Peer review 2.0

In April, SUNY-Albany librarian Laura Cohen described what she saw as "Social Scholarship on the Rise," a trend for scholars to discuss and engage their work via blogs, social networking services, and "soft peer review" (among other things).

Earlier this week, we saw an astonishing example of this process in practice.

On Monday night danah boyd, Berkeley grad student, Annenberg Fellow, and cogent observer of the (relatively) new world of "networked publics," used her blog to publish preliminary observations from her fieldwork on youth engagement with sites like MySpace and Facebook, and asked for feedback.

She posted again yesterday, this time about her shock at the response - within 24 hours, her essay had been viewed 90,000 times, reported on (poorly) by the BBC, and directly commented on over 170 times (190 as of this morning).

Think about this - a grad student publishes preliminary fieldwork notes to the web, and within 24-48 hours has drawn the attention of a mid-sized city. Granted, danah is a rock star, and not all of the comments were appropriate or well-conceived. But I think most academics would consider their careers a success if they commanded an audience of such size over their entire careers.

Is danah a super-hub? Are the rest of us scattered throughout the long tail? Clearly, on both counts. But at the very least, this suggests an emerging mode for scholarship, a new means of engaging the broader community (both scholarly and pedestrian) in our work.

Evolution of the Protest

Wash U student Shlomo Goltz has made a fascinating and beautiful "graphic essay" of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, focusing on the role of technology in helping protesters to organize and mobilize on the street.

Also see work by Melissa A Wall (Cal State-Northridge), such as "Press Conferences or Puppets: NGOs' v Street Groups' Communication in the Battle of Seattle."

H/T to Howard Rheingold at SmartMobs for the Goltz link.

Language processing

Is social science on the verge of a paradigm shift? Research into large-scale natural language processing has been going for some time (especially in national security -- see here and here), but it also seems understanding of how such tools might be applied to social science may be emerging.

In "Data Catalysis: Facilitating Large-Scale Natural Language Data Processing" (presented at ISUC 2007) Patrick Pantel presents a USC project to extend such expertise to social scientists.

While there may still be a gap between such tools and the needs and understanding of most of us, Daniel Hopkins and Gary King recently demonstrated the feasibility of "Extracting Systematic Social Science Meaning from Text," using machine learning to categorize millions of political texts (websites, blogs) with accuracy rates rivaling human coders.

H/T to Mark Liberman at Language Log for the link to Pantel's paper.

Weaving images, metadata

Blaise Aguera y Arcas (and Microsoft Live Labs) knocked one out of the park at TED this year, demonstrating Seadragon and Photosynth, which seem likely to fundamentally shift how we organize and view visual imagery (including text).

If you're pressed for time, jump ahead to 3min 48 seconds, where he demos the seamless integration and spatial orientation of thousands of Flickr images of Notre Dame cathedral, including their associated metadata.

As Aguera y Arcas points out, the network externalities of this technology could integrate spatial and visual memories far beyond anything we've ever seen. Food for thought.

Best collective action EVER

If you're pressed for time, jump ahead to 4min 40 seconds.

I've seen it three times now, and I still can't believe it.

Notable Websites, A-Z

The Internet Resources Newsletter has offered a list of A-Z Notable Websites.

I haven't seen anything quite as comprehensive of broad interest to academics, students, and researchers of all stripes.