ASIS&T update

A quick update on the Milwaukee events....

The first time I went to Mocha's (much better wifi than the hotel and it is free) I saw a familiar face walk in - from Scifoo! World is small. She promised to come to the Science Blogging Conference (I am leaving the name out so not to play Gotcha later if she manages not to come in January). Jean-Claude, Janet, Christina Pikas and I went to dinner at Water Street Brewery last night - all four of us will meet again in January at the Science Blogging Conference. Janet, Jean-Claude and I had lunch at 105-year old German Mader's Restaurant. Back at Mocha's waiting for some time to pass until I go to the airport to go back home....

There is a lot of people from UNC here, including Jeffrey Pomerantz, Tessa Sullivan and Fred Stutzman. Nice to see some familiar faces here. As Janet noted, this is not our tribe. They all know each other and there is a lot of social stuff going on that we are looking at from outside in.

Christina is liveblogging all the sessions she attended, including our session this morning so you can get some more details from someone who was not on the panel itself.

We went to an interesting session this morning, where Phillip Edwards presented his research proposal (pdf) on the decision-making process as to where to publish one's work (especially the choice between Closed and Open Access journals). Christina liveblogged this as well.

I finally got to meet danah boyd whose blog I've been reading for many years now. It is actually one of the first blogs I ever discovered. She was on two panels yesterday afternoon and I went to both of them. Jeffrey blogged about one of them on research methodologies in the study of online social networks. How similar, yet how different from the way the same topic was covered by non-academics at ConvergeSouth the other day.

The best session was the one before it, about online behavior, i.e., types and personas (eg.., trolls, flame warriors, questioners, answerers, connectors, diplomats, etc...). That was actually quite useful for my job as it looks at motivations people have when they post comments and get engaged in online communities.