The Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) is a learned society dedicated to the advancement of the transdisciplinary field of Internet studies. Founded in 1999, it is an international, member-based support network promoting critical and scholarly Internet research, independent from traditional disciplines and existing across academic borders.
AoIR was formally founded on May 30, 1999, at a meeting of nearly sixty scholars at the San Francisco Hilton and Towers, following initial discussions at a 1998 conference at Drake University entitled "The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory: Metaphor, Magic & Power".[1] The inaugural conference was organised by Nancy Baym, Jeremy Hunsinger and Steve Jones at the University of Kansas in 2000, and attracted 300 scholars.[2] As the Chronicle of Higher Education noted, its rapid growth during the first few years of its existence marked the coming of age of Internet studies.[3] It has continued to grow, with a membership of approximately 400 scholars. It supports AIR-L, a mailing list with over 5,000 subscribers.
AoIR holds an annual academic conference, as well as promoting online discussion and collaboration through a long-running mailing list. It also hosts a Mastodon instance, AoIR.social.
Activities
editThe Association supports scholarly communication in a number of ways:
- It organizes an annual, peer-reviewed scholarly conference, which accepts paper and presentation submissions from all disciplines.
- As part of its annual conference, it hosts an annual one day interdisciplinary Doctoral Colloquium for Ph.D. students and an Early Career Researchers event for professionals who are in their first academic positions following the completion of the Ph.D.
- It hosts the AIR-L mailing list with over 5000 subscribers.
- It has published multiple editions of the Internet Research Annual with Peter Lang.
- It hosts working groups that produce reports of interest to researchers in the field, most notably the AoIR Guide on Ethical Online Research.
- It co-sponsors an annual issue of the journal Information, Communication and Society consisting of top papers from the annual conference.
- It publishes Selected Papers of Internet Research (SPIR), an open-access online collection of papers presented at the annual conference.[4]
- It curates videos of its keynote and some of its other speakers on its YouTube page.[5]
Conferences
edit- 2023 – AoIR 2023: Revolutions, Philadelphia, United States
- 2022 – AoIR 2022: Decolonising the Internet, Dublin, Ireland
- 2021 – AoIR 2021: Independence (online)
- 2020 – AoIR 2020: Life (online)
- 2019 – AoIR 2019: Trust in the System, Brisbane, Australia
- 2018 – AoIR 2018: Transnational Materialities, Montreal, Canada
- 2017 – AoIR 2017: Networked Publics, Tartu and Tallinn, Estonia
- 2016 – AoIR 2016: Internet Rules! Berlin, Germany
- 2015 – Internet Research 16: Digital Imaginaries, Phoenix, United States
- 2014 – Internet Research 15: Boundaries and Intersections, Daegu, South Korea
- 2013 – Internet Research 14: Resistance + Appropriation, Denver, United States
- 2012 – Internet Research 13: Technologies, Salford, United Kingdom
- 2011 – Internet Research 12: Performance and Participation, Seattle, United States
- 2010 – Internet Research 11: Sustainability, Participation, Action, Gothenburg, Sweden
- 2009 – Internet Research 10: Internet: Critical, Milwaukee, United States
- 2008 – Internet Research 9: Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place, Copenhagen, Denmark
- 2007 – Internet Research 8: Let's Play!, Vancouver, Canada
- 2006 – Internet Research 7: Internet Convergences, Brisbane, Australia
- 2005 – Internet Research 6: Internet Generations, Chicago, United States
- 2004 – Internet Research 5: Ubiquity?, Brighton, England
- 2003 – Internet Research 4: Broadening the Band, Toronto, Canada
- 2002 – Internet Research 3: Net/Work/Theory, Maastricht, Netherlands
- 2001 – Internet Research 2: InterConnections, Minneapolis, United States
- 2000 – Internet Research 1: The State of the Interdiscipline, Lawrence, United States
Presidents
edit| # | Name | Term |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Steve Jones | 1999–2003 |
| 2 | Nancy Baym | 2003–2005 |
| 3 | Matthew Allen | 2005–2007 |
| 4 | Charles Ess | 2007–2009 |
| 5 | Mia Consalvo | 2009–2011 |
| 6 | Alexander Halavais | 2011–2013 |
| 7 | Lori Kendall | 2013–2015 |
| 8 | Jennifer Stromer-Galley | 2015–2017 |
| 9 | Axel Bruns | 2017–2019 |
| 10 | Lynn Schofield Clark | 2019–2021 |
| 11 | Tama Leaver | 2021–2023 |
| 12 | Nicholas John | 2023–2025 |
References
edit- ^ Witmer, Diane F. (1999). "The Association(of).Internet.Researchers: Formed to support scholarship in and of the internet". Information, Communication & Society. 2 (3): 368–370. doi:10.1080/136911899359637.
- ^ Wellman, Barry (2000). "Social scientists in cyberspace: report on the founding conference of the association for internet researchers". ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin. 21 (2): 13–14. doi:10.1145/605660.605664. ISSN 2372-7403. S2CID 41384277.
- ^ McLemee, Scott (30 March 2001). "Internet studies 1.0: a discipline Is born". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 47, no. 29. p. A24.
- ^ "Conference Papers: SPIR".
- ^ "Association of Internet Researchers - YouTube". YouTube.