Alice Robison asked everyone in ENG654 – Social Media for a status report this week on our online-community research projects, so here’s Updates of Gor, such as they are.
The biggest development was getting the project appropriately scoped. Alice and I sat down early last week and came up with a division into an investigation of the SL Gorean RP use of web forums and social media for class, and a legal anthropology investigation of governance in SL-Gor for an independent study project (and, hopefully, a dissertation chapter down the line, but I’m nowhere near a firm enough dissertation proposal to know if that’ll be feasible). I still owe her – and the chair of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change – a one-page writeup of the project. I’ll probably do that directly after finishing this post.
She recommended a couple books on methodology: Charles Ess’s Digital Media Ethics, and Markham and Baym’s Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method. As soon as I finish Lessig’s Remix, my lunchtime reading for the past week, I’ll start in on the Ess.
I discovered that the project seems to be exempt from IRB approval: as both observation of public behavior (Category 3), and data to be collected without RL identifiers (Category 4). I still have to apply for exemption, the form being, of course, almost identical to that for expedited review of *non*-exempt research. There’s no escape from forms. It seems that I can’t be my own Principal Investigator: that could prove troublesome, and I’ve asked for some clarification as to my options there.
My human subjects certification (which I’d obtained as a facilitator in a study run by my former employer, ASU’s Counseling & Consultation some years back) had expired, so I had to take the National Institutes of Health online training program again. It was actually sort of fun and interesting, and I did very well, quickly getting my Not Mad Scientist certificate:
In a pleasant bit of synchronicity, I discovered that a colleague has deep experience with Gorean RP in SL, and has offered up high-level contacts to provide me a seal of approval and introduction into the community. If it comes through, it’ll be an incredible boon: trying to break in cold as an outsider *and* a researcher could easily be an utter failure.
I’ve created an SL avatar to be my Caste of Scribes researcher, and repurposed one I had around into my kajira (slavegirl) researcher. The scribe has yet to log on for the first time: sometime in the next few days I’ll do up a shape for him, get a good skin, hair and animation overrider, and some generic-but-acceptable Gorean clothes to start in. My kajira needs an RP-appropriate skin and hair, but has a lot of basics in place.
I’m halfw
ay through Book 4 of the canon novels. I’m finding them surprisingly entertaining: John Norman is a *terrible* prose stylist, but does tell a ripping good adventure yarn. The treatment of women has been more silly than offensive: Norman’s social views so far are too absurd to get upset about: his social Darwinism is so patently illogical as to be entertaining. I still plan to read through the first 7 (of 27) novels as soon as possible, but no further, unless necessary.
I haven’t dived into the web communities yet, other than a read-through of the goreanrp.com site, a work in progress intended as a community site for SL-Gor, by the author of a very useful Amazon list of the Gor novels. Thanks to @AZAfterthought, I have a copy of the Bardzell & Odom ethnography of SL-Gor, which looks like it sets a good high mark for me to match with my work.
So the coming week holds: making contact with the SL-Gor community leaders via my colleague, getting my avatars up and running, reading the next couple of novels, startng the Ess book and Bardzell & Odom article, doing a writeup of my proposed research for my advisors, and starting to lurk on the online forums.