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I'm now in the "Politics and the Web" session at Web Science 2016, and we're starting with a paper by Pablo Loyola, whose focus is on politics in Chile. This work is interested in the collective decision-making processes involved in constructing new legislation, and builds on the voting behaviours of MPs and on drafts-in-progress of new bills. Are these processes influenced by the funding that MPs receive from corporate interests?

The project took a Web-centric approach to this: it identified Web content reflecting different ideological positions on a range of legislative issues, and using these corpora assessed the similarity …

Next at Web Science 2016 is Sergej Sizov, who focusses on the economic value of Web advertising. This is surprisingly difficult to calculate, and Sergej begins with the hypothetical example of a small Web advertising campaign. We may make a range of assumptions about click-through and purchase rates, but variance matters: in a substantial number of cases, campaigns may generate no profit whatsoever.

Each campaign constitutes a large number of small events (clicks, conversions, ...), and these can be modelled computationally; from these emerge certain predictions about the probability to make a given profit from the campaign.

Next up at Web Science 2016 is Claudia Orellana-Rodriguez, whose interest is in how journalists spread the news on Twitter. Journalists now regularly engage on social media platforms, but there still is only a very limited understanding of how platforms like Twitter can be used most effectively.

Optimal activities and user engagement may also differ considerably across different news categories: different types of news will have different audiences, and audience members may engage very differently with such news; this may also be affected by the time of day or week.

This project focussed on 200 Irish journalists and captured …

Next up at Web Science 2016 is Walid Magdy, whose focus is on social media commentary following the terrorist attacks in Paris in late 2016. Immediately after the attacks, sympathy with Paris was expressed on Twitter – but as the attacks were linked with Islamist terrorists, anti-Muslim messages also began to appear.

Walid's team tracked relevant keywords and hashtags on Twitter after the attacks, and noted that more than one tenth of all messages discussed Islam in some form; of these, some 336,000 tweets were closely engaged with the question of Islam in Europe. The majority of these tended to …

The next session at Web Science 2016 is on information dissemination and engagement. It begins with a paper by Miriam Fernandez, whose focus is on promoting behavioural changes to combat climate change. Over the past years, there have been multiple social media campaigns that promote more environmentally responsible behaviours; what can these campaigns learn from theories of behaviour change, and how can these theories be translated into computational methods?

The focus here is on Earth Hour 15, and on the COP21 summit in Paris in 2015. The project draws on the 5 Doors Theory, which describes five stages of behavioural …

Day two of Web Science 2016 begins with a keynote by Jure Leskovec, whose interest is in antisocial behaviour in social media spaces. He begins by noting that the Web has moved from a document repository or library to a social space, where users contribute content and provide feedback to each other. Platforms for this include the main social media spaces, as well as Reddit, StackOverflow, and the comment sections of news sites.

These two metaphors for the Web – as a library and as a social space – are very different from each other, especially in how …

And the final paper in this Web Science 2016 session is by Katrin Weller and me. Below are our slides and abstract, and a link to the full paper:

Twitter as a First Draft of the Present – and the Challenges of Preserving It for the Future from Axel Bruns

This paper provides a framework for understanding Twitter as a historical source. We address digital humanities scholars to enable the transfer of concepts from traditional source criticism to new media formats, and to encourage the preservation of Twitter as a cultural artefact. Twitter has established itself as a key social …

The third presenter in this Web Science 2016 session is Tu Ngoc Nguyen, who reintroduces us to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. This is a useful service, but searching it is not necessarily straightforward. Is it possible to draw on the non-content features to improve search results?

The project drew on the full archive for the German Web, and utilised a number of assessment techniques to assess and rank documents based on twenty non-content features. I'm frankly unable to understand the numerical data presented in the tables here, but from what I do understand the use of these additional …

The next WebSci 2016 presenters are Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda and Katrin Weller, who argue that it is necessary to address the digital divides in data accessibility in social media research. They interviewed a large number of social media researchers, and what emerges from this work is that much data sharing is already taking place, but under varying circumstances.

From a methodological point of view, how can we document such sharing to ensure reproducibility? Legally, how can we make such sharing practices sustainable and non-infringing? Ethically, how can we ensure that such data sharing does no harm and lives up to the …

The next WebSci 2016 paper session starts with a presentation by Pei Zhang, which introduces what she calls the Content-Linking-Context model, or CLC. The context for this is legislation such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the European e-Commerce Directive, as well as various national legislation in the EU.

The DMCA requires services providers to take down content on request expeditiously, even without verification of copyright infringement claims, and providers such as Google and Dailymotion are known to act on such requests, but there is little information about the criteria they use to vet requests. Can automated systems …