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A cartoon about Wikipedia from Friday reminds me to post a couple of Wikipedia-related 'toons, I've been hanging onto. The open content encyclopedia figures in a "Donation Derby" comic from "Cat and Girl," and this "User Friendly" comic comments incisively on Jimbo Wales's plans to produce a print version of Wikipedia for the developing world.

Today's "Diesel Sweeties" comic is typically tasteless, but its Wikipedia gag makes it worth posting here.

I am way overdue in posting this Onion story detailing a new versioning system for the U.S. constitution. Despite the flaws revealed in the article, this project would obviate discussions of judicial "Originalism."

Over on Many 2 Many, there's an older post about how an Esquire writer posted an article about Wikipedia to the site itself for participants to edit. The final product will be published in the print version of the magazine. It's an interesting little experiment, and I can't say that some of the results surprise me. Andrew Lih says, "Let’s just say it can be hard to get “neutral point of view” encyclopaedists to liven up their writing style."

It is interesting to think about using Wikipedia articles in print - since Wikipedia articles should be read as a dynamic text in constant flux, what happens when the text is frozen? Some articles are often frozen in order to curb vandalism or maintain a known-good version, and I remember reading that Jimmy Wales had planned a frozen CD-ROM version of the encyclopedia. Regardless, I wonder if as Wikipedia scales, it will become standard for articles to become frozen, and as new information surfaces or errors are caught, the article is temporarily thawed to make changes. In this scheme, only stubs and new articles will be open as a matter of course.

Jon Udell has a post that succinctly describes one of the things I find so fascinating about Wikipedia. "Wikipedia's greatest innovation is arguably the framework it provides to mediate the social construction of knowledge, advocate for neutrality, accommodate dispute, and offer a path to its negotiated resolution," he contends. If I were a librarian or a first-year composition teacher, I'm sure Wikipedia would give me fits, but reading the site as a text continuously under construction provides interesting insights into how people form facts, beliefs, and knowledge. It's a pity Wikipedia doesn't have a "how to read Wikipedia" page, but I think that would conflict with the tacit discourse of credibility that seems to surround the project.

Here's a Wiki created to document "The Politics of Open-Source Adoption." The project claims to create a "real-time history and analysis" of how open-source software projects are selected and deployed in various institutional contexts. Although this project is a little more oriented toward organizational studies than my research interests, the introduction makes a good point, explaining "Our project began with the observation that accounts of the F/OSS movement, to date, have been oriented mostly by the improbable fact of F/OSS’s existence." I agree that most academic work on open source software development focuses on how distributed volunteer project can mobilize and organize resources to create useful software.

In Wiki-related news, "Peanut Butter Wiki" is a new project that allows users to "Make a free, password protected wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich." I would probably explain it to another RTF student as "a Hotmail for Wikis," a hosted service for creating small-scale wikis. I can't think of anything worth Wiki-ing at the moment, but it might be interesting to create a class Wiki in one of my seminars when school starts back up.

On Wikipedia, I found a shot of Jürgen Habermas chatting it up with then-Cardinal Ratzinger. I'm not sure why I find this funny. Perhaps it's because I find Habermas' efforts at rehabilitating Enlightenment thought as conservative or at least neoliberal and seeing him with someone as odious as Pope Benedict XVI sort of seals the deal.

The introduction of this paper "Anarchy and Source Code..." has a passage that gave me pause:

I appreciate the point, but Stallman is certainly scruffy-looking and perhaps not the most grounded person you'll see. At least he didn't use Eric "Geeks with Guns" Raymond as an example

An interview with University of Oklahoma English professor Vince Leitch came in from one of my listservs this morning. I did my undergrad in English at OU, so I was interested in what kind of work faculty do up there. Reading the interview, I was a little surprised I didn't take a class with Leitch, since I graduated on a "Critical Theory/Cultural Texts" track the department offered at the time, and his interests are apparently in text-y kinds of theory.

One thing he says caught my attention, "Postmodern interdisciplines are generally housed in underfunded and nomadic programs or institutes, not departments." Reading that, I wondered, "Is media studies a 'postmodern interdiscipline'?" I'd argue that the media studies program where I'm pursuing a Ph.D. is underfunded, but it's certainly in an established department. He later lists media studies as an interdiscipline, along with usual suspects like women's studies, queer studies, and postcolonial studies.

Despite being in a dedicated media studies department, I do often feel that kind of interdisciplinary anxiety, feeling I don't quite fit in anywhere. As someone who primarily studies Internet media, it can be kind of frustrating working with people who mostly study television and film. (On the other hand, the film grad students often complain that we don't offer enough film studies classes, folding film into classes about larger theoretical topics.) And what people do study ICTs generally approach it from a social science perspective, while I'm more drawn to humanistic methods. I know myself well enough that I don't do well with a lot of structure, so I think I am happier working out how to approach my interests on my happy, but occasionally that anxiety creeps in, particularly when I think about finding a job.

I'm working on a term paper on Wikipedia and it's Countering Systemic Bias project. One of the sections I'm working on deals with the ideology that seems to pervade open-source software development as well as projects like Wikipedia, but I'm sort of at a loss of what to call it "Open Source Ideology" seems to make the most sense to people with a casual understanding of the issue, but because of the tensions between "Free Software" and "open source" partisans, it's not quite appropriate. From the point of view of Free Software advocates, "open source" means corporate co-optation of the development process, so it's probably not the best term to use.

I frankly don't like the GNU folks (I once got a tongue-lashing from Brad Kuhn of the Free Software Foundation back when I edited a newsletter called "Enterprise Linux") so I'm hesitant to use their language as well. I've seen the acronym "FOSS" for "Free/Open-Source Software,' but FOSS will make absolutely no sense to my prof or nearly anyone else in my media studies milieu. Besides, I think the word "open" best expresses the fundamental goals of Free Software, Creative Commons, Free Culture, and the like. I think I finally settle on something like "'Open' Ideology" or "Ideology of Openness" to describe what I'm taking about.

The American Studies department is hosting a grad student conference in the fall with the theme "Defining 'American' Values," and I'm going to submit an abstract about "The Ideology of Openness" - or whatever I wind up calling it - to the conference. I talked to one of the organizers, and she said that they're as interested in subcultural values as well as the dominant ideology, so I just need to come up with a name. What prompted me to post on this topic was the realization that I've never read Eric S. Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar cover-to-cover. I should probably sit down with this book before I start working on the abstract.

StreetTech points to a page of freely downloadable paper-based games while reminiscing about the good ol' days of paper gaming in the eighties and early ninties. One of the games that piqued my interest is Battle of Seattle, which is a simulation game about the N30 uprising. I suppose it isn't the first game to invoke the memory of Seattle; the N30-inspired video game State of Emergency came out a few years back.

The entry for Battle of Seattle pointed to a list of games called "Games for Hippies, Commies, Radicals and Subversives." I don't think the creators of the list are self-described radicals, considering the tone of the introduction. Moreover, one game, Bell-Bottomed Badassses on the Mean Streets of Funk, rehashes racist stereotypes from blaxploitation film. Many of the games on the list relate to drug use, which may appeal to some activists, and I might add that the computer game DopeWars is surprisingly fun. As a kid, I had one of the games on the list, Steve Jackson's classic Illuminati, which we discussed in Janet Staiger's "Historiography" class last semester. Maybe I'll be able to track it down the next time I'm at my parents' house; it seems like a game that media studies grad students could get into.

Growing up, these games could really take hold of my imagination, but I remember feeling disappointed actually playing the games. Game mechanics were often too complex, particularly for middle school boys, and one game I saved for months for, Outdoor Survival, was just plain boring. The art for Gammarauders had me fantasizing for days - I loved the heavily armored penguin - but I don't think I ever even played the game. It seemed like you needed more than two players to enjoy these games, and I seemed to socialize best in one-on-one settings. I've often joked that I lacked the social skills to play Dungeons and Dragons, and perhaps that is why I never became an Über Goober.

Vietnam Views is an interesting project in popular memory. It's a website that allows users to post their recollection of their experiences during the Vietnam War. I get the impression that the site is largely geared toward veterans and their families to record their memories of the conflict. The site uses folksonomic tags to categorize posts, and, as yet, there are not tags dealing with protest.

I just ran across a book dealing with popular memory and Vietnam, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam by Jerry Lembcke, which interrogates the "memory" of anti-war protesters spitting on soldiers returning from the war. Considering how frequently the right deploys this powerful image - it was presented as fact by one of my elementary school teachers - I would like to know the source of this memory. In a related paper, Lembcke writes:

So, it seems that the protesters weren't the ones doing the spitting. In the paper online, some of Lembcke's was unfamiliar and a little questionable, but I would like to read the book and look at the evidence he presents.

As a sort of counterpoint to the previous post, I thought I would point readers to Phillip Agre's "Networking on the Network," which is a guide for graduate students for using social networks on- and off-line to advance their scholarly careers. As a relatively green grad student, I found this piece to be quite helpful in understanding the power dynamics of the academy and the basic mechanics of research.

Here's yet another item that relates to my class about the construction of popular memory, this time from Bruce Sterling. According to a Reuters story, the Cambodian government has turned over adminstration of the"killing fields to a private company."

I suppose it might seem appropriate to have private enterprise manage a place that marks the genocidal brutality of a communist dictator, but if I was a family member of one of the 1.7 million people who died under Pol Pot, I would probably have strong feelings about the memorial turned into a tourist attraction.

I probably should have posted this sooner, since the registration deadline for the School of Journalism's International Symposium on Online Journalism is tomorrow. Dan Gillmor will be speaking at the keynote session Friday, which may draw a mess of blog types to the conference. I'm planning to check out a few of the panels in addtion to the keynote.

And to further clear out my backlog (backblog?) of items to post, here's a thought-provoking article from The San Antonio Current published in anticipation of the conference. On one hand, I'm posting it for sheer ego-stroking; the article asks "with an endowed Knight Chair in Journalism, and a renowned Radio, Television, and Film department, as well, it seems like a good place to look for the answer to the question, Can this profession be saved?"

Its always nice to hear that your program is "renowned," but the article's discussion of "alternative media" or what Clemencia Rodriguez calls "citizen media" gave me some surprises. The article has a pullquote from Bob Jensen, an outspoken activist professor in the J-School, that I didn't expect to see, "A lot of what's called indie media is not journalism. Journalism is an attempt by people who are independent of other institutions to understand and explain the world to people." Since Jensen is such an advocate of radical/progressive movements, this seemed uncharacteristically dismissive of grassroots media projects. One one hand, I would agree with him that "citizen's media" is not journalism, but I would contend that the institutional legitimization of a news organization largely makes journalism journalism. Since most news organizations (at least in the US) are supported by advertising dollars and are influenced by this industrial reality, I'm suspicious of how independent any media-maker can be.

I might conceptualize journalism in the context of the infogeek concept of the "reputation economy," where an earned or instutional reputation can give an individual's voice a degree of credibility in the culture. For example, I.F. Stone is regarded as a hero to many journalists and, today, most would regard him as a journalist. Yet, he self-published his newspaper worked from a particular subjectivity, so he wouldn't have cultural force of a newspaper to make his news "news." It was the reputation he earned (admittedly partially through some reporting for major newspapers) that gave him the credibility to reach an audience and affect their understanding of the world.

To return to Jensen's quote, I do wonder to what extent, the reporter used quotes that reassert the role of conventional journalism in our culture. As Barbie Zelizer points out in Covering the Body, much of the meaning-making journalists engage in is reasserting the cultural role of the journalist as objective expert.

I've started using CiteULike, a social bookmarks manager for academic research, to keep track of articles I find when I'm away from a printer and want to read later on. It has a really nice interface to ACM journals and some other, but, with most articles, you have to enter the bibliographic data by hand. If you're an EndNote user, it has an interface for dumping bibliographic data into the application.

You can see my own list of bookmarks here, but, as you'll notice, I haven't posted too many articles yet. What I've using for a few months is its folksonomic tags like "blog" and "Wikis," which you can subscribe to as an RSS feed.

With this post, I've finally created a "research" category for my blog for school-related posts that don't clearly fit into "meta-media" or "tech." I probably should have created the category a long time ago, and I may go back and recategorize some old entries.