editing and publishing: a workshop @ IR9.0

On 15th Oct a workshop in editing and publishing took place in Copenhagen as part of the wider AoIR conference. As a fairly green post-graduate student my hopes were to gain insight into what appeared to me as a huge blackbox: the eminent celebrities of academia selecting in mysterious and unclear processes whatever they may want to publish, whenever and according to whoever's rules. Something like this, admittedly cynical, had blurred my view. So it was refreshing to see a workshop aimed at de-mystifying the practices and rules, being actually overbooked, so obviously I wasn't alone with my lack of clarity. Co-organiser Marcus Foth - who did a fantastic job - reassured us that there would be a range of strategies available to make life somewhat easier and the help offered by the present co-editors would make the whole business much more of something that can be approached systematically.

Nick Jankowski, co-editor of New Media & Society clarified that the successful submission of a conference paper should be seen as the very first milestone prior to any publications in journals. Make sure you know whether your paper will be made available online or offline and how aspects such as embedded multimedia or screenshots will be dealt with. The UK standard is double blind and peer review - which may not be taken for granted around the globe, so better double-check.

We were then given an overview of abstracting and indexing services such as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and the ISI Web of Knowledge as well as CiteULike which will help you map your citations with Google Scholar being another interesting option.

There is criticism as to bias and reflection of relevance, though, in so far as the SSCI for example was accused of being ideologically driven against free market oriented research. In contrast, Google Scholar was hailed as much friendlier and intended to empower individual academics with their Publish or Perish policy. There is a nice piece of software coming along that lists your statistics - exactly what we all want to know in these days, I guess.

In brief, we were encouraged to submit our manuscript by trying to establish a relationship in person with the editor/s or attaching a proper letter to the draft manuscript. Keeping in mind that this may be the first steps towards a life-long relationship, well sort of. Submission rules may differ: whether online or hardcopies might be required, books can be sent for review to more than one editorial board, journals usually only to one. Expect 2 weeks for the internal assessment and 3-8 weeks for external reviews. The author will be notified of the outcome, so brace yourself to be accepted, rejected or for the review/revise/resubmit cycle. The max period should be no longer than 12 weeks for revision, then the above repeats and the final decision to publish hopefully is going to reward you for all the hard work. Don't be shy when it comes to following up, as Lisa McLaughlin, Editor of Feminist Media Studies pointed out: the tiny number of people working under volunteer conditions in some of the journals and the large number of submissions are behind the max time spans which can be expected: 12 months for revision, 18 months for publishing.

Now, that is certainly a nightmare for anyone researching new media, online social networks and the blogosphere...clearly, we had some discussion about this issue and tried to shed some light on the ways new media should be harnessed in the publishing industry, however, much more is to be discussed yet. Not at least because the seismic paradigm shift may entail a power shift.

The following individual academics provided discussed in panels as well as in small groups with delegates and this was an invaluable experience. I am most grateful to Daniel Cunliffe's generous support and patient answering of all my many questions. He is Associate Editor of the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. Elizabeth Buchanan and
Brian Loader were remarkable in their critical views. Issues such as cultural differences, personal attitudes, the standard of assessment as well as differences among disciplines were at the centre of debate. A discussion of the ethics and politics of reviewing constructively and in a reflexive manner made me help to understand the wider infrastructure and gain an idea of what is possibly going to expect me in the not so far future. Certainly, I will try to see a reviewer's comments from a much more holistic perspective and keep in mind that publishing and editing is of dialogical nature and are meant to strengthen the paper under scrutiny.

IR9.0 - dichotomies, the politics of tagging and the subconscious - thoughts on the keynote lectures

This year's AoIR conference, the IR9.0 in Copenhagen is still inspiring me - it's been a great event with numerous encounters, plenty of food for thought thanks to the fantastic conference chair Lis Klastrup and the programme chair Brian Loader with the organising team and 430 international delegates. Here is a nice visual overview flickr

The keynote lecture presented by Mimi Ito focused on a large-scale project which had made use of a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods applied by 29 researchers. The descriptions of these aspects alone were fascinating and highlighted that managerial and soft skills may have played a quite significant role in the success of the venture. Mimi had resorted to currently dominant discourses around dichotomies such as the connoisseur/amateur, producer/consumer, autonomy/peer pressure in order to frame the findings of research undertaken in the area of anime/fansubbing where reciprocity of peer review is embedded in friendship-driven participation and closely intertwined with practices of status. Exploring this specific area must have been fascinating , some of her results suggest that the genres of participation - covering ID, culture, practice etc acc to her definition - might be rooted too much in traditional sociological terms, though. I thought that these categories did not seem to enable us to truly capture the complex phenomenon of capacity-building activities including the flows of social and transferrable skills which -presumably - start off in the online sphere and gain momentum and their own dynamics in the offline sphere. Mimi ‘s notions on moral panics and the scepticism as to the contrary celebrations of the no-barriers sphere remained marginal in this rather optimistic interpretation within her lecture.

The pessimistic comments were much more at the core of Stephen Graham’s keynote lecture which critically evaluated the tagging practices in the contemporary hype of securing, excluding and trajectory-tracking of mobile bodies, goods and ideas which all aim at listing of profilings including discourses of status, power, control and policing in order to make spaces governable which are perceived as prone to threats. Stephen presented a picture in stark contrast to Mimi’s: the dream of transparency in an ever more complex world chiselled into the gloomy rhetoric and practices of biometrics, militarisation and the fixing of ‘authentic’ IDs into static subjects. He raised the question how much time societies may have left at their hand before their citizens become all too accustomed to the notion of being the sum of tags. Tags defined and attached by others - also here an underlying polarity. Re-animating and re-mediating urban spaces in an attempt to un-blackbox these technocrat politics by moving away from interiorised gaming were among the ideas Stephen presented as to how to resist and appropriate at grass-root level. I felt, though that questioning the lack of questioning in these days might be the underlying issue at stake in a hybrid on/offline world where anxiety has gained true celebrity status as it actually dictates the culture of tagging in a very subtle manner - and in this sense is an even more powerful agent in a nation's subconscious.

ethics and research in the virtual world

In July I attended the Internet Studies Festival at John Moores University in Liverpool which was a rather small but very valuable event. One issue though seemed to remain in the dark and it is still not as widely debated as it should be: ethics.

A post-grad social researcher argued that 'one would need to find a way to work around' - she left us in the dark about the details of her own research, i.e. how exactly she had ensured privacy and data protection in her fieldwork centred around 'understanding student's use of Facebook' were secured at all times. Rather she had perceived the semi-public sphere of facebook with her friends' contact details a rich source of data - and subsequently presented poorly disguised images and personal details of her participants as part of her findings to the delegates - assuming this would be another semi-private/exclusive space. Hence, a safe arena.

This may come across as a specifically sad case but looking at the currently available formal framework of guidelines as provided by the AoiR [Association of Internet Researchers] AoIR Research Ethics and the BSA Research Ethics
the guidelines are perhaps not explicit enough and might remain vague to those students who learned to expect a larger extent or more explicit guidance. Also, the applications online available, the range of settings and practices within and around the online social networks, the micro-/blogosphere etc may change faster than academic institutions/committees are usually able to respond and amend their guidelines. Dynamic and flexibility would need to increase - or students might need to get equipped with the skills and attitude to adopt/develop guidelines themselves according to the demands of the specific environment under investigation.

Another issue in this context might be the persistence of a rather unhelpful debate: the public/private dichotomy. Certainly, the online sphere deserves just as much careful consideration of ethical issues as the offline spheres - otherwise we, i.e. the community of researchers [at all stages], may risk to loose reputation, credibility - and most importantly: the degree of influence we actually seek when we embark upon the research journey.