research, n.¹
1. The act of searching (closely or carefully) for or after a specified thing or person. [oed]

If E-Research is simply the use of the Internet in research methods, it could be any of the following:

• using an online card catalog to find relevant books
• using Google to find relevant web content
• using any number of other webapps for experiment execution or analysis

Unless the object of study is actually the Internet, or some phenomena occurring on it, it doesn’t seem like these tools actually change research methods more than they aid them, by providing unparalleled access to information and analysis of just about anything, whether it be the last hour’s news or an eighteenth-century scientific survey.

On the other hand, E-Research could involve the study of online representations of any subject, through methods such as link analysis and usage studies. This latter definition seems to be what the VKS is focused on.

A study of wayfinding practices like the one we are planning can easily incorporate all of the above. In the first context, online research tools can be used to find previously published information in helping to design and substantiate a research plan. That plan can in turn incorporate an online component, such as a study of how people use some technology to aid their wayfinding behavior.

Get out now. Not just outside, but beyond the rap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people at the end of our century. Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, and look around. Do not jog. Do not run…Walk. Stroll. Saunter…Explore.

Heeding the words of John Stilgoe in Outside Lies Magic, a few of us went to the Seattle Art Museum’s relatively new Olympic Sculpture Park yesterday morning to make observations regarding wayfinding in urban spaces, in order to help us develop a question for research in Amsterdam.

I found the park to be an incredible use of what was just recently an industrial wasteland. The layout of the park gently guides one along a Z-shaped walkway, providing many opportunities for one to saunter off into auxiliary paths and alcoves without letting visitors forget that they are in a museum. Impressively, the park integrates itself into its surroundings, crossing over Elliot Avenue and the BNSF railway, and landing at the shoreline of Elliot Bay.

The morning’s slow pace allowed us to “read the city” and make many observations, especially about the rapid proliferation of condo buildings throughout downtown Seattle, and the effects that such construction has upon the city’s storied history, both physically and socially.

On a somewhat unrelated note, at some point in this discussion, the topic came up that cellphone conversations almost always begin with the caller stating their current location. If you think about it, it’s true – the context of a phone call generally holds a good deal of importance, regardless of the call’s purpose, and a mobile phone does not (visibly) transmit the implicit location information carried by landlines. How long will it take before caller ID includes that contextual information, such as location and maybe even a Twitter status?

First off, a user’s browsing patterns are clearly and intimately visible on the page of any active del.icio.us account. Not only is a viewer given a clear idea of the user’s personal interests, one can infer how a user moves between noteworthy sites through both time and cyberspace.

Taking a more social look at online browsing patterns beyond bookmarking, we can note the shift from a static web to what is now known as Web 2.0, where users become active participants at almost every website. This has possibly brought the shift from us following links in static web pages while keeping a definite goal in mind (just as we follow “see also” citations in encyclopedias), to an extremely transient movement pattern by way of links in blog posts, blogrolls, and randomized searches. Furthermore, sites like Digg and Technorati make evident the temporal popularity of ideas, as people discover, visit, and discuss interesting news and websites in a simultaneous and collective fashion.

This brings about yet another question: how has the dramatic shift from static to dynamic online content affected wayfinding patterns on the Internet?

In terms of how I would like this research to be situated, my main goal for the trip is “international engagement,” so I have not seriously considered working towards published material. However, it is my perception that all or most of the research I am concerned with could be done without significant involvement of human subjects, since much of it could involve social network analysis and other related methods of study. If this turns out to be true, it might be worth pursuing the idea of a publication, as these topics are currently of wide interest to the academic community.

Challenges to be faced in the near future include the process of narrowing a research topic and creating a group where everyone is interested in and comfortable with the topic we choose to commit ourselves to. Let’s do this!