too many topics,

    too little time.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Fourth International Conference on
CULTURAL ATTITUDES TOWARDS TECHNOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION
(CATaC'04)
27 June-1 July 2004
Karlstad University, Sweden
www.it.murdoch.edu.au/catac/

Conference theme:
Off the shelf or from the ground up?
ICTs and cultural marginalization, homogenization or hybridization

The biennial CATaC conference series provides a continuously expanding
international forum for the presentation and discussion of current
research on how diverse cultural attitudes shape the implementation
and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The
conference series brings together scholars from around the globe who
provide diverse perspectives, both in terms of the specific culture(s)
they highlight in their presentations and discussions, and in terms of
the discipline(s) through which they approach the conference theme.
The first conference in the series was held in London in 1998, the
second in Perth in 2000, and the third in Montreal in 2002.

Beginning with our first conference in 1998, the CATaC conferences
have highlighted theoretical and praxis-oriented scholarship and
research from all parts of the globe, including Asia, Africa, and the
Middle-East. The conferences focus especially on people and
communities at the developing edges of ICT diffusion, including
indigenous peoples and those outside the English-speaking world.

Understanding the role of culture in how far minority and/or
indigenous cultural groups may succeed - or fail - in taking up ICTs
designed for a majority culture is obviously crucial to the moral and
political imperative of designing ICTs in ways that will not simply
reinforce such groups' marginalization. What is the role of culture in
the development of ICTs "from the ground up" - beginning with the
local culture and conditions - rather than assuming dominant "off the
shelf" technologies are appropriate? Are the empowering potentials of
ICTs successfully exploited among minority and indigenous groups,
and/or do they rather engender cultural marginalization, cultural
homogenization or cultural hybridization?

Original full papers (especially those which connect theoretical
frameworks with specific examples of cultural values, practices, etc.)
and short papers (e.g. describing current research projects and
preliminary results) are invited.

Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to:

- Culture: theory and praxis
- Culture and economy
- Alternative models for ICT diffusion
- Role of governments and activists in culture, technology and communication
- ICTs and cultural hybridity
- ICTs and intercultural communication
- Culture, communication and e-learning

Our conference themes provide a range of approaches to the questions raised.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Nina Wakeford, Foundation Fund Lecturer in Sociology and Social
Methodology. For her DPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford, Dr Wakeford
studied the experiences of mature students using a sociological
conception of risk. Before coming to the University of Surrey in
September of 1998, she spent three years studying "Women's Experiences
of Virtual Communities", funded by an ESRC Post-Doctoral grant. The
last two years of this Fellowship she conducted fieldwork in and
around Silicon Valley while based at the University of California,
Berkeley.

CATaC'04 will also feature two particular foci, each chaired by a
distinguished colleague who will oversee paper review and development
of the final panels.

PANEL 1: The Multilingual Internet
Panel Chairs: Susan Herring and Brenda Danet
Expanding on their collective work, including a special issue of the
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (Vol. 9 (1), November, 2003
- see http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/), this thread invites papers with a
specific focus on how the Internet impacts language choice and
linguistic practices in traditionally non-English speaking cultural
contexts. Of particular interest are situations that respond in
various ways to the tension between global English dominance and local
linguistic diversity, e.g., through use of English as an online lingua
franca, the "localization" of global or regional linguistic
influences, translation or code-switching between different languages,
and strategic uses of the Internet to maintain and invigorate minority
languages.
Susan Herring is Professor of Information Science and Linguistics,
Indiana University Bloomington
Brenda Danet is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Communication at
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

PANEL 2: Utopian Dreams vs. Real-World Conditions: Under what
conditions can ICTs really help worse off communities?
Panel Chair: Michel Menou.
CATaC'04 will likely feature some examples of "best practices" in
using ICTs to aid culturally-appropriate development, especially as
pursued through governmental or NGOs' projects, community informatics
endeavours, etc. At the same time, however, real-world politics and
realities - e.g., violent oppression, political corruption, gender and
ethnic discrimination, abuse of dominant economic position, structural
disasters, worst practices of all kinds and origins, etc. - can
shatter the best-laid plans for using ICTs to supposedly help
especially the poorest of the poor. How far can ICTs succeed in
supporting culturally-appropriate development - and what appropriate
answers to real-world conditions are required in order for our best
efforts to realize the liberatory potentials of these technologies not
be broken down?
Michel Menou, has worked on the development of national information
policies and systems in many countries of the Southern hemisphere
since 1966. Since 1992 his work focused on the impact of information
and ICT in development. He is a member of the Community Informatics
Research Network and of the network of Telecentres of Latin America
and Caribbean.

PAPER SUBMISSIONS

All submissions will be peer reviewed by an international panel of
scholars and researchers and accepted papers will appear in the
conference proceedings.

Initial submissions are to be uploaded to the CATaC website according
to the paper guidelines (available at the conference website).
Submission of a paper implies that it has not been submitted or
published elsewhere. At least one author of each accepted paper is
expected to present the paper at the conference.

There will be the opportunity for selected papers from this 2004
conference to appear in special issues of journals and a book. Papers
in previous conferences have appeared in journals (Journal of Computer
Mediated Communication, Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue
Electronique de Communication, AI and Society, Javnost- The Public,
and New Media and Society) and a book (Culture, Technology,
Communication: towards an Intercultural Global Village, 2001, edited
by Charles Ess with Fay Sudweeks, SUNY Press, New York). You may
purchase the conference proceedings from the 2002 conference from
www.it.murdoch.edu.au/catac.

Important Dates

Full papers (10-20 pages): 12 January 2004
Short papers (3-5 pages): 26 January 2004
Notification of acceptance: end February 2004
Final formatted papers: 29 March 2004

CONFERENCE CO-CHAIRS
 Charles Ess, Drury University, USA, catac@it.murdoch.edu.au
 Fay Sudweeks, Murdoch University, Australia, catac@it.murdoch.edu.au
CONFERENCE CO-VICE-CHAIRS
 Malin Sveningsson, Karlstad University, Sweden, malin.sveningsson@kau.se

Sharing and stealing. Jessica Litman, Sharing and Stealing, a preprint posted to SSRN. From the abstract: “The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation and mass dissemination of a wide variety of works. Until recently, most means of mass dissemination required a significant capital investment. The lion's share of the economic proceeds of copyrights were therefore channeled to publishers and distributors, and the law was designed to facilitate that. Digital distribution invites us to reconsider all of the assumptions underlying that model. We are still in the early history of the networked digital environment, but already we've seen experiments with both direct and consumer-to-consumer distribution of works of authorship. One remarkable example of the difference consumer-to-consumer dissemination can make is seen in the astonishing information space that has grown up on the world wide web….This paper…proposes that we adopt a legal architecture that encourages but does not compel copyright owners to make their works available for widespread sharing over digital networks….” (Thanks to C-FIT.) [Open Access News]

Radio TrackBack monitor. If you're blogging with Radio and have TrackBack enabled, you'll love this service which provides an RSS feed of TrackBacks to your weblog -  I'm kicking myself for missing it when Phil came up with it a few months back. So I now have a TrackBack feed in addition to my comments feed, which means I'll be more aware of feedback on my writing. Thanks Phil!

(…lost in the jargon? Try a glossary)

(found via Al via Google)
[Seb's Open Research]

history, credit and identity. Like many students of computing, i was inspired by Vannevar Bush from my earliest days. “As We May Think” and follow-up writings on the Memex helped define a century of thought and computational effort. Yet, as Michael Buckland is uncovering,… [misbehaving.net]

my response over there follows:
Vannevar Bush's fame is not singularly tied to 'as we may think'. he was very much a polymath of sorts, and was a significant figure in several fields, this allowed him more popular press access of course, but if you check out his accomplishments on the wikipedia page here, I think you'll see that his fame is a bit broader based and that some of his other works are foundational in other fields. he was even on the cover of Time magazine for his work in physics

a short biblio includes such works as:

modern arms and free men: a discussion of the role of science in preserving democracy

principles of electrical engineering

science is not enough

pieces of action

endless horizons <--- which was on my ph.d. exam reading list

two codicils:

1. bush cetainly falls into the 'great man' problem of history, he is usually individuated and put forth out of his myriad of contexts, so we have to be careful about what his role really was in regards to certain concepts that he put forth, which could in fact be hinting at another problem in science studies, which is that we traditonally put undo emphasis on the people that do something first, usually singling them out in opposition to others, when they very well may have been aware of the others work and thought they were working in a larger framework. so saying 'goldberg or bush' is problematic, when it could have been that bush was seeking to popularize goldberg or something else.

2. memex has nothing to do with hypertext and everyone knows hypertext is dead (said snarkily)

New issue of Jekyll. The September issue of Jekyll (”International Journal on Science Communication”) is now online. Here are the OA-related articles.

• Pietro Greco, Political censorship of science

• Gerry McKiernan, Invisible Hand(s): Quality Assurance in the Age of Author Self-Archiving
• Stevan Harnad, Self-archive unto others as ye would have them self-archive unto you

[Open Access News]

Down my throat no more. Jim McGee: John Seely Brown on Stolen Knowledge.

[....]

Why is it such a
hard step to give up on the notion of control? Or, put another way, why
do organizations and schools insist on forcing certain content down
people's throats? You might want to take a look at Roger Schank's
thoughts about learning in this context. Take a look at Coloring Outside the Lines : Raising a Smarter Kid by Breaking All the Rules or at Designing World-Class E-Learning.

Or if you want things in a real nutshell consider the following bit of wisdom from Calvin and Hobbes:

Calvin and Hobbes for 27 Nov 1992

[Seb's Open Research]

The Critical Questions. I did this week's reading for my IR&R 2 course. And according to my prof's last 2 sets of comments, I am not allowed/supposed to write reflection papers which are based on my usual critical questions/misgivings with the readings. So… [Flailing in the Surf]

U.S. funds study of tech monocultures [InfoWar Monitor]

The National Science Foundation has granted $750,000 to two universities to study how diversifying information systems and software could help fend off future cyberattacks, the agency said Tuesday.

The study, proposed by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of New Mexico almost a year ago, will seek to identify commonalities in software that could be used as the basis for attacks. Such common vulnerabilities would point to a computer “monoculture”–a population so homogeneous that a single threat could destroy it.

GOP Steal Compter Files - No Film at 11. John Moltz brings to our attention a story from Calpundit. A Republican Senate staffer accesed files on a Democratic staffers computer and then leaked them to the press. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said yesterday that a… [Eat Your Vegetables]

Patent Poet. Ray Kurzweil has been awarded a patent for his AI-based ” target=”_blank”>cybernetic poetry software. (via NYTimes) Kurzweil, a successful developer of AI-based technologies and author of several books including The Age of Spiritual Machines, has an elaborate website promoting AI… [grandtextauto.org]

From users to programmers. A few months ago Steven Garrity's blog was host to an interesting conversation on the gap between user and programmer.
I hope the computer environments of the future will enable ordinary
people to just “get things done” without encountering steep learning
curves, even when that involves choregraphing
the work of several applications. The growing adoption of scripting languages and availability of open interfaces
to services suggests things might indeed be evolving in that direction.

Reading through the discussion reminded me of Python inventor Guido van Rossum's currently-limboed

Computer Programming for Everybody initiative, and of Tomasso Toffoli's vision of the knowledge home. Alan Kay comes to mind, too.

The information objects we are manipulating, while they are meaningful in and of themselves, ought to become things that
have a more powerful and easily learnable interface than “view/save”. We're
stuck with trinkets that are nice to look at, but hard to combine in
new ways. We need tinkertoys and Mindstorms. In the information routing arena, this is the kind of direction I was getting at with that feed algebra idea.
[Seb's Open Research]

Pooping on O'Reilley. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog appears on Fresh
Air with Terry Gross and does a superb take-off on Bill O'Reilley's recent
meltdown on the same show. [Interesting Times]

Social software collectibles. Ross Mayfield offers a Social Software Reader. Thanks for putting this together, Ross!

Assembling these kinds of lists is a low-cost way of adding value (and
providing extra exposure) to older pieces of writing. I should do that
too at some point.

Here are a few of my favorite picks in Ross's list:

• Stowe Boyd: Are you ready for Social Software
• GBN/Shirky: Social Software and the Next Big Phase of the Internet
• Lee Bryant: Smarter, Simpler, Social
• SocialSoftware on Meatball Wiki

[Seb's Open Research]

Today I am. 1. Re-reading Eric Laurier and Chris Philo 's X-morphising: review essay of Bruno Latour&#137;&#165;&#250;s “Aramis, or the Love of Technology”. Excellent stuff.

2. Reading Susan Newman's Here, There, and Nowhere At All: Distribution, negotiation, and virtuality in postmodern ethnography and engineering - found via Lucy Suchman's brilliant Sociality of Information Technologies course at Lancaster.

3. Going out for dinner with the fascinating fabulous Joey Berzowska - who will be lecturing on Wearable Technology and Soft Computation at the NRC tomorrow morning.

Also looking forward to meeting speaking more with Steve Marsh - who leads the Socially Adept Technology and Advanced Collaborative Environments research programmes at the NRC-IIT.

More later. [Purse Lip Square Jaw]

——-

just logging these for research

Let's wrap it up. Star presenter wears hijab and apparently gets “a flood of calls”. But, in an odd turn for the BBC, the piece doesn't say what those calls think. Are they all praising the traditional - and controversial - head-dress, or are they up in arms. The story skirts the issue. Islam 101 explains a bit about it. [MetaFilter]