I’ve been digesting a bunch of information from GAWC for a while now, at the suggestion last spring of the advisor.

Projects of note include:

• A Comparative Study of ICT Industry Development in the Beijing, Shanghai-Suzhou, and Shenzhen-Dongguan City Regions in China
  A look at regional differences in ICT production
• Chicago in the World City Network
  Well, not especially relevant, but I can’t help but read the Chicago stuff.
• The Use of Fuzzy Classification Techniques for World City Network Analysis
  Primarily methodological, this project classifies World Cities not hierachically, but rather in a network. That seems a little bit meta-, as the whole World Cities arena is steeped in network analysis, but the methods seem to work.
• How US Cities Plug into the World
  This project really explains how GAWC goes about measuring the whole World Cities thing. This may be the project that I mine the most for applicable methods.

Along these lines, a criteria is starting to emerge for my own work. What factors should be present to deem a digitizing project successful (by our standards)?  Off the top of my head:

• trusted repository
• critical mass
• written documentation
• onsite technical personnel
• developed metadata standards

Had a very nice conversation with a political scientist working on internet issues in Singapore this afternoon.  He is very much engaged with some of the same civil society discourse that a new book I’m reading covers.  While I have been purposely avoiding free speech and political reform issues, almost all of the non-business literature about the Internet in China confronts these issues head on.

Anyway, he encouraged me to at least look into how Gramsci-an civil society issues might be applicable to my project.  I know that I have to tie digital repositories to development in general, and that I would be making the argument that libraries are an essential component of civil society, but I didn’t want to delve too deeply into it.  It keeps coming up.