Festival Of New MR: The Tastiest Synopses - A Baker’s Dozen
The Festival of New MR, a virtual research conference organised by Ray Poynter and others, has closed its submissions process - all the presentation synopses are up now. There will be a voting process soon apparently, but meanwhile the list is a fine showcase of where researchers’ heads are at right now.
I have a synopsis in consideration myself, but I thought it would be nice to highlight the summaries I think are most exciting or intriguing from the current list. I’ve left off mine (obviously!) and also anything I’ve already seen at a conference (which includes some great ones). And this is a list which caters to my own peculiar tastes in research work, so if you’re not on it, that certainly doesn’t mean I thought your paper was under-par or boring! (And I’m not on the festival committee so it hardly matters anyhow!)
So - in order of appearance on the synopsis page, my top 13 - it could easily have been 25, but I have a pub to go to:
Embracing The Third Screen (Steve August/Ian Ralph): Online qual on smartphones - as the kind of stuff I work on (communities/social media research) goes more and more mobile this is exactly the sort of thinking I need to catch up on.
How Zynga Conducts Research (Vivek Bhaskaran/Kevin Keeker): There’s a bunch of papers on short-form/modular research - this is a REALLY important area which seems to be creeping up on us a bit. This one has the added carrot of coming from social gaming giant Zynga, so I’m hoping I’ll learn a bit about that too.
Tesco And Stokes Croft (Nigel Legg): Looks like a useful case study of context in social media - I like the framing of the question as one of power, not of “influence” (we should be calling this particular spade a spade more generally too)
How Easily Can I “Game” Your Future Dataset? (Dan Foreman): Very excited someone is finally talking about this - industrial reputation espionage in the social media age, conversation jamming and dataset fixing. Yum yum!
Whose Afraid Of The Big Collaborative Wolf? (Nick Coates): Lots of co-creation summaries here, I picked Nick’s simply because it sounded funniest - and I like the emphasis on non-researchers.
We Came Up With The Term MROC: Now We’re Telling You What It Is (Tamara Barber): Supremely cheeky title, this! ;) It would be professionally remiss of me not to want this one to get through, partly because the promised “lively Q+A” should actually BE lively!
Asia and the Developing World - Smart Enough For Mobile MR (Navin Williams): Not enough BRIC-oriented synopses (in my opinion - and mine wasn’t either!). This one looks meaty and very useful, though.
Red Velvet Ropes (Alison Macleod): Alison raises a really interesting point - if we’re all about giving the participant more autonomy and control in New MR, shouldn’t and couldn’t that extend to sample frames? Who gets to choose a “target market” in a collaborative age - not the dear old brand, surely?
Don’t Forget… The Respondent Experience Trumps All (Leslie Townsend): So fully locked-on to the specs of my own job (using social media to improve the research experience) that I really want to find out what Leslie has to say here.
Navel Gazing with Purpose (Theo Downes-Le Guin): Also cheeky! Social media analysis of the researchosphere, you say? :)
Zero Gravity Questions (John Griffiths): Typically forward-thinking examination of the ecology of the question (I have a sneaky feeling something I mentioned ages ago may have inspired a tiny bit of this, but John is running with it and then some.)
Time: A Goldmine Of Free Data (John Puleston): Almost can’t believe this is the only paradata-based synopsis in here: this stuff is going to be really important, especially when linked to eye-tracking etc. I say this with the confidence of someone who doesn’t actually know much about it, so perhaps I will learn more here!
Hacking The Data Shadow (Rich Shaw): Covers some of the same territory as John Griffiths’ proposal (see above) but I had to include this because of the overall “what can researchers learn from hackers” idea - very enticing. And it made me look up what a “data shadow” was!
There you go - that’s MY dream virtual festival (or one day of it, anyway). What’s yours?
