(pr) networks

CPSA 2015: The Prime Ministers Speeches 2004 -2014

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Sun, 12 Jul 2015 23:34:00 +0000

Susan Delacourt covered my recent conference paper at the CPSA 2015 annual meeting (see the following):

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2015/07/03/analysis-of-politicians-speeches-can-be-revealing-delacourt.html

The database of Prime Ministers' speeches is still being finalized for public use, but will be made available once the final article is published. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions before the official publication becomes available. I'm willing to share drafts of the conference paper and materials from the database in the meantime.

Launching The Capital Report: Alberta's newest political journalism eMagazine (Official Launch: May 4, 2015)

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 23:27:00 +0000

Please see my new publication, "The Platform as an Agenda-Setting Document," along with many other timely pieces ahead of the fall federal election, in the Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law's special edition, The Informed Citizens' Guide to Elections: Electioneering Based on the Rule of Law:

http://www.carswell.com/DynamicData/ProductDocs/tableofcontents/toc-978-0-7798-6464-5.pdf

Launching The Capital Report: Alberta's newest political journalism eMagazine (Official Launch: May 4, 2015)

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Mon, 04 May 2015 23:17:00 +0000

Launching The Capital Report: Alberta's newest political journalism eMagazine

www.capitalreport.ca

Please see what my amazing MacEwan University students have been up to this past term!

This launch includes a Q & A with Rachel Notley, among many other topical articles to help Albertans make their provincial election decisions.

Twitter: @TheCapitalRPRT

New Article in Canadian Public Administration: The Bonds of Institutional Language

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 20:57:00 +0000

Here's a link to the recently published article in CPA:

Dutil, Patrice, and Peter Malachy Ryan. “The Bonds of Institutional Language: A discursive institutionalist approach to the Clerk of the Privy Council's annual report.” Canadian Public Administration 56.1 (2013): 26-46.
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/capa.12002/abstract>

New Publication: Finance Ministers and the Budgets of Ontario

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 21:05:00 +0000

I just found out that Finance Ministers and the Budgets of Ontario was selected as a finalist for the 2012 Ontario Legislature Speaker's Book Award -- congrats to all those involved with this work!

Here's a link:

Dutil, Patrice, Peter Malachy Ryan, and André Gossignac. “From Thoughts to Words: The Budget Speech in Ontario (1968-2003)” [Chapter Nine]. Finance Ministers and the Budgets of Ontario. University of Toronto Press, 2010.

http://www.utppublishing.com/The-Guardian-Perspectives-on-the-Ministry-of-Finance-of-Ontario.html

Dissertation Link in Digital Commons: Agenda Setting

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 21:07:00 +0000

How does the Digital Commons help works to circulate you ask?

Well, I've barely had the link up to my dissertation in Digital Commons for less than a week (without even advertising that it was posted), and I've already had 50 downloads simply from its topical crosslisting functions.

So, let's see what happens when some other network pings start to connect to it:

Ryan, Peter Malachy, "Agenda Setting in English Canada in the Age of Minority Government, 2004-2011" (2012). Theses and dissertations. Paper 1162.

http://digitalcommons.ryerson.ca/dissertations/1162

Alberta Election 2012: Election Day Social Media Results

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:33:00 +0000

Here's the last report on the uses of social media in the 2012 Alberta Election:

http://stw.ryerson.ca/~pryan/Social_Media_Alberta_Election_Results_2012.pdf

Over the entire course of the election no party leader changed their rank in terms of social media uses as compared to the previous weeks. Danielle Smith increased her “likes” for her politician Facebook page from 9,955 to 29,559 over the campaign to win the Facebook battle; her increase demonstrates a true explosion of social media in a Canadian provincial election as compared to previous campaigns (for example, Prime Minister Stephen Harper currently has 2,796 “likes” for his politician page). Smith also used YouTube to the greatest effect of the leaders, but she did not surpass Alison Redford’s Twitter base of 13,054 followers.

It is interesting to note that Smith’s social media support did not translate into the kind of support pollsters were predicting, especially when compared to the results of the election. In the future, researchers may want to investigate what forces and tactics drove Smith’s large gains on social media, and why party support lags that of the individual leaders (see the final numbers in the report).

Alberta Election 2012: Social Media Report (Week 4)

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 22:21:00 +0000

Here's the social media analysis for Week 4 of the Alberta Election Campaign that were captured on Monday, April 16th, 2012. There are still no changes in the leader board for social media uses heading into Election Day on Monday, April 23rd, 2012:

http://stw.ryerson.ca/~pryan/Alberta_Election_2012_Week4.pdf

Alberta Election 2012: Social Media Report

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:34:00 +0000

I'm posting here a quick summary of the social media campaign during the first two weeks of the Alberta 2012 provincial election for those interested (see the attached document):

Alberta Election 2012: Social Media Report

The report is meant as a follow-up to Tony Seckus' Calgary Herald article on April 7, 2012:

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/politics/Alberta+election+Twitter+about+social+media/6425304/story.html

I'll update the report each week until the end of the election.

APSA 2009 Paper: Hyperlink Analysis of the Anti and Pro Gun Control Advocacy Networks

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:51:00 +0000

We currently have a working paper available in the APSA 2009 conference proceedings:

Devereaux, Z.P., Cukier, W., Ryan, P. M., & Thomlinson, N.R. (2009, September 5). Using the Issue Crawler to Map Gun Control Issue-Networks. APSA 2009: Toronto Meeting [Conference Paper]. Available at SSRN:

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1449612

We would appreciate any comments on the paper before we send it off to a journal for formal publication.

On another note, my blog activity has gone through the roof in the past few months for two reasons:

1) SSHRC season (everyone is looking for SSHRC advice):
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2007/10/phd-dissertation-proposal-sshrc.html

2) CPSA Paper on the "Canadian Gun Registry":
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2009/08/canadian-firearms-registry.html

Those two blog entries are now the most searched for on my site. Facebook policy is still popular too, but no where as near as these top two.

Lawrence Lessig on the Google Book Search Settlement - "Static goods, dynamic bads"

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:34:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Svytkew5qPI

Summer Updates

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 02:12:00 +0000

I have some time to blog again as all my projects seem to be in order for the moment. Hopefully, I’ll be able to return to once a month blogging in September if my ducks will stay in a line.

Here are some links to interesting items concerning Network Theory that I have been compiling over the last bit:

1) The World Class University Project at Yeungnam University

First off, Greg Elmer and the Infoscape Research Lab are partnering with other informational politics researchers on the World Class University Project to explore media information focusing on elections. Information about the project can be found here:

http://yeungnam.edublogs.org/about/

2) Canadian Political Science Association On-line Politics Papers

I was at the CPSA Annual Conference in Ottawa in May, and I attended the informational politics panels there. It was good to see that there were a few sessions at the CPSA, which is a new thing from previous years. It is a sign that interest is growing in the area, and informational politics research is not strictly a Communication scholars’ concern anymore.

Here are links to papers from those sessions:

> Raynauld, Vincent, Giasson, Thierry and Darisse, Cynthia

Constitution of Representative and Reliable Web-based Research Samples: The Challenges of Studying Blogs and Online Socio-Political Networks

Their paper is a great review of methodological problems for tracking “blogs”, and it was interesting to find out that the Quebec political blogosphere is rather small with only about 100-125 bloggers.

> Smith, Peter (Jay) and Chen, Peter John

A Canadian E-lection 2008? Online Media and Political Competition

> Bastedo, Heather, Goodman, Nicole, LeDuc, Lawrence and Pammett, Jon H.

“Facebooking” Young Voters in the 2008 Federal Election Campaign: Perceptions of Citizenship and Participation

> Milner, Henry

The Internet: Friend or Foe of Youth Political Participation

3) Internet Law and Politics Conference

Friend and Colleague Ismael Pena Lopez helped to organize an interesting Internet Law and Politics Conference.

> Link 1: http://ictlogy.net/20090706-5th-internet-law-and-politics-conference-iv-daithi-mac-sithigh-law-track-gather-up/

> Link 2:
http://ictlogy.net/20090720-live-blogging-and-conference-reviews/

Ismael also recently defended his dissertation – Congrats Dr. Lopez!

> Another SDP alumni Daithi Mac Sithigh blogged the Internet Law and Politics event:
http://www.lexferenda.com/07072009/idp2009-written-report-of-day-1/

4) Global-Village Theory

Another SDP alumni Cindy Shen posted a link to an interesting counter claim to the Global-Village Theory -- “E-mail Traffic Data Casts Doubt on Global-Village Theory”:

“If you think e-mail is making geographical distance less important, think again. A new analysis indicates that the opposite may be true”:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23717/

5) Richard Rogers at GovCom.org

Zach Devereaux posted some of Richard Rogers’s work from GovCom.org: http://www.govcom.org/publications.html

6) New Books

Here’s a new book on The Internet and National Elections: A Comparative Study of Web Campaigning by Nick Jankowski and Kirsten A. Foot, among others: http://ipa.tamu.edu/projects/Elections.asp

Also, Manuel Castells has a new one out on Communication Power

7) Robot Aggregating Sites

Lastly, more robot sites are aggregating blogs these days – here’s one I stumbled upon in checking out links to my own work - I was wondering why traffic had actually picked up to my site recently even though I've had no time to post things:
http://www.networkedblogs.com/blog/prnetworks/

The Canadian Firearms Registry

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:36:00 +0000

Well, we’ve started a bit of a political ballyhoo with some research at Ryerson. I want to affirm here from the beginning that I am an independent researcher, and my research is not out to target or support any single Canadian political party. I am simply a concerned Canadian citizen, and I do not share who I vote for (like most journalists) in order to be as objective as possible in my research.

Working with Wendy Cukier, Neil Thomlinson, and Zachary Devereaux (three Albertans in total on the article including myself!), we went looking to better understand the merits of the Canadian Firearms Registry and what we should do now that it is here, despite its costs running so high initially.

A link to the original newspaper coverage of our study is available here -- "Study shoots holes in $2B 'fabrication'" by Rob Linke:

http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/search/article/703339

The main point of the article is that anyone who says the registry cost "$2 billion" is lying to the Canadian people and has not done their research. Officially, the registry has cost near to $1 billion over ten years (Auditor General of Canada, 2006).

Our paper at the Canadian Political Science Association (May, 2009) was cited in the article, and a copy of the paper can be found here:

http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2009/Ryan-Cukier-Thomlinson-Devereaux.pdf

Some pertinent details include the following:

1) The old registry system cost $30M / year (over ten years = $300M), which would not have had any of the benefits of the new system. The system was definitely in need of an upgrade, which the initial Progressive Conservative Party Bill C-17, a revised version of Bill C-80, under then Justice Minister Kim Campbell, was attempting to provide in 1991.

2) Police consistently maintained that the registry system is an important tool for police, who use it nearly 10,000 times a day according to Steven Chabot, President of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (“Public safety will be at risk if gun registry is dismantled,” Toronto Star, 10 April 2009: A23).

3) Public health analysts maintain that gun-related deaths have decreased in Canada since the new Firearms Act became law (Snider et al., 2009; Cukier & Sidel, 2006).

4) Ian MacLeod is the author of the Ottawa Citizen article that describes how police had confiscated 3560 guns nationally in one year, which “would have been more difficult, if not impossible, to locate and confiscate” without the registry:

Source: MacLeod, I. (2009). 92 handguns collected in city since fall. Ottawa Citizen. Retrieved May 29, 2009, from http://www.ottawacitizen.com/handguns+collected+city+since+fall/1640924/story.html

I don’t know about you, but after doing my research, I was quite swayed to go with what doctors and the police think about the registry rather than the non-authoritative accounts.

Contextualizing Costs of the Registry

How can we contextualize the cost of the registry? How much should public safety cost? Yes, the registry went over cost like other IT endeavors – for example, the current Harper minority government’s support of Secure Channel – another $1 billion information technology “boondoggle” – that has gone mostly unnoticed [see: “Government to replace $1B online service ‘boondoggle’” (Ottawa Citizen, May, 2008)] -- but how much should the registry cost now that it is here? What do we do with it?

Here are some numbers to consider:

1) A Canadian Medical Association article placed the costs of gun death and injury in Canada at $6.6 billion (1993 Canadian dollar value) in 1991 (Miller, 1995).

2) The Geneva Small Arms Survey states that productivity losses due to firearms are $1.6 billion annually in Canada (Small Arms Study, 2006).

3) Comparison to other safety investments: A Coalition for Gun Control report “Continued funding for the Firearms Program is essential to public safety” (2004) provides the example that $400 million was used to fix a stretch of road in New Brunswick where forty-three lives were lost between 1996 and 2000. By comparison, Canada has more than one thousand gun deaths every year.

4) Per Capita costs of Other Government Programs: Legal Aid spending in Canada per year (2008, Thursday, July 31), which arguably is very low compared to other Western nations, totalled $583 million (02-03) and $659 million (06-07). The per capita cost was $18.59 (02-03) and $20.19 (06-07) (Tyler, 2008). By comparison, the gun registry costs every Canadian $2.81/year at its current cost.

5) Canada’s Passport Office costs $125 million a year (over ten years = $ 1.25 billion) to register travelers.

Lastly, I’ve also attached the estimated costs of registering guns today from the Canada Firearm Centre:

http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/est-pre/20052006/CFC-CAFC/CFC-CAFCr5602_e.asp#22

While the CFC has a budget of $82.3M a year, actually registering the guns is $15.7M, and scrapping the long gun registry would save $3M (according to some estimates). These costs are in fact lower now than the older registry.

However, the only people who seem to want to scrap these things are Conservative politicians linked with the gun lobby and a few rural MPs.

I want to hear more from other people about this, because I really do see the value of the registry at this point after doing the research, and I think citizens shouldn’t take it lightly that MPs Breitkreuz and Hoeppner are lying about public accounts in the House. A $1B error in fact…

All of my Albertan friends who own guns that I have talked to have say a registered gun can kill a moose just as easily as an unregistered gun – in other words, they feel that the registry did cost too much, but now that it’s here we should agree with the doctors and police who argue it is needed for public safety issues.

I was interested to see what happened to the story on-line a month afterward -- Here’s what others think about the story in the blogosphere:

> The reader’s comments on this article from MP Breitkreuz are interesting: http://www.themarknews.com/articles/257-tearing-down-the-long-gun-registry

> http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=printer_friendly&forum=118&topic_id=235208

> http://bcinto.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html

> http://www.gunpolicy.org/Topics/Gun_Rights.html

Lastly, just to alert some people to the potential consequences of independent research: Some anonymous user named “BigUglyMan” (no word of a lie) on the password protected “Gun Nutz” website profiled me as a “joker” and “a disciple of Wendy” within minutes of the original Rob Linke article being posted. Obviously, I don’t have a brain of my own to make up my mind about the gun registry, and I’m not a concerned Canadian citizen with a right to my own voice…

Michael Ondaatje’s words here are humourously poignant “I was always a private man. It is difficult to realize that I was so discussed” (The English Patient, p. 138), but I guess it comes with the territory of researching issues and networked politics. A member of my family joked that a gun registry is needed simply because people like that exist…

Looking forward to your thoughts and comments!

Peter

New JITP Publication on Political Blogging

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:33:00 +0000

The Infoscape Research Lab has a new publication on Canada's political blogosphere in the Summer 2009 issue of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics:

"Blogs I Read": Partisanship and Party Loyalty in the Canadian Political Blogosphere. Greg Elmer, Ganaele Langlois, Zachary Devereaux, Peter Malachy Ryan, Fenwick McKelvey, Joanna Redden, and A. Brady Curlew.

http://www.jitp.net/m_archive.php?p=10

The JITP issue also has a rather balanced review of Jonathan Zittrain's book (it's tough on the work in some parts, but I might say fair overall from a quick read):

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.
Reviewed by Jeremy Malcolm

Update: Shane Schick Article on my Research

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Sat, 09 May 2009 14:15:00 +0000

Someone just sent this link to me from one of my interview respondents, Shane Schick. I must have missed its launch during my busy year-end activities in late 2008:

http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/shane/2008/03/10/what-literary-fiction-has-to-tell-us-about-the-it-industry/

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/031108-what-fiction-has-to-tell.html

http://www.cio.de/news/cio_worldnews/851826/

The dissertation is before my committee right now, and I will have an update on when final drafts can be sent to the respondents in the next few weeks for any last changes.

Until then,

Peter

Update: Infoscape Lab Canadian Federal Election Tracking

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:21:00 +0000

The Infoscape Lab has been tracking the Canadian Federal election on-line in conjunction with CBC's Susan Ormiston on-line:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canadavotes/campaign2/ormiston/

I do not plan to post anything more until after the election is completed because my work will mostly appear on the page above under lab director Greg Elmer's care or through the lab directly:

www.infoscapelab.ca

The lab's efforts are collectively aggregated in both places, so a third blog is a bit redundant until October 14, 2008.

Remember to get political folks.

Update: I'll be offline until the end of August

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:28:00 +0000

Thanks to those who have sent in comments about my blog and questions wondering why I've stopped posting things over the past two months. I'll be off-line until the end of August working on my dissertation, so I'll post no new content until the Fall.

For now, here are some quick observations on Google Analytics blog tracking after not posting anything for a few months:

1) Direct and referring traffic to a blog drops off significantly on Google Analytics without increasing the content during a month.

2) Google search traffic goes through the roof though, and the most read story on this blog right now is the Bruno Latour lecture at U of T (posted below) because of this phenomenon. It seems people do a lot of searching for two main things listed on this blog: "Bruno Latour" and "Facebook".

3) Generally, for a blog like mine, it gets at least 150-200 hits a month even if no new content is placed on it.

I'll write more in month!

Cheers,

Peter

Jonathan Zittrain on Colbert

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:19:00 +0000

Here's a link for Jonathan Zittrain's discussion of his book "The Future of the Internet" with Colbert:

http://www.spike.com/episode/27765/st/2994516

Also, here's his new blog for the book:

http://futureoftheinternet.org/blog/

Bruno Latour's Keynote at Reclaiming the World: the Future of Objectivity

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Sat, 24 May 2008 02:20:00 +0000

I just attended Bruno Latour's keynote address at “Reclaiming the World: the Future of Objectivity”.

It was a packed house at the U of T's Bahen Centre, and they will be putting a video recording of the event on-line shortly.

They said there was no problem if I made an audio recording, so I've attached my handheld audio recording to this blog post in case anyone can't wait for the official video copy. It's a Latour bootleg! If they ask me to take it down for any reason, I will... But they gave me the green light in person, so here it is (see the attached 1 hour itunes/QuickTime M4a clip; it's about 22 MBs -- I hope the sampling frequency is audible and the file size isn't too large for folks):

* Bruno Latour Keynote

If you're up to date with Latour's work, there wasn't much new in his talk on political epistemologies. He mostly developed ideas from his two recent works Reassembling the Social and Making Things Public for a North American audience. He also provided numerous examples of new data visualization tools and projects such as:

1) http://www.demoscience.org/
2) http://mapofscience.com/

Perhaps the most interesting part of the talk for Latour fans were the reactions to it. For example, Ian Hacking critiqued Latour's work as being an "insane phenomenology" with too many examples and not enough of a through line. Others from the more traditional and perhaps not so cutting edge U of T crowd similarly critiqued Latour’s work for not going into enough depth to develop a sense of how new data visualization projects are in fact “new” or leading to a redesign of society that is different from classical epistemologies. Also, many did not understand how networked technologies provided any resistance to dominant epistemologies.

My thoughts on the topic would be that if people are not seeing in Latour's work that new data visualization tools are "new", then they should stop using them and see what happens to their research. I believe other network theorists, like Yochai Benkler for example, would definitely support Latour’s analysis. Google, the military, and other big industries are banking on these “new” visualization tools, so there must be some reason behind it. To spell it out explicitly, beyond Latour's justifications which you can hear in the audio recording or find in his works, I would say that “new” data visualizations are "new" because of:

1) Massive Public Data Interaction: Open data access allow individuals to interact with massive networks that were not publicly available and at scales that have never before been studied, at such an instant speed of investigation (e.g. Just watch CNN's coverage of the Presidential race).

2) Automated Political-Technological Agents: The amount of technological penetration in Western society also increasingly has technology making decisions for us in our research as politically invested agents with their own in-built epistemologies that reflect particular dominant political groups. These epistemologies must be questioned and understood, especially when they do not fit into traditional epistemologies or ways of knowing.

3) On-line Discourse Domination: Decision making processes are moving on-line, and if different cultures want to be invested in science and technological decisions of "objectivity", then they have to become a part of this game, which is increasingly exclusionary.

That's my quick take on the topic. I'll write more as debate arises or time allows me to offer up more insights.

Overall, I was happy to finally hear the work of someone I have been studying for the past five years in person, and his slideshow was definitely very impressive. One of the main things that will stick with me from the talk is how the Maps of Science group and other scientometric tracking projects are demonstrating that globally there are about 12 major research clusters in the new knowledge economy of any discipline. That’s a fairly powerful data visualization of the realignment of social agents.

Okay, that's my final word, for now...

More from MaRS

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Thu, 15 May 2008 04:35:00 +0000

Here are some more reviews from the MaRS event:

1) CBC Blog: http://www.cbc.ca/news/blogwatch/2008/03/blogs_and_politics_the_permane.html

2) Jesse Hirsch: http://www.jessehirsh.com/the-permanent-campaign-event-alpha-test-report

3) Maclean’s Kady O’Malley: http://blog.macleans.ca/2008/03/20/you-got-technology-in-my-politics-recapping-the-permanent-campaign-conference/

4) Greg Elmer: http://manu.rcc.ryerson.ca/~gelmer/?p=43

Growing Protests in Canada

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:21:00 +0000

Most predictions are that protests will increase in the coming years in Canada and North America as the demographic shift of power from the retiring baby boomers to the millennial generation causes structural tensions in all sectors of society. For example, many university faculty members are increasingly concerned about the administrative change to favour contractual labour and sessional positions as retirements increase, versus the more permanent positions of tenured jobs. Along with that dominant issue are the other pressures of increased class sizes, and more expectations for publication and committee work being linked with those contracts. On the student side of the issue are increases to tuition fees, decreasing quality of education and higher student debt.

We are most likely starting to see the beginning of these structural tensions spilling into formalized protests from examples such as the following:

1) University of Toronto non-violent student sit-in over new 20% tuition fee hikes that captured the police violently removing students from outside the President’s office on campus (today):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ketNtnZQIwQ

2) York University Sweat Shop Policy sit in that was peaceful and successful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow9xDYGl_gI

3) York University protest over the Iraq war in 2005 that similarly captured police violently removing students from Vari Hall on video tape, and led to two students being sent to hospital: http://uppingtheanti.org/node/1119

Perhaps surprisingly, no large student groups at Ryerson have organized around the Chris Avenir case in a similar way, but this might best be explained by the fact that Ryerson student groups are still developing at the relatively young university.

Beyond student groups, one of the main issues in North America that we may see more protests developing around concerns the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) that the Infoscape Lab has found to be growing in the Blogosphere and on YouTube:

1) A media mash up by a Vlogger concerning the SPP that has become highly watched on YouTube can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDoaYILUMAs

2) Compare that story to CNN’s coverage of the same SPP story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU3e8luD2Iw

3) The Montebello Summit Protest and the use of Miami Police Tactics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1-WTc1kow

4) NAFTA-gate with Obama and Clinton:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLJJ88HTiX8

Fallout from Facebook Decision at Ryerson

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:40:00 +0000

A blogger on the AoIR listserv posted this summary of the University's decision not to expel Chris Avenir, the Ryerson student who was up to be expelled for using Facebook:

http://onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/03/ryerson-facebook-study-group-student.html

Overall, the student won't be expelled, will receive zero for the assignment, and will have to take an Academic Integrity course: http://www.ryerson.ca/academicintegrity/

Avenir is still going to appeal the decision, and as of yet, Ryerson has not made any formal announcements from its own university portal, and have not addressed if anything would happen to other students in the group.

For more see on the back story: http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/03/university-facebook-policies-breakfast.html

Tools from MaRS and other places

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:55:00 +0000

Happy post-St. Patty’s Day to ye all,

I hope everyone is still feeling the luck of the Irish today, and are not too under the weather from the cheer last night.

I thought I’d just quickly post some new interesting tools coming down the pipe and also some other items that people might find interesting. First off, here are some of the tools that were demonstrated at the MaRS “Permanent Campaign” event that the Infoscape Lab attended today with Greg Elmer being the keynote:

1) aideRSS: http://www.aiderss.com/

This seems like a generally useful tool for those who read a large number of blogs. However, at the moment, aideRSS are keeping their ranking heuristics hidden, and they do not allow readers to set up their own advanced ranking methods. For instance, it would be useful for someone to just choose to read blogs that have a lot of comments, or that have a large number of blogs linking to them. It would also be useful for the aideRSS tool to present such information as comments and links in an easily readable manner along with the other statistics they offer. Test it out to see what I mean exactly, of course.

2) Blogscope.net: http://www.blogscope.net/

Blog surveillance technology from the U of T. These folks have even automated tone judgments of the postings on blogs in the beta version, which sounds pretty sketchy to me, especially since once again they do not share their heuristics for how they judge tone. Their plan so far is to also make it the blogger’s individual duty to de-list their personal information from their network tracking software, which profiles every blogger on the web. This could be potentially very controversial.

The company linked with Blogscope is: www.Sysomos.com

3) Iotum: http://iotum.com/

Free conference calls for everyone, using Facebook or otherwise. This might be useful, especially if they add video calls some day. It appears to be a step up from plain old Skype.

************************************************

Here are some other items not connected with the MaRS event, but connected with political tools in general:

1) Microsoft’s Blews: http://research.microsoft.com/projects/blews/blews.aspx

This software seems similar to the Blogscope.net platform above, but it appears to have a more elegant user interface. However, the team that has worked on it does not include any political scientists or sociologists, so I’m not sure how well it will target specific user needs to drill into political blogs and news ("blews") in the social media space.

2) Gapminder.org: Interesting use of data visualization software, and there is a TED video of Hans Rosling from the Gapminder.org group on their powerful use of data visualization here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUwS1uAdUcI

3) Morningside Analytics: http://morningside-analytics.com/
John Kelly from Columbia University who was at the OII SDP this summer has officially launched his company with the help of Leonard Lidov, who is a Torontonian. Their business looks interesting, and I wish them well.

4) Michael Zimmer’s bibliography of ethical and privacy dimensions of web
search engines: http://michaelzimmer.org/2007/06/30/scholarship-on-privacy-and-search-engines/

More to come on the MaRS talk when I get a second to write in April.

The Breakfast Club 2.0: University Facebook Policies

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:44:00 +0000

Here's a link to a Ryerson Student newspaper article on the changing Facebook policy that’s been circulating in the news and is currently a hot topic nationally and internationally:

http://www.theeyeopener.com/article/3816

I truly think it's going to be difficult for students to change the policy proceeding along the lines that this author is arguing. Students need to understand when on-line activity is "public" -- we've never been able to defame our bosses, openly cheat on examines and assignments, steal content and call it our own, and then document those crimes for all to see in an easily traceable manner back to the individual. Many of the acts they’re documenting here are the equivalent of cheating on an exam, and taking a picture of it, then showing it to the professor... How do they expect a school to react?

I think the school administration will definitely listen to arguments about voices of protest being stifled, academic freedom being infringed, and intellectual innovation issues along the lines of the Creative Commons movements, Open Source and other such things, especially if there are pertinent cases to draw upon. I think though what is more at issue in the above article is the draconian punishments that are being handed out, and the lack of using those opportunities to teach students about what does and does not cross respectable and lawful student or citizen activity. Completely destroying a student's life because they're exploring the possibilities of a new technology is different from using the moment to guide the student's poor decisions into a more productive activity within reasonable limits.

Some people were asking for some background on the Ryerson case, so here goes. Every university has a Student Code of Non-Academic Conduct, and here are some links to Ryerson's:

1) http://www.ryerson.ca/calendar/2007-2008/pg28.html
2) http://www.ryerson.ca/undergraduate/currentstudents/rr/pol61NonACCode.pdf

These codes serve as blanket liability protection for, among other things, cases when a student does something in public that makes his or her university look bad in some way and the university wants to distance themselves from the student (or expel the student completely). Some general examples of when this code might be used is if criminal behaviour occurs off of the campus or destruction of university property occurs while the student is not actively engaged in "academic" behaviour, which would be covered by the Student Code of Academic Conduct. Most professors list links to these codes on their course syllabi, but many students don't know what their actual rights are on campus because like the plagiarism policy, those sections are often glossed over. In truth, these codes also exist for Faculty, and students and instructors alike should know that they overlap in many ways to create community panopticon to favour the university administration, but at the other end of the spectrum they also protect all of the academic community.

All universities have been trying to reformulate these codes in light of the Web 2.0 challenges. At Ryerson in 2006, a business professor, was "owned" on YouTube, and the university admin moved fast to squash the video, which was taken off YouTube fairly quickly, but they never delivered any universal university statement about the event and they only dealt with the event internally to that business class from what I know. However, they have been working on this policy since that time.

Most recently, at Oxford students have been fined for posting incriminating pictures of "disorderly" behaviour on Facebook, and the university has warned students to set their settings to friends only privacy levels:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/jul/17/digitalmedia.highereducation

In other words, the Student Code of Non-Academic Conduct has always had protections against any negative forms of university publicity which could affect the "value" and "reputation" of a university's degree conferring status. After all, who would want to go to a university where “x” happened? While that seems to be the line universities use in these cases, the code has obviously been abused in the past, and perhaps is being abused in these current cases.

I hope this background helps. I believe Ryerson’s code at this point is at a nascent phase, and if the university will ever be at a point where they will consider student input, it will be now.

Good to hear people are interested in these policy issues! I would definitely recommend writing your own response to the admin, and formulating how the code should be used if you want to change things now.

Here are two links to some previous posts on this topic from last year where I was harder on High School students for abusing Facebook for similar things, but having been familiarized with High School suspensions myself (for artistic reasons, of course), I believe university suspensions are of a whole different degree because they can affect a student for the rest of his or her life, whereas High School suspensions really never affect a person again afterward, unless of course, it’s The Breakfast Club:

1) Michael Geist:
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2007/05/geist-on-facebook-in-toronto-star.html

2) Supplement:
http://prnetworks.blogspot.com/2007/05/suspending-students-supplement.html

Infoscape Lab Covers the Alberta Election 2008

noreply@blogger.com ((pr)) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:43:00 +0000

For those out in Alberta, the Infoscape lab has started tracking Politics 2.0 for the Alberta Election:

http://www.infoscapelab.ca/node/376

There's not much of a story yet, but the election isn't over yet.