The New New Media

Tomorrow is the first day of a class I’m excited about - “The New New Media: Exploratory Research on Collaborative Information and Communication Technologies.” It’s just been added to the schedule recently due to student interest in the topic. I think we’ll have some freedom to come up with projects and such. The idea is that we’ll work with some of the technologies in question (blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, tags, feeds, etc.) as well as looking at them from a theoretical and historical perspective. Steve Jones, the professor for the class, is co-director of the AoIR meeting here in Chicago in October this year so we’ll be involved some way with that.

My 2 cents on what we can do with AoIR is that we should promote a tag for bookmarks, blogs, pictures and whatever else–if no one is already doing that– aoir6 would be an obvious choice.

I’ll also bring up the idea of a class tag for the same purpose - maybe nnm05.

I also have a thesis meeting tomorrow so maybe I’ll have an update on that front soon. I’ve just recently been looking at the lit on the psychology of categorization - found some good things so far. Next thing to tackle (I think) is finding the lit on categorization in linguistics.