If theory and research are meant to inform practice, recommendations need to be current, relevant, and actionable. This can be hard to achieve in a domain that develops so quickly. Checkland (1998) observed a while ago how it is very hard for theory to keep up and be informative, thereby failing to match the “ideal” dynamic:

Checkland's ideal for theory informing practice

Whilst a range of research-theoretical stances can be taken, justified and accepted by the research community, only some seem to be close enough to practice to usefully inform it. This is where the researchers are either experimenting directly through design, or are involved enough to really engage with the language, problems and possible solutions in the domain. So I would favour interpretive or action research approaches in this regard:

Levels of engagement and theoretical stance (based on Aakhus & Jackson (2005))

Whilst the more descriptive, long view can still be valuable, it is hard to realise this value unless the knowledge gained is acted on by those implementing new designs and approaches. As they are the ones reading the research, this should perhaps be the research community itself in the first instance. Design improvement can then be further communicated through demonstrators, but these need to be compelling enough to be taken seriously.

References

1. Aakhus, M. and Jackson, S., 2005. Technology, Interaction and Design. In: Fitch, K.L. and Sanders, R.E.( eds) Handbook of Language and Social Interaction. LEA, pp. 411-433
2. Checkland, P .and Holwell ,S. 1998. Information, Systems and Information Systems: Making Sense of the Field John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York, NY, USA

To see them in the context of the conference programme, I converted the tweets and the event schedule to XML suitable for display in a Simile Timeline. Click the screenshot below to access the resulting timeline mashup (nb tweets take a few seconds to load).

What would have made this exercise easier, and the conference tweets easier to track:

• If the conference programme had been published in a more mashable format eg iCal / XML
• If there was a way to identify a particular conference track (a sub hashtag? – or is that overkill?)
• A way to distinguish critical comments, reportage, and general flim-flam. Though perhaps that is part of the fun!

The graphic below shows the Bristolian IDs with the most friends who are also located in Bristol. The most highly connected accounts are in red towards the centre. The highest number of Bristolian friends was 183 (bristolnews), with the average number 11, though stats like this of course ignore the fact that many people don’t report their location (or do report it as lat/long). An initial look shows that “traditional” media corporate – and individual – IDs are well linked in, but that social and creative orgs. and those backed by online community sites are also among the most popular.

When I get time, the plan is to categorise IDs by sector and by individual / corporate (though there is a large number of in-betweens). There are also signs that the accounts are organised into four distinct clusters and it will be interesting to see if there is any discernible basis to this.

Here is a Wordle of the user bios. Not too many surprises here – a good overview of Bristol’s online creative community – though the prominence of tea was interesting (23 mentions) in comparison to coffee (8) !