'Big Data'

The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is the great Jessica Walter, presenting a large data donation study involving YouTube users in Denmark. Such data donations are increasingly prominent in light of the decline of social media data APIs; they are enabled in Europe also by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which enables users to claim a copy of their digital data from the platforms they engage with.

These data packages can then be donated to researchers, and provide considerable detail about user activities and experiences on such platforms; the insights they provide are also skewed somewhat by …

The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is Valentin Ihßen, whose focus is on the use of metrics in digital political campaigning. The focus here is especially on digital advocacy organisations’ campaigns, which exist in various national settings from democracies to autocracies. Such organisations use the digital media toolkit for online and offline campaigns, and draw centrally on digital data and metrics to determine whether and how they should pursue their campaigns.

At the backstage of these campaigns there are some fairly sophisticated metrics dashboards, therefore – these include opening and click-through rates for campaign mail-outs, for instance, and such …

I’m the next speaker at the ACSPRI 2024 conference, presenting our new practice mapping method for this study of multimodal networks. Slides are below:

The final speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Sidiq Madya, whose interest is in the discussion of the idea of data sovereignty by civil society organisations. Data sovereignty is a spectrum of approaches by nation states to subject data flows to national jurisdictions, and/or the ability or right of individuals to control their personal data and information.

This addresses the misuse and abuse of personal data for surveillance or microtargeting, seeks to mitigate increasing datafication, and seeks alternative models of data governance that limit the free flow of data and encourage local data ownership. There are a large …

The final speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Aaron Willcox, presenting work with the Scanlon Research Institute to explore local government-level civic opportunities. For organisations, such opportunities include hosting events, offering memberships, involving individuals through volunteering, and taking action through advocacy and campaigns.

The project used the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission database, which contains valid information on the activities of some 30,000 charities around the country; it used Web scraping and human coding to identify civic activities, and utilised Large Language Models to directly code the data as well as to emulate the coding process of human …

The first session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference is on generative AI, and starts with Lachlan Watson. He is interested in the use of AI assistance to analyse public policy submissions, here in the context of Animal Welfare Victoria’s draft cat management strategy. Feedback could be in the form of written submissions, surveys, or both, and needed to be analysed using quantitative approaches given the substantial volume of submission.

The organisation chose Relevance AI as a tool for this – this is a low code AI solution not unlike ChatGPT, but data is hosted in a private environment and none …