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This page provides online resources
to assist users in carrying out web-based research on Indonesia and East Timor. Suggestions for additional links are always
welcome!
Edited by Elizabeth Coville (ecoville@gmail.com)
What's Up on the Web:
A fortnightly update on items of special interest to researchers on Indonesia
and East Timor
and accessible through links on this page.
# 29 -
Information, communication, people
Posted on July 16, 2007
No matter what the subject is, the way
information moves from the scholarly domain to the popular domain is worth
watching. Earlier this summer I asked a student to track some current news
stories in a certain sub field of anthropology as they moved from the pages
of scholarly journals to the pages, air waves, and net sites of various news
media, discussion groups, and blogs. What struck me in her findings was the
extent to which people misunderstand the information and jump to conclusions
not warranted by the facts. But, as she entitled her write-up "from
scholarly to popular -- and scholarly fights back," the net allows a new
dynamic. In thinking about these "stories," I was also struck by an
important feature -- that we can actually trace the way the discussion moves
and how it diverges rather than just seeing the final results of the
popularization. In the same way that footnotes, acknowledgments, and
sources cited allow one to
contextualize a scholarly article, so too the internet allows an observer to
follow the paths taken by information as it circulates in society.
And also this year I watched as a group of academics who have been
communicating on an "old-fashioned" listserv decided to start a team blog in
order to represent their sub field to the public at large. The shift to a
broader audience was interesting to watch: On the blog, writers dots their
'i's and cross their 't's, so to speak, and the result is greater clarity
for the uninitiated. It's noteworthy that this clarity is presented in an
informal, non-specialist style. I think there are some grad students out
there in cyberspace doing this sort of blogging, too. Three cheers for them.
A recent story on NPR entitled "Social
networking on the web grows up" caught my ear. One comment: on social
networking sites and blogs, there is an emphasis on building profiles and
presenting oneself to an audience who the writer does not know. People are
getting used to doing this and can write on blogs and social networking
sites for an audience of people who can't be assumed to share the writer's
premises and presuppositions.
On the net, how does one jump into the middle of a conversation that has
been ongoing for some time? How does one get up to speed, quickly? Maybe
that is what is daunting to some people. There is so much information out
there, where do we start, how do we sift? As with many things in life, we
look for help. Here
is an example of how one can get a quick tutorial in a new subject. From
here you can then go backward for ten messages by typing in the numbers down
to 7653 in descending order.
By way of summary, many of the features that are most interesting about the
web are old wine in new bottles: citing sources, footnoting, writing
acknowledgements; asking advice from someone who knows; presenting oneself
as a writer or reader or whatever to a world of unfamiliar folks. All those
things happen on the web, as they do in "real" life.
@ 2000 Antara Kita. Southeast Asian Studies
Program, Yamada House, Ohio University, Athens, OH
45701-2979, USA.
This site was last updated on
July 16,
2007
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