Doing An Internet Study

Doing an Internet study without e-science in a strong Internet nation Han Woo PARK, PhD Dept. of Communication & Information YeungNam University Republic of Korea (South) Email: hanpark@ynu.ac.kr, parkhanwoo@hotmail.com Website: http://www.hanpark.net

This is written for a round table,

“ Internet studies and e-science: New tools and concepts for research”, in annual conference of AoIR (Association of Internet Researchers) in Vancouver Canada, 17-20 October 2007.

Biographical sketches of author

Han Woo Park is Assistant Professor at YeungNam University in South Korea.

His research on the use of new digital technologies in extending social networks has contributed to development of a new research field, Hyperlink Network Analysis , and his research has appeared in several international journals, including New Media & Society and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Acknowledgement

The author kindly acknowledges support through the Korea Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2004-042-H00004).

I have been a principal investigator in a research project titled “ Analyzing South Korea’s political websphere ” supported through the Korean Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2004-042-H00004) from December 2004 to November 2007.

Let me give some reflections on the four round table questions based on a personal experience with this particular project.

This project is composed of three research package . The first is to compare South Korea’s electoral websphere with other countries.

This was done as a part of the “ Internet & Election Project ” whose e-science aspect is well introduced in a recent Journal of Compute-Mediated Communication ’s e-science special issue (Jankowski, 2007).

The second is to examine the structure of online relational networking using a set of hyperlink data collected from the official websites (Park, Thelwall, & Kluver, 2005; Park & Thelwall, 2007a forthcoming)

and personal blogs (Park & Kluver, 2007b forthcoming) of elected politicians ,

i.e., National Assembly members, and citizen blogs having a strong engagement with Korean politicians (Park & Jankowski, 2006).

The third is a cross-national survey of websites produced by Japanese and South Korean politicians by comparing their websites features and hyperlinks

(Tkach-Kawasaki & Park, 2007).

Through this research project, I have been able to collaborate with several oversea scholars in terms of brainstorming, writing-together, and conferencing.

However, most of these activities were done through commercial softwares

(e.g., Skype, MS office, Webdex etc.).

These proprietary programs are neither safe nor confidential enough to do a scientific communication.

However, public e-science communication tools for instantaneous Q & A, mutual writing/proof-reading, and co-analyzing are rare in nearly all nations including South Korea with strong Internet infrastructure.

There are some embryonic attempts driven by the USA, for example, SNAC

(Social Networks and Cyberinfrastructure, http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Conferences/SNAC/index.html ).

Therefore, the development of public e-science tools for scholarly communication particularly among humanists and social scientists needs to be perceived as an important policy issue .

Further, a focus interview with scholars having a strong desire about adopting e-science communication media can be taken as an appropriate approach to policy issues regarding social Internet studies and e-science.

A heavy dependence on commercial application is also true of “link analysis ” that is often referred to as the most promising area where Internet studies and e-science can meet (Ackland et al., 2006; Park & Thelwall, 2003).

None of non-commercial crawlers is superior to major search engines such as the Yahoo, the Google, and the AltaVista in terms of the coverage of World Wide Web.

Therefore, in order to conduct link analysis, researchers should be aware of (advanced) search engine queries and technical components comprising of a website.

In relation to this, Nentwich (2003, pp.235~244) provides a good sketch of new skills and roles for scholars and librarians in the e-science age.

Lastly, if I had had an access to virtual collaboratory with massive data storage capacity and advanced research network, it would have greatly enhanced the quality of a cross-national research that examines the different styles and practices of politician websites between South Korea and Japan.

Its primary method lied in identifying the existence of certain information and engagement characteristics contained in the websites of national assembly members.

This joint project accompanied with downloading and storing entire websites of individual politicians using the Offline Explorer, a paid program that allows you to download certain website and navigate the site offline.

Due to the limited bandwidth capacity of ordinary Internet network, I was not able to share archived websites with a Japanese partner as a class and vice versa.

Only screen-shots were exchanged via email. Table 1 summarizes the total amount of South Korean politician websites in terms of website size, number of folders, and number of files .

*Table 1) Website sizes of South Korean politician homepages