Imagine a YouTube or Facebook for academia. One Brown student is working to launch a Web site that will function as a networking site for students, academics and even journalists and policy makers interested in international affairs.
Henry Shepherd '08 tentatively calls his project "University Commons," and said he hopes to launch the Web site by the end of the summer.
The site, which will have personal pages - similar to a social networking site - and pages for specific interest areas, will allow people to describe their academic interests and have discussions with others.
"We think that people are interested in what scholars think about and what they're researching, and what's going on in society around them," Shepherd said.
The Web site will make extensive use of video as a communication tool, and Shepherd said he envisions students posting videos of their professors giving lectures or interviews.
Shepherd's idea developed last year, when he worked on the Brown Journal of World Affairs and interned over the summer at a public radio station in Cambridge, Mass. Shepherd said his experience at the journal encouraged him to think about the production cycle of a paper publication - and its limitations.
He said he was frustrated by waiting for scholars to submit research articles, the intensity of the editing period right before publication and the costliness of printing and distribution. "That production cycle doesn't keep as many people involved as would want to be in a different kind of cycle," Shepherd said.
Shepherd said he realized as an intern at WGBH in Cambridge, Mass., that the Internet could be used to accelerate the production cycle for distributing ideas. While the radio station was covering the Israeli-Lebanon war, a student blogger in Lebanon contacted him online, and the student was able to talk via Skype to the radio station about his experience in the country.
"I learned you can get close to news events," Shepherd said. "The evolving lesson of journalism is that the more technology you have, the closer you can get to an event or place - quickly."
"I thought, 'I have conversed with someone who is in a completely different situation than me, and not only that, it's completely newsworthy,' " Shepherd said. "That was really inspiring to me."
Shepherd's Web site would make it "possible for students around the world to collaborate on the production of a publication, and each of them would have access to scholars around the world as if they were scholars at their own university," he said.
Last month, Shepherd met with about 15 people interested in getting involved in the project. Shepherd said the meeting generated a lot of excitement, and he has since recruited other students who have technical, design, coding and video production experience as well as an interest in international relations.
Shepherd also approached James Der Derian, research professor of international studies at the Watson Institute for International Studies, for advice and support. Der Derian heads the institute's Global Media Project, which explores "the significance of the new media landscape for major international issues," according to its Web site.
"Henry came to me with a great idea," Der Derian said. "I'm providing informal advice on how to find the best medium for what he's attempting and how to package it."
Shepherd said his idea is not entirely new, but it's indicative of the changes that have happened on the Web in the last couple of years - namely the emergence of online social networks and user-driven content.
The advantages of a Web site over a printed publication, he said, are that it is generally less expensive to publish and easier to encourage academics to share their knowledge. For example, a scholar who doesn't have the time to write an article might have time to sit down and do an interview, Shepherd said.
Der Derian agreed that Shepherd's idea is consistent with broader changes on the Internet. "On the Web, we're moving to something more robust and democratic in how people have access to information, produce their own video and produce their own Web sites," he said. "Because of the increasing ubiquity of broadband Internet ... and because of the literacy and fluency of users, increasingly they are becoming producers as well as consumers of media. The Web is becoming a more sophisticated tool for academic and political use."
Shepherd and other students are still in the early stages of creating the Web site and have yet to work out some of the logistics. For example, he said students would not videotape class lectures without express permission.
"I haven't investigated the legal side of this at all. I am going to be working with a lawyer," Shepherd said.
