http://bit.ly/benp9Z @BBC_HaveYourSay: That’s what we want to find out: http://tinyurl.com/yk3gjgb

Click here to download a PDF of the APSA Information Technology and Politics Section panels, some of which are co-sponsored with the Political Communication Section. It's a very promising line-up this year.

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend an excellent workshop on new media and political engagement at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.Ismael Peña-López, an attendee, was live blogging the event. Here is the excellent result (note: this is the first of several entries. Scroll up for the rest).

[First published at andrewchadwick.com)

Useful AP story on the Independent's website. Related Independent article here.

Coverage on BBC Radio Four's The World At One (featuring a brief interview with yours truly).

Sky News interviewed me at lunchtime and it sounds like they will be running a useful story this evening (sorry for the shameless self-promotion).

Guardian article mentioning possible IT security director's leak here.

Election hashtag search here.

I invite you to send submissions for this year's ITP Section Best Computer Software Award. The award "recognizes work in software, other than statistical software, by a member of APSA, which best contributes to the furtherance of research in the field. The winner will receive a certificate and a check for the cost of one year's membership in the APSA and the ITP section."

Self nominations are welcomed. Please send details to: andrew.chadwick@rhul.ac.uk

The extended deadline is May 20, 2009. The Award will be presented at the business meeting of the section at the 2009 APSA conference.

It is a common joke at academic conferences on the internet and politics that the British far-right BNP has long had the "best" web campaigning strategy in UK politics.

What "best" actually means in this context is, of course, highly debatable.

But if we examine the Alexa rankings for the BNP, as revealed at the foot of their home page, they clearly appear to have the most highly ranked political party website in the UK. They have also long deployed sophisticated integration of mobile and web tools, and they have recently migrated, along with all of Britain's parties, into the new arenas of online social network sites.

The big challenge is how to explain the "popularity" of the BNP site. This is especially pressing as we progress, not only through arguably what is one of the most significant crises of confidence that modern Westminster has ever faced -- the MPs' expenses scandal -- but also the European Parliament elections.

Last week, the UK Foreign Office held a Digital Diplomacy event. Chaired by the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones and promoted by Weber Shandwick, the event was designed as a showcase for the recent intensification of social media initiatives at the FCO. These come under the heading of “Bringing Foreign Policy Home.”

Cellan-Jones has a typically funny post about the event.

While it’s easy to be sceptical, it’s interesting to note that the FCO has not dumped its earlier internet enthusiasm overboard, as many predicted would happen when David Miliband and members of his team started blogging a couple of years ago.

The FCO bloggers are one of the several examples I discuss in my latest paper:Chadwick, A. (2009) “Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance”I/S: Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society5 (1), pp. 9-41. Download pdf.

[First published at andrewchadwick.com]

Nick Anstead and I have just published an article "The 2008 Digital Campaign in the United States: The Real Lesson for British Parties" in a special double issue of the journal Renewal. The issue is timed to coincide with the Labour Party conference, which takes place next week. It contains a range of interesting papers.

Here's an excerpt from our conclusion, followed by the editors' description of the volume.

"Our analysis leads to an important conclusion for British politicians seeking to harness the power of the internet.

While it is certainly the case that British parties and candidates can learn something from the United States, precisely how they should measure their success in so doing is far from straightforward. The challenge is as much one of institutional design as it is about the adoption of the latest technology: how do we reform British politics to set free the full democratic potential of the internet? This is a long term project, but it could lead to huge rewards. Many of the issues identified in this article as significant are now frequently debated in the UK: democratising party organisations, forging links between parties and broader citizen campaigns, reforming campaign finance laws, and entrenching a culture of constitutional pluralism, to name but a few. It is now imperative that the relationship between political institutions and technology is considered in these debates.

The real lesson of Obama 2008 is that British parties need to approach this issue from two complementary perspectives. They should design their online campaigns so that they mesh with the aspects of their organisational structures and Britain’s electoral environment that they value and wish to maintain. But they should consider simultaneously how they might democratise their organisational structures and the electoral environment in ways likely to catalyse internet-enabled civic engagement."

RENEWAL Vol 16 No 3/4

A special double issue for autumn 2008 offers essential reading on the present economic, political, environmental, social, and ideological crisis. And it points to the new ideas, initiatives and alliances that could contain the right's revival and renew progressive politics.

With contributions from ADAM LENT on the excesses of the City and the crisis of civility ... MATTHEW WATSON on Gordon Brown's choice of intellectual hero... GRAHAM TURNER on the credit crunch as the consequence of unequal globalisation ... JOHN HOUGHTON on the failure of the market to deliver affordable and sustainable housing ... WILL DAVIES on the limits of New Labour's expertise ... SUNDER KATWALA on the need for a new pluralism ... JON CRUDDAS on reclaiming aspiration ... ANDREW SIMMS on the prospects for a green New Deal ... ROBIN WILSON on social democratic solutions to today's global challenges ... DAVID LAMMY on what we can learn from the US elections ... NICK ANSTEAD AND ANDREW CHADWICK on online campaigning ... DEBORAH LITTMAN on building grassroots movements ... KARMA NABULSI on mobilising to reanimate political institutions ...

PLUS.

a major essay by STUART WHITE on the economic thought of Andrew Glyn...

Notebook: LEN DUVALL on Tory London; and GIDEON RACHMAN on McCain vs Obama...

...and reviews by COLIN CROUCH on 'bad capitalism'; PAUL SEGAL on the causes of global poverty; and BEN JACKSON on the return of American liberalism

RENEWAL 16.3/4 is being sent out to subscribers now and can be ordered online from http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals.html

--

RENEWAL
Email info@renewal.org.uk
Website http://www.renewal.org.uk

This week and next are pretty significant for the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway. On August 29 the Department and its three research centres move from their current location on the first floor of the Arts Building to a suite of offices in the College's Founders Building (the fancy big red one in all of the photos).

This is good news for all kinds of reasons. We are expanding, and there are simply not enough rooms in our current location to cope. Our new accommodation provides us with a bit more room for PhD students, a good sized administrative hub, and an academic common room. We also get to hang out in what is arguably the finest university building in the whole of the United Kingdom (Oxford and Cambridge have fine buildings, but none to match the sheer scale and majesty of Founders, though I admit it is not to everybody's taste).

Over the last couple of weeks, staff have been busy packing boxes and attaching sticky labels to things in anticipation of the big day. Many of us have taken the opportunity to chuck out some of the detritus that inevitably gathers over time. Academics are notorious hoarders. "When in doubt, keep it" is our motto, often in the vague hope that some old History and English Literature A-level revision notes (guilty) or a pile of prospectuses from 2001 (guilty again) might one day come in useful. I even found a form letter from 1989 (when I was 18), from none other than Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour Party, welcoming me as a member. For some unknown reason it was nestling within those A-level revision notes.

As I wandered up and down the corridor last week, I witnessed quite a few rueful smiles as colleagues landed upon dog-eared postcards, yellowing newspaper clippings, long-forgotten publishers' rejections, proudly retained student thank-you letters, obscure journal article offprints, and miscellaneous electronic artifacts, such as a Sony digital camera from the mid-1990s that actually stored images on 3.5" floppy disks. One colleague bitterly described how he had taken the momentous decision to give away - to a library in Zimbabwe - thousands of pounds' worth of legal documents dating back forty years, such was his desire to purge.

The laxative effect of the Department's move has sparked several discussions of scholarly practices in these digital times. What, and where, is the "archive", even in a personal sense, these days? I have about 3000 PDF documents on my hard disk, mostly journal articles and conference papers that I've gathered over the last five years. All of my published work, apart from a few book reviews, is stored in various file formats on the same disk. These are instantly searchable, indexed by Copernic, my desktop search engine. Sometimes I have to ferret around in directories and subdirectories to find something, but this usually doesn't take too long. The convenience is amazing. Contrast this with the eight box files of photocopies, scraps of notes, none of them searchable, that provided the raw materials for my PhD thesis, published as my first book.

But while we gain convenience we lose permanence. The dusty piles of documents, the bottom drawers of filing cabinets, even those individually-labelled floppy disks, have a fixity about them. Adobe's PDF is a standard and has been around an eon in "internet time", but will it be the same in a decade? Will I be able to read the files? Will I have lost the lot in a catastrophic hard disk crash? Don't even mention Microsoft Word, a programme that has been through several well-meaning, though irritating, file format changes in only the last few years (".docx", anyone?).

In thirty years' time, will somebody going through the office of a scholar who started out in the late 1990s be able to construct a reasonable narrative of their life's work? I doubt it. And even if they could, it would not look at all like it would have done in the pre-digital era. In days gone by, retiring professors would often deposit their "papers" with their university library, the idea being that their judgment over what to hoard had some intrinsic value worth passing on to future generations. What would "papers" even mean these days?

Librarians have pondered the problem of the digital era archive for more than a decade, but my sense is that we are still massively underprepared for what lies ahead.

Those A level revision notes and PhD box files went to the recycling plant last Thursday. They are gone forever. It felt good. And the 19 year old letter from Neil Kinnock? Sitting safely in a folder waiting to be transported to room FW114, of course.

YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States
April 3 & 4, 2009 - Amherst, Massachusetts
http://youtube08election.crowdvine.com
 
A two-day conference jointly hosted by:

• The University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Political Science
• The Science, Technology, and Society Initiative (STS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
• The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
• The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP)
• The Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP)

 
Keynote Speakers
Richard Rogers, Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Director of govcom.org.
Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University, the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA.

Approach
The Program Committee encourages disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches rooted in political science, media studies, and communication scholarship. The JITP Editor strongly endorses new and experimental approaches involving collaboration with information and computer science scholars. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:
 
- citizen initiated campaign videos,
- candidates' use of YouTube,
- bloggers use of YouTube to influence the primaries or election,
- the impact of YouTube on traditional or new media coverage of the election cycle,
- the effect of YouTube on citizen interest, knowledge, engagement, or voting behavior,
- social network analysis of YouTube and related election-oriented sites,
- political theory or communication theory and YouTube in the context of the 2008 election,
- new metrics that support the study of the "YouTube Effect" on elections,
- archives for saving and tools for mapping the full landscape of YouTube election content,
- use of YouTube in the classroom as a way to teach American electoral politics, or
- reviews of existing scholarship about YouTube.

Paper Submissions
Authors are invited to prepare and submit to JITP a manuscript following one of the six submission formats by January 7, 2009. These formats include research papers, policy viewpoints, workbench notes, review essays, book reviews, and papers on teaching innovation. The goal is to produce a special issue, or double issue, of JITP with a wide variety of approaches to the broad theme of "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States."

How to Submit
Everything you need to know about how to prepare and submit a strong JITP paper via the JITP web site is documented at http://www.jitp.net. Papers will be put through an expedited blind peer review process by the Program Committee and authors will be notified about a decision by February 15, 2009. A small number of papers will be accepted for presentation at the conference. Other paper authors will be invited to present a poster during the Friday evening reception. All posters must include a "YouTube" version of their research findings.
 
Best Paper and Poster Cash Prizes
The author (or authors) of the best research paper will receive a single $1,000 prize. The creator (or creators) of the best YouTube poster/research presentation will also receive a single prize of $1,000.

Conference Co-Chairs
Stuart Shulman, University of Pittsburgh
Michael Xenos, Louisiana State University
 
Program Committee
Sam Abrams, Harvard University
Micah Altman, Harvard University
Karine Barzilai-Nahon, University of Washington
Lance Bennett, University of Washington
Ryan Biava, University of Wisconsin
Bob Boynton, University of Iowa
Tom Carlson, Åbo Akademi University
Andrew Chadwick, Royal Holloway, University of London
Greg Elmer, Ryerson University
Kirsten Foot, University of Washington
Jane Fountain, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Jeff Guliati, Bentley College
Mike Hais, Co-author, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics
Matthew Hale, Seton Hall University
Justin Holmes, University of Minnesota
Helen Margetts, Oxford Internet Institute
Mike Margolis, University of Cincinnati
Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst
John McNutt, University of Delaware
Andrew Philpot, University of Southern California-Information Sciences Institute
Antoinette Pole, Montclair State University
Stephen Purpura, Cornell University
Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project
Jeffrey Seifert, Congressional Research Service
Mack Shelley, Iowa State University
Charlie Schweik, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Chirag Shah, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
John Wilkerson, University of Washington
Christine Williams, Bentley College
Morley Winograd, University of Southern California
Quan Zhou, University of Wisconsin-Stout