Richard Rogers is a Web
epistemologist, an area of study where the
main claim is that the Web is a knowledge
culture distinct from other media. Rogers
concentrates on the research opportunities
that would have been improbable or impossible
without the Internet. His research involves
studying and building info-tools. He studies
and makes use of the adjudicative or ‘recommender’
cultures of the Web that help to determine
the reputation of information as well as organizations.
The most well-known tool Rogers has developed
with his colleagues is the Issue Crawler,
a server-side Web crawler, co-link machine
and graph visualizer. It locates what Rogers
and colleagues have dubbed “issue networks”
on the Web – densely interlinked clutches
of NGOs, funders, agencies, institutes and
lone scientists or scientific groups, working
in the same issue area. Unlike social networks,
issue networks do not privilege individuals
and groups, as the networks also may be made
up of a news story, a document, a leak, a
database, an image or other such items. Taken
together these actors and ‘argument
objects’ serve as a means to understand
the state of an issue either in snapshots
or over time.
Rogers and colleagues also developed the Election
Issue Tracker, a pre-RSS newspaper query machine
employed in the Netherlands to understand
whether media aided the rise of populism.
Recently, Rogers and collaborators have embarked
on building the Issue Scraper, which undertakes
comparative analysis of the news and the blogsphere.
The lead question is: What is the quality
of the blogsphere? Other tools Rogers and
colleagues have developed include the Web
Issue Index of Civil Society, also known
as the Issue Ticker, where the campaigning
behavior of NGOs is monitored. The Index is
a novel form of attention cycle research,
showing whether attention to issues is rising
or falling, according to civil society (as
opposed to the newspapers). Some of the tools
Rogers and colleagues are featured at the
ZKM, in the 2005 exhibition, entitled “Making
Things Public,” and curated by Bruno
Latour and Peter Weibel.
Richard Rogers is University
Lecturer in New Media at the University of
Amsterdam, recurrent Visiting Professor in
the Philosophy and Social Study of Science
at the University of Vienna, and Director
of the Govcom.org Foundation (Amsterdam).
Previously, Rogers worked as Senior Advisor
to Infodrome, the Dutch Governmental Information
Society initiative. He also has worked as
a Researcher and Tutor in Computer Related
Design at the Royal College of Art (London),
as Research Fellow in Design and Media at
the Jan van Eyck Academy (Maastricht), and
as a Researcher in Technology Assessment at
the Science Center Berlin (WZB) and in Strategic
Computing in the Public Sector at the JFK
School, Harvard University. He earned his
PhD and MSc in Science Studies at the University
of Amsterdam, and his B.A. in Government and
German at Cornell University. Over the past
five years, Rogers and the Govcom.org Foundation
have received grants from the Dutch Government
(the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry
of Education, Culture and Science), the Open
Society Institute and the Ford Foundation.
Rogers is author of Technological Landscapes
(Royal College of Art, London, 1999), editor
of Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics
on the Web (Jan van Eyck Press, 2000), and
author of Information Politics on the Web
(MIT Press, 2004).
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