From the IU News Room at Indiana University:

Using two of the planet’s largest, creative online communities — World of Warcraft gamers and Etsy artists — as their laboratory, two Indiana University Bloomington researchers hope to understand how the inner workings of such massive, networked collaborations could benefit scientists, corporations and the very IT designers who facilitated the success of the two online communities.

Interesting, isn’t it? You’ve got the primarily male-dominated World of Warcraft network, and the primarily female-dominated Etsy network. What benefits are there to learning more about how these two networks tick?

Etsy’s modes of production, folk theories of creativity and what is ‘quality,’ and social understandings may be gendered in a way that differs from that of the male-dominated WoW machinima community,” Shaowen Bardzell noted. “The goal here is to not only understand network-based participatory creativity, but specifically to consider it from the perspective of a female mode of creative knowledge production.”

You can read the full article here.

~Laura Kuhlmann