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The final speaker in this Web Science 2016 session is Clare Hooper, whose interest is in 'social machines' as defined by Tim Berners-Lee: systems were people do the creative work, and machines take care of the administration. Social machines will exist in the context of problems to be solved; they may be created by single stakeholders (as in the case of Galaxy Zoo), while others arise in a more emergent fashion (from online communities).

Next up at Web Science 2016 is Paul Seitlinger, whose interest is in social tagging practices. These provide a valuable insight into human cognition and offer an opportunity to validate lab-based models 'in the wild'. One key question in this is how semantic stabilisation, or consensual use of tags, comes into being. This is influenced by the interplay of both human and non-human actors.

The next Web Science 2016 presenter is Jack Webster, who focusses on music recommender systems. Such recommender systems could generate filter bubbles, but that threat is nothing new; the cultural intermediaries described by Pierre Bourdieu fulfilled very similar roles and could have engendered very similar patterns.

The next session at Web Science 2016 starts with Natalia Boldyrev, whose focus is on Web taxonomies. There are a number of different approaches to taxonomies, from traditional librarian approaches to user-generated taxonomies, and from hierarchical catalogues of terms to unordered tag clouds. Such taxonomies are also culturally predicated: the taxonomy for football-related books in the German Amazon is much more detailed than it is in Amazon US, for instance.

The final day of Web Science 2016 starts with a keynote by Daniel Miller, who contributes an anthropologist's perspective to the conference. He notes that especially when it comes to the popular discussion of Web technologies such as social media, there are many spurious claims about how they change social interactions – and anthropologists are called upon to make sense of these claims. Anthropology, he notes, is in fact the study of people as social networks: we are all of us embedded in our social relations with others, and it is these relations that anthropology examines and analyses.

This enables a process of 'holistic contextualisation', which aims to examine comprehensively why people do what they do, online and offline. This studiously avoids any simplistic concentrations on online or offline activities, as people are almost always operating across both spaces. One core principle of this is the idea of 'polymedia', which builds on the fact that cost and access barriers to most media have decreased to the point that people no longer choose their media based on such factors, but instead on other – social and moral – considerations. (The moral judgment comes in as people assess others' uses of specific media: is it appropriate to break up a relationship via social media, for instance?)

The next speaker at Web Science 2016 is Onur Varol, who points out the wide variety of purposes for which people use social media, and notes that we change our online persona and usage styles according to different communicative contexts. Can we match language style and user intent, then?

The next speaker at Web Science 2016 is Jenna Mittelmeier, whose focus is on cross-cultural collaboration. Group work has always been difficult, and the majority of online contributions are from a small subset of all users; this free riding by non-participants is especially problematic in educational settings that require all users to participate equally.

The next session at Web Science 2016 starts with a paper by Jure Leskovec on information cascades. Such cascades emerge as users of social media platforms (re)share content through their networks, and the prediction of such processes is traditionally very difficult.