David Karpf

My new article, “Social Science Research Methods in Internet Time” will be published in a forthcoming issue of Information, Communication, and Society.  An advance version of the article is now available online.

I’m thrilled to announce that Oxford University Press will be publishing my first book, The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy in May, 2012.

I’ll be launching a book site this spring to promote the book.

The book is 256 pages, $27.95.  I wrote three jokes in the footnotes.  Will you be able to find them all?

My first article based on the Membership Communications Project dataset has just been published as the lead article in Policy & Internet, an online journal published by Berkeley Electronic Press and Oxford Internet Institute.

The article is titled “Online Political Mobilization from the Advocacy Group’s Perspective: Looking Beyond Clicktivism.”  The article challenges the”clicktivism” critique of online organizing, as presented by Malcolm Gladwell, Micah White, Stu Shulman and others.  Relying upon personal observations with the environmental movement and on a content analysis of 6 months of advocacy group e-mail traffic, I argue that e-petitions (1) are less heavily-used than many critics believe, and (2) are used by advocacy groups as an initial tactic in a broader strategy, including a “ladder-of-engagement” that leads to heavier volunteer involvement and further political actions.

You can download the article for free from BEPress, so I’m linking to it here rather than posting a copy on my site.

I had the opportunity to present some of my research at the luncheon series at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.  For those who are interested in an updated version of my “MoveOn Effect” argument, the video is available on their site.  You can also get a quicker overview by checking out the power point, or check out David Weinberger’s liveblog of the event.

Thanks to Amar Ashar and Aaron Shaw for helping to set up the event.  It was a great conversation and I appreciated the feedback.

I presented two papers at the APSA conference last weekend.  The first (at the Political Communication Preconference) was a report on the “Membership Communications Project,”  which is a dataset of 2,162 advocacy group emails, compiled over a 6 month time period.  The second was a paper called “Beyond Citizen Journalism” which uses the Weigelgate controversy from June 2010 to get into the fluid definitional boundaries between bloggers and journalists, as well as delving into the role played by backchannel discussion channels like JournoList.

The MCP dataset is open data, and it resides in a googledoc spreadsheet.  If you’re interested in using the data, contact me directly and I’ll add you to the user base.

I’m thrilled to announce that, beginning in September 2010, I’ll be joining the faculty of the Rutgers School of Communication and Information as an Assistant Professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Department.

Additionally, I’ll be joining the Yale Information Society Project as a Visiting Fellow for the 2010-11 schoolyear.

Finally, I’ve joined the strategy group for the newly-launched Meta-Activism Project.

Looking forward to working with all of my new colleagues…

I’ll be presenting a whole slew of new work this spring.

April 23rd I’ll be presenting a paper on interest group endorsements in the 2008 Presidential Primary at the Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting.

May 6th and 7th I’ll be at the Politics of Open Source conference at UMass-Amherst, presenting a theory-building piece on online community-of-interest formation (redeveloped from chapter 2 of the dissertation).

May 20th and 21st I’ll be at the Political Networks Conference at Duke, presenting the preliminary version of a new data collection project that gathers and analyzes email appeals from a large set of the progressive advocacy groups.  The email analysis will eventually have 6 months of data, whereas I’ll be presenting at Duke based on the first 3 months of data collected.

I’ll post the conference papers to this site once they’re polished.  As always, comments and suggestions appreciated.

The publisher of Journal of Information Technology and Politics has decided to make the top 5 most-downloaded articles of 2009 available for free here.

As the copyright is held by Taylor and Francis, I have only included a link to the firewalled informaworld page for my “Understanding Blogspace” article through this site.  Thanks to everyone who paid to download the article in 2009, it is now available for free in 2010.

On Sunday, November 1st, I moderated a book salon discussion of Matthew Kerbel’s Netroots: Online Progressives and the Transformation of American Politics.  Professor Kerbel and I served on a panel together this summer at Netroots Nation, and I highly recommend his book.

I’d like to thank Professor Kerbel, Beverly Wright, and the FireDogLake community for the very interesting time (as well as Henry Farrell for the initial suggestion).  For those who are interested in learning more about the book, my writeup and the discussion that followed are available here.