Association of Internet Researchers

Last updated

The Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) is a learned society dedicated to the advancement of the transdisciplinary field of Internet studies. Founded in 1999, it is an international, member-based support network promoting critical and scholarly Internet research, independent from traditional disciplines and existing across academic borders.

Contents

AoIR was formally founded on May 30, 1999, at a meeting of nearly sixty scholars at the San Francisco Hilton and Towers, following initial discussions at a 1998 conference at Drake University entitled "The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory: Metaphor, Magic & Power". [1] The inaugural conference was organised by Nancy Baym, Jeremy Hunsinger and Steve Jones at the University of Kansas in 2000, and attracted 300 scholars. [2] As the Chronicle of Higher Education noted, its rapid growth during the first few years of its existence marked the coming of age of Internet studies. [3] It has continued to grow, with a membership of approximately 400 scholars. It supports AIR-L, a mailing list with over 5,000 subscribers.

AoIR holds an annual academic conference, as well as promoting online discussion and collaboration through a long-running mailing list. It also hosts a Mastodon instance, AoIR.social.

Activities

The Association supports scholarly communication in a number of ways:

Conferences

Presidents

#NameTerm
1Steve Jones1999–2003
2 Nancy Baym 2003–2005
3Matthew Allen2005–2007
4Charles Ess2007–2009
5 Mia Consalvo 2009–2011
6 Alexander Halavais 2011–2013
7Lori Kendall2013–2015
8Jennifer Stromer-Galley2015–2017
9 Axel Bruns 2017–2019
10 Lynn Schofield Clark 2019–2021
11Tama Leaver2021–2023
12Nicholas John2023–2025

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic publishing</span> Subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship

Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or thesis. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

Internet studies is an interdisciplinary field studying the social, psychological, political, technical, cultural and other dimensions of the Internet and associated information and communication technologies. The human aspects of the Internet are a subject of focus in this field. While that may be facilitated by the underlying technology of the Internet, the focus of study is often less on the technology itself than on the social circumstances that technology creates or influences.

The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) is a scholarly, non-political and non-profit professional association focusing on Asia and the study of Asia. It is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States.

The International Political Science Association (IPSA), founded under the auspices of UNESCO in 1949, is an international scholarly association. IPSA is devoted to the advancement of political science in all parts of the world. During its history it has helped build bridges between East and West, North and South, and has promoted collaboration between scholars in both established and emerging democracies. Its aim is to create a global political science community in which all can participate, most recently it has been extending its reach in Eastern Europe and Latin America. IPSA has consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) and it is a member of the International Science Council, which brings together over 230 science organizations across the world and actively cooperates with partners from the United Nations system, such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Internet research ethics involves the research ethics of social science, humanities, and scientific research carried out via the Internet.

Online ethnography is an online research method that adapts ethnographic methods to the study of the communities and cultures created through computer-mediated social interaction. As modifications of the term ethnography, cyber-ethnography, online ethnography and virtual ethnography designate particular variations regarding the conduct of online fieldwork that adapts ethnographic methodology. There is no canonical approach to cyber-ethnography that prescribes how ethnography is adapted to the online setting. Instead individual researchers are left to specify their own adaptations. Netnography is another form of online ethnography or cyber-ethnography with more specific sets of guidelines and rules, and a common multidisciplinary base of literature and scholars. This article is not about a particular neologism, but the general application of ethnographic methods to online fieldwork as practiced by anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">H-Net</span> Website

H-Net is an interdisciplinary forum for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. It is best known for hosting electronic mailing lists organized by academic disciplines; according to the organization's website, H-Net lists reach over 200,000 subscribers in more than 90 countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture</span>

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OI) is an independent research organization located in Williamsburg, Virginia, sponsored by William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg. Founded in 1943, the OI supports the scholars and scholarship of vast early America—a term used to describe the capacious histories of North America and related geographies, including foundational histories of indigenous peoples, the scale and impact of transatlantic slavery, and multidimensional European colonization and settlement, from the 1450s to the 1820s.

Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books. It is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use." This primarily involves the publication of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and conference papers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies</span>

The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) is a scholarly society "dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia, and Eastern Europe in regional and global contexts." The ASEEES supports teaching, research, and publication relating to the peoples and territories within this area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Communication Association</span> Academic association

The International Communication Association (ICA) is an academic association for scholars interested in the study, teaching and application of all aspects of human and mediated communication.

Founded in 1981, the American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA) seeks to advance education and research in mass communication history. Through its annual meeting, regional conferences, committees, awards, speakers and publications, members work to raise historical standards and ensure that all scholars and students recognize the vast importance of media history and apply this knowledge to the advancement of society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Society for the History of Discoveries</span>

Society for the History of Discoveries, founded in 1960, is an international, United States-based, organization formed to stimulate interest in teaching, research, and publishing the history of geographical exploration. Its members include those from several academic disciplines as well as archivists, non-affiliated scholars, and laypersons with an interest in history. SHD advances its goals by organizing annual meetings at which pertinent scholarly research papers are presented, by publishing a scholarly journal with articles on geographic exploration, and by annually offering an award to student research papers in the field. The Society is a US non-profit 501(c)(3) organization administered by a voluntary and unpaid team of council members and officers. Membership is open to all who have an interest in the history of geographical exploration. It publishes a semiannual journal, Terrae Incognitae.

The Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) at Columbia University was a unit of the University Libraries that partnered with researchers and scholars at Columbia to share their research broadly with the world. Using innovative new media and digital technologies, CDRS sought to empower the Columbia research community with online tools and services to enable them to make the most of scholarly communication, collaboration, data sharing, and preservation. CDRS was part of Columbia University Libraries/Information Services (CUL/IS).

The European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN), originally named the European Distance Education Network, was established in 1991. EDEN is an international educational association open to institutions and individuals dealing with e-learning, open education, and distance education. EDEN is a not-for-profit organisation, registered as a limited company under English law.

The Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) is a professional organization of scholars concerned with the archaeology of the modern world. Founded in 1967, the SHA promotes scholarly research and the dissemination of knowledge pertaining to historical archaeology. The society is specifically interested in the identification, excavation, interpretation, and conservation of sites and materials on land and underwater. It is the largest such organization in the world and the third-largest anthropological organization in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caroline Haythornthwaite</span>

Caroline Haythornthwaite is a professor emerita at Syracuse University School of Information Studies. She served as the School's director of the Library Science graduate program from July 2017 to June 2019. She previously served as Director and Professor at the Library, Archival and Information Studies, School of SLAIS, at The iSchool at The University of British Columbia (UBC). Her research areas explore the way interaction, via computer media, supports and affects work, learning, and social interaction, primarily from a social-network-analysis perspective. Previously, during 1996–2010, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Haythornthwaite had worked as assistant professor, associate, or full professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital scholarship</span>

Digital scholarship is the use of digital evidence, methods of inquiry, research, publication and preservation to achieve scholarly and research goals. Digital scholarship can encompass both scholarly communication using digital media and research on digital media. An important aspect of digital scholarship is the effort to establish digital media and social media as credible, professional and legitimate means of research and communication. Digital scholarship has a close association with digital humanities, often serving as the umbrella term for discipline-agnostic digital research methods.

Inkshed was a Canadian organization of teachers and scholars of writing and reading, predominantly in postsecondary institutions. It effectively began in 1982 with the publication of a newsletter, which continued in various forms until 2015. The first national "Inkshed Working Conference" was held in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in August 1984, and annual conferences were held in various Canadian cities until 2015.

Mia Consalvo is an American professor of Communication Studies presently at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and holds the post of Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design, Communication Studies. Consalvo has authored a number of scholarly books and publications on the topic of video games in contemporary society and the culture of gameplay.

References

  1. Witmer, Diane F. (1999). "The Association(of).Internet.Researchers: Formed to support scholarship in and of the internet". Information, Communication & Society. 2 (3): 368–370. doi:10.1080/136911899359637.
  2. Wellman, Barry (2000). "Social scientists in cyberspace: report on the founding conference of the association for internet researchers". ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin. 21 (2): 13–14. doi:10.1145/605660.605664. ISSN   2372-7403. S2CID   41384277.
  3. McLemee, Scott (30 March 2001). "Internet studies 1.0: a discipline Is born". The Chronicle of Higher Education . Vol. 47, no. 29. p. A24.
  4. "Conference Papers: SPIR".
  5. "Association of Internet Researchers - YouTube". YouTube .