Author Archives: Phillips Academy

Research Confidential and Surveying Bloggers

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In our research methods seminar this evening at the Berkman Center, we got into a spirited conversation about the challenges of surveying bloggers.  In this seminar, we’ve been working primarily from a text called Research Confidential, edited by Eszter Hargittai (who happens to be my co-teacher in this experimental class, taught concurrently, and by video-conference, between Northwestern and Harvard). The book is a great jumping-off point for conversations about problems in research methods.

The two chapters we’ve read for this week were both excellent: Gina Walejko’s “Online Survey: Instant Publication, Instant Mistake, All of the Above” and Dmitri Williams and Li Xiong’s “Herding Cats Online: Real Studies of Virtual Communities.”  Both chapters are compelling (as are the others that we’ve read for this course).  They tell useful stories about specific research projects that the authors conducted related to populations active online.  In support of our discussion about surveys in class, these two chapters tee up many of the issues that we ought to have raised in this conversation.  Gina also came to class to discuss her chapter with us, which was amazing.  (Come to think of it, I would also have liked to have met the two authors of the second chapter; they wrote some truly funny lines into the otherwise very serious text.)

In a previous class, we started with Eszter’s Introductory chapter, “Doing Empirical Social Science Research,” as well as Christian Sandvig’s “How Technical is Technology Research? Acquiring and Deploying Technical Knowledge in Social Research Projects.”  These two chapters were a terrific way to start the course; I’d recommend the pairing of the two as a possible starting point for getting into the book, even though they’re not presented in that order (with no disrespect meant for those who chose the chapter order in the book itself!).

While many of Research Confidential’s chapters bear on the special problems prompted by use of the Internet and the special opportunities that Internet-related methods present, the book strikes me as very useful read for anyone conducting research in today’s world.  I strongly recommend it.  The mode of the book renders the text very accessible and readable: unlike most methods textbooks, this book is a series of narratives by young researchers about their experiences in approaching research problems, some of them related to the Internet and others not so technical in nature.  As a researcher, I learned a great deal; as a reader, I thoroughly enjoyed the book’s stories.

Harvard Library Report

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Over the past nine months or so, a group of us have worked on a Harvard-wide Task Force to consider our library systems.  The report is being issued today by Harvard’s Provost, Steven E. Hyman, who chaired our Task Force.  Over the next year-plus, we will be working to implement changes in five key areas of the Harvard University library system.

Harvard is fortunate to have one of the great library systems in the world as a crown jewel.  The library system plays a central role in the intellectual life of our community, both as physical spaces and as resources of teaching and scholarship.  The 1200 or so library staff at Harvard, as I’ve come to learn, are simply extraordinary in terms of breadth and depth of talent.   But we can do more with what we have, and we can better position ourselves for the future — a future that will be “digital-plus” — than we are today.

As Provost Hyman wrote about the report:

“The report of the Task Force on University Libraries is a very thoughtful document about an extraordinary system. But it is also a stark rendering of a structure in need of reform. Our collections are superlative, and our knowledgeable library staff are central to the success of the University’s mission. The way the system operates, however, is placing terrible strain on the libraries and the people who work within them.

“Over time, a lack of coordination has led to a fragmented collection of collections that is not optimally positioned to respond to the 21st century information needs of faculty and students. The libraries’ organizational chart is truly labyrinthine in its complexity, and in practice this complexity impedes effective collective decision-making.

“Widely varying information technology systems present barriers to communication among libraries and stymie collaboration with institutions beyond our campus gates. Our funding mechanisms have created incentives to collect or subscribe in ways that diminish the vitality of the overall collection.

“Libraries the world over are undergoing a challenging transition into the digital age, and Harvard’s libraries are no exception. The Task Force report points us toward a future in which our libraries must be able to work together far more effectively than is the case today as well as to collaborate with other great libraries to maximize access to the materials needed by our scholars.”

I am excited to work with members of the Harvard library community and many others — inside and outside the community — to build on the promise of this report and the Harvard library system.

Dawn Nunziato's Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age

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Dawn Nunziato, a law prof at George Washington University Law School, has written a helpful and interesting new book, entitled Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age.

Her focus in “Virtual Freedom” is — as the subtitle suggests — free speech on the net, framed primarily for the current net neutrality debate.  She compares two distinct conceptions of the First Amendment, one affirmative and the other negative.  She argues forcefully for the affirmative approach to the First Amendment.  In making out her argument, she recalls John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes (on the marketplace of ideas conception), through to Cass Sunstein (whose views get a great deal of airtime in the book) and Owen Fiss, among others.  Along the way, she takes up, fairly extensively, the core relevant doctrines: the state action doctrine, the public forum doctrine, the fairness doctrine, must carry, and common carriage.  She also spends a good deal of time in the caselaw, carefully reviewing also the matters one might expect to see, many of which predate today’s Internet: Marsh v. Alabama, Pruneyard, and other state action doctrine/shopping mall-type cases; the AP decision of 1945; Red Lion; Turner; Brand X; Carlin; AT&T v. the City of Portland; and so forth.  She takes up several Internet-specific matters as well (such as Intel v. Hamidi, CDT v. Pappert, and the ICANN debates) and sets them in context.

Her bottom line is that Congress should pass a law (or require the FCC) to prohibit broadband providers from blocking legal content or applications and from engaging in various forms of discrimination and prioritization of packets.  She argues, too, in favor of greater transparency by broadband providers when they do engage in selective passage of packets.  She says maybe we should regulate powerful search engines, such as Google, too.

Nunziato’s book made me think of two other books I’ve re-read in the past few weeks.  The first is Newton Minow and Craig LaMay’s Abandoned in the Vast Wasteland: Children, Television, and the First Amendment (1996), which takes up similar issues related to various conceptions of the First Amendment, though from the angle of protecting and supporting children.  The other is Jonathan Zittrain’s free-for-the downloading Future of the Internet — and How to Stop it (2008), especially in chapters 7 through 9, in which JZ takes up many of the same issues (changes in the public/private online and how we should think about “regulation” of online behaviors).

I enjoyed this book: it’s well-written and, just as important, I think Nunziato is, by and large, right as to her normative view.  Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age belongs on the bookshelf (virtual or otherwise!) of anyone working on broadband regulation, net neutrality, online censorship, and the like.

Managing Partners Weigh in on Impact of the Global Financial Crisis (Live-Blog)

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At a workshop at Oxford University, HLS Prof. David Wilkins has convened the managing partners of some of the world’s leading law firms.  Ted Burke of Freshfields, Simon Davies of Linklaters, Wim Dejonghe of Allen & Overy, Neville Eisenberg og Berwin Leighton Paisner, and Cyril Shroff of India’s Amarchand & Mangaldas are being interviewed by HLS Prof. Ashish Nanda, Wilkins’ partner at the Program on the Legal Profession at HLS.  Nanda is asking them about the impact of the financial crisis on the marketplace for global legal services.  There wasn’t complete agreement on all fronts, but some take-aways from the managing partners on which they seemed more or less agreed:

– Competition for clients and the best talent in lawyers (especially new, young ones) is getting increasingly fierce.

– This competition will lead to a drop-off by the “low-end of the global firms.”  The cost structure will make it too hard for some of the recent-arrivals to the global marketplace to compete.  These firms will retreat to smaller practices or fail.

– This competition will also lead law firms to explore a broader range of strategies and business models than ever before.

– The ecology of types of firms will get increasingly mixed.

– A truly consistently first-class firm — the law firm equivalent, they say, of the Four Seasons in the hotel business — will continue to be able to charge a premium and will succeed.  If you can’t be consistently first-class across all offices, don’t try it.

Areas of some disagreement:

– One view is that US firms will have to adopt a “more internationalist approach” as business continues to head East.  Without an Asia strategy (China and India in particular), no firm can have a leading global practice over the next 10 to 15 years.  The big challenge will be integration of cultures in global practices.  One challenge: developing international skills and dropping the baggage of a colonial past.  But others note that the litigation business is much higher for the US firms than for big European firms; and litigation can be huge in the local US market.  There is less need to fish in other ponds for big US firms as there is for European firms, for instance.  Without something cataclysmic happening, the fancy New York firms that focus primarily on the US (“the Cravaths of the world”) are unlikely to change their models any time soon.

– What it means to be a “global law firm” is an elastic definition some say.  Others have a clearer sense of what’s required in terms of presence and skill sets to be truly “global” and a “firm” in the coming years (i.e., the need for an Asia strategy, diverse practice areas, and so forth).  The group also disagreed somewhat on what it will take for a firm to compete successfully in emerging markets.

This event is a joint effort of the Program on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School; the faculty of law and the Said Business School at Oxford; and the Jindal Global Law School in India.

Graduate Seminar on Research Methods on Internet & Society

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Amid all the noise of the start of fall semester, Eszter Hargittai and I are launching a new experiment: a course taught jointly (and separately) at Northwestern University and at Harvard University on research methods in Internet & Society.  We’ll post as much of the material as makes sense to a publicly-accessible wiki.  Students can register for credit at either school.  In the Harvard version, we’ll do 6 of the 10 sessions joined by video-conference.  The other 4 sessions at Harvard will be just with HU students.  In part, we will work in these extra sessions toward planning a General Education course to be offered for undergraduates on Internet & Society in 2010-11 by Berkman Center faculty from around the university.  If you’re a Harvard or Northwestern graduate student, we’d especially love to hear from you.  The course starts later this month.  I’m sure I’ll be learning a lot myself from social scientists, computer scientists and others who are blazing new trails with methods for studying life and other phenomena on the Net.

New Harvard Law School Library Organizational Design

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Over the past year, I’ve worked with my colleagues at the Harvard Law School Library, our Library Committee of faculty members, and many others to develop a new organizational design for the HLSL.  It goes into effect today.  The description of our new organizational form is posted to the Library’s blog, Et Seq. The future of libraries may seem on its face to be unclear in a digital world.  But I am confident that it is bright; that librarians have never been needed more than they are today; and that the best thing that we can do to move into this future is to work collaboratively to chart it ourselves.

Skype-ing into Summercore

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This summer I’ve been occasionally doing video/audio Skype sessions with Steve Bergen’s Summercore program for teachers. It’s the first time with “distance ed” that I’ve felt the process is natural. The sessions are about a half-hour, focused mostly on issues related to youth media usage, with teachers on the other end asking questions. They’ve done homework online and based on readings in advance, and they’ve posted good questions to a wiki and Twitter in advance.  Most of the conversations touch on copyright and fair use in particular. It has the feel of a use of technology that is natural, easy, cheap (free!) and effective — that the process is coming of age, with fewer and fewer tech-related hassles than in the past. (Now watch the connection break down today, since I’m trying it from Europe -> Florida!)

Google Books Settlement: Two Events

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Tonight, the Boston Public Library is hosting an event on the GBS: July 21 at 6:00 p.m. at the BPL, moderated by Maura Marx of the Open Knowledge Commons.

On July 31, we at the Berkman Center are hosting an open workshop on alternative futures for digitizing of books in the shadow of the GBS.  We have 95 registrants so far and will close registration at 100 — so please sign up fast if you are interested (and then add your name to the public wiki, if you’re willing, to let others know you are coming; only 71 people have done so as of right now).