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OII Summer Doctoral Programme (2003-2009): Recap, attempted

Published on
18 Nov 2009
Written by
Victoria Nash

I’m not sure anyone’s ever attempted to gather together the scattered blogged thoughts and general stuff generated by all our Summer Doctoral Programmes.

So here goes. It isn’t at all comprehensive (sideways glance at best) and some of it may be only of erm academic interest now, but still … there’s some good, funny, serious and thought-provoking stuff here from past students and tutors.

So. SDP2009 (‘the one about Creativity’) was held in Brisbane (QUT). Co-organiser (and SDP2004 student!) was Jean Burgess who blogged: OII Summer Doctoral Programme to be held in Brisbane in 2009. Nils Gustafsson blogged his Collegial Consultation with Bernie Hogan and Rami Olwan recapped the OII SDP 2009. There was an SDP2009 Flickr group (and yes, there are photographs of kangaroos).

SDP2008: Oxford (‘Webscience’) was one that I got a bit excited by … fortunately I was able to decamp to the overflow room for the fortnight. SDP2008 seemed to be marked by a certain amount of introspection re ‘What exactly is webscience, then?’ (eg Sonny Zulhuda on Web Science in the Making – Or is It?)

There are recaps from Tobias Escher: Summer Doctoral Programme 2008 – Last Words, Oshani Seneviratne: Chaos: Summer Doctoral Program, and Sonny Zulhuda: Quotable Quotes from SDP 2008.

SDP2007 was hosted by our long-standing partners at the Berkman Center (Harvard University). This was the first year that the group seemed to throw themselves into the blogosphere. Berkman Director John Palfrey started things off with some personal thoughts: Summer Doctoral Program(me) Comes to Cambridge.

Michael Zimmer blogged his SDP2007 Presentation: The Quest for the Perfect Search Engine, Joris van Hoboken blogged his end-of One Full Summer Doctoral Week in Boston and there were posts by tutors Urs Gasser: Cambridge, Summer 2007: A Few Impressions and A Thank You and Ethan Zuckerman: Summer doctoral program at Berkman and Daithí Mac Síthigh, who tagged a whole series of SDP2007 posts … as did Ismael Peña-López on his blog ICTlogy (tagged as SDP2007).

There are also recaps from the Berkman Buzz, from Joris: SDP 2007; My Final Report, Cuihua Shen: OII SDP recap – Cool widgets, and Ismael: OII SDP 2007 (Epilogue): Last Thoughts About Web Science And Academic Blogging Or Why Did Not Academia Came Up With Wikipedia. And Some Acknowledgments Too.

There was an SDP2007 Flickr group.

SDP2006 is starting to retreat into ‘not terribly online’ territory. But two notable things: a post by Urs Gasser on a seminar by John Palfrey discussing a paper by Jonathan Zittrain: JP/JZ Mash-up: Live from OII SDP. And student Nick Anstead kept an SDP blog.

SDP2005 was held in China. I seem to have found nothing from China. So I guess we move on to SDP2004 (Oxford), and Kylie Veale’s SDP2004 Blog.

And 2003. Well, 2003 was a long long time ago.

I have undoubtedly left things out (let me know if so!) .. just thought it might be useful to do a little hunting and gathering. Go explore, have fun!

Where it all started: students from the first Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP2003) in front of the Oxford Internet Institute. Over 250 SDP students from more than 30 countries have passed through our doors since then.