Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies

The  Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies is a useful hub for scholars and researchers interested in "questions emerging at the intersections of religion, the internet and new, social and mobile media" to meet.

Founded in 2010, the site includes an extensive (500-plus items) bibliography resting heavily on the convenient shoulders of Google Scholar as well as a Scholars Index of around 200 members from around the world. The Index is comprised of the list of members with individual links to brief bio and affiliation info. Expertise tags are liberally applied to these profiles. Art Bamford's expertise lies with media ecology, orality, literacy, music recording technology, music production technology, and Stevie Wonder. Good stuff. 

A nice feature is the News section which is updated on a regular basis. I notice there is a submission today.  The submission before that was 4 days previous and that seems to be about the pace.  The most recent stories feature a gospel app development contest being encouraged by the Mormon Church, a columnist from the Times-Gazette.com calling the Bible "God's Facebook," and a 3-D game developed by the American Bible Society. It looks like these news items are intended to be crowd-sourced but it's pretty much the same few folks posting.

The site is clean and attractive, pushing all the latest related books, even jobs in the field.  The blog section offers more extended (compared to the posts in News) reflections on current research, but these articles are still quite brief. The site is informative and happening, but not time-consuming, especially for lurkers.

That's my little tour of the site. Did I mention it's "located" at Texas A&M University where it was launched with the help of their Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture.

IJoC's Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age

From the latest ICA newsletter: The International Journal of Communication (IJoC) is pleased to announce the publication ([April 11, 2011] of a Special Section, "Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age," coedited by Manuel Castells, Peter Monge, and Noshir Contractor. Human communication networks, like those typically found in the network society, are highly complex and relationally rich in that they often connect different types of objects with multiple types of relations. This special section presents seven articles that explore the implications of this network multidimensionality. The articles cover a broad array of issues including network sociomateriality, network power, network exclusion, the semantic web, network fuzziness, and network spheres. The theoretical implications of network multidimensionality are explored and a number of relevant social examples are examined including the degrees of freedom in WikiLeaks networks, the kinds of power in societal networks, and the network changes that occur when technologies and other sociomaterial objects are brought inside the network. The keynote article by Bruno Latour argues that network multidimensionality eradicates the long-standing theoretical distinction between individual and society. Collectively, these papers provide a rich compendium of ideas and arguments on the theoretical and practical implications of network multidimensionality.

Introducing The Communication Initiative Network

The Communication Initiative Network (The CI) is an portal for the exchange of information between "the people and organizations engaged in or supporting communication as a fundamental strategy for economic and social development and change...This process is supported by web-based resources of summarized information and several electronic publications, as well as online research, review, and discussion platforms providing insight into communication for development experiences.

Currently, The CI Network process includes: The Communication Initiative: Global - in English, with a worldwide overview and focus; La Iniciativa de Comunicacion: Latin America - in Spanish, with a worldwide overview and focus on the Latin American experience and context; and, Soul Beat Africa - in English, with a focus on the African experience and context."

The site also includes a Policy Blogs section and Development Networks for such topics as Journalism in Crisis, Haiti, Communication and Climate Change, Polio Communication Consultation Group, and HIV/AIDS Strategy.

The Drum Beat, a weekly electronic magazine features new summarized information from the site.

The ASC community should be proud to know that The Annenberg School has become an associative member of "The CI." Here's hoping more academic institutions join us. Anyone interested in global communication, development communication or health communication beyond our shores should find something useful at this site.

ICA Fellows Book Award Winner: The Control Revolution

As you may have already heard in San Francisco, James R. Beniger's The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Harvard University Press, 1986) won the International Communication Association Fellows Book Award which recognizes books that "have made a substantial contribution to the scholarship of the communication field, as well as the broader rubric of the social sciences, and have stood some test of time." (August 2007, ICA Newsletter).

You can check out this cross-disciplinary synthesis on the origins and meaning of the Information Society from either the Annenberg or Van Pelt Library or access the online version.

The ICA award has not been long in existence. Here is the list so far:

2007 - James R Beniger, U of Southern California
The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society
Published in 1986 by Harvard U Press

2004 - Klaus Krippendorff, U of Pennsylvania
Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology
Published in 2004 by Sage

2002 - James Bradac (Deceased), U of California - Santa Barbara
Charles R. Berger, U of California - Davis
Language and Social Knowledge: Uncertainty in Interpersonal Relations
Published in 2002 by E. Arnold

2000 - Everett M. Rogers (Deceased), U of New Mexico
Diffusion of Innovations

Network visualization site

Visualcomplexity.com is a resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods across a series of disciplines as diverse as biology, social networks or the World Wide Web. The site displays hundreds of projects that "either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject." Whatever one's level of understanding of the workings of the software used in these projects or of the depicted networks themselves, the displays are aesthetically stunning.

For more information about information visualization the site includes a page of resource links to related sites, including SPIDER: Social Psychology of Information Diffusion--Educational Resources and An Atlas of Cyberspaces, (maps and graphic representations of the geographies of the Internet).