reports & essays – Page 5

Reimagining Internet Studies

10 August 2009Erhardt Graeff

Link

http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/08/reimagining-internet-studies/

Excerpt

“Our field poses two simple questions to researchers:

‘Where have studies about the web failed?’ and,
‘How can we do better?’

“The emerging field of Web Ecology is an attempt to unify contemporary research and practice under a common focus, set of principles, and general approach to promote new insights and more fruitful forms of exchange in this space. We believe that these lay the groundwork for a more vibrant, more dynamic, and more useful field of research and community of researchers.”

One Laptop per Digital Divide?

6 February 2008Erhardt Graeff

Published Version

graeff-2008-onelaptop

Excerpt

“When I first heard about the One Laptop per Child [OLPC] programme—the goal of distributing inexpensively produced laptops to every child in the world for education—my immediate reaction was: what a great idea! When faced with OLPC’s cute, little XO laptops, the problem of ‘The Digital Divide’ seems so simple and so solvable

“But that was my first alarm bell: simple. It seemed so simple. Solutions can often be simple—but development problems are rarely simple. They are usually historical, culturally specific and inherently complex. And while the XO laptop may have an expertly-designed-to-be-simple interace, it is anything but a simple solution.”

ICTs and Political Practice in Post-Soviet Estonia

24 May 2007Erhardt Graeff

For my RIT International Studies Thesis, I looked at four examples of political ICT use in Estonia in the context of contemporary egovernment terminology and European “information society” initiatives as a case study in egovernment innovation.

Full Text

graeff-2007-isthesis

Abstract

This undergraduate thesis seeks to provide an overview of the successful adoption of information and communication technologies by the Post-Soviet government of Estonia—i.e. the successful promotion of an information society via e-Government. Furthermore, the paper argues that the consistent and proactive endorsement of these activities by enforceable legislative means is the most significant factor leading to the successful utilization of new technologies; a point which has led to Estonia boasting better than average and trendsetting regional and world rankings for e-Government performance. To these ends the terms of Information Society, e-Government, e-Democracy, e-Gov Databases, e-voting, and e-Gov web portals have been workably defined; and the correlating policies and information and communication technology end products (currently in use by the Estonian citizenry) have been detailed.

Attempting to build the Semantic Web: The Ontological Approach

14 December 2004Erhardt Graeff

Award

This paper won the 2007 RIT Institute Writing Contest in Technical Writing.

Full Text

graeff-2004-semanticweb

Introduction

When father of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee first envisioned the World Wide Web, he imagined it as “an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help.” (1998, Introduction, para. 1) However, what amassed was a mess of poorly formed HTML documents boasting animated GIFs and information displayed without regard for meaning or context. What Berners-Lee was wishing for, and continues to wish for, is a better World Wide Web—a Semantic Web. This ultimate realization of the Internet’s potential is something that Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are still working on. With millions of users and billions of documents, the web is constantly growing and evolving. The W3C hopes that it evolves into the Semantic Web—and that hope lies in something called an ontology. (Clark, 2002)