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The final speaker in this WebSci 2016 session is Ramine Tinati, whose focus is on citizen science platforms. Citizen science itself has been around for hundreds of years, but more recent developments in online crowdsourcing techniques have enabled even greater mass participation in such scientific activities; one early success in this was Zooniverse, which asks users for help in classifying galaxy types.

The platform studied by this paper is Eyewire, which asks users to complete puzzles that help in visually mapping the human brain. The platform also includes a real-time chat interface that connects players with each other …

The next paper in this WebSci 2016 session is presented by Mariana Arantes, whose interest is in the matching of video ads to YouTube videos. Such ads are displayed before some YouTube videos, and they can often be stopped after a set number of seconds. How do users consume these ads? How does their popularity change over time? What is the relationship between videos and ads, and does a better content match mean that ads are more likely to be watched all the way through?

It is difficult to investigate this given the poor range of data provided by the …

We start the first paper session at WebSci 2016 with a paper by Guanliang Chen that examines learner engagement with Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). These generate a great deal of data about learner engagement during the MOOC itself, but there's very little information about learners before and after this experience. Can we use external social Web data to identify and profile these learners, in order to better customise the learning experience for them?

The biggest challenge in this is to identify the learners across diverse social media platforms. There are some possible approaches: explicit matching based on public email …

It's a cool morning in Germany, and I'm in Hannover for the opening of the 2016 Web Science conference, where later today my colleague Katrin Weller and I will present our paper calling for more efforts to preserve social media content as a first draft of the present. But we start with an opening keynote by Yahoo!'s Ricardo Baeza-Yates, on Data and Algorithmic Bias in the Web.

Ricardo begins by pointing out that all data have a built-in bias; additional bias is added in the data processing and interpretation. For instance, some researchers working with Twitter data then extrapolate …

One more post before I head home from the AoIR 2015 conference in Phoenix: during the conference, I also received my author’s copy of Hashtag Publics, an excellent new collection edited by Nathan Rambukkana. In this collection, Jean Burgess and I published an updated version of our paper from the ECPR conference in Reykjavík, which conceptualises (some) hashtag communities as ad hoc publics – and Theresa Sauter and I also have a chapter in the book that explores the #auspol hashtag for Australian politics.

Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess. “Twitter Hashtags from Ad Hoc to Calculated Publics.” …

The final speaker in this final AoIR 2015 session is Lee Humphreys. Her interest is in the intersections between mobility and memory, and this needs to be understood in terms of degrees of mobility; some devices are more mobile than others.

There is also a very long history of mobile media, all the way back at least to the immensely popular pocket diaries of previous centuries. These devices enabled their users to create media messages – to note things ad hoc as users were going about their day. By contrast, (paper) photo albums could be seen as mobile media memory …