Designing Online Communities

Trevor Owens is a digital archivist at the Library of Congress. He holds a doctorate in social science research methods from George Mason University. His research has been published in journals such as Curator: The Museum Journal, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Science Communication. In 2014, he received the Society for American Archivists’ Archival Innovator Award.

• Contents: Learning and Collective Intelligence on the Web – A Framework for Studying Online Community Software – Research Questions and Methods – Community and Values: A Worked Example of Analysis – Rhetorics of Online Community: A Brief History – Enacting Control, Granting Permissions – Studying the Records of Online Communities.

«‘Designing Online Communities’ is a must-have for anyone designing or researching online communities, particularly for learning. Trevor Owens’s work is both comprehensive and eminently readable, a sweeping look at the technologies, design patterns, and cultural forms they produce that is both theoretically ambitious and grounded in examples and tools that will help you develop, research, and manage online communities.» (Kurt Squire, University of Wisconsin)«[Owens’s] engaging analysis gives clarity to how the design strategies implicit in code influence the ways we build conversations, relationships, and communities on the web.» (Jefferson Bailey, Internet Archive)«Can media archaeology have a methodology? Does software studies need data sets? In Designing Online Communities, Owens presents a bracing case study that not only contributes to our understanding of lives lived online, but also joins the empirical rigor of applied social science with leading-edge digital and media studies.» (Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland)«Owens asks us to consider how technologies reflect and shape permissions and control, and how the managers and builders of online communities wield power beyond simply an offer of ‘connectivity.’» (Audrey Watters, Hack Education)«This book provides essential context for our shared online existence.» (Dan Cohen, Digital Public Library of America)