Digital Contexts: Studies of Online Research and Citation

Introduction

section one
Spaces for Digital Scholarship: Creating, Using, and Improving

section two
Teaching, Training, Investigating: Understanding Student Research Behaviors

section three
Beyond the Academy: Understanding Digital Research Behaviors

SECTION THREE
Researching Activity on the World Wide Web

The articles in this final section move beyond university research settings. They take into account the larger social implications of online research and citation practices, arguing that digital spaces open up possibilities for interaction and communication in new ways that affect research and knowledge construction. In the first article in this section, Amanda Spink and Bernard Jansen expand their continuing work to examine public searching of the Web and to provide an overview of trends in how people use the internet for both scholarly and “everyday” research practices. Next, Mary Karcher discusses how the use of social software, and the process of tagging can be used to create moments of association and juxtaposition that are critical to creative research activities. The next two articles in this section are connected to Karcher’s piece, in that they both examine how actual use of digital search spaces, software, and tools may be said to create, not just specific kinds of research practices, but specific ways of making knowledge that are particularly situated within and connected to digital searching. Susan Paasonen discusses the ways that internet searching affects scholarly identities, disciplinary knowledge practices, and processes of memory and erasure that are unique to digital spaces. Denise Rall discusses how the acquisition of information in digital spaces constitutes a kind of truth claim, which can be examined both for its unique properties and for its connections to knowledge-making practices in various disciplinary fields. In the final chapter in this section, Megan Kelly offers an important look at the blending of research spaces (both physical and digital) that is occurring as the result of renovations to the Seattle Public Library system, including stronger and more intimate connections between the public and university library systems.

ABSTRACT
In 1994 Gregory Ulmer asked “What will research be like in an electronic apparatus?”(Heuretics 32). A decade later we have the answer: Social software. Based on the digital logic of association and pattern recognition, Social software allows for alternative and unconventional categorizations. “Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories—for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result” (McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage 8). Because these categorizations can be juxtaposed through random association, the opportunity for “startling discoveries” is substantial. Social software will initiate new forms of reason based on a new relationship between technology, institutions and human subjects (Ulmer, Heuretics 93), and it will shift the grounds of research from proof to discovery.

Internet sites such as del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flikr, which are created around Social software, enable users to create their own databases of online information through the use of tagging, a process that involves categorizing the information with names and keywords that the individual user can define. These tags are then hyperlinked automatically to all the other sites and information that have been given the same tag by other users. What results is a vast network of web pages, photographs, articles, music, recipes, indeed anything whatsoever, all hyperlinked together and instantly retrievable. Among these online nodes and networks, can be found the seeds of invention and the ‘eureka moments’ that can come from random association and juxtaposition.

Because many of our current research practices are fixed in a specific print tradition, the benefits of a juxtaposed, associative system have not been fully explored. Those involved with CCC Online are experimenting with such software and are exploring the academic possibilities and research potential that can be opened up by utilizing digital ways of tagging and thinking. Their efforts, however, are only just a beginning. English studies need to engage in a rhetorical exploration and analysis of Social software so as to fully exploit the opportunities and advances such ways of thinking and researching can provide.

In my article I examine these types of Social software and demonstrate that they inspire new forms of reason, analysis and discovery. Specifically I examine the ways in which del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flikr extend classification systems far beyond those systems that are based on pre-established taxonomies. While the potential that is offered by this type of software must be acknowledged, I will also address some of the limitations inherent in this new method of classification. A rhetorical exploration of these systems, however, begins the process of identifying novel and innovative research methodologies which take full advantage of the new systems that have been specifically developed for arranging information in an online environment. Ultimately, it is clear that these types of Social software provide not only the chance for new forms of online research but also for new means of knowledge construction.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN
TITLE: Web Search Trends
AUTHORS: Amanda Spink, Professor of Information Technology, Queensland University of Technology, Australia; Bernard J. Jansen, Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, USA; Sherry Koshman, Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences of Pittsburgh, USA .

ABSTRACT
This article examines the public searching of the Web and provides an overview of trends in how people search the Web. The article reports selected findings from studies conducted from 1997 to 2005 using large-scale Web user data provided by commercial Web companies, including Excite, Ask Jeeves, AlltheWeb.com, Alta Vista, Vivisimo and Dogpile. These findings provide insights into current patterns of public Web searching, including how people structure their Web searches, what they search for, and search behavior in special topic areas. We include discussion of the following sub-topic areas: Web query characteristics, Web query reformulation, types of queries, results page viewing characteristics, Web search topics, and more complex Web search behaviors. Ongoing Web searching research is examining a number of large-scale Web query transaction logs. These studies, using large-scale log data, are showing some interesting trends and patterns in general Web searching and helping to answer some interesting questions about Web searching. The findings do provide a snapshot for comparison of public Web searching that can help improve Web search engines and services, and provide a greater understanding of Web search trends.

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CHAPTER TWELVE
TITLE: On Location and Amnesia: Doing Internet Research
AUTHOR: Susanna Paasonen, Assisstant Professor in Digital Culture, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

ABSTRACT
This chapter considers research and citation practices in Internet research from two intertwining perspectives. Firstly, it addresses the creation of Internet research as a field of investigation (although not necessarily a discipline) and ways in which this is reflected in referencing practices. The second strand of discussion concerns temporality and Internet research: the fast transformations in online technologies, the ephemeral and contingent nature of online materials, and their implications for scholarly practice. Bringing these two themes together, the chapter concludes with a discussion on the ethics of self-reflexivity and the need of making visible different disciplinary histories in the study of internet-based activity.

Internet research may have a brief history but it is nevertheless an important point of scholarly self-identification. In no more than a decade, anthologies, readers, special journal issues and syllabi have created a canon of key authors, texts and topics that people doing Internet research are assumed to be familiar with. A closer look at this literature makes evident the dominance—if not hegemony—of English language and North American research, the striking exclusion of several other continents from the creation of scholarly history as well as the dominance of some disciplines over others (cf. Mizielinska 2005.
A sense of disciplinary continuum is created centrally through citation practices: ways of acknowledging, drawing from, and engaging in critical dialogue with previous research, creating theoretical, methodological and conceptual background for one’s own investigations. This chapter argues for the importance of making visible various scholarly histories—in terms of disciplines, different languages, national and local contexts—in research and citation practices and thereby questioning the criteria of “core reading,” as it has currently been outlined. Such reflexive contextualization creates a more complex and diverse understanding of Internet research as practices that are simultaneously location-specific and networked.

Local (and interdisciplinary) histories of Internet research tend to be effaced in broad disciplinary overviews but they also have the power to question the analytical power of such overviews. Making contexts and histories visible is central also in the sense that the Internet tends to be defined by accelerated temporality. Nalini P. Kotamraju (1999) calls this “time compression” characteristic of the Internet as a medium: the Internet changes rapidly as applications and hardware are upgraded and memories of previous ones are effaced in the process. Electronic documents disappear, URL addresses and sites are in constant transformation. Notions such as “net years” aim to depict both the fast tempo of change and the overall accelerated tempo of online phenomena.

Effacing traces of the past, time compression creates a form of amnesia that is further complemented by the attempt of researchers to keep up with the changing medium (cf. Paasonen 2005). A different kind of amnesia is implicit in the selective ways of narrating the story of Internet research. Both forms of amnesia are problematic in terms of the understanding of the Internet—and Internet research—that they produce. As a form of contextualizing and making connections, citation practices are a means to counter amnesia and attaching oneself to debates and paradigms.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TITLE: Is there a Method in their Madness? Testing ‘truth claims’ against Search Engine Results.
AUTHOR: Denise N. Rall, School of Environmental Science and Management, Southern Cross University, Lismore Australia.

ABSTRACT:
What is a truth claim? A truth claim examines the relationship between the type of question or inquiry that researchers ask, and the evidence produced in response to that inquiry. This chapter suggests that search engine results form a type of truth claim, in that they produce a special relationship – a ‘truth claim’ – which examines links between the inquiry and the evidence that follows. This review of how evidence is acquired is part of a long philosophical tradition which has furthered our knowledge over the millennia. Further, there are various types of truth claims, i.e., epistemological, ontological. This means that claims to ‘truth’ depend on one’s starting point (Kirk & Van Vanhoozer, 1999, p.19-34). This chapter reads truth claims as methodological assumptions which impact on the types of inquiries and evidence produced by search engines. After outlining the unique properties that determine search engine results, comparisons can then be made to other research traditions, such as those found in science, social science, the law, and aesthetics.

REFERENCES
Kirk, J. Andrew, & Kevin J. Vanhoozer. 1999. To stake a claim: Mission and the Western crisis of knowledge. New York: Orbis Books.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
TITLE: Visualizing Literacy in Library Spaces and Interfaces: A Case Study of Seattle’s Public and Academic Libraries
AUTHORS: Megan Kelly, University of Washington

ABSTRACT:
In this paper, I tell part of the story of the “library buildings and their virtual counterparts” in Seattle. Focusing first on the renovation of the Seattle Public Library – which Jacobs calls the “the people’s university” (cited in Paton, 2004) – and then on the University of Washington (UW) Libraries, I track the ways libraries continue to change as physical and virtual spaces to accommodate users’ shifting relationship to information gathering and literacy. My research questions include: How does the architecture of library spaces and interfaces embody the role of information literacy in society and how do they reflect our relationship to this information? In analyzing the discourse of texts by and about libraries, I explore how the metaphor of the interface is used to characterize these information spaces. The library serves as the interface between the content of the library (that is, information) and the library users on two levels. First is the literal interface of the cataloging system. But the Central Library Building in Seattle shows how the library itself – its architecture and public spaces – is also an interface, positioning library users in relation to information. Finally, I examine how the UW Library system is redefining its relationship to undergraduate students and its role in literacy development in the information age.