Prof Denemark crystallises some of the complex political contexts in which people use the Web and social media globally. When we study social media it's easy to forget the real people in real places with real events occurring around them.
social science (15 out of 15)
Cool, social sciences are SO far ahead of web science when it comes to publishing on the Web >.> (and activism about Open Access in general) #LinkedResearch
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
Amy added http://inkdroid.org/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
+ http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/pubs.html
Amy added http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/pubs.html to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
In reply to: https://twitter.com/emax/status/635856657780707328
i quit
+ http://srmo.sagepub.com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/view/basics-of-qualitative-research/SAGE.xml
Amy added http://srmo.sagepub.com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/view/basics-of-qualitative-research/SAGE.xml to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
WebSci2015
ACM Web Science 2015 (Oxford, UK) was the complete opposite of WWW2015. Almost to a point of saturation... but I shouldn't complain :)
With a heavy weighting of social science (or social science influenced) papers, despite still having a majority of computer scientists in the audience, most sessions and panels were about ethics, privacy, digital rights, inclusivity and a 'pro-human' Web. The focus was overwhelmingly social media, with a side of Internet of Things, plus a weird smattering of robot ethics. Usually a focus on social media means lots of SNA, detecting content trends, and user profiling and other things I hate, but instead substantial discussion of people as people, rather than users (or targets), was refreshing. There was also plenty of work on sites other than Twitter and Facebook! Such as individual blogs, social gaming sites, specialist and smaller communities. Though I'm not sure if we figured out any solutions to the personal data crisis.
That's not to say it was all social! There were technical talks too, including a few papers on linked data.
Max presented our paper The Many Dimensions of Lying Online during the first Online Social Behaviours session, and along with the other three papers presented formed a great narrative about the complex and nuanced nature of online identities, and how they both affect and are affected by technical systems.
I'm not going to write up content here. Instead, see all my posts from during the conference at /tag/websci15.
Other things. The structure of the conference felt unusual (in a good way); parallel paper sessions were dispersed amongst panels and workshops. All sessions were very interdisciplinary. The catering was really good. There were fewer people than I expected.
Social media theory is missing theories of power and control. Protocols and UIs are control mechanisms. ~ Hans Akkermans
Notes post social-informatics seminar talk
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2015/06/what-profile
Notes post social-informatics seminar talk
methodology: iterative, inductive
ResearchGate > Academia.edu
Research in use of avatars
Where the good enough boundary lies for managing? When is it dangerous, when serendipitous. What 'matters'? No perfect model of social management/access control.
Easier to look at different systems doing the same thing in different ways (things of a similar species)
Profiles shaped strongly by the needs of the service providers Problems of their own survival are also played out in this space Difficulties people may have managing profiles are sometimes down to easily fixable poor design things Interests of people fight with interests of service
Github
Definition of ownership
ACNE and other diseases communities on twitter - people create second accounts to participate
"epidemic communication patterns" - Robin Williams
+ https://eytan.github.io/www-15-tutorial/
Amy added https://eytan.github.io/www-15-tutorial/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Personal challenge: see how long I can stay in Facebook social experiments session before leaving in outrage.
In talk by a computer scientist to social scientists on crawling for SNA. Q: 'is it ethical?' A: 'yes data is public'. Resisting challenge about expectation of privacy cos I want to go to the pub. But honestly, damn computer scientists.