Hi everyone! The University of Calgary is looking for participants for an interesting & important study about social media and polarizing conversations. If you like to debate with others over social media, or often get involved in online discussions about polarizing topics, then we want to hear from you.

I’m part of a team at the U of C and NTT Communication Science Labs, and we’re interested in how social media design can better facilitate conversations about polarizing topics between people with diverse perspectives. Participants must currently reside in Canada, be fluent in English, and be at least 18 years of age.

Interested? Fill out our Recruitment Questionnaire now (~5 min): https://survey.ucalgary.ca/jfe/form/SV_554YojHAL4VeMom

Selected participants will be entered into a draw for one of ten $50 gift cards. The UCalgary Research Ethics Board has approved this study (REB21-0847).

I recently defended my dissertation and have completed my PhD. It’s titled Independent Together: Building and Maintaining Values in a Distributed Web Infrastructure, and investigates the role of values in the construction and maintenance of the IndieWeb.

My project for IndieWebCamp 2020 East was to finalize the HTML version of my dissertation. I’m delighted that I can now share my dissertation as both a PDF and a web page. You can read it at dissertation.jackjamieson.net

 

Here’s the abstract as a quick preview:

This dissertation studies a community of web developers building the IndieWeb, a modular and decentralized social web infrastructure through which people can produce and share content and participate in online communities without being dependent on corporate platforms. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how developers’ values shape and are shaped by this infrastructure, including how concentrations of power and influence affect individuals’ capacity to participate in design-decisions related to values. Individuals’ design activities are situated in a sociotechnical system to address influence among individual software artifacts, peers in the community, mechanisms for interoperability, and broader internet infrastructures.

Multiple methods are combined to address design activities across individual, community, and infrastructural scales. I observed discussions and development activities in IndieWeb’s online chat and at in-person events, studied source-code and developer decision-making on GitHub, and conducted 15 in-depth interviews with IndieWeb contributors between April 2018 and June 2019. I engaged in critical making to reflect on and document the process of building software for this infrastructure. And I employed computational analyses including social network analysis and topic modelling to study the structure of developers’ online activities.

This dissertation identifies how values of import to IndieWeb’s community are employed in designing its material architectures as well as community policies. This includes an ongoing balance between supporting individuals’ agency over personal design decisions and a need to maintain commensurability for the sake of interoperability. In many cases, early decisions about this balance have contributed to barriers for certain types of participants. Yet, those who can cross those barriers experience a lack of stabilization in IndieWeb’s infrastructure as a means of achieving richer engagements with technology. By studying design activities as longitudinal and situated within broader infrastructures, this dissertation describes how changing situations and a variety of influences affect possibilities for articulating values through material engagement, offering insights about how to support positive and healthy relationships with technology.

 

As far as making an HTML version, it turned out to fairly straightforward once I found the right tools. The dissertation was written in LaTeX, which makes it easy to produce a beautifully formatted PDF.  To convert this to HTML, I used htlatex. For the first pass, I used the following command:

htlatex file.tex "xhtml,html5,charset=utf-8" " -cmozhtf -utf8"

This took care of most of the conversion, preserves links within the document and did a good job handling tables and figures.  Footnotes were not translated correctly, so I manually set up a list of footnotes at the end of each chapter.

From there, I added a few features to aid navigation:

• Created a floating hamburger menu that shows the table of contents.
• Added a preview for when you hover over a citation or footnote link.
• Added basic microformats 2

If you notice any bugs or formatting errors, let me know and I’ll try to fix them.