My dissertation research is on community formation on the Internet. That is, I'm looking at how people are forming communities of interest rather than being limited by geographically bound communities. As a result, I spend a considerable portion of my time on DragonMud. This is the community about which I write.
Papers and publications include:
Ethnographic Fieldwork on the Internet about
gender issues and how they do (and don't) pertain to DragonMud.
Shar's Return: Performance as Gifting is a
look at how performance (usually spontaneous in nature, on DragonMud) can
be intentional and, in fact, can be constructed as a gift to the
community.
Simulating Future Histories, written
with Dr. Reed Riner, about NAU's academic application of DragonMud's
code.
Creating
a Community of Interest: "Self" and "Other" on DragonMud was a paper
presented at the Combined Conference on MUDs in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on
Jan 15, 1997. (An earlier version is listed below.)
Computer-Mediated Interactions: Human Factors was one of three
keynote speeches presented at MUDShopII in San Diego CA, Sept 1995.
Some of my other work is a bit more experimental -- I've gotten to the point where I'm trying to think about how to go about thinking about this stuff. (Epistemic tautology. Don'cha love it?) ANYhow, since the following were written primarily for graduate seminars and for profs who've never seen a MU*, there's a fair amount of repetition in the background material here. SOMEday, all of this will get tied together coherently into a PhD dissertation.
Living the Virtual Life: People and Places in an On-Line Community
was origially written as a grant proposal and is an (albeit dated) attempt
to explain what, exactly, I'm trying to write about.
Creating a Community of Interest: "Self" and "Other" on DragonMud
is an attempt to look at how DragonMudders negotiate the community's
standards of behavior. This is an early version of the "Creating a Community
of Interest" paper listed earlier.
Orality in a Text-based Community is an
exploration into the applicability of two theoretical perspectives when
trying to analyze DragonMud interactions.
Space and Place in a Virtual Community,
about how players "construct" space.
Ritual and Religion on DragonMud is a first
pass at looking at ritual process. The bit about "religion" doesn't work,
imho, but, well, I've left it in because I haven't gotten around to
rewriting this into the paper that I think it should be -- with
considerably more emphasis on what it means to be a wizard on DragonMud.
And for those patient folks who've requested it, my working bibliography is finally up.