News from the Berkman Center

Digital Shadows
August 13, 2008
People leave behind digital dossiers all the time.

The Citizen Media Law Project on Understanding Your Legal Risks When You Blog or Publish Online
August 05, 2008

Citizen Media Law Project Completes Launch of Online Guide to Media Law
July 29, 2008
Cambridge, MA – The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) announced today that it has completed the launch of its Citizen Media Legal Guide, located at http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide. The free guide, which is intended for use by bloggers, website operators, and other citizen media creators, focuses on the legal issues that non-traditional and traditional journalists are likely to encounter as they gather information and publish their work online.

The Library in the New Age
June 05, 2008
Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library, who helped advocate for open access at the University, has written an essay for the New York Review of Books on "what it means to be a library in the digital age"

Projects in the Berkman Center for Internet and Society

Berkman Center: Research

1. Center for Citizen Media

2. Publius Project

3. Media Re:public

Projects in the Cambridge-MIT Partnership Programme

1. Communications Research Network

The Cambridge-MIT institute recognised the importance of the communications sector to the UK economy. Realising that there was no single organisation acting as a forum for the industry as a whole in the UK, CMI created the Communications Research Network to bring the industry together with a focus on research and how the industry might evolve in the future. The network's research had two main themes: to better understand the value chain of the industry and explore roadmaps to possible futures; and to conceive and demonstrate unexpected and disruptive visions of the future. CRN helped to inform industry about the barriers at which to focus innovation, and to inform academics about the research that would have the greatest impact on industry

2. Intelligent Book

In order to improve the teaching of complex material, and make that material available more widely, a collaborative "Intelligent Book" is being jointly developed by the University of Cambridge and MIT. The Intelligent Book collects data from large numbers of people who read it on the Web, and it uses that data in a modelling system to assess and predict reader progress and provide multimedia information tailored to a given reader’s needs. Educational materials designed for the Intelligent Book will be developed and used to teach introductory electronics at MIT and Discrete Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

3. Internet Security Group

In the digital knowledge economy, as the value of information increases so does the importance of maintaining the security of that information. Business is becoming ever more dependent on electronic information exchange such as email and the internet, but with that dependency comes the danger of complacency. It is vital therefore that Business recognises not only the efficiency and productivity that electronic communication can deliver, but also the potential risks. We must stay alert and ask – what about security?

4. Smart Media - The Flexible Media Prototype Research Experiment

The Flexible Media Prototype Research Experiment brought together teams from industrial R&D, Creative Media Production Research, Academia and Creative Education. Together they forged a new media content form, new presentation formats for projects, and new tools for creating and exhibiting digital media stories and programmes.

Current projects in Oxford Internet Institute

PUBLICATIONS:

Dutton, W.H. and Helsper, E. (2007) Oxford Internet Survey 2007 Report: The Internet in Britain (Oxford Internet Institute).

Guerra, G.A., Zizzo, D.J., Dutton. W.H. and Peltu, M. (2003) Economics of trust in the information economy: issues of identity, privacy and security OII Research Report No. 1 .

Noam, E., Hay, D., Baye, M.R. and Morgan, J. (2003) The Internet: still wide open and competitive? OII Internet Issue Brief No. 1 .

Caldas, A., David, P.A. and Ormanidhi, O. (2005) Digital information network technologies, organisational performance and productivity Report for Cisco-funded project: 'Internet and productivity in public services: innovative pathways for e-government' (Oxford Internet Institute).

Birmingham, P. and Davies, C. (2005) Implementing broadband Internet in the classroom: key issues for research and practice OII Research Report No. 6 .

Nash, V., Dutton, W.H. and Peltu, M. (2004) Innovative pathways to the next level of e-learning OII Forum Discussion Paper No. 2 .

Schroeder, R., Caldas, A., Mesch, G. and Dutton, W. (2005) The World Wide Web of Science: Reconfiguring Access to Information Paper on the 'World Wide Web of Science' project, presented at the annual conference of The National Centre for e-Social Science in 2005, in the session 'Social Shaping of e-Research' .

Schroeder, R., Fry, J. and Virkar, S. (2006) The World Wide Web of Science and Global Expertise: Democratizing Access to Knowledge? Paper presented at the World Wide Web of Science Workshop at the OII in February 2006 .

Yorick Wilks (2006) What is the Semantic Web and what will it do for eScience? OII Research Report No. 12 .

Dutton, W.H. (2004) Social transformation in the information society WSIS Publication Series (UNESCO: Paris).

1. COMPANIONS

COMPANIONS aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual conversational 'Companion'.

PUBLICATIONS:

Benyon, D. and Mival, O. (2008) Landscaping Personification Technologies: from Interactions to Relationships.In: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008).

2. DIGITISED RESOURCES: A USAGE AND IMPACT STUDY

Are digital resources succeeding at reaching their intended users, or are they being missed because of poor information seeking skills among the target users? There are a number of challenges in assessing the use and impact of online digital resources: these include new methods, shifts in the way that people access resources, new audiences, and new forms of information-seeking behaviour among different audiences. The project combines quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure the impact of online scholarly resources.

3. NETWORKS FOR WEB SCIENCE

Web Science brings together computer scientists and engineers, social scientists and policy makers to study complex information systems as personified by the Web. In other words, Web Science is the study of decentralized information systems. Web Science encompasses science, engineering, social understanding and capacity building. The aim of this proposal is to establish networks of researchers from different technical and social science research disciplines to begin to develop a Web Science research agenda through the exchange of PhD students and collaborative workshops, the results of which will be disseminated through detailed review papers.

4. OXFORD INTERNET SURVEYS

Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS) research is designed to offer detailed insights into the influence of the Internet on everyday life in Britain.

Launched in 2003 by the Oxford Internet Institute, OxIS is an authoritative source of information about Internet access, use and attitudes. Some of the areas covered include: digital and social inclusion and exclusion; regulation and governance of the Internet; privacy, trust and risk concerns; social networking and entertainment; and online education.

5. E-LEARNING RESEARCH GROUP

The e-Learning Research group is concerned with a wide range of issues concerning teaching and learning in the digital age. It focuses on the role of new technologies in developing and revolutionising educational theory and practice in a variety of educational contexts in the 21st century.

6. Virtual communities of practice: the open source software community

This is developing and applying new automated data extraction techniques, quantitative methods of analysis and empirical findings about the organisation, governance and performance of the large Internet-connected communities that develop free and open source software, such as the Linux kernel, the Mozilla browser and the Apache Webserver. It is being undertaken by teams at Stanford University and partner institutions in the UK, France and the Netherlands

7. World Internet Project

The World Internet Project (WIP) is a major, international, collaborative project looking at the social, political and economic impact of the Internet and other new technologies. Conceived as the study of the Internet that should have been conducted of television in its early days, the WIP believes that the Internet's influence will ultimately be far greater than television.

8. World Wide Web of Humanities

The World Wide Web is enormous and is in constant flux, with more web content lost to time than is currently accessible via the live Web. The growing body of archived web material available to researchers is immensely valuable as a record of important aspects of modern society, but there is little, if any, supporting infrastructure, processes and trusted methods available to facilitate domain specific Internet research. Humanities researchers are expected to individually assemble research data and e-Research tools needed for analysis. This can be cost-prohibitive in terms of resources and time.

This project aims to begin to address this gap by establishing a framework for e-Humanities (also called Digital Humanities) research using available open source tools and technologies and archived web content to create novel research interfaces to the first of many, scholarly, e-Humanities web collections