Internet Technologies

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 …

The third speaker in this session at Web Science 2016 is Gefion Thuermer, whose interest is in decision-making processes within political parties. Such processes must be equal and inclusive, which may be a problem the more Internet-based communication tools play a role.

Attitudes towards such exclusion differ widely across parties. Greens politicians in Germany have traditionally been very concerned about avoiding exclusionary processes, while Pirate Party politicians assume that everybody is online and claim never to have met an 'Offline Pirate'. This means that the Green Party has traditionally developed its own processes and used Internet technologies only for administrative …

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.

The next AoIR 2015 session I'm in has only two papers, as one speaker has dropped out at the last minute; the first speaker therefore is Fan Mai, whose focus is on the use of Virtual Private Networks and anonymising proxy servers in China. Some such servers are used especially by expatriates living in China, trying to access western media sites that are otherwise blocked.

Such blocking is part of the Chinese censorship regime, of course, and a range of approaches to circumvention are rife in the country. There are very little hard data on the use of such tools …

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Smiljana Antonijević, whose interest is in the emerging field of the digital humanities. How did this field come to be imagined? It's founding story is generally associated with the Jesuit priest Roberto Busa and his interest in using digital technologies for information management; this gradually developed into humanities computing or linguistic computing. The arrival of personal computing further broadened this, and the term digital humanities finally emerged in the mid-1990s.

Digital humanities has been visible especially in digital mapping of specific geographic sites. In developing literature databases, and in other key uses; there …

The next AoIR 2015 speaker is Stacey May Koosel, whose interest is in the temporalities of digital culture. She worked with articles to explore the concept of tl;dr (too long; didn't read) – in relation to our consciousness of time. Tl;dr is related to information overload, and emerged in 2003; it may point to decreasing attention spans, and show how we are overwhelmed by the information deluge we are now faced with. We negotiate it by employing pattern recognition.

One artist, for example – a compulsive hoarder – used his collection in his art, showing the volume of this material …

The next session at AoIR 2015 is exploring timing issues, and the first paper by Sarah Muñoz-Bates is about the effects of Google on how people perceive topics. For example, what is the effect of seeing the term 'illegal' rather than 'undocumented' in relation to migrants? Does it cross the line and criminalise the person; is it racialised in a way that other terms are not?

Google participates in this debate with the word choices that it provides to users as they enter their search queries. These are largely driven by the words and phrases that Web users and content …

We are now inviting applications for the 2016 CCI Digital Methods Summer School. The deadline for application is Monday 21 Sep. 2016.

Hosted by the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), the 2016 event will focus on digital methods for sociocultural research. It is designed for university researchers at all stages of their careers, from doctoral students, postdoctoral and mid-career academics to established scholars.

The week-long intensive program will focus on new quantitative, qualitative and data-driven digital methods and their research applications in the humanities and social sciences, with a particular focus on media, communication and cultural …

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Michael Stevenson, whose focus is on what he calls new media "rupture-talk". The idea here is to take what we often refer to as "mere talk" more seriously. Michael points to John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" as an example of this – new media as a radical break from the past.

The concept of cyberspace has been on the decline since its heyday in the mid-1990s, even in major booster publications like Wired. But other rupture-talk concepts, such as MOOCs or the "social graph" have emerged, and are …

The final speakers in this Digital Methods plenary are Axel Maireder and Katrin Jungnickel, whose interest is in the uncertainties of the Facebook timeline. Facebook has continued to tinker with how the timeline is selected and presented for several years now, and this affects the flow of communication on the platform; what, then, are the factors which determine that flow?

This study combined content analysis and user surveys, but both these approaches have their drawbacks - it is impossible from the outside to track the content of users' timelines, for example, but surveys of users also suffer from self-reporting biases …