MetaTalk posts tagged with research and metafilter

The Joy of FPPing

Wordshore — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 10:06:41 -0800

To people who have done this; why did you create Front Page Post(s) on MetaFilter? The motivations are interesting in themselves, and may also provide positive reasons for people to cross the rubicon from lurker to poster. It's an activity which takes a variable amount of time, from a single link cat video post, to a multi-screen, multi-linked complex. There is no monetary or career-enhancement reward for posting. There's (arguably thankfully) no shiny gamification 'badges' for posting many times on MetaFilter. As the poster you are, in a sense, putting your head "above the parapet". And it is very unlikely (tho' guess not impossible?) that posting to MetaFilter will ultimately result in you "getting laid". So, what have been the motivation(s) for you to post. Were they different depending on the nature, subject matter, of the post? Were they different from posting on e.g. online newspaper comment sections, community blogs, other sites where people link to and discuss online content? Was it to illuminate something you think should have a wider audience? To provoke debate, be the catalyst for comment? To highlight something negative you think people need to be aware of? To make people happy(er) with something cute? To digitally shout out "OMG!" at some news, event, happening in the world? Or did you take an intrinsic pleasure in creating the post (the "inner librarian" concept); editing it, doing the research, refining it for the particular audience which is MetaFilter? Or post to become more immersed, "meshed" into the MetaFilter network/community? Or to altruistically add to a "sum of MetaFilter community knowledge". Or, for regular posters, is the motivation to post more of a reflex reaction to encountering something interesting online? Or some other motivation(s) for why you dedicated the time and effort to creating a specific post? Related: Jessamyn's comment about mini-bibliographies.

How can we improve access to primary research on MetaFilter?

Scientist — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:33:18 -0800

Is there a community consensus about best practices for disseminating subscription-only journal material in threads? Also, what can we do to improve access within the community to primary research? Blasdelb's excellent comment in the Lenski thread prompted me to ask about this. Sometimes a comment (or less frequently, a post) will heavily feature an article from a scientific journal of some sort. Said articles are quite often restricted to people who have a subscription to said journal through an institution such as a university. These sorts of links can be a bit problematic because they aren't accessible to all, but I feel like this is a community that is often interested in seeing and talking about primary research, and I'd like it if we could talk about ways to help people get access to that. I feel like Blasdelb (and I've seen others doing this stuff too) sets a good example in the comment linked above. His comment provides open-journal links wherever possible such that there's plenty of meat for people to chew on even if they can't get to the closed journals, and he makes an offer to provide article copies to people on a one-on-one basis. (Which may technically be something that the journal publishers would rather people didn't do, but which is something that researchers do all the time for each other or for students or colleagues who lack access.) What are some other things that we could do to help improve access to journal articles? I myself just put a line in my profile offering to at least attempt to provide copies of articles to anybody who MeMails me asking for one relating to a link on this site. Could we maybe think about putting together a list of people who are willing to do this and throwing it up on the Wiki? Perhaps something like this already exists? Perhaps this thread would also be a good place for people to share tips for finding open-access versions of articles or open-access publications in general. Google Scholar is a good start here, but I'm sure that others have lots of other sources to recommend. Finally, is there any feasible way to host articles (Scribd? Coral Cache?) so that people can access them when they might otherwise not be able to? Or is the community/administrative consensus that doing something like that would be crossing a legal line and that one should simply avoid using articles that cannot easily be provided in an open-access format? I would understand that sentiment, but I feel like having access to original research can often really improve quality of discussion and that sometimes not being able to provide access can make it impossible to have an informed discussion about something. I feel like it would be good if we could come up with a general-purpose solution to this problem, but perhaps there just isn't one and we'll have to muddle through as best we can. Anyway, I wanted to solicit the community's thoughts on this issue and see what ideas people have for improving access to primary research within the MetaFilter community for the purposes of improving discussion and education.

Killer tools for a killer post?

symbioid — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 09:02:39 -0800

What are your techniques and tools for making a killer post? I have a desire to start making somewhat regular mefi posts that have lots of substance and links... I know I can use bookmarks to do some of the work, but I've also come across PersonalBrain (endorsed by Mr. Connections himself, James Burke)... What I want to know is if there are any other "knowledge organization"/research tools that can help organize information. Do any of you folks have a preferred research technique/process/flow? One topic that I'm wanting to do a post on has some seeming scarce source materal online (due to it being in another language) and I'm wondering if hitting up a library and asking a librarian for some help would be a benefit, does anyone ever do that? Is that overkill for a mefi post?

Please help me collect some meta MeTa Data data. Ta! –Me.

iamkimiam — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:29:22 -0800

Hi Everybody! I'm trying to come up with a "MeFi glossary of terms / phrases / behaviors" to include in my PhD dissertation about linguistics and MetaFilter. If you could help me with this, that would be fantastic. I'm looking to create a list of the types of things that say to you (or to others) "Oh, that's so MetaFilter!" or "That sounds like something a MeFite would say." This could be anything from the use of a single character to a phrase or meme, to a way of doing things here. If you can think of something to add, please share it in the comments. Thanks! This post is mod- and University of York ethics-approved. If you have any questions about this or the research I'm doing, please feel free to post it here or email me at mefistudy@gmail.com.

Notes from the Metafilter research panel at AoIR's 12th conference

cortex — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:55:05 -0800

So, four mefites collaborated on a Metafilter-themed panel last month at at the Association of Internet Researchers's 12th annual Internet Research conference, and we thought we'd go ahead and share our presentation notes and such. Come on in! The three actual academics involved are iamkimiam (Kim), lewistate (Quinn), and DiscourseMarker (Kris); they were nice enough to invite me to show up and talk about the Infodump as well. The four of us took turns talking for about fifteen minutes to a few dozen fellow nerds including some other mefites, and it was a fun time. We've each got presentation notes available, as well as audio from the actual presentation. The presentations, in the order they were given: - Josh: The Metafilter Infodump - Kim: Why the way you say MeFi matters - Kris: Anonymity and Conflict in Metafilter.com - Quinn: The Rhetoric of Trust Audio from the panel (very lofi, there was a seriously noisy HVAC fan running on and off): - Kris's intro - Josh's talk - Kim's talk - Kris' talk - Quinn's talk - Q & A - Kim's rerecorded talk Some of this research you may remember hearing about previously: Quinn's work originally came up in Metatalk in October, 2009 when he was conducing a survey for his dissertation research (which subsequently got him his Ph.D); last March we helped Kim run a poll about "mefi" and "mefite" pronunciations for her sociolinguistics research toward her Masters. I'm not sure where/when on the site Kris has spoken specifically about this part of her work but she's totally a nerdy doctor too, so, hey.

How does it feel to know you're a lab rat?

dersins — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:56:51 -0800

Exploring the dynamics of blog communities: the case of MetaFilter. Leiser Silva, Lakshmi Goel, Elham Mousavidin. Information Systems Journal. vol 19 no. 1 pp 55-81. 2009.

Mefi's scholarly value?

Saucy Intruder — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 22:05:17 -0800

"My thesis is on Metafilter..."
This isn't the first reference I've seen to The Blue as an empirical playground for academic discourse. What exactly is Mefi's scholarly value?