicians, school administrators, religious leaders, and activists. My own research is about the criminalization and management of racialized youth in Canada and I was excited for this opportunity to learn about how these issues play out in New York. I’m familiar with the broad strokes of debates around the school-to-prison-pipeline but I was hoping to figure out what the particular dynamics/disagreements/nuances are in discussions among New Yorkers who broadly agree that the “school-to-prison-pipeline” is a problem. Twitter was a space where some of these dynamics were made visible. Here are a few examples that surfaced under the hashtag #RLJ13 (RaceLawJustice2013):

(@marlon_79) “Being patient, but I am disturbed when ppl are surprised when they hear black kids get suspended 2 much” #RLJ13

(@ruby_beth) “Do NOT ignore the courts as resources.” – Judith Kaye \\ this is hard to do when courts are sources of anxiety & not support for many #RLJ13

(@marlon_79) Not 2 many men in attendance at #RLJ13 this is an issue on most forums. Where r the men? Y aren’t convos marketed for us? Y we don’t come?

These tweets (and others) were counter-conversations; questions; people making visible (and then attempting to fill) gaps in the official program. Without twitter I think these thoughts would have probably remained as private notes scrawled on people’s free conference notepads.

There weren’t that many people tweeting under the #RLJ13 hashtag (which was developed by a few of us in the absence of an official suggestion). But it was easy to see how, at a larger event (or one which explicitly promoted the use of twitter), many different sub-conversations could emerge. An event organized around sitting and listening to presentations about the school-to-prison pipeline could become, in the twitterverse, a collaborative project of thinking through the issues being raised in real-time.

Just like any other digital technology, twitter doesn’t change anything about conferences, or activism, or academia independent of us deciding to use it in particular ways. But it does provide a space for conversations to be layered and laid-out in ways that I think are unique. The way we were using twitter at #RLJ13 made the summit feel like a more interactive and more participatory space than the official set-up actually allowed for. There are barriers to tweeting that make it less than totally democratic – the most obvious being that you need a material electronic device that costs a lot of money in order to participate (and I would love to hear more about what others think about the democratic potential of twitter). But I definitely heard voices I wouldn’t have otherwise heard and made connections with other audience members that I wouldn’t have otherwise made.

  • Please join me as I tweet for JustPulbics@365 from this event next week. Beth Richie will be talking about her new book Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation at King Juan Carlos Center in New York, and I will probably literally tweet everything she says because she is brilliant.
  • You can also follow the upcoming Theorizing the Web (#Ttw13) conference on twitter. There will be an official hashtag moderator livetweeting from each session and compiling questions from the twitterverse.

Publishing and the POOC, or, why we need open access

Isn’t everything up on the internet for free? Yes, most new books and articles appear in digital format, but NO-O-O they’re not (yet) mostly free. Libraries pay big bucks to license them, and the licenses require libraries to restrict access to narrow audiences (students, faculty, or people physically inside the library).

  • Publishers sell journal articles for $15, $20, $35 or more, but people affiliated with a licensing library get them for free. U.S. copyright law enables restricted access and constructs a formidable barrier to information for anyone without a university affiliation. Some publishers profit mightily from this arrangement. Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley all routinely clear around 30% profit by selling journal articles back to universities through library expenditures.
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2013/01/29/why-open-access-is-better-for-scholarly-societies/
Elsevier clears more profit than Walmart, Apple, and Disney. Data from Mike Taylor, The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers, 2012. Chart by Stuart Shieber, 2013.
  • U.S. copyright law as applied in traditional scholarly publishing protects publishers interests at the expense of readers and authors.
  • Online digital display of most post-1923 American book titles is limited to a few pages, unless you buy a licensed copy yourself or access it through your library license.
  • Challenging U.S. copyright law and scholarly publication practices, activist Aaron Swartz drew a civil lawsuit for downloading a ton of JSTOR articles using a computer surreptitiously stashed inside a MIT’s library IP-space.

The required readings for the Graduate Center’s Spring 2013 JustPublics365 POOC are selected not only because they’re interesting and relevant, but also because they’re available in a free and open digital format. Lots of what we want to read is still locked up behind digital pay walls; we were only able to liberate some of it. For this course, many of the suggested readings are marked with an asterisk. This means that to reach them online, you have to be a Graduate Center affiliate (with an active GC network userid/pwd) or an affiliate with another subscribing institution.  For example: restricted licensed article from the POOC suggested reading list:

example: restricted licensed article

 

The Open Access (OA) movement seeks to change this. OA advocates ask writers, particularly academics who give their work to publishers for free, to publish open access with a Creative Commons license so readers everywhere can at least read/view it for free, then re-use and re-mix according to the author’s rules. Scholars want the widest possible impact by reaching the widest possible audience. Librarians want to stop spending insane amounts of money to publishers for academic work the university has already subsidized with faculty salaries. Readers want to read for free.

Academic authors and activists have to make it happen. Publish in a journal that is all (or “gold”) open access with DOAJ.org. Or use a SPARC sample contract to negotiate with your publisher to retain author copyright. Or, use the Sherpa/Romeo tool to find a journal’s standing permission for open access author archiving (“green” open access). About 95% of academic journals have standing permission for authors to post already-published articles on the web after a 6 – 24 month embargo. If every academic would post their articles for following publisher guidelines already in place, there would be lots more reading available for our Spring 2013 POOC.

A few academic book publishers experiment with open access, but there are relatively few new open access books. Books published in the USA prior to 1923 may be in public domain (unless publishers extend copyright protection), but post-1923 US books can’t be distributed on the web without tempting copyright litigation. Nearly all the books available free online are so old that the copyright protections have expired, or, they’re government works-for- hire, or, the authors subscribe to the principle that academic work should be free to the public. Posting anything online from a copyright-protected book, even a single PDF book chapter password-protected for “reserve” reading by traditional university course, can tempt litigation.

A team of CUNY faculty, students, and librarians select and review every reading for this course. We’ve done our best to point you to the finest open access reading available, but we wish we had more to choose from. It’s up to all of us to transform the academy, to support open access scholarly publishing, and to make the work of public higher education a greater force for the common good.

 

Text mining at the GC

Back in December, GC English student Sarah Ruth Jacobs posted about the possibility of losing software that might be of interest to English students:

There are 5 installations of a text mining software that can be used for qualitative and quantitative textual analysis called QDA Miner with WordStat and Simstat in room 5487 at the Grad Center. The IT person at the meeting said that it has only been used ONCE, and so if we want to keep it we need to use it.

Having absolutely zero experience with text mining software, I decided to ask the person responsible for using it ONCE if the rest of us folk were missing out on anything.

Enter the English department’s very own digital guru Amanda Licastro, who used text mining tools for a paper in Spring 2011 in order to analyze 36 digitized prefaces published between 1600 to 1800.   Drawing from Franco Moretti’s 2009 Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850), Amanda used these tools to identify frequent keywords in her sample selection.  By analyzing these keywords and their contexts — with both new tools and traditional methods — she makes several suggestions about the role of the preface in the 18th century.

genrepie

But the other interesting thing about her paper is her comparison of two different types of text mining tools.  Amanda experimented with both QDA Miner with Wordstat 6.1 (which clocks in around $4000 for commercial use) and also a similar (though free and open source) tool,  Intelligent Archive.   Though Intelligent Archive did not come with all the bells and whistles of QDA Miner (such as automatically outputting charts like the one shown above), Amanda did recommend the open source tool as a respectable alternative.  Just remember, regardless of which tool one uses, to “always clean up your data!”

I thank Amanda for her full comparison here:

There are remarkable differences between the two programs, and as part of this  experiment I would like to point to several that are significant in terms of textual analysis. The  Intelligent Archive allows the user to filter out common words such as prepositions and articles,  WordStat does not. It also allows you to search coded text if you have a text uploaded in the  Textual Coding Initiative (TEI) format. As of May 2011, TCP has released thousands of TEI  encoded eighteenth century texts, but they are still not publicly available to download. 6 The  QDA Miner solves this problem by allowing you to code text easily within the program. The  user can encode any amount of text and designate it as a part of a user generated category. The coded text can overlap and be coded as more than one category. The coded text is searchable,  and the user can perform content and statistical analysis using the data from one category of  coded text, or can compare multiple sets of data. For instance, you can do a word frequency on  one set of coded text and the results will show that word in the context of a sentence or  paragraph, determined by the user before the search. The user can then eliminate uses of the  word that do not fit the experiment before opening the list in WordStat to create graphs or charts  that display the results. This gives the user more control over their results by adding a process  that at this time still necessitates human intervention, because the program cannot yet identify  the meaning of a word by the context in which it is used. It would be impossible to create valid  codes and properly narrow the results without a strong understanding of the original material. In  other words, it is at this point when traditional literary scholarship is necessary.

Becoming Public: Academic Blogging as a Tool for Activism and Community Engagement

A recent feature on the London School of Economics (LSE) blog, asked a question which has been plaguing the academic community for over 10 years: “Why are so many academics against academic blogging?”  There is much anecdotal evidence as to the reasons why academics refrain from blogging.  They include concerns that academic blogging:

  • Demeans or cheapens scholarly work
  • Can become misconstrued, misunderstood, and misused to fit narrow political or social agendas as it enters the public realm.  This may threaten the autonomy of academic work.
  • Takes too much time and so, takes away from “more legitimate academic activities”.
  • Leads to internalized self-censorship that comes with years of enforced academic perfectionism
  • Can hurt the academic and professional prospects of a scholar

Looking at these concerns it’s clear that academics have to mediate between the discomforts and concerns that surround academic work and the public realm. Academic blogging is merely one of the common ways that academia life intersects with the publics. LSE argued in their article above, “Academic blogging exists somewhere in an ether space between academic research and broader community.”  It is the space where academic research is made more accessible and so facilitates a more democratic relationship between academics and various publics.”  

And who is most equipped and suited to overcome these challenges and provide further definition and insight into this ether space – than academics themselves!  Many academics are trained in ethnographic and field work methods which prepare them to act as brokers and mediate between two worlds.  These are the same skills that can be used in order to merge the academic with the public and lay the groundwork for channeling  academic blogging towards activism and community engagement.

photo ethnographicresearch_zps7999a203.jpg
(CC Image from Flickr)

Last week was the launch of CUNY Graduate Center’s first participatory, open, online course “POOC”: Reassesing Inequality and Reimagining the 21st Century: East Harlem Focus.  The speakers Dr. Michelle Fine and Dr. Maria Torres shared personal experiences conducting participatory action research (PAR) in regards to stop and frisk policy issues in NYC communities. Their talk described and emphasized the mutual reliance that academics and the communities they study have to foster and grow a shared learning process.  Academics have learned though years of hard lessons out on the field; to juggle the ethical demands and principles of their scholarly community with those that arise when they embed themselves in the lives and communities they seek to study.  Like in most types of field work research, as the mediation process is introduced, there are risks of misrepresentation, misinterpretation and exaggeration that may arise.  However, in field work we have learned to persevere and overcome these challenges. Why can’t the same difficult, long, yet rewarding learning process take place, as it is now academics and their work, ideas, and thoughts which are placed under the microscope of public scrutiny and for public consumption? The basis of much of academia is to bring people together across these boundaries, ideas, and beliefs – and we should be committed to contributing to this shared learning process.

So, my hope is that by acknowledging the difficulty of “becoming public” we can set ourselves on a path to identifying lessons we have learned in our own research and work that can help us move on and “get over it.”

With that being said, embracing a culture of connectivity is not for every academic. However, there has never been a better time to be a public intellectual thanks to the abundance of technology and digital tools available.  And as this article argues – academics are among the best equipped to help forge that path. 

British Modernism and the Public Intellectual

It’s the beginning of a new semester as well as the new year. There are new faces in my classroom, and taxes are due. And, with JustPublics@365, the figure of the public intellectual is very much on my mind.

A couple years ago at a weekly Friday departmental talk, I was surprised when a very respected professor bemoaned the dearth of contemporary public intellectuals. We have no Voltaires, he said, and as a culture we are suspicious of too much erudition. Another professor joined him to urge us, graduate students in this public university, to publish outside academia because really, hardly anyone is reading your 30-page article in the leading academic journal in your field. “You have to get yourself out there, and heard by a wider audience,” they exhorted.

Listening to them, I wondered: I teach between 50 to 90 students per semester; isn’t that “public” enough? Each week, my inbox floods with notices of talks, exhibitions, readings, screenings, and panel discussions that I look through and delete—there’s just not enough time for everything. It seemed, in the small circles I moved in, that there were too many public intellectuals. If only these academics stayed home a bit more and did a teeny bit less, I might have the leisure to make it to more of their events.

It’s been a few semesters since this gripey reflection, and I now realize how different my experience is from, say, that of my students. Consider the results of a brief, informal survey: Only a handful of hopeful engineers in my community college classroom had heard of Stephen Hawking, whose author photo from A Brief History of Time (1988) was one of the most significant images of my childhood. My film studies class had a few young people who lived and breathed film, though a majority would have trouble locating the Angelika. But the biggest challenge by far is with my English literature students, who study literary theory and British modernism with me. Few public intellectuals are spouting insights based on structural linguistics or psychoanalytic criticism, and even fewer reference nuggets from James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and the like. To my students, the value of the material we cover is purely personal because, they see, there’s no place for that kind of language or discourse in the so-called real world. If there are “text-to-world” connections (such a favourite in pedagogic short-hand) between the classroom and the rest of lived experience, well, those connections are largely restricted to out-of-the-box ideas about romance and relationships, not job decisions and work ethics. In a kind of mental extension of the Levittown mentality, the personal is separated from public life, matters of head and heart firmly distanced, and although my students acknowledge that the literary modernists had pretty good things to say about interpersonal relationships, I’m also told in no uncertain terms that the “modernist mood” is no help at all with practicalities. We measure out our lives with coffee spoons, but what good does it do to point it out?

http://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/901/flashcards/124901/jpg/head_butt1304882691036.jpgMark Halsey, “A Short History of Modernist Painting” (1982)

All of which would have upset the modernists at least a little. Although modernism is most famous for being difficult, snooty, cold-hearted, and abstruse (to pick only the nicer adjectives my students supply), modernist writers were eager to be part of larger dialogues and the bigger picture. They felt the need to “Make it new”—not only for themselves, but for the culture as a whole. George Orwell, one of my dearest literary figures, was so committed to political action that he volunteered for the Spanish Civil War and was shot in the throat for his pains; he also managed to get a lovely book out of it. Eliot, for all his erudition, was intimately concerned with steering the intellectual climate of interwar England. The stultification they experienced, the alienation, loss, emasculation—all this was meant to draw in the unwary reader and then pull the rug out from under them, so to speak, and make it impossible to read any run-of-the-mill mush in quite the same way again.

In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes writes about failed relationships (among other things) and why we fall so stupidly in love with the wrong people over and over again. But really, she’s talking about education and the incipient danger of gender stereotypes:

“We were impaled in our childhood upon [unsuitable, stereotypical lovers] as they rode through our primers, the sweetest lie of all, now come to be in boy or girl, for in the girl it is the prince, and in the boy it is the girl that makes a prince a prince—and not a man. They go far back in our lost distance where what we never had stands waiting; it was inevitable that we should come upon them, for our miscalculated longing has created them. They are our answer to what our grandmothers were told love was, and what it never came to be; they, the living lie of our century” (145-6).

This passage is startling in its use of semi-colons, but further, it manages to succinctly connect fairy tales and children’s books to complex questions about gender (“princes” and “princesses”), identity (“a prince—and not a man”), illusions (“miscalculated longing”), and family structures (we inherit the dreams of our grandmothers, which seem so much more benign than those of our mothers). I like to spend a good bit of time in class discussing how our training molds and shapes us, and annoy students by suggesting that all this education is really designed to leave them (us) quiescent. I say, borrowing Barnes’ irony, that you “take away a man’s conformity and you take away his remedy,” leaving him like “the paralyzed man in Coney Island who had to lie on his back in a box” (155) as gawpers passed by. As we read, we find that these insights are from a middle-aged cross-dressing drunk, the false Dr. Matthew O’Connor. Social commentary with a dash of raucous melodrama: who wouldn’t want to read this book cover-to-cover?

All of which is to say, the modernists are no longer in the public eye, and maybe they are as over-intellectual as my students claim, but that doesn’t preclude their relevance today. One of the missions of JustPublics@365 is to invite participatory voices from beyond the academy; I propose we extend this “beyond” to those chilly, austere, literary modernist works that urge us to think outside and behind, to probe and question, to declaim the system even as it teaches you to speak. BLAST.

What does it mean to be a “Digital Scholar”?

This post was originally published on the GC Digital Fellows blog

After reading Erin and Alice Lynn’s latest posts, I began to wonder what a “successful” digital scholar looks like.  Should success be measured by the scope of one’s digital presence?  Should it be measured by how much one’s research is cited on the web?  Or does it instead have something to do with how many digital tools one has created for / incorporated into their research?

This is a tricky question to answer; just trying to find a simple definition of ‘digital scholarship’ is a task unto itself.  Some argue that we should refrain from attempting to define digital scholarship in the first place, while others argue that digital scholarship should be defined loosely so as to incorporate diverse approaches.  If we can’t even decide how to define digital scholarship, how can we determine if one is a successful digital scholar?

I can’t say that I have an answer that could unify or encompass everything that may fall under ‘digital scholarship’, and I won’t try to offer suggestions here either.  Instead, I’d like to suggest that readers of this post reflect on problems they’ve encountered in academia (trouble finding others who share your research interests, institutional limitations on your research, difficulty gathering and assessing data, limited publication options for your topic, etc), and think of ways that these obstacles could be overcome using less traditional means.  What do I have in mind by ‘less traditional means’?

Although it is difficult – and perhaps unnecessary – to strictly define digital scholarship, it is not difficult to become a digital scholar; approaching traditional scholarship from a new angle is all that’s required.

Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus: Social-Justice Researchers Meet Social Media in New Effort at CUNY

The City University of New York’s Graduate Center has announced a project to expand the social-media reach of academics working on social-justice issues.

The project, called JustPublics@365 and supported by a $550,000 grant awarded this month by the Ford Foundation, seeks to “move conversations that happen within the ivory tower of academia into the wider world where they have broader impact,” said Jessie Daniels, a professor of public health and sociology and co-principal investigator for the grant.

The project will train professors and graduate students to use social media to make their social-justice research more visible to a wider audience and to measure its impact.

JustPublics@365 will hold a number of events, beginning in March, to connect researchers, social-justice activists, and journalists, including conferences on such topics as racial justice and the intersection of health and housing. “MediaCamp” workshops, co-sponsored in January with the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, will teach skills like using Twitter, setting up a blog, and writing op-eds. The project will also play host to a free massive open online course, or MOOC, focused on East Harlem.

You can read the complete article by Alisha Azvedo here.

 

Center for Digital Media: Digital Media Meets Social Justice Research in CUNY Project

Traditional academic research is about to get a digital makeover.

The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY) is mixing social justice research, activism and digital media in an effort to connect research with broader audiences. Leaders of a project dubbed JustPublics@365hope to change academic conversations about what research looks like and connect research to wider audiences through social media.

“We’re really thinking about what are new ways that we could connect these pieces: the research, the engagement with social media and wider publics through that, and also this focus on social justice,” said Jessie Daniels, professor of public health and sociology at The Graduate Center and a project leader.

You can read the complete article by Tanya Roscorla here.

Graduate Center Launches JustPublics@365

Press Release, 11/14/2012.

 

Graduate Center’s (CUNY) Newly-Formed JustPublics@365 Receives Research Grant from the Ford Foundation to Address Social Inequality through Digital Media

 

Ambitious Program Will Link Work of Academics, Activists and Journalists to inform the public

New York, NY (November 14, 2012) – The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (GC) announced today that the Ford Foundation has provided a research grant to launch JustPublics@365, which will bring together journalists, academics, activists and policy advocates who are working to address social inequality through digital media.

“We’re delighted that the Ford Foundation shares our long-term vision for bringing academic research to bear on pressing problems of social justice,” said Graduate Center Provost Chase F. Robinson. “JustPublics@365 is an ambitious effort to maximize the influence of faculty research through the innovative use of a wide range of social media, by creating partnerships among academics, activists and policy-makers, and by seeking new ways to measure impact.”

“The Graduate Center, with its distinguished history of research on inequality, is uniquely qualified to work with the Ford Foundation to create a more informed public sphere,” added Robinson.

At the Graduate Center and beyond it, JustPublics@365 engages a dialogue among researchers on inequality, activists and media. It uses the networked landscape of the internet and the physical environs of the GC – JustPublics@365 is named for the institution’s address at 365 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan – to bring attention to those inequalities across several domains: economic, housing, race and ethnicity, immigration, health, and education. The program’s first Summit will be held at the GC on Thursday, March 6, 2013.

“The pathway for scholars working on social justice research to engage the public via traditional and new forms of media will require collaborative models like JustPublics@365 now and into the future,” said Darren Walker, vice president of the Education, Creativity and Free Expression program at the Ford Foundation. “An informed citizenry is a prerequisite for democracy and embarking on creative experiments to connect the public to research on critical issues is a necessary priority.”

JustPublics@365 will be overseen by Chase Robinson, Provost of the GC, Jessie Daniels, a professor of Public Health and Sociology at the Graduate Center, and Matthew K. Gold, who serves at the GC as Advisor to the Provost for Master’s Programs and Digital Initiatives and Acting Executive Officer of the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies.

Through the $550,000 research grant, Robinson, Daniels and Gold will develop an innovative “alt metrics” measurement program with GC to assess the impact of academic research on the public sphere and social justice initiatives.