Thursday 22 March 2012

Twitter, blogs, tinyarm and a possible experiment

I have been playing with graphs libraries to visualize social relationships... you know this kind of stuff that nobody has done so far... (irony? ;)) So yes... I was playing with these libraries and I was thinking in which kind of experiment could involve these visualizations.

I haven't really thought about it in depth, but I reminded a conversation with Luis de la Fuente (when he was visiting us) that they (he and Katrien) were thinking to set up an ethnographic experiment with twitter and do some kind of comparison between belgian and spanish behavior... after some time  brainstorming we didn't see the point... and we finished with the unusual (irony again) sentence: "we have to think more about it" and we didn't talk about the topic anymore...

But now just thinking, an idea came up to my mind... I was thinking that we could set up an experiment four different research groups in different countries(?). The scope could be master thesis supervision.

What would be the requirements?
  • Similar approach using social networks in the supervision of master thesis. For instance, twitter, blogs and Tinyarm to report the read/skimmed papers (It is not an hypothetical example... is how we supervise ours ;))
  • The topic of the research groups should be similar.
  • The location of the groups could be two from the center of Europe (Belgium-Germany) and two from the north of Africa... sorry... south of Europe (Portugal-Italy-Greece-Spain) (The order of the countries was not random). But preferably countries that share the root of their languages, so Greece could be discarded.
  • All the communication should be in English.
  • All the groups will share the same hashtag in Twitter. 
  • All the papers in TinyARM should be also in English.
What could we study?
  • Are new established links between students in different countries?
  • If yes, makes sense to think that there are some intercultural relation?
  • Maybe is more important the topic.
  • In which system do the students create more new relationships? For instance, in twitter sending tweets to each other, commenting on each other blogs or even in TinyArm reading papers that others have read or recommending papers. 
And for sure... STEP UP! could be the central point of information... ;)

I guess that it is a very open experiment where we can study many factors, for sure, we have to think more about it. Damn! The forbidden sentence... now such experiment is condemned to obscurity... Anyway... it was a nice exercise to write it down...

Keep in mind that you are the only one who can avoid the predictable and sad fate of this experiment! ;)

Feedback is welcome, for sure, I can learn from you! :) Thx in advance!