[journal issue: IT and politics]

The Journal of Information Technology & Politics Volume 6, Issue 3 & 4
(2009)
Special Issue: “Politics: Web 2.0” Visit: http://shrinkify.com/144k


Guest Editor's Introduction
“The Internet and Politics in Flux”
Andrew Chadwick

Research Papers
“Realizing the Social Internet? Online Social Networking Meets Offline Civic
Engagement”
- Josh Pasek;  eian more; Daniel Romer

“Typing Together? Clustering of Ideological Types in Online Social Networks”
- Brian J. Gaines; Jeffery J. Mondak

“Building an Architecture of Participation? Political Parties and Web 2.0 in
Britain”
- Nigel A. Jackson; Darren G. Lilleker

“Norwegian Parties and Web 2.0”
- Øyvind Kalnes

“The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: Overcommunication,
Miscommunication, and Communicative Overload”
- Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

“Developing the “Good Citizen”: Digital Artifacts, Peer Networks, and Formal
Organization During the 2003–2004 Howard Dean Campaign”
- Daniel Kreiss

“Lost in Technology? Political Parties and the Online Campaigns of
Constituency Candidates in Germany's Mixed Member Electoral System”
- Thomas Zittel

“Internet Election 2.0? Culture, Institutions, and Technology in the Korean
Presidential Elections of 2002 and 2007”
- Yeon-Ok Lee

“The Internet and Mobile Technologies in Election Campaigns: The GABRIELA
Women's Party During the 2007 Philippine Elections”
- Kavita Karan;  Jacques D. M. Gimeno; Edson Tandoc Jr.

[journals: ranking and inventory]

~~ via scholarship 2.o


JournalBase *- *A Comparative International Study of Scientific Journal Databases in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH)

Michèle Dassa et Christine Kosmopoulos / Cybergeo, The Electronic European Journal of Geography / Dossier publié le 25 juin 2009 / Document published on 25 June 2009 / Last updated : 17 July 2009.

Presented here for the first time in a comparative table are the contents of the databases that inventory the journals in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH), of the Web of Science (published by Thomson Reuters) and of Scopus (published by Elsevier), as well as of the lists European Reference Index for Humanities (ERIH) (published by the European Science Foundation and of the French Agence pour l'Evaluation de la Recherche et de l'Enseignement Supérieur (AERES).

With some 20,000 entries, this is an almost exhaustive overview of the wealth of publications in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, at last made available in this table, adopting the same nomenclature for classing the journals according to their disciplines as the one used in 27 workstations of the European Science Foundation.

The multiple assignments reveal the multidisciplinarity of the journals, which is quite frequent in SSH, but also sometimes the incoherence of databases that have not been corrected.The research was carried out in 2008 with the financial support of the TGE Adonis of the CNRS.

An updated version will soon be presented online.The final objective of this project, which concerns the entire international community of the Social Sciences and the Humanities, is to put online, in a bilingual English/French version, the database of JournalBase in interactive mode on a collaborative platform, as well as the final report of the study, so that the decision-makers, the scientists, the experts in scientific information have access to up-to-date information, and so that they may contribute to forward movement in the reflection on these questions, through the exchange of experiences and of good working practices.

JournalBase has been updated on the 17 July 2009. It includes the information on open access journals indexed in the DOAJ.

Source

[http://www.cybergeo.eu/index22492.html]

Full Text

[http://www.cybergeo.eu/pdf/22492]

[journal of community informatics: new issue]

Vol 5, No 1 (2009)

Table of Contents

Editorial

Editorial: Building the Broadband Economy from the Bottom Up: A Community Informatics Approach to BB and Economic Development	HTML
Michael Gurstein

Points of View

Moving Community Informatics Research Forward	Abstract HTML
Aldo de Moor

Articles

Community Inquiry and Collaborative Practice: The iLabs of Paseo Boricua	Abstract HTML
Ann Peterson Bishop, Bertram (Chip) C. Bruce

Assessing the geodemographics of the People's Network in public libraries in Shropshire.	Abstract HTML
Adrian Oliver Barlow

The role of Social Entrepreneurs in Deploying ICTs for Youth and Community Development in South Africa	Abstract HTML
Chijioke J Evoh

The Effect of Formal and Informal Social Capital on Diffusion of Wireless Encryption Practices: A longitudinal case study	Abstract HTML
Sorin Adam Matei

ICTs and Community Participation: An Indicative Framework	Abstract HTML
Dhanaraj Thakur

Notes from the field

Communities, Technologies and Participation: Notes from C&T 2009	Abstract HTML
Joe McCarthy

Reports

Role of ICTs in Indian Rural Communities	Abstract HTML
Siriginidi Subba Rao

[journal of virtual worlds research]

An interesting edition considering the role of virtual worlds in health research:

Vol 2, No 2: 3D Virtual Worlds for Health and Healthcare

Table of Contents

Editor's Corner

Musings on the State of '3-D Virtual Worlds for Health and Healthcare' in 2009

Maria Toro-Troconis, Maged N. Kamel Boulos

Abstract | PDF

Invited Articles

Virtual Worlds in Health Care Higher Education

Constance M Johnson, Allison A Vorderstrasse, Ryan Shaw

Abstract | PDF

Peer Reviewed Research Papers

The Growth and Direction of Healthcare Support Groups in Virtual Worlds

John Robert Norris

Abstract | PDF

Development of a Virtual Reality Coping Skills Game to Prevent Post-Hospitalization Smoking Relapse in Tobacco Dependent Cancer Patients

Paul Krebs, Jack Burkhalter, Shireen Lewis, Tinesha Hendrickson, Ophelia Chiu, Paul Fearn, Wendy Perchick, Jamie Ostroff

Abstract | PDF

Does this Avatar Make Me Look Fat? Obesity and Interviewing in Second Life

Elizabeth Dean, Sarah Cook, Michael Keating, Joe Murphy

Abstract | PDF

Research Papers

Development and Evaluation of Health and Wellness Exhibits at the Jefferson Occupational Therapy Education Center in Second Life

Susan Toth-Cohen, Therese Gallagher

Abstract | PDF

Research-in-Brief Papers

Development of Virtual Patient Simulations for Medical Education

Douglas R Danforth, Mike Procter, Richard Chen, Mary Johnson, Robert Heller

Abstract | PDF

"Think Pieces"

Virtual Worlds, Collective Responses and Responsibilities in Health

Rashid M Kashani, Anne Roberts, Ray Jones, Maged N. Kamel Boulos

Abstract | PDF

Pitfalls in 3-D Virtual Worlds Health Project Evaluations: The Trap of Drug-trial-style Media Comparative Studies

Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Inocencio Maramba

Abstract | PDF

Towards a virtual doctor-patient relationship: Understanding virtual patients.

Vanessa Gamboa González

Abstract | PDF

Editor-in-Chief's Corner

Cultural Identity in Virtual Reality (VR): A Case Study of a Muslim Woman with hijab in Second Life(SL)

Methal Mohammed

Abstract | PDF

Shaping the ‘Public Sphere’ in Second Life: Architectures of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

Annabel Jane Wharton

Abstract | PDF

[open access journal pilot project]

Via Jacqueline Wilson, CDL Senior Associate for Shared Content:

"This ground-breaking agreement enables UC-authored articles accepted for publication in most of the 2000+ Springer journals to be published through Springer Open Choice, allowing full and immediate access to all readers. These articles will also be fully accessible through UC’s eScholarship publishing platform. UC authors pay no additional publication fees to support this open access model."

A task force appointed by the Scholarly Communications Officers (SCO) worked with the California Digital Library (CDL) to prepare information on the UC/Springer Open Access Journal Publishing Pilot, originally announced in January, for distribution to UC authors on each campus. The information can be found on the Reshaping Scholarly Communication site at http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/alternatives/springer_faq.html. This site includes a FAQ, a link to the Springer journals covered by the pilot as well as a short list of titles excluded from the program. It is expected that campuses will customize the information to suit their local audience.

As was noted in the original message about this arrangement, it will be important to the success of the pilot that as many UC authors as possible know about this open access opportunity. Scholarly Communications Officers and others will distribute information about this agreement to appropriate faculty and other authors on their campus as part of the local publicity plans that they have developed.

Final versions of the Springer journal articles published during the pilot will be available in the eScholarship Repository beginning in the fall.

CDL is pleased to have made this ground-breaking arrangement with Springer on behalf of UC authors and the Task Force is looking forward to assessing the results of this experiment as it unfolds over the next two years.

UC/Springer Open Access Journal Publishing Pilot Task Group:

Ivy Anderson (CDL)
Catherine Mitchell (CDL)
Margaret Phillips (Berkeley)
Jacqueline Wilson (CDL, Chair)

[scholarly publishing 2.0: mit goes open access]

MIT is asking its staff to contribute their articles to DSpace (a digital repository managed by MIT and HP) which will make them freely available. However, the choice remains with each staff member to grant open access to their contribution. So not sure really how well this will take off in light of several studies which suggest tenured professors prefer to publish in subscription-based publications. Also, DSpace does not contain "all MIT's research and is limited to digital research products."

From the Wall Street Journal:

"With academic journals charging libraries increasingly high subscription rates, Massachusetts Institute of Technology passed a resolution to make it easier for faculty authors to share and distribute their work for free.

MIT said faculty members will grant open access to all journal articles through DSpace, an open-source digital repository created by MIT and Hewlett Packard.

Professors usually strike up agreements to publish their works with individual journals, but once the copyright for a scholarly work belongs to that publisher, it can be difficult or impossible to reuse it for another publication or even as course material. University libraries are having a tough time keeping up with rising subscription costs.

“Scholarly publishing has so far been based purely on contracts between publishers and individual faculty authors,” says Hal Abelson, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and chair of MIT’s committee on open-access publishing. “In that system, faculty members and their institutions are powerless. This resolution changes that by creating a role in the publishing process for the faculty as a whole, not just as isolated individuals.”

Read more here.

[employment opportunity - Kairos is hiring]

Kairos - An online academic open-access peer-reviewed journal that focuses on digital and multimodal practises and pedagogy. They're hiring a Praxis section assistant editor(s) and a Reviews section assistant editor(s).

Get applications in by Friday, September 19, 2008. Interviews are scheduled for soon after. The start dates is November, 2008.

[first day of work]

Welcome to me...to the life of a *real* person and not a student (even if it was doctoral!).

Today is my first day of work and I've already found the stationary closet and have piled my desk with a myriad of fluorescent highlighters, coloured pens, pink and yellow post-its and even, yes, a pencil! I've located the coffee maker and the fridge and have settled in nicely. Now that those important first-day things are out of the way, I'm diving into the minefield of scholarly publishing - issues about open access, electronic or not or both, impact factors, citations and the like. Through my browsing I've come across The Scholarly Kitchen, an excellent blog on, well, all things scholarly and publishing. Today's blog post at the Kitchen hits a major question in academia today: what to watch. Should academics (publishers, researchers, writers) keep an eye on issues like those I mentioned above or should the focus move to the reader, funding bodies, "author talent" and the like?

Kent Anderson, author of this post at Scholarly Kitchen, mentions an article I read recently in Science on the nature of electronic publishing. That Science article noted that readers *use* (key word here) online resources rather differently from print ones:

"Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon."

Anderson has picked out some responses to the Science article and it's interesting to see the high value readers/users are putting on notions of accessibility, usability and personalisation:

"I]f a paper isn’t on G[oogle] S[cholar], and I haven’t seen it in another publication, as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t exist. . . .

Basically, if I can’t download a “free” pdf, the paper doesn’t get referenced. I do go from time to time to the library for mission critical papers, but the time it takes to get a paper is on the order of 30 min to an hour. A massive waste of time.

[O]ften older papers aren’t worth referencing, the 80’s and 90’s probably saw more invalidation of old research than the entire preceding century in total (in the biological sciences anyway). And this decade will probably be more than the 80’s and 90’s combined, the pace of research is just that much faster, and that many more people doing it. You don’t reference a 1970’s paper that is half wrong, you reference the 1998 paper that examined the 70’s one and refined the concepts."

I wonder how these kinds of comments affect impact factors/"mono-metrics" and what this means for the new generation RAE which is supposed to be more fair.

[ TIR-W Volume 9 no. 2 Instruments and Playable Text ]

From the guest editor Stuart Moulthrop:

"Our work is animated by the desire to evoke from simple rules a plausibly infinite set of expressions. We come at this problem from various perspectives, techniques, and points of the aesthetic compass, and we arrive at happily different results, but a certain resemblance remains.

For Judy Malloy, who was a master composer when I was still learning canon and fugue, the key to invention lies in the artful crossing of pattern and chance, of musical and cybernetic form, in her "Concerto for Narrative Data."

John Cayley, who would be our Che or Tristan Tzara if this were an actual movement, gives us a newly re-engineered version of "riverIsland," an exploration of poetry-as-simulation that continues to define the possibilities of its form.

Next come some younger though no less accomplished talents, beginning with Shawn Rider, a writer, digital designer, and meta-gamer who is represented here with two pieces, "PiTp," a work laid open deliberately to digital intervention, and "So Random," a story that tells itself each time, specially, just for you.

Elizabeth Knipe, another relatively new player, offers "activeReader," an interactive media piece that brings its own interpretation of reader engagement and emergent, open form.

Nick Montfort, equally at ease with aesthetic programming and the long-form palindrome, offers what we might call a minimum instrument, "The Purpling," a maze of recirculating expression built from humble Web pages.

Last in train is my own "Under Language," a sort of talkative poem with consequences, far less credible in its claim to infinity than most of its companions, but still a kind of game, for those who will play."

Read the new issue here.

[lit blog wars...or some such thing]

"In remarks at last month's National Book Critics Circle Awards — when his family memoir The Lost was honored as best autobiography — Daniel Mendelsohn said that he was especially proud to receive recognition "in an era in which anyone who owns a Dell laptop is a published critic." The NBCC prize, he said, comes from "people who know what they're talking about." Mendelsohn was quickly denounced by one popular blogger (presumably using a Dell laptop) as one of the "elitist fogies who just don't get it." But Mendelsohn has an apparent ally in the pages of the upstart literary journal n+1. The current issue carries a short but potent attack — titled "The Blog Reflex" — in which the n+1 editors dismiss blogs about books and literature as little more than a publicity tool of the big publishing houses. This broadside has set off a sometimes cranky discussion about the purpose of blogs and the amateurization of literary criticism."

n+1 article:

"The Blog Reflex"

Imagine a grandfather clock that strikes at random intervals. You can't tell time by it and yet you begin to live in constant anticipation of the next random chime.

Number Five, Winter 2007.

Excerpt from "The Blog Reflex" from Long Sunday:

"The accident waiting to happen to bloggers was most visible when they turned their attention to literature and ideas. The hope had been to democratize the intellectual sphere. Freedom of the press is for those who own one. But now all you needed was a laptop and some time on your hands. The idea was especially attractive in light of the consolidation of media holdings and the destruction of intellectual life in the '80s and '90s, when people began to work longer and harder for less, available public spaces and quiet cafes dried up, and argument in the academies gave way to 'respect'.

The blogs salved this ennui and created nourishing microcommunities. Yet criticism as an art didn't survive. People might have used their blogs to post the best they could think and say. The could have posted 5,000-word critiques of their favorite books and records. Some polymath might even have shown, on-line, how an acute and well-stocked sensibility responds to the streaming world in real time. But those things didn't happen, at least not often enough. In practice, blogs reveal how much we are unwitting stenographers of hip talk and marketing speak, and how secondhand and often ugly our unconscious impulses still are. The need for speed encourages, as a willed style, the intemperate, the unconsidered, the undigested. (Not for nothing is the word blog evocative of vomit.) "So hot right now," the bloggers say. Or: "Jumped the shark." The language is supposed to mimic the way people speak on the street or the college quad, the phatic emotive growl and purr of exhibitionistic consumer satisfaction - "The Divine Comedy is SOOO GOOOD!" - or displeasure - "I shit on Dante!" So man hands on information to man."

Hrm....some responses:

Mary Dell offers her opinion on "The Blog Reflex"

n+1 vs. Lit-Bloggers; or, on with the Resipiscence, already - Scott Eric Kaufman

See the comments on Gareth Risk Hallberg’s post

A Response by Edward Champion

The editors of n+1 talk about the theme of their new issue, and why the world needs their work.

The Literary Saloon reminds Keith Gessen (one of the editors of n+1) that not all bloggers are alike.

Daniel Green on Blogging Sensibilities

[currents in electronic literacy is ba-ack]

Currents in Electronic Literacy is back and is boasting a "new and improved Currents [...] e-journal of the Computer Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas." Sounds promising.

"We are excited to announce that Currents is moving in a new direction. The Spring 2007 issue of Currents will focus on reviews. We believe a journal based on reviews can be of much greater relevance to the field than our past models, which consisted of a few long articles supplemented by short book reviews. However, in this new model we will conceive of “reviews” more broadly. In addition to reviewing books, we are soliciting reviews of software, websites, blogs, conferences, parallel academic programs, and pedagogical practices. We hope that the new version of Currents will point out emerging trends in the field of electronic literacy.

We see ourselves as opening up a new frontier in the discipline because Currents is the first publication dedicated solely to reviewing new technologies, literatures, and "currents" in the field.

[new river journal is ba-ack]

After a period of dormancy (in the eloquent ELO's words) the New River Journal is back and kicking. The first issue includes work by Jason Nelson, David Herrstrom, and Dan Waber. Waber's piece is most interesting as it deals with the temporal dimension of writing.