EVOnline: Electrical Vehicle User/Driver Profile

This survey provides quantitative and qualitative data on electric vehicles and usage patterns spanning the entrance of major corporate players into the automobile industry (GM, Honda, Toyota). The feedback has been fairly successfuly due to recruitment efforts from the project team (such as presentations at Electric Car Clubs and shows) and an electronically well connected Electric Vehicle (EV) - community. Survey data reveals that the "hobbyist" EV movement is slowly giving way to the established manufacturers. Kirsch also found out that EV drivers own more than on EV. Qualitative responses underscore the enthusiasm of the EV drivers for their vehicles even as they admit the limits of the new technology.

The EVonline project team received some invaluable on-line contributions such as a battery evaluation report and some personal EV chronicles. Together with the survey-data such documentation forms the basis for future, more extensive research. Should this technology fail, if electric vehicles never enter transportation mainstream, EVonline will be a potentially valuable resource to future scholars interested in technological failure.

 

The Blackout History Project: What Happens When a Mature Technology Fails?

Jim Sparrow tailored his survey to two different target communities. The Blackout Experience Survey is aimed at the random 'Blackout survivor' who was old enough at the time to remember it. Here, Sparrow is interested in learning more about the social and psychological aspects of a large technological system at the point of consumption, its failure and impact on consumers. Participants are asked if the blackouts caused any profound crisis, how they affected their daily reliance on electricity. Their feedback builds the collective memory of these two events. Members of the electric utility are asked to convey their technical understanding of these power failures by completing the Electric Utility survey adding another layer to the community memory.

In the case of the Blackout History the on-line surveys serve as tools to reach multiple audiences. The survey results will be displayed immediately after submission and are connected with the rest of the material on the site via full-text search. In other words: if visitors conduct searches the survey-results will be part of that search.

The MouseSite - creator, Tim Lenoir, seeks to engage former colleagues and collaborators of Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse and pioneer in the field of human-computer interaction, in a series of on-going interactive forums on several categories:

• Persons
  Purpose of this forum is to collect biographical information and
  career trajectories of Engelbart-group members. Individuals are
  encouraged to add their own archives and additional documents to
  the collection.
  
• Devices
  Douglas Engelbart and his research group created hardware and
  software for the original NLS (online) system, the system from
  which the computer mouse developed. In this part of the forum
  we ask participants for further information on these devices.
• Culture and Context
  In this forum Lenoir explores the cultural context in which
  Engelbart and his research group worked both on within a
  particular institution (Stanford Research Institute) as well as on
  a broader societal level (Silicon Valley, Military-industrial
  complex in the United States between 1950 and 1970).
  
  As with the on-line surveys contributions to the fora can be
  in the Log of Comments.
  
  

The discussion fora on the Making PCR - web site target the inventors of the polymerase chain reaction for comments by regularly posting provocative statements.
Currently, two fora are running: Rehash the Past and Write Your Own Future. Paul Rabinow is well connected with his target community, having interviewed most of the central players for an ethnographic study, the basis for this web site. Besides these personal contacts the site was reviewed in journals such as Science and the Scout Report and was distributed on BioMednet's HMS Beagle. As with the MouseSite's log of comments the PCR Archive makes available previous submissions.