Here comes the time of the year when Calls for Participation at conferences, workshops and seminars circulate around and you don’t know where to submit or where to go while the deadlines are approaching. It’s especially hectic if you’re conducting research on your own, and invited to be a Program Committee or/and a reviewer at some event or publication (Internet scholars know what I’m talking about).

With the tradition of the last year’s workshop Making Sense of Microposts or #MSM11, this year the big World Wide Web 2012 or WWW12 conference, is happening in April in Lyon, France. The official keynote speakers are announced,  and we can expect an interesting forum for researchers and practitioners in Web technologies to discuss and exchange positions on current and emergent Web topics.

This year, I’m again in the Programme Committee at one of the workshops: #MSM12 or Making Sense of Microposts, so I encourage you to submit your papers, findings, and demos – I’m looking forward to see you this spring in France.  Below is the rationale for the workshop.

With the appearance and expansion of Twitter, Facebook Like, Foursquare, and similar low-effort publishing services, the effort required to participate on the Web is getting lower and lower. Enormous quantities of small user input are being piped into the data streams of the Web, leading to a rate of growth which has never been witnessed before. We refer to such small user inputs as Microposts, these can range from ‘checkin’ at a location on a geo-social networking site – allowing users to inform their friends of their current location – through to a status update on a social networking platform. The production of such masses of data, combined with the disparate and heterogeneous nature of the topics which Microposts refer to, requires new techniques to glean knowledge from them and provide useful services and applications sitting atop the amalgamation of this data.

This workshop: “Making Sense of Microposts” (MSM), will cover the topics of: information extraction and leveraging of semantics from Microposts; making use of Microposts’ semantics; and social studies related to Microposts that could help build appealing new systems based on this type of data. The workshop has two main points of difference from existing Social Semantic Web workshops which partially treat Microposts: (a) the interdisciplinary nature and interest to bring together the Social Sciences and Semantic Web research; (b) the focus on Microposts’ usage in making appealing tools for Web users and showing how the Semantic Web makes a difference in those applications. One of the main goals of MSM is to bring together the researchers from various disciplines treating the question of Microposts from different angles. We are particularly interested in submissions describing theories from the Social Sciences related to the creation and potential usage of Microposts that could inspire the creation of data structures, ontologies and finally interfaces that make advanced use of Microposts. We also envisage submissions that describe the application of Semantic Web technologies, either in enabling the inference of new facts, or the gleaning and enriching of knowledge from collections of such data.”

I wrote an article at the Scientific American blog yesterday highlighting digital divides – or digital inequalities, if you prefer – from other perspectives, pointing out that these digital divides go far beyond pure infrastructure issues and need to become a key focus of engagement for profit and nonprofit organizations as they continue their missions to develop programs for social and digital inclusion.

Everyone’s talking about internet access: from European media to US media, stressing connectivity issues that merely compounding existing social inequalities as “new digital divides”, as if they are something new in the networked society. They are not.

According to the available measures, the selected indicators (such as gender, income, occupation, online experience, internet penetration, type of internet connection, etc.) are significantly related to the levels of (one’s country) per capita GDP, literacies, education, level of democratization, etc.

In Europe, Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Commission) conduct surveys and publish reports on Internet use (data I used for my research and other International reports and stats), whilst the EU’s Digital Agenda for Europe strategy make and initiate action plans for taking care of the information society in Europe.

As I wrote, the notion of being social on the Internet is constantly evolving since we are connected not only via computers but also via mobile phones or handheld devices. The web is getting more powerful and social: new messaging services emerge each month; streamed media is becoming real even for the non-technical consumer; Google reshapes its services like a child rearranging building blocks; new ideas in federated rather than centralized systems are being explored, and more. The frequent change in layouts, privacy settings and interaction tools indicate that online dynamics require users to possess new classes of knowledge and skills if they are to adapt to such major changes on Facebook, Google, Twitter and other places in order to navigate and socialize online.

Governments are struck by internet access and computers on the top level but don’t consider other factors important to decreasing already widening digital inequalities. But in the last 24 hrs I’ve received enormous amounts of feedback, with emails, comments, replies and reactions from the readers, twitterers (those following at @DanicaR), software engineers, education and e-learning specialists, media and policy makers, and comments from people in the Information-Communication Technologies. I’m grateful for your feedback as as I think I’ve hit a hot spot to which everyone in the Internet industry and policy sectors has to pay attention. It is a very interesting topic but also a complex one, and it will be a burning subject in the years to come as it influences all areas in the Information Networked Society.

Also take a look at a post from the Computer World. This is a very interesting reaction on my SciAm article by Simon Phipps who also gave some practical examples of digital inequalities/divides that illustrated how broad the categories at hand actually are. They include: teaching children and adults to use “transferrable concepts and skills using a variety of open source software; insisting that public data needs to be paid for because some companies might profit from it, with the result that only companies who can profit from it can use it; privacy controls which pretend that “privacy” is a synonym for “keeping secrets”, rather than “the ability to assert control over a social situation” as one researcher insightfully observes”, etc.

Governments worldwide must create more efficient strategies and programs to overcome such inequalities and not just provide techno-infrastructure. They can do this by creating, developing and fostering knowledge societies in order to decrease the existing divides, and also by cultivating communities of practice and emphasizing over and over that learning (formal, non formal, life-long) is social and by engaging and interacting on social networks and deploying social media services. Of course, in the future we need to get more concrete on those skills online, as well as the behaviours through which they are expressed. We also need to create strategies and implementation plans for how they can be cultivated and developed. I think here foremost of the communication skills, literacy, participatory, critical skills, that are enabling us to socialize, network, learn, and collaborate.

Feel free to comment on the types of digital divide and inequalities you have noticed or experienced lately. Your observations and thoughts are welcomed – this is going much further than I expected!

Finally, news of my own progress. A book chapter I wrote should be published next year I hope. Meanwhile, my dissertation has entered the final phase of qualitative research and writing up. Now more than ever I am ready for new engagements and collaborations, projects and initiatives in the upcoming year – 2012. Feel free to email me if you are interested in working/collaborating with me – or indeed if your company needs me! Wishing you the very best for the holidays!

Photo credits: mimax

This is a post on what I was working on in the last few weeks, writing a book chapter for the great edition on the Internet and digital inequalities in International perspective including International contributors, and submitting some other papers on social networks and communication dynamics online.

Since many of you asked me on Twitter, Facebook, email, Skype what the book chapter is about – I just wanted to share with you just a piece of it (the book is supposed to be published next year). It is individual work that is the result of several years of experience, observing, recent talking and writing on different kinds of digital and social divides, social media and communication practices present on the Internet, and recently measured by quantiative and qualitative research of mine. In short my focus for this book was on Internet and social media in European perspective – Balkan countries, and Serbia in particular. My manuscript is theoretically grounded on social theories developed by the classical sociologists like Max Weber, Giddens, Meyorwitz and I applied them to the issues of Internet inequality. Weber’s stratification theory is grounded in the core perspective on inequality in my case, where I provided a concise interpretation of sociology’s theoretical perspective.

In addition to the classical sociological perspectives, I also observed inequalities from a communication theories point of view and computer-mediated communication (CMC). I  explored communication practices and possibilities that are present on the Internet (from interaction to collaboration).  With this research, I offered an understanding of social inequality in the hyper-connected information-driven globally networked world and I focused on South Eastern Europe (SEE) as it was interesting for me to observe countries in transition, where the political, economic and social turbulence of the nineties of the previous century have influenced its culture and ethical values, as well as the development of the ICTs and the creation of an online public sphere (Radovanovic, 2010). The observations and findings do not differ much from other European/SEE countries, very similar dynamics have been found.

However, I have examined the paradox of how moving beyond digital divides in the context of the technological infrastructure and Internet access that would permit us to tackle other existing problems such as digital inequalities (digital literacies, critical thinking skills/crap detector to navigate and evaluate data online, information/knowledge management and sharing, networking/notworking, etc.)  in order to explore the differences in how  people use the Internet not just in their everyday lives, but also for learning, communication and collaborative purposes. In doing so, I have used statistical data, national and international reports analysis, trying to fill the gap in the existing reports and data, using sources not used before, and presenting some empirical evidence that cannot be found in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) or  Statistical Office of The Republic of Serbia (SORS) documents.

I have presented some of the findings from research, web studies, online surveys and interviews, and I have raised some important questions and shed light on current issues to be solved in the future. A colleague from History and Social sciences department at the University of Oxford has helped me with theoretical framework, and I hope that my modest contribution in theory and practice will help Internet practitioners and governments in the future to design new strategies and policies that will overcome the issues I’ve been addressing.

I am more than pleased to talk and write more about this and other social media/Internet related topics in the future, and I’m currently open for collaborations and co-authorships for 2012 – both in practice and research. Feel free to contact me via email. Next month I’m advising Civic Society representatives as Social Media Consultant and participating in a very interesting TechCamp in Euro-zone, so I’ll write about it more in the upcoming posts.

When I’m not exploring social media, writing, researching, consulting, travelling, creating photography and else, I’m curious about other things that are interconnected with Information-Communication technologies. This is my first text for the Scientific American blog on robots and new technologies. From the Scientific American blog:

My first experience with robots was through popular culture and literature when I was a little girl. I was fascinated with the first computers, space and robots:  Star wars and R2D2 (first indication of my geekiness), watching many times and dreaming of Blade runner, reading short stories by I.Asimov. Later on, during college, courses on information systems, cybernetics caught my attention, from the cybernetic communication models to cybernetic organisms being described as cyborgs and the larger networks of communication. I was interested in techno-science and feminist-cyborg studies of Donna Haraway and S.Turkle’s cyber-analysis of the robots sociability, her studies on intimate bonds we form with our artifacts (robots and computers),  and how they shape who we are. Finally, with the Internet expansion my interests switched to Information and communication technologies and Computer-Mediated Communication, networked  and learning systems.

Then, last December at TED Women I’ve reached a  “robotic moment” watching a roboticist from MIT, Cynthia Breazeal, who talked about robots in communication technologies: mobile, expressive, performing collaborative tasks, and socially engaging, something that interconnected with my internet studies and research on communication in different contexts.

People interact with robots identically as with their computers. They trust in them and they are emotionally engaged. To find out more about the possibilities of robots and their proliferation in society (in learning, medicine, space, everyday life) as well as the European robotic scene, I was talking with researchers in Cognitive Robotics Sasa Bodiroza and his colleague Guido Schillaci from the Cognitive Robotics Department at the University of Humboldt in Berlin.

More at The Scientific American.

I would like to inform you that Call for papers for the workshop Making Sense of Microposts (MSM) at the Extended Semantic Web conference 2011 is announced. The workshop is interdiscipinary and gathers academics and professionals from the Semantic Web technologies and Social/Web Science studies. Also, have in mind that we will have a best paper award. (I’m on the Steering committee.)

Information about the topics of interest, submissions, and important dates could be found on the MSM web page.

“Making Sense of Microposts” (MSM), will cover the topics of: information extraction and leveraging of semantics from Microposts; making use of Microposts’ semantics; and social studies related to Microposts that could help build appealing new systems based on this type of data. The workshop has two main points of difference from existing Social Semantic Web workshops which partially treat Microposts: (a) the interdisciplinary nature and interest to bring together the Social Sciences and Semantic Web research; (b) the focus on Microposts’ usage in making appealing tools for Web users and showing how the Semantic Web makes a difference in those applications. One of the main goals of MSM is to bring together the researchers from various disciplines treating the question of Microposts from different angles. We are particularly interested in submissions describing theories from the Social Sciences related to the creation and potential usage of Microposts that could inspire the creation of data structures, ontologies and finally interfaces that make advanced use of Microposts. We also envisage submissions that describe the application of Semantic Web technologies, either in enabling the inference of new facts, or the gleaning and enriching of knowledge from collections of such data.

Do you remember the stories when computer engineer advices you to store all the important files on the partition D, and the partition C is for the Program files? Well, forget about it. The hard drive on my laptop is dead. In a seconds. No data saved. On both partitions. “But HOW?”, my friend screamed out this morning.

I have been using laptop computers for over a decade. Simply, my dynamic life style, frequent travels and the change of living and working places since the end of the 90′s determined that I will be using laptops. I had them many and experienced different malfunctions, software errors, but never so far had any major problems with hard discs, major enough to have complete crash and lost of data. I heard that  such situations usually happen on weekends when technicians are not working. Now I believe in that.

Yesterday morning I had this message on the screen: PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable. PXE-M0F: Existing Broadcom PXE ROM. I couldn’t start up the system, manipulate HDD from BIOS, find out what happened since I have relatively new laptop that is known for the excellent performance, durability, features. I tweeted out and facebooked on my ac.account the news and asked for help. I got some assumptions. Today, someone who happen to be computer engineer tried to boot my laptop from bios using Linux/Ubuntu, but failed. BIOS showed zero hard drive. Our fear became the worst case scenario that happened in really not desirable time in the project flow.

I haven’t back-up data in the last 25 days, at least. I haven’t saved my important files in the Dropbox either. I haven’t used the USB flash to back up my current work and projects I am working on, now. I lost them all in the seconds. We went to the computer service and the official technician immediately got me back in their working offices, opened the laptop, tested the hard drive on something few times, detected and announced it is dead. No help. No data extract. Nothing. They had to replace it with new one. I couldn’t say I was upset as much as I was shocked with the fact it actually happened without the reason and the fact that I am a good user, have the great laptop, and good life karma. We don’t know why did it happen. Neither the technician. He said in his twenty years of fixing computers sometimes things happen without the reason. In between what have happened today, I tweeted mostly and many of you have contacted me, and called me, even long distance. I am appreciating any of reaction of yours, kind words, support and help. That matters.

What I have lost is all data I’ve been working in the last 3, 4 weeks on the design of projects’ protocol, then research recent doc’s, e-Articles (that I can resume though). I also lost the TREE design on the mindmap, app files, all the relevant bookmarks (over 24 000!) for work and research that I will never be able to find or resume, many GB’s of photography (only 1/50  you can see on Flickr), over 300 GB of music (those around me know that music is “must” when I work), etc. I have less than 90 hrs to send the relevant documents before the deadline and I am writing this blog post while I download simultaneously eleven programs and services I may need, that I can think of at the moment, as I lost also the list of the existing programs in the previous life of this laptop.  I don’t even think about emails I lost in Thunderbird (please if anyone knows how to / if possible/ to bring back all the emails from different accounts, even those non existing, email me).  Some of you suggested there are disk doctors who can extract data, but I assume it costs a lot, and my technician told me that probably folks from Taiwan, who manufactured HDD, could retrieve the data.

But then, I believe that this event and data crash, and the new HDD will lead to newer and better things, more inspiring thoughts and productive ideas for the current and future projects. I perceive it as some kind of wonderful test. Test of the machine and test in life, and the relations with others. I didn’t tell you that I was writing a lot in my Moleskine notebooks in the last 24hrs. And there is more hard work for me in the next few hours. Nothing is lost, everything is on breathe and reboot.

My dear friend Simon Baddeley just sent me this quote that I will end my machine/data rumbling with:

“Sir Isaac Newton had on his table a pile of papers upon which were written calculations that had taken him twenty years to make. One evening, he left the room for a few minutes, and when he came back he found that his little dog “Diamond” had overturned a candle and set fire to the precious papers, of which nothing was left but a heap of ashes.
““O Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest the damage thou hast done”.

Updated: I got Serendipity moment today. The technician “fixed”, by good chance, my, as I thought previously broken touch pad, by simply unlocking it with two keys. Goodness me, I spent months at OUCS, with Oxford engineers who couldn’t solve the mystery of not working touch pad advising to buy wifi mouse as the procedure of hardware touch pad fixing would last a month or two. In less than two hours, technician du jour showed me how it works now. Oi!

“Open Access” to information [and knowledge, D.R.]– the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

I have been writing earlier about the Open Access movement and its importance for the science, research and technology, as being involved in the several Open Access projects since 2005.  This year’s Open Access Week, October 18 – 24, is dedicated to the collaboration and participation through a broad range of initiatives around the globe, including many universities, research institutes, digital repositories, online databases, and other initiatives that support Open Access.

It is very important that the academic and research community continue to learn about the benefits of Open Access, since many electronic resources relevant to the education are still under locked archives, databases, and numerous valuable material stays behind the iron gates. Institutions, scholars, researchers, educators, librarians are encouraged to share what they’ve learned with peers, share their production,  and to inspire wider participation in making Open Access a new norm in research, technology, scholarship.

I’ve collected a short list of links to digital repositories, online databases with various e-resources, thesis, articles, papers. Feel free to include your list or share some interesting Open access project.

Does it matter to you? And how?

- JISC (brings advice on implementing OA to the universities and research institutions)

-OhioLINK Electronic Thesis and Dissertation website

- read at PLoSONE how Open Access increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research

-OpenThesis – Open Access repository of dissertations

-Collection of videos on Open Access week offical site

- SpringerOpen, open access for authors in all disciplines

- The London School of Economics. LSE Research Online

-The SOAP project

-Creative Commons and Open Access