judith meskill's knowledge notes...

notable judiths - judith donath...

Last evening I was reading a post on Mopsos - Is there a practical use to SNA? wherein Martin Dugage responds to an article by Patti Anklam on KM and the social network and asks an important question about SNA and corporate settings.

Reading Martin's post and Patti's article inspired me to perform a Google Search on the intersection of "knowledge management" and "social network analysis". The first result of this search was a February 21, 2002 article by Peter Morville on Social Network Analysis that appeared in his column Semantics. Great post by the way. When I read the comments section for this entry I found Ben Hyde's reference to The Sociable Media Group.

Clicking on the Sociable Media Group's people link led me to Judith S. Donath, the Director, who "is an Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab, where she directs the Sociable Media research group. Her work focuses on the social side of computing, synthesizing knowledge from fields such as graphic design, urban studies and cognitive science to build innovative interfaces for the online communities, virtual identities and computer-mediated collaborations that have emerged with the convergence of computing and communication."

This winding web-based path guided me back to an idea that I had a number of months ago to scribe a series of brief bios, on my weblog, of Notable Judiths. I was first inspired to embark on this endeavor by a late night Google Search on the word Judith. In this search Judith Donath was the second entry out of 4.78 million results. I was originally going to start scribing this series with the first Judith returned by Google. However the second (Judith Donath), in this serendipitous turn of events, will serve as an excellent beginning.

Postscript:
I found this article from Discover magazine in the April 2003 edition - Emerging Technology: Who Loves Ya, Baby?. In this article the research of both Judith Donath and Valdis Krebs are featured. And so, to bring this piece back full circle, I recently had a virtual meet with both Patti Anklam and Valdis Krebs in an AOK: Star Series discussion. Patti Was the Star of the series and Valdis most graciously joined in on the discussion to bring his deep knowledge and research to bear in the rather lively discussion. Well within six degrees. (^:

K-Collector
August 31, 2003 01:42 AM | google it! | threadorati