I enjoyed talking about Gerard's work today as I am sure I have been boring people with bus talk for weeks now. (I will introduce my project later). I always find discussion around any topic stimulating for it enables cross-connections and invariably creates links with your own project. It was also stimulating being in the British Library - a great space for research, thinking and source of nice strong clear plastic bags.
-kat

Adam, Kat, Gerard and I had a good talk at the British Library today about Gerard's work on digital music in the home. I'll let him say more if he wants, but it was good to hear what he's been thinking as he works towards concluding his literature review.
-kris

I gave two talks at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) on Tuesday, one on collaborating with design and industry, and one on blogging. This was part of their Summer Doctoral Program, in which students from all over the world who are doing internet research, and who hail from a huge range of disciplines, come together for just over 2 weeks to share the results of their own work and to hear talks by people working in relevant fields. They're a very good, very lively bunch, with a fascinating range of interests. I like very much the model of placing focus on a topic (e.g. the internet and doing research on it) which both invites diverse disciplinary involvement and at the same time obviates some of the more obstructive (perceived) differences between those disciplines.
-kris

just back from fascinating couple of days with People and Practices Unit of Intel Research in Portland, Oregon. It was intriguing to spend time not just with social scientists at the unit, but also designers and engineers. Particularly enjoyed setting up and running the workshop on mapping and new media in London; interesting to see what different groups made of the collaborative mapping task!
adam

BLOGGING AND POLITICS: last week bloggers and interested parties [including MPs] got together at Westminster to discuss the potential role of blogs in attempts to expand democratic partipation and political expression [see Voxpolitics]. One MP has already started his own weblog.
adam

take a look at this fantastic site that displays the ways in which the Underground map relates to the actual geography of the city, and to the London map.
adam

Been a long time between posts, hasn't it? In this sense, the calendric form is the blogger's bane and boon; when one hasn't posted, one knows precisely how embarrassingly long it's been since the last post; and conversely, frequent posting must be a nice source of pride (but we wouldn't know). I was at the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) conference last week and gave a new version of the photoblogging paper. Mary (who will introduce herself here soon) has been busy at her summer IDEO internship and the 100 other things she does around the sociology department and INCITE. Nina and Adam are soon off to Portland for intensive work sessions with Intel. Kat (who will also introduce herself soon) is doing great and diversely ethnographic work on the 73 bus route, working with blogs as analytical tools, and dropping jaws with her encyclopedic knowledge of routemaster buses. Gerard troops ahead with his reading and early work on digital music in the home. Kate is writing up and writing up and writing up her dissertation. And we'll all endeavor to be a bit more regular with our posts here.
-kris