Proposed SNA Project: Connecting PRAXIS

Student Information

Ross Weistroffer (MALD 2015)

I will not be taking the second module for credit, but may be interested in commissioning this project to an SNA second module student.  Please contact me at ross.weistroffer@tufts.edu if you you’re interested getting some freelance consulting experience in addition to some SNA experience!  

I also strongly encourage you to submit any of your second module research to PRAXIS, the Fletcher Journal of Human Security, if it relates to human security (the intersection of humanitarian assistance, international development, human rights, and conflict resolution) and is between 15 and 30 pages double spaced.  You would be promoting social network analysis, and yourself, in a very interesting field.  The priority submission deadline is December 14, 2013, and the final deadline is January 4, 2014; papers are submitted by sending them to fletcherpraxis@tufts.edu.  Please contact me for a copy of our Call for Submissions.

Background

As I started my position as the new editor-in-chief of PRAXIS, I discovered that while our new blog looked like a blog, it wasn’t acting like one. Where was the blogroll, with its handy links to other international relations blogs (presumably linked back to us)?  Where were the posts of other blogs’ content, with commentary adding to the discussion?   

The reason these questions even occurred to me, of course, is because of the buzzing international relations scholastic blogosphere.  Many of my professors at my alma mater have blogs, and they seem to put an unusual amount of work into them considering their many academic duties: blogs like The Duck of Minerva and The Monkey Cage have many posts per day on a wide variety of IR topics, frequently with extensive analyses of current events.  For these and others, the line between blog and professional media site has begun to blur, given The Washington Post’s recent acquisition of The Monkey Cage and with sites like UN Dispatch explicitly sponsored by the United Nations Foundation. 

Simultaneously, our journal relies on connections with practitioners and academics in order for our call for submissions to be successful; we need a large number of high quality papers in order to be able to publish the best papers and maintain a healthy mix of practitioners and academics.  While a blog can be enhanced for its own sake, we should consider potential means of enhancing this network as well. 

Objective

To connect PRAXIS to the human security blog community, and position itself within the greater international relations blog community so as to promote the perspective of human security. 

To connect PRAXIS with the most practitioners and academics possible, and receive the largest possible amount of high quality papers on matters related to human security. 

Research Question

What is PRAXIS’s place in the network of IR journals, online and offline, and how can we optimize our connections to ensure that we’re connecting with other journals, researchers, and practitioners?

Implicit (Potentially Unanswerable/Irrelevant) Questions of Interest

What is the utility of blogging in a professional context?

Are blogs connecting IR academics and professionals in ways that journals are not, or are they just reinforcing the status quo?

Hypothesis

PRAXIS already has a large network of connections to other IR schools; we target APSIA schools and use personal connections to ensure our call for submissions reaches the most amount of people.  However, there are many other non-APSIA schools with IR departments that may produce interesting research, and our connections to practitioner organizations are completely unknown, but are likely weak to non-existent.  We must enhance our betweenness in the network of IR organizations, and reach out to our fellow Fletcher and APSIA journals for potential avenues of collaboration.

Methodology

This is a project that begins in two parts: one mapping the IR blogosphere, and the other mapping the network of IR journals.  They inevitably intersect, however, as network participants, and the online and offline networks, are connected by shared citation and organization.  

The field of social network analysis has grown up with the technologies of blogging, with Chin et al. having fully explored this question of « identifying, measuring and evaluating communities in blogs » by means of sense of community and centrality measures, combining a structural analysis of a blog’s social network with sense of community surveys of readers to develop an understanding of « blog communities ».  Chin et al. also provide their own Internet-ready SOC survey to be posed to users, and describe how data mining techniques like crawling can be used to capture how sites are linking, and thereby linked, to each other.

The SOC surveys, including the basic question of whether or not the person reads or participates in any IR-oriented blogs, would be posed to Fletcher students and professors. 

Should the study include the network of the offline IR world, I would use PRAXIS records of previous editing teams’ institutional connections to begin to construct the network.  While this may be one potential method for creating an ego network for PRAXIS, it will likely not be possible to obtain similar records for other journals in constructing an inter-journal network, making it more suitable to use the act of publication as a tie between a journal and the author’s institution.  SOC surveys on blogs, and a description of personal connections to other journals, may also be served to other journals’ staff (though whether or not they complete them is, as always, uncertain).

Sources

Chin, Alvin, and Mark Chignell. "Identifying Communities in Blogs: Roles for Social Network Analysis and Survey Instruments." International Journal of Web Based Communities 3.3 (2007): 345-363. Web. 24 Oct. 2013. <http://inderscience.metapress.com/content/JTR822U6VV382W25>.