The Facebook Project

Summer 2009: Return to Social Media

06.07.2009 @ 12:28 AM by Jeff Ginger

I think it's been just about every week that I've had a young aspiring graduate student contact me asking for advice on how to best go about researching something on Facebook. It's trendy, what can we say. But there's also a lot of opportunity in the folds of this well-worn social network. My greatest suggestion to those seeking guidance is this: get to know your social research methods. No I'm not just talking about how to conduct a good interview or run a statistics test. The makings for good research actually form before all of this. Often it's really easy to rush into a project without really fully thinking about why you wish to study something and what ultimate effects or contributions your research will have. Rarely are graduate students told that they should pick a data-collection method not just on account of its validity or generalizability but also based on how well it fits their personality, resources or available time. Also remember it's okay to mess up. Students are pressured to perform so much in graduate school that they often believe the stakes for admitting a mistake are higher than they might really be. It's better to acknowledge drawbacks and limitations (and learn from them!) than to present faulty research. You might start a project with surveys about behaviors and eventually come to realize you really wanted to capture meanings with interviews - that's okay. You're here to learn. Remember that and be confident.

Okay, enough dispensing wisdom, I'm like what, 25 years old? Figured it was time for a summer update. I get to teach a social media class next year! This means I'll probably start working with this site a bit more, but we'll see. Other than this I only have two major items of note:

I had the privilege of giving a presentation on Facebook and ubiquitous learning at the HASTAC conference at UIUC this past spring. You can see the PowerPoint or better yet read the paper (starts on page 7).

It's summer. It's my last 'break' summer before I hit the remainder of my classes, area exams and the loss of most of my free time. Now's perhaps the best opportunity to talk to me if you have ideas or questions about Facebook!

Spring 2009: Transitions

02.20.2009 @ 5:00 PM by Jeff Ginger

Over the past couple of weeks I've received a surge of emails from various researchers interested in Facebook. Somebody important must have posted this site somewhere (AOIR?), because I've been out of the game for a bit. I figured it was about time for an update!

People

Jeff Ginger - I've found my way to a new area of study in Community Informatics but still maintain some interest with Facebook. I've come to realize just how handy of a resource this place can be for aspiring graduate students, so I've kept it up. Feel free to continue sending me questions related to Facebook research, if nothing else I can offer connections, perspectives and advice. I've managed to meet some of the big names (Cliff Lampe, Nicole Ellison, danah boyd, Fred Stutzman) and tell them about the site, so it's now officially "on the radar." I'm also happy to host papers and materials for open access here.

Jenny Ryan - Jenny Ryan is currently living in New York City, and is about to begin a new internship with the Berkman Center's Media Cloud project. Yet another unfortunate victim of our sinking economy, she's had ample free time to work on her first publications- a chapter on memorialization and commemoration on Facebook for a Stanford collection entitled The Psychology of Facebook, and another chapter on neotribalism and psytrance on Tribe.net for a collection entitled Psytrance: Local Scenes and Global Culture. Available for freelance social media consulting, she is also working on turning her MA thesis, The Virtual Campfire, into a book. While awaiting responses from several Ph.D programs, she has been channeling her energies into Webnographers, a wiki for resources pertaining to virtual ethnography- and would love for you to contribute!

Eric Gilbert - is a bit of a celebrity in HCI these days. He's managed to snag two Best Paper awards at CHI, and some of us are considering imposing term limits. He just pushed out a paper on measuring strength of ties (social capital) with the use of Facebook, which is pretty swank. Lately Eric and Jeff have been kicking around papers on HCI and CSCW in a weekly reading group, but with only a little emphasis on Facebook.

Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch - is freaking out over comps questions and her dissertation and hasn't been worrying too much about Facebook research recently.

Additions

New Papers - Kelin Kitchener and Matthew J. Kushin have added a paper exploring political discourse on Facebook. Alex Lambert and Stephen Bezek have a paper on enabling secure email with social networking.

Webnographers - Jenny now has a Webnographers wiki, dedicated to organizating the literature, journals, academic programs, people and other online resources that provide, in effect, a cyberanthropologist's toolkit. This is helpful for anyone interested in digital ethnography.

Connecting Researchers - I've added a section to the wiki listing most of the researchers I've come in contact with that have something to do with Facebook. Use this as a place

The Wiki - Hasn't really taken off, and the Resource Pool is badly in need of an update. If you check it out for sources, help to add more.

Jeff's Masters Paper Anthology - I plan to release a different (shorter!) version of my Masters Paper that overviews most of the research I've done to date on Facebook. This should come out in the next few weeks, if I can stay on track.

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