updates all around
As many of my visitors have noted over the past several months, there hasn’t been much activity on my personal website for some time – here’s a recap:
In January I moved to Washington, DC to pursue a fellowship at Georgetown University working on the Crossroads Project. Much of my time has been spent developing the American Studies Web search engine, recently released in beta.
Although I stated online that I was going to publicly release the results of my Oregon Trail survey, I have decided to withhold any final conclusions. Several individuals who were interested in learning about the results have contacted me; I encourage you to do the same but at this time it would be inappropriate for me to publicly disclose these results. Recognizing weaknesses in my own online survey methodology, I need better data to definitively draw any conclusions. With that said, I’m very surprised by the results and success of the survey. Expect an improved Oregon Trail survey to be conducted in the future!
Speaking of surveys, I’ve begun development on an online survey tool called Surveylicious. Recently I was contacted by graduate students who wish to do online surveys connecting to Facebook (Hello Jim from Stanford!); Surveylicious establishes this connection similarly to how my Oregon Trail survey worked, using the Facebook API. Fortunately, the API is now in stable release so the session problems I encountered should no longer be an issue. I’ll be blogging a lot about the development and methodology of Surveylicious.
The first weekend of May I graduate from St. John Fisher College with a degree in American Studies and minor in Information Technology.
Beyond studying the Oregon Trail computer game, several months ago I began documenting and analyzing “Wild West” computer simulations in Second Life. I am working with users in Second Life to archive these environments, many which no longer exist. Once I gain full permission to distribute these images, text, and objects I’ll post them for others to study.
Notice the new URL and feed – I’m now davelester.ORG.
