Investigating e-research methods for my topic

After talking about some possible ways to go about this assignment in class on Wednesday, I began with what I thought might be the most interesting way to find sources with people that I can actually interact with. This involved searching for relevant topics on wikipedia, and then looking at the discussion and the history to see who is actually writing these articles.

While I still think this is a great idea, for my particular topic, I had some trouble finding relevant information on wikipedia. I began by broadly looking at Amsterdam, and then following some links that spread out into neighboring subtopics. I wasn't really feeling like I was making much progress with this approach until I came across this article on Waag, which is one of the oldest buildings in Amsterdam. I was thinking that this could possibly be relevant to my research, and then when I looked at the history of who modified it, I found someone who I think has tremendous potential: Dirk van der Made. He is Dutch, lives in Amsterdam, and is a self-proclaimed wikipedia addict.

The fact that he is very involved in wikipedia might make wikipedia itself a whole new form of interaction. Specifically, on Dirk's discussion page he has already had a few in depth discussions with other wikipedia users, and I think actually conducting my interactions through wikipedia could provide the added benefit of other people that are knowledgeable about my topic joining in the discussion. I'm very excited about using wikipedia as a medium for interaction because I think it is much like a traditional web forum, but because it is focused on creating an accurate and detailed source of knowledge, the people using it seem to be much more academic in their discourse.

I did also attempt some other methods for tracking down people I can interact with. In an attempt to scour the blogosphere I tried Technorati by searching for Amsterdam City Planning. I was suprised to find one of the top hits to be a post by Belinda, who is in our class and she was writing about one of the assigned readings. Unfortunately, Belinda probably doesn't count as one of the three sources we're trying to track down for this assignment. The other results that I got from Technorati did not seem to have the information I was looking for.

Although somewhat less interesting finds than my first source, my other two source seem like they could be useful. I found both of these through looking at the Amsterdam links that were put together for us by the librarian from the UW school of Architecture and Urban Planning First is the Berlage Institute, which is a laboratory of architecture in Rotterdam. The Berlage Staff Page has the contact info for various people in the department. The final source is the NAi (Netherlands Architecture Institute). There is a publishing group that puts out different compilations of architecture, that I was able to find contact info for their editors.