Conferences

On to the next session - I got here late because the session was moved, but the current paper by Michael Nentwich is about the virtualisation of research and academic exchange. He discusses first the suitability of email for academic communication. Asynchronicity, speed, the written character, and the permanence are mentioned as useful characteristics in this context.

Five functions of traditional academic seminars, workshops and conferences: they contribute to quality control, the transmission of knowledge, serving as a node in the scientific network, social management, and ideas generation. In a virtual setting, these might continue to exist: this is certainly true for quality control, but the transmission of knowledge or the placement of nodes in scientific networks might work better face-to-face. Social management could work, but not in the same way as it does in offline contexts, and the same might be true for ideas generation.

The View from My Room, Complete with CowsI'm starting to get a bit frustrated with my lack of connectivity here. Not only is there no wireless, but there's also no way to plug into the cable-based network; I ended up buying a phone card for £3 in order to be able to connect via dial-up, but that didn't work either… And to make matters worse, now my mobile is on the blink too, and locks up every time I try to do anything. Argh!

A good discussion about blogging and the lack of wireless support over lunch; including some very good ideas for what to do better next time around. Lilia has now set up a site on TopicExchange to combine most of us AoIR bloggers, and I'll post more details about this as soon as I can actually post something… We've now moved on to the next session on Internet governance.

Finally had an opportunity to do some basic networking in the break. I really don't seem to have much success with technology at the moment, though - now even my mobile phone seems to be acting up! I came in late on Mattia Miani's presentation on electronic democracy in cooperative enterprises, so I'm not sure how much sense I'll be able to make of the rest of this talk.

Yay, I've run into a fellow blogger, Lilia Efimova (and we've commiserated about not being able to do live blogging of this conference, in the absence of direct Internet access). Interesting to discuss approaches to coping with this.

Ted NelsonAfter all of this, the first keynote of this conference will be delivered by hypertext veteran Ted Nelson. He basically begins by saying the present computer world is appalling - it is based on techie misunderstandings of human life and human thought, hidden behind flash user interfaces. The GUI (or for him PUI - park user interface) presents a cosmology which categorises all computer tasks into paper-based tasks. WYSIWYG, too, remains paper-based, of course - what you see is what you get when you print it out. (Developed, of course, by Xerox - what a surprise.)

University of Sussex LibraryAnd we're off … the first sessions at AoIR 2004 (about 8 running simultaneously) have started now. I'm in one on mobile phones and wireless access. Kakuko Miyata starts this session, speaking of Internet use through mobile phones in Japan. She has three research questions: who uses mobiles to access the Net, how do people use these media, and does the use of the Net increase their social capital?

The view from my hotel room, complete with collapsed pier.Well, I'm in Brighton now - staying right now at a hotel just on the famous beach before I transfer to the University of Sussex for the Association of Internet Researchers conference today. Lots of noise last night, though, which isn't what you want when you're sleeping off your jetlag, so I've decided to make the best of it and get up early for a bit of a walk along the beachside.

We're on to the post-lunch sessions now - and the researchers' working group has been joined by the access working group. There are seven hypothetical usage cases for the archive which they've envisaged, and these will help us work out what the archive would need to be able to do.

Pierre Lévy now takes the discussion to another level; I heard him give a keynote at AoIR 2003 and was very impressed (and sufficiently confused at the scale of his project), so I'm looking forward to this.