Some time ago I became involved with a primitive game called the Geowiki game that was being studied by Clair Dormann a postdoctoral fellow in the HOT Lab at Carleton. The work was being done in conjuction with the Cybercartography initiative.

The game involved sequentially picking three commands, one from each of three categories. The participants would then record their observations made while carrying out the commands. For example, groups of students from a class would go to some location [say the Market] and then pick their first command [something like “Find someone wearing a hat.”]. Once such a person was found, the group would pick a second command [something like “Follow the person until they go indoors.”]. Once the group was at the spot where the hat-wearing person went indoors, they would pick the last command [something like “Identify all the trees you can see.” or “Ask the first person that walks by about the history of this spot.”] The group’s observations where recorded in a wiki and they became entries in an atlas building exercise: the first two commands randomizing location and the last command identifying the info to be collected.

I have a class this term that is undertaking what I think is a similar activity, only this time in the blogosphere. They are finding content by choosing what sites to visit in a series of steps. The observation at each step is a word cloud of the site they have reached. I’m interested in how their “content map” compares to what various search engines reveal; the characteristics of the search paths; etc. This involves visualizing content and extracting content from word clouds.

Good Evening fellow and fella un conference goers,
I don’t necessarily have my own session to propose, but wish to add some thoughts based on my own experiences and work, as well as on the thoughts already expressed through this forum.
As a grad student researching and working in an online environment I have found it both frustrating and rewarding to use online resources and to be increasingly aware of those in hard copy elsewhere (physically elsewhere). The ideas presented by Peter about the plethora of resources available online is what intimidates me. With the immediacy of many resources I as a researcher often feel as though this almost forces me to cover all my bases and then some.
For example, in reading various newspapers online to extract information for a current school project, I realized that I did not have online access to the closest newspaper (geographically) to the event in question. I did not even have access to it in person at either of two major universities. In my undergraduate years I may have chosen to disregard this source and simply rely on the others due to the simplicity of the action.
Now, however I feel as though I will potentially be criticized for not including this source in my research because it is findable thanks to the power of the internet. Interestingly enough I ended up relying on a tried and true method, ordering microfilm through RACER (interlibrary loan system) and then reading it in a construction site (i.e. our university library). I am very happy to have read this particular source and to have the information which it provided for my project. Had I not read this source my project would be very different.
All of that said, the wide range of available materials is, I guess, keeping us researchers on our toes, forcing us to either stick to a small number of sources (and justify it) or cover all our bases (as much as possible) by taking advantage of the resources available to us.
So in the end, this has led to good, but I welcome your thoughts on the subject all the same.
Best,
Rebecca

Hey everyone – if you require any communications accommodations like ASL or CART you must tell us by today (rather than Wednesday).