SLIS Events News

Graduate students, staff, and faculty are cordially invited to attend the SLIS Colloquium Series.

Title: The Past, Present and Future of Weblogs
Speaker: Susan C. Herring, School of Library and Information Science
Date: Friday, October 31, 2003
Time: 2:30pm
Place: LI001 Main Library

Talk preceded by an informal gathering with cookies, tea, and coffee, available at 2:15pm.

Abstract
Weblogs (blogs) are frequently modified Web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence. As with other Internet communication protocols that have experienced seemingly sudden, intense popularity (e.g., email, the WWW, peer-to-peer file transfer), blogs are being hailed as radically new and potentially socially transformative. This talk considers the origins, current status, and evolutionary trajectory of weblogs as a mode of computer-mediated communication, based on recent findings from the BROG (Blog Research on Genre) project at Indiana University. It is proposed that the weblog can be understood as a hybrid both diachronically and synchronically, and that a historically-contextualized understanding allows us to predict certain of its future social impacts.

Bio
Susan Herring is Professor of Information Science and Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington. One of the first researchers to apply linguistic analysis methods to interactive, text-based computer-mediated communication in the early 1990s, in recent years she has extended her investigations to include multimedia Internet content, with a focus on the World Wide Web. For more information on her research, see http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/herring/. A recent SLIS News article on research on blogging and the SLIS research group studying bloggers is available at: http://www.slis.indiana.edu/news/story.php?story_id=671.

Posted Oct. 27, 2003