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eChicago 2009 Kate Williams, editor Proceedings of the third eChicago symposium held at Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois April 2-3, 2009 A monograph published by the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Graduate Schools of Library and Information Science © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois ISBN-10: 0-87845-130-7 ISBN-13: 978-0-87845-130-2 The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science has a distinguished tradition of publishing high-quality publications for the field of LIS and actively produces Library Trends and The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. Our 50 year publishing history includes scholarly and practical publications that address current issues and also serve as historical archives. Here you can find quality books, journals, papers, and conference proceedings for teaching, scholarly reading, and daily application. This and other titles are available through the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS) at http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/handle/2142/154 To link directly to all the eChicago proceedings, visit http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/4605 Keep up to date on eChicago at http://echicago.illinois.edu eChicago 2009 Cybernavigating our Cultures Introduction—Kate Williams with Chris Hagar................................................................. 1 Symposium program........................................................................................................... 5 Photo gallery—Robert A. Sengstacke ................................................................................ 9 President’s welcome—Donna Carroll .............................................................................. 19 Dean’s welcome—John Unsworth ................................................................................... 21 Digiplace and cyberscapes: Rethinking the digital divide in urban America—Matthew A. Zook .................................................................................................................................. 23 Provost’s welcome—Cheryl Johnson-Odim..................................................................... 41 Dean’s welcome—Susan Roman...................................................................................... 43 Via Chicago: Ethnic media, new media and the experience of migration and mobility— Steve Jones........................................................................................................................ 45 Sustaining the cyberlife of Chicago’s ethnic communities............................................... 61 Abdul Alkalimat ........................................................................................................... 61 Brooke Bahnsen............................................................................................................ 62 Aiko Takazawa ............................................................................................................. 63 Hui Yan......................................................................................................................... 65 Melissa Martinez........................................................................................................... 67 Sarah Cottonaro ............................................................................................................ 68 Héctor R. Hernández..................................................................................................... 70 The CyberNavigators of Chicago Public Library ............................................................. 79 Roberto Pang................................................................................................................. 79 Sophia Hou ................................................................................................................... 83 Juan Pablo Avalos......................................................................................................... 84 Omar Ramirez............................................................................................................... 84 Alicia Henry.................................................................................................................. 85 Anita Mechler ............................................................................................................... 86 Building community: Bit by byte—Carolyn Anthony...................................................... 99 The City of Chicago’s three Digital Excellence Demonstration Communities.............. 109 Ernest “Ernie” Sanders ............................................................................................... 109 Elvia Rodriguez Ochoa............................................................................................... 111 Andrew Pinçon ........................................................................................................... 113 Licia Knight ................................................................................................................ 120 Jon Gant ...................................................................................................................... 121 Academic and activist perspectives on community informatics..................................... 129 Safiya Noble ............................................................................................................... 129 Nate B. Grant .............................................................................................................. 133 Vincent McCaskill ...................................................................................................... 136 Willie Cade ................................................................................................................. 139 eChicago: Can we sketch a plan for cyberdemocracy in Chicagoland? ......................... 147 Abdul Alkalimat ......................................................................................................... 147 Matthew Guilford ....................................................................................................... 148 Zorica Nedovic-Budic................................................................................................. 152 Charles Benton............................................................................................................ 162 Kate Williams ............................................................................................................. 166 Introduction—Kate Williams with Chris Hagar12 This volume is the third proceedings of our series of eChicago symposia. The focus has always been to gather all voices to describe, analyze and advocate how Chicago can complete its transformation from an industrial city to an information city. In the third symposium we had 35 speakers and chairs in eight sessions, 187 people in attendance and more participating online. The basic field of study that makes eChicago possible is community informatics. Now, it is of course true that all computing is social. And computers and the internet are tools for social networks of all kinds. But community informatics focuses primarily on the local, historical communities in which we live. Those of us studying and teaching about this phenomenon see our work as foundational. This is because the library and every other institution, including the family itself, depends on the integrity of the local community. In fact, crises and disasters, which are a research focus for one of your eChicago co-chairs, prove this once and for all. The program and the proceedings here presents three elementary components of eChicago: the objective, the subjective, and what makes those both matter, human agency. Objective, we hear from Matt Zook: He shows us our basic geographic landscape, and the new tools that enable us to add a dimension or two onto that landscape. Since we move through space, we need to know how it’s different now. Subjective, we hear from Steve Jones: What are the stories we tell? What is our consciousness about the transformation we see and are a part of? The example of immigration, which is going on at the same time as digitization, helps us understand this subjective process. But then, the third element: human agency. Nothing matters without 1 Kate Williams (PhD, University of Michigan School of Information) is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science. She began community technology work in 1993 at the Chicago Area Project teaching women to use an Apple 2e, helped organize the Job?Tech conferences at UIC, MIT, and UCLA, and has taught at Devry University in Chicago, University of Toledo, Dominican, and UIUC. A case study of a community technology center in Toledo was the start of her research in community informatics. She founded the eChicago symposium in 2007 and leads the IMLS-funded eChicago study of IT use in Chicago’s ethnic communities. Her work uses social capital and social network theory to measure and model the sustainability of IT use in local communities. ([email protected]) 2 Chris Hagar is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Library & Information Science, Dominican University in River Forest where she teaches classes in community informatics, crisis informatics, and research methods. She holds a PhD in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.