The use of Actor-Network Theory and a Practice-Based approach to understand online community participation

Viva in progress

Viva in progress

My last work duty of 2012 has been to travel to the iSchool at the University of Sheffield to examine a PhD entitled The use of Actor-Network Theory and a Practice-Based Approach to understand online community participation. The viva went well and I’m pleased that the student will be awarded his PhD subject to minor corrections to the thesis. I was particularly interested in this work because it has parallels with my own doctoral study. In my work I analysed actor-networks that had developed around a knowledge management implementation within a large, distributed organisation to reveal the role of a corporate intranet in knowledge and information sharing.

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New AHRC grant for the Centre for Social Informatics

AHRC logoThe Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded a grant of £200,000 to the Centre for Social Informatics for a project entitled Informing the Good Society (InGSoc) to be led by my colleague Dr Alistair Duff. Over three years Alistair and the team will address three main areas: (1) population-census informatics and ethics; (2) the future of columns and electronic “punditry”; and (3) the socio-philosophical foundations of information policy. The project aims to make contributions to our understanding of the social importance of information, and to assist in the development of sound policies.

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Latest outputs from CSI projects completed in summer 2012

LIS Research Coalition DREaM RiLIES logos

Summer 2012 was a very busy time as I brought three projects hosted within the my research centre to a close: (1) the implementation of the Library and Information Science Research Coalition in July; (2) RiLIES2, also in July; and (3) the Developing Research Excellence and Methods project in August.

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EPSRC Digital Personhood sandpit week

EPSRC logo Engineering and Physical Science Research Council logoLast week I served as a mentor for the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council in Cheshire at a one-week sandpit event (a form of interactive workshop, and one that appears to have been misunderstood by Private Eye, as can be seen below). My fellow mentors were Professor Richard Harper of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Professor Bruce Brown of the University of Brighton, and Professor Pete Edwards of the University of Aberdeen. Pete also served as the sandpit director. The aim of the sandpit was to stimulate thinking in promising new areas of the digital economy (DE) research theme.

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