Just read how he finishes off the quickness memo with an indicative story and think about our obsession with the ‘speed’ of the Web and digital transformations all around us. In many ways these shifting tectonic Internet plates conflate economy of expression and depth of impact in a kind of slow quickness, flashes of light that we saw coming a long way off. At any rate Calvino says it much more quickly and slowly at the same time.

Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. “I need another five years,” said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.

Overall we considered the project a great success and it was covered in more than 400 newspapers and magazines worldwide alongside TV current affairs programmes in the UK and abroad. It provides CAST with another excellent case study regarding working together with industry to research intersections of emergent technologies and social life.

My role was project manager of the overall project and the field research was led by Jennifer Barth with support from Richard Lewis, Yael Gerson, and Marcus Gilroy-Ware. We were supported by Goldsmiths Communications & Publicity, the Goldsmiths Business Development Office, and various field sites including Harris Primary Free School, Peckham. This project is typical of our plans for CAST research by combining traditional social research with digital research methods to rapidly investigate the intersection of social life and emergent technologies.

The project was basically broke down into four phases. The first phase was finding suitable research subjects. For this we worked closely with the Goldsmiths communications team to crowdsource suitable research subjects by engaging people in conversations about the cloud on our combined social networks channels. Using this approach we identified five different research subjects and spent an intensive two week period in our second phase ‘following’ the subject in the finest tradition of ethnography, both digital and offline. We combined mixed methods of interviews, subject daily diaries, and observation. Alongside these offline processes we performed a variety of digital research methods on the cloud. We scraped about 5,000 conversations and news stories about cloud computing through the Google News and Twitter APIs and started out attempting to train a classifier for sentiment analysis. With insufficient ground truth for reliable sentiment we moved on to a form of latent semantic analysis using term frequency and inverse document frequency. This yielded good results and showed us the most common reference points for cloud computing and the unique instances of particular terms in particular conversations or news stories. This told us that the concept of the cloud was indeed very fluid with a huge variety of potential futures for consolidation of public perception of the concept.

The third phase was publishing an extensive report for Rackspace accompanied by a brief summary video for use in publicising the research findings. Our key findings were the existence of four different emergent social types related to social usage of cloud computing: the e-hoarder, the cloud contrarian (skeptic), the cloud reality check, and the teenager 2020. Each of these social types exhibited particular behavioural and social characteristics related to their usage of the cloud and told us something about where the technology might be heading in social application and adoption. It also raised new issues about what responsibilities apply to the cloud hosting providers, the cloud service providers, regulatory bodies, and end users. We will be publishing our findings shortly in peer reviewed academic journals.

The fourth phase was arranging to support the publicising of the research findings. This taught us a lot about the benefits of working with professional public relations organisations in raising awareness of the importance of the findings of the research. Interestingly, the aspect of the research findings that the media was most interested in was not on of our four core social types but instead Digital Inheritance, a concept we stumbled across in the process of our two-week intensive qualitative research.

Development

This is the first personal website that I developed on my Localhost using the web server on my Mac OS 10.6 as a development and testing environment. It took about five days from concept to launch. When it was ready to launch I migrated it on to my Linux web server using only Terminal to migrate files back and forth and match the installation environments. This approach mirrored the one we were working through in the first few classes of our MA Digital Journalism digital sandbox module at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Tools

• installing Apache, PHP, SQL, Python, Emacs, Curl, and a few others
• some basic design skills in Photoshop and Illustrator
• little bit of PHP and CSS to customise the WordPress theme
• bunch of troubleshooting and configuring on both Apache web servers

Plans

The concept of the site is to allow a ton of expansion as I start generating a lot more variety of content. My plan is to do a lot more video, script scrapes, storytelling, and press citations. The past decade in my life started out working on my PhD and concluded settling into a variety of different professional roles. The dust has temporarily settled and my hope is that this site inspires renewed efforts at publicly engaging through this site representing my home base for my personal identity online.