2008 grants - social networking and online identity

We have been very slow in bring you news of our grant funding for 2008.  Sorry about that.  The delay is basically down to getting all of the projects fully signed off by all parties.  Anyway, enough of the excuses...

...we are very pleased to be supporting three projects this year, representing, in total, over £200,000 of project funding.  The projects, conducted by University of Edinburgh, King's College London, and University of Reading, all focus on issues associated with social networking and digital identity.

Assisting the W3C in opening social networking data

This two-year project, undertaken by Harry Halpin at the University of Edinburgh, aims to explore the power and utility of royalty-free standards for extensible open social data. This project will help investigate and generate work proposals for opening social data at the Web's foremost standards body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Rhizome: exploring strands of online identity in learning, teaching and research

A fourteen month project, led by Dr Steven Warburton of King's College London. The project will use narrative inquiry and scenario mapping to explore the key technical and social elements that impact on the construction of online identities. The work will build a framework for understanding the tools, literacies, and practices needed to create and manage individuals' digital self-representations.

This is me

An eight month project, led by Shirley Williams of the School of Systems Engineering at the University of Reading, will investigate how individuals can be made more aware of their digital identity and how such identities can be developed and enhanced. The project will produce a set of Web-based resources designed to be of use both within the University of Reading and by the wider UK HE community.

Comments

[PeteJ]

Rhizome have a nice slideshow introducing the project:

http://www.slideshare.net/stevenw/rhizome-project-exploring-digital-identities-presentation