The next speaker at the CCC symposium is the fabulous Nancy Baym, who begins by noting how overwhelming the buzz about 'big data' has become. There's a great deal of fascination just with the things we can do with big data sources - tracing interesting patterns, attempting to predict future processes, making sense of data by using algorithmic tools.
But the outcomes of such research often remain predictable: they show what we already knew (that various social factors influence each other, for example), and the close studies mean that wider context is often missed. Internet studies has always been very …
Here are some more updates on my recent adventures in the world of Twitter research. First, I’m very happy to report that a new chapter on the impact of Twitter on the long-standing melée between industrial and citizen journalism has now been published. In the article, co-written with my CCI colleague Tim Highfield, we explore how the emergence of Twitter as a middle ground between the branded spaces of news Websites and citizen journalist blogs and other sites complicates the previously somewhat more obvious battle lines between the two sides – extending a process of, if not convergence then at …
