Networking Young Citizens Blog

Greetings all,

As you may know, the deadline for the Digging into Data proposal is fast approaching, and actually falls just a day or two after our meetings in Seattle will conclude.  Based on this timeline, Lance and Stephen and I have been working on getting the proposal nearly ready so that we can have a chance to review it as a group before we submit.  Toward that end, I’m attaching the latest draft of the narrative section of the project application.

See the narrative here.

For convenience, the original RFP is here.

Other background materials on the funding challenge can be found at the DiD website.

Have been enjoying looking over the other proposals, documents, and RFPs, and am excited to see everyone in Seattle next week!

Mike

I like the way the discussion is developing. There is as far as I am aware little survey data about use of ICT for the purposes of citizenship education in schools. I would like to respond positively to Brian’s specific suggestion that he and I work something up on the school dimension. We can easily have a face to face meeting and then add some comments to the blog for all to see.

Ian

We have received some valuable feedback and what looks like a green light on preparing a full proposal for the Digging into Data challenge.

See the official response.

Are any members of our group familiar with the previously funded project mentioned in the comments?  Perhaps we could have a comment discussion on how we might be able to distinguish ourselves from that project, as well as some of the other issues raised by the reviewer(s).

Looking forward to our upcoming meetings in Seattle.

Cheers,
Mike

Based on feedback from the group, over the weekend I put together the final version of our letter of intent for the Digging into Data funding opportunity, and submitted it via their website.  This afternoon, I received a confirmation from the Office of Digital Humanities folks, which indicated that we should get feedback by the beginning of May.  Thanks to everyone who helped put this together! Here is what we ended up submitting:

networking-young-citizens-loi

Cheers,

Mike

Greetings all,

In order to facilitate group discussion of this, I’m reposting a copy of the draft LOI here on the blog.

As noted in the original email, in addition to comments and suggestions, we need to settle on directors and members of the research team (in this context, we’re just talking about membership on the research team for this particular proposal).  Stephen has already graciously agreed to serve as UK director, but remaining questions are still open to discussion.

For ease of reading, I’m pasting the text of the proposal here in its original form.

Also for ease of reference, here’s the main link for the funding challenge (there are supplemental links off the main page to specific pages from each funding agency): http://www.diggingintodata.com/

I’m going to start the comment thread by pasting in Lance’s comments from the list.

Draft LOI:

March 15, 2009

Digging into Data Challenge

Online Citizenship and Youth Political Culture:

A Comparative Analysis of Online Civic Opportunities for Youth in Three Countries

Members of the review panel,

Over the past year, our research team has worked through the Worldwide Universities Network on an international and interdisciplinary study of the most effective ways that new media tools can be used to enhance civic skills and knowledge among young people in the UK, the United States, and Australia. More information about our larger project and group members may be accessed at our WUN website (http://www.wun.ac.uk/demo/nyc/index.html). As a component of our broader effort, we would like to create a proposal for an exhaustive and comparative study of online environments in which young people may learn a variety of skills and information relevant to civic engagement and participation, using the vast library of civic engagement websites in the Internet Archive as our primary source of data.

Names and countries of research teams and project directors: U.S. Project director: ???; U.K. Project director: ???

Additional researchers from the U.S. include Michael Xenos (Louisiana State University), Lance Bennett (University of Washington), and Kathryn Montgomery (American University). Additional researchers from the U.K. include Stephen Coleman (University of Leeds), Ian Davies (University of York), and Brian Loader (University of York). Our team of researchers also includes two members from Australia: Suzanne Mellor (Australian Council for Educational Research), and Ariadne Vromen (University of Sydney).

Intellectual significance: Recent technological and political developments have raised a variety of questions concerning the potential of digital media to provide new ways for young people to become engaged in public life. High profile political campaigns and governmental actors have significantly expanded their presences in the online world, and new kinds of site features (so-called Web 2.0 affordances) have enabled (mainly younger) users to connect with one another and share information in ever more dynamic ways. There is a widespread assumption that these developments significantly contribute to young people’s involvement in public life through traditional democratic institutions such as elections, as well as newer forms of lifestyle politics played out in less-bounded domains of culture and consumer behavior. Yet there is little systematic research devoted to understanding whether such efforts are effective, much less the processes through which they may be influencing the relationships young people have with political activities and participation.

This project will provide the first truly comparative investigation of online political content and resources targeted at young people. Based on research designs used in earlier studies of youth politics websites in the United States, project members will both refine these techniques, and apply them to a much larger comparative collection of websites drawn from the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. The goal of the project is to document the range of information and resources provided to young people in each of these countries, in order to better study and understand the ways in which online resources may interact with offline factors such as political culture, educational institutions, and other forces of political socialization to determine future patterns of civic engagement. Specifically, we plan to probe youth-oriented political websites in the three countries for features and content corresponding to typologies developed in earlier research by Bennett and Coleman. These typologies focus on the orientation of website features and content toward different conceptions of citizenship and political engagement. For example, sites may center on either institutionalized participation out of a sense of duty, or more loosely defined and interactive engagement with issues motivated by a desire for personal growth or self-expression. They may also vary in the extent to which they treat site visitors as autonomous political actors, using institutional and technical design to enable users to interact with one another on their own terms. In addition, the research will also document the presence of a variety of other features that have been explored in previous work by Vromen, Xenos and other members of the broader WUN study group.

The resulting comparative data set will provide numerous benefits to research. First, on its own, it will uniquely enable research into online opportunities for civic learning and engagement targeted at young people that can systematically explore cross-national differences. Additionally, we plan to use the research from this project to inform our broader research initiative, which will use survey data, experimental research, and case studies to shed further light on the potential for new media tools to significantly advance youth engagement in each project country.

Data: We plan to collect data for the project from the Internet Archive. Research teams in each of the three countries will begin by identifying sites to be included in the analysis, using a variety of tools deployed in previous projects. These tools include structured web searches, consultation with key actors within each network, and hyperlink analyses using the Issue Crawler web tool (http://www.govcom.org/Issuecrawler_instructions.htm). Based on our collective prior experience with sites of this kind, we expect to identify hundreds of youth civic engagement websites in total across the three countries. Once we have identified relevant web spheres for analysis in each country, we will cross-reference our lists with the holdings of the Internet Archive. Any sites not present within the Archive would be included in a special request for archiving, submitted with enough time to ensure inclusion into Archive holdings prior to content analysis of the relevant site impressions. Our primary focus, however, will be on sites currently included in the Archive.

Currently, the web portion of the Internet Archive consists of some 85 billion archived web pages. Given the ephemeral nature of web artifacts, virtually no systematic study of the content and technical affordances of websites is possible without some form of archiving. At the most basic level, archiving enables replication and/or verification of research. Unlike mass media content, which is extensively archived, any given piece of web content may or may not be available tomorrow or years from now. Researchers can get around this problem by creating their own special archives, but this does not enable one to explore web artifacts related to events that have already passed, such as previous elections or other pivotal political or social events. These special qualities of the Internet Archive (access to stable reference copies of websites and the ability to search back in time) uniquely create the possibility for projects such as ours.

Members of the Project Team and their Qualifications

Lance Bennett received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1974, and has taught since then at the University of Washington, where he is Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor Communication and Professor of Political Science. He is also founder and director of the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement (www.engagedcitizen.org). The Center is dedicated to understanding how communication processes and technologies can enhance citizen engagement with social life, politics, and global affairs. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Spencer Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Annenberg Policy Foundation, Belgian Science Policy Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission, among others.

Stephen Coleman is Professor of Political Communication at the Institute for Communications Studies, University of Leeds. He was previously Professor of e-Democracy at the Oxford Internet Institute and senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. He has written extensively on new forms of political communication and democratic representation, exploring the relationship between popular and political culture. Recent publications include ‘E-Democracy: the History and Future of an Idea’, in Quah, D., Silverstone, R., Mansell, R. and Avgerou, C. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; ‘Doing It For Themselves: Management versus Autonomy in Youth E-Citizenship’, in Bennett, W.L. (ed.) Digital Media and Youth Civic Engagement, Boston: MIT Press, 2007; How The Other Half Votes: Big Brother Viewers and the 2005 British General Election Campaign’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 9(4): 457-80, 2006.

Ariadne Vromen is a Senior Lecturer in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. Her research and teaching interests are in political sociology. She has undertaken recent research projects on young people and politics, internet-based politics, community politics in Sydney, and the Australian Greens. She has co-written two editions of Powerscape: Contemporary Australian Political Practice (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2004 and 2008) and Keywords in Australian Politics (Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 2006) and published refereed articles in journals including Contemporary Politics, Information Communication & Society, City and Community, Australian Journal of Political Science, Australian Journal of Public Administration, Australian Journal of Politics and History, and Third Sector Review.

Michael Xenos received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Washington in 2005, and is an assistant professor in the Manship School of Mass Communication and in the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University. In 2002, he worked with Kirsten Foot and Steven Schneider on the creation of the United States Election 2002 Web Archive for the Library of Congress, and has published a number of scholarly articles based on analysis of data from that collection. He has also published articles and book chapters dealing with political websites specifically targeted at young people, and the effects of these sites on their intended audience. These works have appeared in: Journal of Communication, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Information, Communication, and Society, and the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning.