Debating the Digital Humanities Gets Real

Posted on January 29, 2012 by tjowens

My author copies of Debating the Digital Humanities came in today. It’s humbling to have some of my words included in such a hefty tome. I’ve been reading and enjoying it, great stuff. Beyond being a useful volume, it’s also neat to see it incorporate a selection of blog posts. The format of the book is itself an argument for how publish-then-filter can work for humanities scholarship.

It is fun and weird to see things I hadn’t intended for print in print. They have a different kind of materiality to them now. As my words ended up in two of the publish-then-filter parts of the book, I thought I might be slightly interesting to take a moment to reflect on how what I wrote ended up making its way in there.

Blogging about Course Blogging Goes to Print

I teach a digital history course at American University, this is my second time around at the course. After teaching my first incarnation of the course I wrote a series of reflective blog posts about the experience. The goal of those posts was to distill and refine my thinking about the role that public blogging can play as an instructional tool. It is particularly pertinent to the digital history course as participating in online public dialog is a core goal of the course. I was both excited and flattered when Matt asked if I would be game for including one of my posts on the course for the book. See below.

It is fun and neat to have a post end up in a book, but it is also a bit disorienting. On my blog it was part of a threaded run of posts about my teaching and writing. I like to think that everything I write here always remains a draft. Everything I write here is something I might return to and revise. Undoubtedly there will be typos in this post that someone will point out that I will fix. But now, reading the post on paper in this volume, it feels completely different. Instead of being my informal thinking out loud on my teaching it has become something much more enduring. Just look at those type faces! Such dignified serifs. It’s no longer some guys words on the internet. It’s a stake in the ground about the place of technology in teaching and learning in an emerging field. I love it.

Seeing the post in print helps further validate the point of the post and blogging in the course.  It is one thing to stand up in front of a class of students and say, “hey, this blogging thing is important. It changes how power and publishing works. So take it serious, write good stuff and write it in public so you can claim credit.” It’s something completely different to be able to say, “Oh, and when you do blog, sometimes you say something interesting enough that it warrant’s being included in a really cool book.” When I tell my students about this next Wednesday I will have gone from course, to reflection, to book, to this blog post and back to course in seven months. I for one think that is rather neat.

Day of Digital Humanities Definitions

I have one other small contribution in the book. At the end of the first section are a selection of definitions of the digital humanities that some of us provided for the Day of Digital Humanities. See mine below, again in print, in the book.

What’s funny about this is that it’s a flippant comment, a personal aside. Here is some context. When you sign up to do the Day of Digital Humanities you fill out a web form, more or less a registration form. On the form there was a text box to fill in with your definition. It didn’t say “think about this really carefully, because it might end up in a big thick book.” So what I filled in was just what came off the top of my head at the time. To this end, it is all the more jarring to read something I had to fill in on a registration form printed like this. Jarring in a good way. I’m relatively happy with my definition. I’ll stand behind these jottings. Some of the value in these definitions is that they are not diplomatic. They are the things we had on hand at the moment and there is something that is a bit more direct and honest about those kinds of comments.

Trying to do the Digital Humanities Face

In conclusion, here is my best attempt at doing the debates in the digital humanities face. I should probably have shaved before taking the picture, but there lies the perils of just being able to hit the publish button before anyone else intervenes to stop you.

Posted in History, Teaching | Leave a comment

Tripadvisor Rates Einstein: Traces of Public Memory and Science on the Web

Posted on January 27, 2012 by tjowens

Arguing with Einstein is one of my favorite photos of the Albert Einstein memorial. It encapsulates how some of the sculptor’s intentions, his argument about Einstein and science, manifest themselves in an invitation to argue with a statue. The seated statue invites us to sit on him, climb him, and argue with him, and it is my contention that sites like Yelp, Tripadvisor, and Flickr offer us the ability to explore and examine our relationship to these kinds of monuments and memorials in unprecedented ways.

Photo: Schmidt, C., 2008. Arguing with Einstein, Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisbrenschmidt/2190660089/

Its been long in the making but I am excited to report that my paper Tripadvisor rates Einstein: Using the social web to unpack the public meanings of a cultural heritage site is out in the newest issue of The International Journal of Web Based Communities. I did the primary research for this project back in my master’s program in a great course called Museums, Monuments and Memory. That was in the Fall of 2008. (I know, wow that was a while ago my how time flys in the world of academic publishing)

The paper is largely an attempt to parse out the different kinds about sites of public memory that we can tell when we draw on traditional archival collections, in this case using materials from the National Academy of Sciences archives, as opposed to the kinds of stories we can tell when we look at traces of experience and interaction with those sites of memory online. In this case, I find it particularly interesting to try and evaluate how some of the intentions in the design of the monument can be evaluated in the kinds of things that we create online as a result of experiences with the memorial. My hope is that this can serve as both further validation of the value of preserving public discourse on the web and potentially as an example for how other’s might use social sites like Yelp, Flickr, and Tripadvisor to explore and interrogate public memory.

Below is the abstract for the paper. I would love to hear any comments or critiques in the comments. Similarly, if you end up using the paper in any way I would also love to hear about it.

Abstract:

Near the US Capitol, in front of the National Academy of Sciences sits a gigantic bronze statue of Albert Einstein. The monument was created to celebrate Einstein and the sense of awe and wonder his work represents. However, while under construction, art critics and some scientists derided the idea of the memorial. They felt the scale of such a giant memorial did not fit the modesty of Einstein. This paper explores the extent to which perspectives of the monument’s public supporters and critics can be seen in how people interact with it as evidenced in reviews and images of the monument posted online. I analyse how individuals appropriate the monument on social websites, including Fickr, Yelp, Tripadvisor, and Yahoo Travel, as a means to explore how the broader public co-creates the meaning of this particular memorial. I argue this case-study can serve as an example for leveraging the social web as a means to understand cultural heritage sites.

If you don’t have access to the official copy I have my own personal unofficial personal archival copy that you can take a look at.

Posted in History | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?

Posted on December 15, 2011 by tjowens

Fred and I got some fantastic comments on our Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing paper through the Writing History in the Digital Age open peer review. We are currently working on revising the manuscript. At this point I have worked on a range of book chapters and articles and I can say that doing this chapter has been a real pleasure. I thought the open review process went great and working with a coauthor has also been great. Both are things that don’t happen that much in the humanities. I think the work is much stronger for Fred and I having pooled our forces to put this together. Now, one the comments we got sent me on another tangent. One that is too big of a thing to shoe horn into the revised paper.

On the Relationship Between Data and Evidence

We were asked to clarify what we saw as the difference between data and evidence. We will help to clarify this in the paper, but it has also sparked a much longer conversation in my mind that I wanted to share here and invite comments on. As I said, this is too big of a can of worms to fit into that paper, but I wanted to take a few moments to sketch this out and see what others think about it.

What Data Is to a Humanist?

I think we have a few different ways to think about what data actually is to a humanist. I feel like thinking about this and being reflexive about what we do with data is a really important thing to engage in and here is my first pass at some tools for thought about data for humanists. First, as constructed things data are a species of artifact. Second, as authored objects created for particular audiences, data can be interpreted as texts. Third, as computer processable information data can be computed in a whole host of ways to generate novel artifacts and texts which themselves open to interpretation and analysis. This gets us to evidence. Each of these approaches, data as text, artifact, and processable information, allow one to produce/uncover evidence that can support particular claims and arguments. I would suggest that data is not a kind of evidence but is a thing in which evidence can be found.

Data are Constructed Artifacts

Data is always manufactured. It is created. More specifically, data sets are always, at least indirectly, created by people. In this sense, the idea of “raw data” is a bit misleading. The production of a data set requires a set of assumptions about what is to be collected, how it is to be collected, how it is to be encoded. Each of those decisions is itself of potential interest for analysis.

In the sciences, there are some agreed upon stances on what assumptions are OK and given those assumptions a set of statistical tests exist for helping ensure the validity of interpretations. These kinds of statistical instruments are also great tools for humanists to use. However, they are the only way to look at data. For example, most of the statistics one is likely to learn have to do with attempting to make generalizations from a sample of things to a bigger population. Now, if you don’t want to generalize, if you want to instead get into the gritty details of a particular individual set of data, you probably shouldn’t use statistical tests that are intended to see if trends in a sample are trends in some larger population.

Data are Interpretable Texts

As a species of human made artifact, we can think of datasets as having the characteristics of texts. Data is created for an audience. Humanists can, and should interpret data as an authored work and the intentions of the author are worth consideration and exploration. At the same time, the audience of data is also relevant, it is worth thinking about how a given set of data is actually used, understood and how data is interpreted by audiences that it makes its way to. That could well include audiences of other scientists, the general public, government officials, etc. In light of this, one can take a reader response theory approach to data.

Data are Processable Information

Data can be processed by computers. We can visualize it. We can manipulate it. We can pivot and change our perspective on it. Doing so can help us see things differently. You can process data in a stats package like R to run a range of statistical tests, you can do like Mark Sample and use N+7 on a text. In both cases, you can process information, numerical or textual information, to change your frame of understanding a particular set of data.

Data can Hold Evidentiary Value

As a species of human artifact, as a cultural object, as a kind of text, and as processable information data is open to a range of hermeneutic processes of interpretation. In much the same way that encoding a text is an interpretive act creating, manipulating, transferring, exploring and otherwise making use of a data set is also an interpretive act. In this case, data as an artifact or a text can be thought of as having the same potential evidentiary value of any kind of artifact. That is, analysis, interpretation, exploration and engagement with data can allow one to uncover information, facts, figures, perspectives, meanings, and traces which can be deployed as evidence to support all manner of claims and arguments. I would suggest that data is not a kind of evidence; it is a potential source of information which could hold evidentiary value.

Posted in History, Science, Teaching | Leave a comment

Techies You Decide! You’re either a Feminist or a Misogynist

Posted on December 13, 2011 by tjowens

I got caught up reading Margaret Robertson’s great post today, In Which I don’t try to write like a man. She describes how she has self-censored herself. How she has tried to frequently go out of her way to de-gender herself in her writing on games.

Here is a particularly good quote:

It’s taken me a while to recognise that a big part of why I don’t post things like this is because I’m *scared*. Actually scared. Actually worried that I’ll terminally undermine my credibility. And that’s because the degree of abuse you can attract is of a different order from the generality of internet rough-and-tumble

This depressed me. This feeling of depression took me back to reading Skud’s post, On being Harassed. (Seriously, if you haven’t read Skud’s post go read it now, and some of the links.)

See, I work on open source, but I work on it in libraries and the digital humanities. I also do things with games, but it’s humanities research. In both cases, I end up spending my time on the web hanging with feminists like myself. In general, I think folks in the digital humanities respond rather well to issues around gender and technology. For example, I think the What Do Girl’s Dig conversation that Bethany kicked off was really productive. Heck, it became a book chapter. With that said, we are working on it. I think DH folks do a rather good job in realizing that conversations about technology come pre-loaded with gender problems.

If you read Robertson’s post, and the comments, and Skud’s post I think this becomes rather self-evident. You are either a expressed feminist or you are a witting or un-witting misogynist. I just wanted to make where I stand clear, and invite anyone else who wants to make this clear to say so as well.

Mysogony or Feminism: The Choice is Yours

But I’m an equalist!!!!111!! No, you’re not. If you are an equalist you are a feminist. The situation is as follows. Society is normative. Society is anti-feminist. That is just how power works. You can choose to recognize this. If you do, the result is that you need to think very carefully about what you are going to do to try to help make sure that your actions don’t further exacerbate the problem. Otherwise you can accept that you are an unwitting accomplice in perpetuating the status quo. Seriously, go read about some of the psychological research on stereotype threat. (For those unaware of stereotype threat research, the gist is that you can quantify the effects of gender and race stereotypes effects on academic achievement on tests.)

This is Not Novel But It Needs to be Restated

The purpose of this post is not to make a new or novel point. I make no claim to be breaking new ground. I just think we need more people in tech, more men in particular, who will explicitly and unambitious state that they are feminists. There are plenty of people out there waiting to shout women down and the more people willing to clearly state that this is a problem the better we will all be.

This is not a women’s issue. I want to live in a more just society. That is why I am a feminist. If you want to live in a more just society then you’re a feminist too. It upsets me when I am reminded of just how unkind and abrasive the web, technology and gaming communities are to women. I feel rather strongly that the world needs more people in technology, men in particular, who are willing to clearly state that they are feminists. To me that means being someone who is willing to think through and second guess my own actions. It also means that I consciously try to advocate on behalf of women in technology.

So, which side are you on? Remember, you get to choose, but choosing not to choose is also choosing a side.

Posted in Education, Games | 5 Comments

Ancient Wisdom from the Forums: Failures of Collective Intelligence

Posted on December 7, 2011 by tjowens

A while back, I wrote about how the shame you are supposed to feel when someone uses Let Me Google That For You illustrates how finding answers to your questions on the knowledge base that is the internet has become a distinct literacy. That sort of thing is really an example of how making use of collective intelligence for work and life is becoming something we expect people to be able to do.

I thought this XKCD from a few days back gets at the same idea.

The collective intelligence point is also evident in what you see when you mouse over the comic on XKCD. “All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying ‘DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here’s what we’ve figured out so far …’”

Like the answer is on the tip of our collective tongue

Discussion threads are not simply records of conversations, they are part of the global knowledge base. When we get so close, like finding the thread, finding the same question, but can’t find the answer, we experience something a bit like the feeling of having a word on the tip of your tongue. At some other moment of time someone else had this problem, and if someone had just answered it for them it would be answered for me too.

Posted in History, Note to historians of the future | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Newbs, N00bs and Elitists: Neologisms for learners and teachers in open online communities

Posted on November 26, 2011 by tjowens

The openness of online communities is one of the things that make them so exciting. Anyone, anywhere, can create an account and start participating. The more I think about some of the research I did on RPGmakerVX.net the more I think that the neologisms for dispositions of a few different kinds of users on the site capture some important parts of defining teachers and learners in open interest driven web communities. In this post I will briefly describe how the terms Newbs, N00b and Elitist Bastards expressed in the ground rules of the RPGmakerVX community serve to define the roles for learners and teachers in this space.

As a frame of reference, RPGmakerVX.net is an online discussion board where those interested in creating SNES looking role-playing games congregate to discuss, develop, and share their projects. Elsewhere I’ve written about how this operates as a community of learners. When I first visited the site though, I was struck by the discussion boards simple guidelines.

Eletist Bastardly Behavior Will Not Be Tolerated

The following appears at the top of the Board Rules page. For our purposes, the first prime directive and its first bullet point are particularly relevant.

This prime directive classifies three kinds of users. First and foremost, the elitist bastard, the kind of person who is not tolerated on the boards. The elitist bastard refuses to understand the difference between two different kinds of new members to the site, the newb and and n00b. Before parsing through all of this in a bit more depth it is worth following the link for newb and n00b from the rules to see how the terms are used here. Following the link leads to this comic from CTL+ALT+DELETE

Glossary: Newb/Noob

The following is the comic linked to from the RPGmakerVX.net discussion boards. (Actually it looks like the link is broken now but this is what it linked to a few months back.) This 2006 web comic walks through the distinctions between these two terms for gamers who are new to a particular game.

The newb is inexperienced, but is wants to learn and when given guidance is happy to take it and act on it. In contrast, the n00b, while similarly clueless is unwilling to submit to respect the elders, the gamers who know how to play the game, or in this case the game makers who have developed expertise. The comic explains what , “newbs should be cared for and nurtured so that they may grow into valuable skilled players” while “N00bs deserve our wrath” and our apparent pity as they are likely to have problems in finding or making any meaningful relationships.

Newbs Respect the Authority/Wisdom of the Open Knowledge Community, N00bs are Unwilling to Learn the Ground Rules for Being a Novice

These neologisms are widespread. Turning to the OED of Internet slang, the Urban Dictionary. We find that a newb is “A term used to describe a inexperienced gamer/person/etc. Unlike a noob, a newb is someone who actually wants to get better.” Aside from just being part of the rules of the community, when I asked participants in my study of the RPG Maker VX community what the difference between a N00b and a newb most of the participants could parse the difference between the two terms.

The Elitist Bastard Fails to Nurture the Novice

The elitist bastard is one who fails to recognize the difference between new learners. There is almost no barrier to entry to RPGmakerVX.net. All you need to do is sign up for an account to join and start posting. This means that new community members are going to need to be vetted and filtered after they have already come in the virtual door and started talking. Some of the new users are newbs, that is individuals who are want to learn to make games and are willing to show deference to the elders of this online community. Some of those users are n00bs, who are unwilling to do things like read the FAQ, read stickied posts on how to ask questions and post about their projects, and when told follow the rules will simply become disgruntled and argumentative. In short, experienced members of the community need to know who to nurture and who to moderate, call out, and judge for not respecting the rules of the community.

Necessary Neologisms for Learning on the Open Web?

I’m curious to hear from those who talk about learning webs, about massively open online courses, or for that matter any bread of open online education projects about this. It strikes me that the story of RPGmakervx.net is very similar to my experience with any number of online communities. Things like open source communities, fan fiction communities, photo sharing communities on sites like Flickr, the guild of Wikipedians, each seem to have this kind of operational structure. Are these necessary neologisms for learning on the open web, or are newbs, n00bs, and elitist bastards just 1337 way of talking about things we already have names for?

Posted in Education, Games | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

My First Citation! Not my writing but my gaming?

Posted on November 23, 2011 by tjowens

Well it’s happened. I have been cited for my work! While it would be fun to say that it was one of my fantastic research articles, it is actually for my chops as a Druid a few years back in World of Warcraft.

See the excerpt below from Kurt Squire‘s book Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age.

I still do look forward to the day when someone actually cites one of my papers or my book (ideally in a positive way). With that said, there is something kind of cool in knowing that my exploits as a Druid have been immortalized in print.

To add one more layer to the story for folks who know WoW: While I was healing in Molten Core, and switched to bear form to pick up agro, I was in fact specced as a Moonkin Druid at the time. So I was actually doubly out of my element. Oh, and in the fight I was tanking one of the Sulfuron Harbinger adds.

I do like that my story falls under the heading of “The Fantasy of Being an Expert. I can relate to that :)

Posted in Education, Games | 2 Comments

Please Write it Down: Design and Research in the Digital Humanities

Posted on November 11, 2011 by tjowens

As Theory Fight 2011 rages on among the DH twitter folk I feel compelled to interject in something that is more than 140 characters. Which brings me here.

Last night Tom Scheinfeldt provocatively suggested,

DH arguments are encoded in code. I disagree with the notion that those arguments must be translated / re-encoded in text.

It struck up quite a back and forth over twitter, which anyone interested can peruse on Natalia Cecire’s blog. The conversation makes for a good read.  What I see as the key issue to think through here is not so much should Digital Humanists also need to “re-encode” their work in writing. Reflective designers of all stripes are already doing a lot of writing. They are creating documentation, making wireframes, etc. The question here is what kinds of writing should humanities scholars who design software and make things in code be doing.

Writing is Thinking and Designers Write Things Too

Everybody working on a DH projects needs to be writing. I am suggesting that this is simply a fact of life. If you don’t have at least a one-pager for your project  you don’t have a project, you are just fiddling around. In fact, the process of doing purposeful design involves the creation of documentation at nearly every step.  As I recently suggested, every document and artifact that you would create in the process of design could serve as a new genre of humanities scholarship. For starters, practically everything in Dan Brown’s Communicating Design already almost looks like the kinds of things we already write.

As I see it, it is not that you need to translate what you did in code into text. Instead, to have made something interesting in code you have to have gone through a reflective process that inevitably creates a wake of valuable texts that were central to both the creation of the argument the code makes and are the most potentially viable at communicating that argument. You probably only need to clean them up a little bit. Even better, many of these projects are the result of grant funded work. In those cases the text already exists. The creator needed to make an argument for what the thing we were going to make was supposed to do.

With this said, I would also suggest that at the end of a project (Or whatever it is we are calling done) taking time to sit down and write out what you learned is invaluable as part of reflective practice. Again, in my own experience, far from being a moment when you translate something you already knew into another format, this is the reflective moment in which what it is that you actually learned comes into focus. This is not about writing it up, instead taking a few moments at the end of a project to reflect on what it is you wanted to accomplish, what actually happened, and what it is you learned from the process is invaluable not only for communicating these things but for actually really coming to know them.

With Design and Humanities Research we are Still Only Beginning

So people who make stuff have to write a lot about what they are doing as part of the process of making stuff. This kind of writing is simply part of being a reflective designer. With that said, I think we are still only scratching the surface of what the process of design could mean for humanities scholarship.

Having my feet in both the DH world and the world of educational research I would also like to point people to a conversation that has been going on about design and research in work in instructional technology. About 12 years ago educational technologists started talking about something they call design based research. In this case, the idea is that instead of contriving wonky experimental designs it would be better for researchers to take on the role of designer and think through how the iterative practice of design could be made a bit more formal and thought of as a research method. The idea behind design based research is that there is some kind of hybrid form of doing, theorizing, building and iterating that we should turn into a methodology.

For anyone interested I would suggest reading Design-Based Research: An Emerging Paradigm for Educational Inquiry (pdf) and Design Based Research: Putting a Stake in the Ground  (pdf). A quote from the first article does a nice job showing how this might pull together some of the threads around theory, practice and method.

Design based researchers’ innovations embody specific theoretical claims about teaching and learning, and help us understand the relationships among educational theory, designed artifact, and practice. Design is central in efforts to foster learning, create usable knowledge, and advance theories of learning and teaching in complex settings.

In short, Yes, design’s always have explicit and implicit arguments inside them. However, I reflective designers produce a range of artifacts and documents in the process of design that, if shared, could both help them become better designers and help others learn to become better designers. Further, the idea of design based research offers the potential for us to think more deeply and not simply absorb the design practices of others. What would a design based research method look like if we translated it from the educational context and into the context of a particular humanities research question?

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Finding Scholarship and Scholarship Finding Us

Posted on November 7, 2011 by tjowens

Melissa Terras has a great post up about what happens when you tweet an open access paper. Seriously, go read it. The details are interesting, but the main point is that 535 people who wouldn’t have seen her paper at least went through the trouble of downloading it. Now aside from the fact that more downloads = more people seeing your paper I think Melissa’s example is all the more important because of the kind of diffuse way those people came to find her work.

How would one find Melissa’s article?

I would suggest that there are a few different ways that someone would find Melissa’s article. Her article, ”Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation” (PDF) was published in Literary and Linguistic Computing (LLC) in 2009. I would suggest that, before tweeting the open access link, there were two primary modes in which people came across her paper.

  1. You see LLC as an important journal in your field and you have been involved in the field since before 2009. So, whenever a new issue of the journal comes out you read over the table of contents and consider skimming the articles. In this case you know about Melissa’s article because you are ambiently aware of what is going on in the community that LLC represents.
  2. You have decided to write a paper that is in some way related to amateur digitization or some other keyword that is associated with her paper, so you either sought out and got into the Oxford journals website or found the article as part of an explicit search process . In this case you likely already have a research question in mind. Heck, lets face it, you may well already have the whole study put together and you are just working on making sure that you have covered information that is related to the project. Unlike the first, there is a good chance that you might not even identify with the LLC community. That is, being a part of the search results in any kind of research aggregation thing is that your research is discovered by people outside your field.

Tweeting the Paper is Important Because of Who Those Readers Were

What is particularly important about the 535 readers who found downloaded the Open Access copy is that they found that paper as part of an ambient awareness, like what the table of contents in the journal did in 2009, but unlike the table of contents, the somewhat more heterogeneous community of people who follow Melissa on Twitter are the ones who get that ambient information. In short, the tweet contributes to an interdisciplinary ambiant awareness.
Now beyond this, as Melissa can at any moment tweet about this paper again she has the added ability to interject a link to her paper on twitter, or in any other place in the public sphere and get it back into part of the ambient awareness on any number of other topics.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Studying Discourse Online is Studying Designed Experience

Posted on November 6, 2011 by tjowens

Young people participating in fan fiction forums are learning English as a second language. People arguing about Preist tallents in the World of Warcraft forms are participating in informal science learning and reasoning. Hip hop discourse in online forums can help us engineer financial literacy into learning environments. Folks participating in forums for RPG Maker are learning to take and give criticism. Everywhere you look researchers are studying discourse online, but we don’t necessarily know that much about how that discourse is shaped by the people that build and administrate the software that enables that discourse. As I’ve mentioned, this is the subject for a research project I am working on, I wanted to take a moment to share a few early examples and ideas I have on how this might be working.

Discourse on the Web is a Result of Designed Experience

For starters, discussions on the web are the result of designed experience, you shouldn’t study them without taking into account the functionality of the software that enables them. The designers and administrators of those spaces have set them up to enable particular kinds of communication and to ensure that other kinds of interaction do not occur.

For example, here is how Derek Powazek explained the role of software tools in Design for Community: the art of connecting real people in virtual places:

This is all about power. Giving your users tools to communicate is giving them the power. But we’re not talking about all the tools they could possibly want. We’re talking about carefully crafted experiences, conservatively proportioned for maximum impact. ( Powazek, xxii)

So How Do Forum Designers and Administrators Shape Discourse?

So, what do the folks who manage, run, and build web forums think about their end users? Further, how do their theories about the goals, motivations, and desires of those users shape the way that they enable them to interact with each other. One of the places I am looking for answers to these questions is in guidebooks for web forum administrators. I should give a more full rundown of what books I am looking at, but I thought it would be fun to share some of the kinds of examples I have found of how the books are talking about users and the resulting implications for design that they suggest. I am still just at the beginning of this research project, but I wanted to share some of these examples for comment. The following are a few preliminary examples. I will share more examples as they show up, but wanted to put these out there for anyone to react to.

Explicit Public Rules

The most obvious way that community managers influence the content which people share on these sites is through enforcing explicit rules. Practically all of the books in this genre I have read so far explain the importance of having and enforcing these kinds of explicit rules. Here Patrick O’Keefe explains the importance of rules:

Respect is the cornerstone of a good environment. You create a respectful community by requiring that everyone treat everyone else with the respect they deserve. You do this by having written policies and by actively enforcing those policies. (O’Keefe, 219)

Using Design to Filter Who Participates

In  primary lessons for design is to “bury the post button.” He suggests the more effort that is required to get to the point where someone can post a comment will result in higher quality discussion.

Why would this be? because, in this case, the multiple clicks it takes to read the whole story are actually acting as a great screening mechanism. Users who are looking for trouble or aren’t really engaged in your content will be put off by the distance. They’ll drift away. But the users who are engaged by the content and interested in the results of the conversation will stick with it.(53)

In Community Building Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities on the Web Amy Jo Kim gives very similar advice:

“What you want to do is create appropriate hurdles for member contributions, particularly those that extend the public space within your community…It’s up to you to figure out the restrictions that best meet the needs of your members and support the kind of community you are trying to create. (Kim, 71)

Aside from any explicit rules designers of these community spaces are using design as a filter. It is a kind of soft power that shapes the way that we interact with each other online and anyone studying interactions online should think about how the design of the space might be acting as filter

Tricking users and distorting reality

Explaining that “Creativity never hurts when you’re trying to get major league idiots off your community.” O’Keefe provides a few creative ideas.

Sometimes referred to as global ignore, you can incorporate a function that lets the banned user log in but then makes this user go unseen to all users of your community. The banned user cannot receive private messages, and if he tries to send them, they don’t reach the intended users. He can still make his posts, but only he ( and maybe you and your staff) can see the posts– no one else. Basically, in his eyes, the site works as is intended. He will just think that everyone is ignoring him and go away. (O’Keefe, 215)

In this case, an administrator can let a user think they are participating in the conversation when no one else can see what they are saying. Worse than being silenced, the user still thinks they are part of the conversation.

In short, the designed experience of web community spaces is not something that can be read in any straightforward fashion. At the very least, to say something about a community you need to understand the explicit guidelines and rules. But beyond this, without understanding the intentions and tactics of developers and administrators it is going to be difficult to know how exactly they are implicitly shaping the structure and nature of the discourse. It’s my intention to try and work through this relationship between designers, administrators and users in my project.

What are some other examples of ways designers and administrators shape discourse online?

Posted in Digital Tools | Leave a comment