SIAT Grad Student Presents Social Networking Application for Humanities Researchers

posted: october 1. 2008

MA candidate Johnny Rodgers, a new member of Dr. Diane Gromala's BioMedia Lab at the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at SFU, has been developing a social networking tool as a means to investigate the application of modern web trends and social networking to the realm of research and collaboration among humanities researchers.

Since the early part of this decade, social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr and del.icio.us have thoroughly transformed the way many people, from various demographic groups, connect with and share information and media online. For several years, the nature of online communication patterns, and their offline impacts, has been dramatically shaped by this emerging paradigm of social objects and their relationships to people. The staggering statistics from these and other popular services help to illustrate their widespread influence: over 2 billion photos have been shared on Flickr [Flickr Blog], and over 80 million active Facebook users make it the 6th-most trafficked site on the web [Facebook Statistics, 2008].

Much of the impact of these phenomena has been related to sharing information and assets about our personal lives (such as sharing photos). However, there is also the potential for social networking practices to be applied in a professional context. Humanities researchers have maintained traditional methods of research and
collaboration without fully taking advantage of this user-oriented paradigm, which sees media objects as intrinsically connected to the people who produce, consume, and share them.

The Digital Texts 2.0 project (http://dtext2.org/) is an ongoing attempt to better understand web-based social networking and how it might be adapted to benefit the ways in which humanities scholars interact with electronic texts, with the potential of transforming them as thoroughly as social networking has transformed other aspects of human interaction. In its current form, the project is a Facebook application open to all members interested in new ways of interacting with and sharing electronic texts.

In October, Johnny will present his paper, "Digital Texts 2.0: Towards Social Networking of Texts" alongside Dr. Stéfan Sinclair of McMaster University at CaSTA (Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis) at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

View the project abstract (PDF)

View the project website