Over the past couple of weeks I've received a surge of emails from various researchers interested in Facebook. Somebody important must have posted this site somewhere (AOIR?), because I've been out of the game for a bit. I figured it was about time for an update!
Jeff Ginger - I've found my way to a new area of study in
Community Informatics but still maintain some interest with Facebook. I've come to realize just how handy of a resource this place can be for
aspiring graduate students, so I've kept it up. Feel free to continue sending me questions related to Facebook research, if nothing else I can offer connections, perspectives and advice. I've managed to meet some of the big names (Cliff Lampe, Nicole Ellison, danah boyd, Fred Stutzman) and tell them about the site, so it's now officially "on the radar." I'm also happy to host papers and materials for open access here.
Jenny Ryan - Jenny Ryan is currently living in New York City, and is about to begin a new internship with the
Berkman Center's Media Cloud project. Yet another unfortunate victim of our sinking economy, she's had ample free time to work on her first publications- a chapter on memorialization and commemoration on Facebook for a Stanford collection entitled
The Psychology of Facebook, and another chapter on neotribalism and psytrance on Tribe.net for a collection entitled
Psytrance: Local Scenes and Global Culture. Available for freelance social media consulting, she is also working on turning her MA thesis,
The Virtual Campfire, into a book. While awaiting responses from several Ph.D programs, she has been channeling her energies into
Webnographers, a wiki for resources pertaining to virtual ethnography- and would love for you to contribute!
Eric Gilbert - is a bit of a celebrity in HCI these days. He's managed to snag two
Best Paper awards at
CHI, and some of us are considering imposing term limits. He just pushed out a paper on
measuring strength of ties (social capital) with the use of Facebook, which is pretty swank. Lately Eric and Jeff have been kicking around papers on HCI and CSCW in a weekly reading group, but with only a little emphasis on Facebook.
Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch - is freaking out over comps questions and her dissertation and hasn't been worrying too much about Facebook research recently.
New Papers -
Kelin Kitchener and Matthew J. Kushin have added a paper exploring political discourse on Facebook. Alex Lambert and Stephen Bezek have a paper on enabling secure email with social networking, but we have to hold off until after CHI to post it up online.
Contact me if you're interested in it.
Webnographers - Jenny now has a
Webnographers wiki, dedicated to organizating the literature, journals, academic programs, people and other online resources that provide, in effect, a cyberanthropologist's toolkit. This is helpful for anyone interested in digital ethnography.
Connecting Researchers - I've added a
section to the wiki listing most of the researchers I've come in contact with that have something to do with Facebook. Use this as a place
The Wiki - Hasn't really taken off, and the Resource Pool is badly in need of an update. If you check it out for sources, help to add more.
Jeff's Masters Paper Anthology - I plan to release a different (shorter!) version of my Masters Paper that overviews most of the research I've done to date on Facebook. This should come out in the next few weeks, if I can stay on track.