Blog

The next Web Science 2016 presenter is Jack Webster, who focusses on music recommender systems. Such recommender systems could generate filter bubbles, but that threat is nothing new; the cultural intermediaries described by Pierre Bourdieu fulfilled very similar roles and could have engendered very similar patterns.

But music recommender systems do not draw on a lifetime of personal experience, but rather utilise large datasets on users' engagement with music streaming and download services, applying algorithms designed by human coders. How do these different human and technological actors come together in creating and operating recommender systems, then?

Cultural intermediaries are the …

The next session at Web Science 2016 starts with Natalia Boldyrev, whose focus is on Web taxonomies. There are a number of different approaches to taxonomies, from traditional librarian approaches to user-generated taxonomies, and from hierarchical catalogues of terms to unordered tag clouds. Such taxonomies are also culturally predicated: the taxonomy for football-related books in the German Amazon is much more detailed than it is in Amazon US, for instance.

Matching such diverse taxonomies in order to connect the datasets they describe is difficult. This is, on the face of it, an ontology matching problem, and can also be understood …

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 next speaker at Web Science 2016 is Onur Varol, who points out the wide variety of purposes for which people use social media, and notes that we change our online persona and usage styles according to different communicative contexts. Can we match language style and user intent, then?

The project's experiments found that messages written using logical arguments are perceived as more authoritative, while an absence of logical content makes the sender appear more likeable; the communication style also varies across different fields of interest (products, health, politics).

URL cascades tend to be more likely to involve relatively similar …

The next speaker at Web Science 2016 is Jenna Mittelmeier, whose focus is on cross-cultural collaboration. Group work has always been difficult, and the majority of online contributions are from a small subset of all users; this free riding by non-participants is especially problematic in educational settings that require all users to participate equally.

How do users offline networks translate into their online collaboration practices? Jenna's study examined a group of 118 students in the UK, including 92% international students; these students varied from having highly homophilous to very country-diverse networks. These networks did not have any direct influence in …

The next session at Web Science 2016 starts with a paper by Jure Leskovec on information cascades. Such cascades emerge as users of social media platforms (re)share content through their networks, and the prediction of such processes is traditionally very difficult.

One question in such predictions is whether a given cascade will reach the median size observed in historical cascades; because of how the median is defined, even a blind guess on this question will have a 50% success rate.

But cascades on a platform like Twitter can consist of multiple cascade trees sharing the same information, as pieces of …

The final speaker in this Web Science 2016 session is Daniel Alexandrov, whose interest is in the use of social networking platforms in politics across the Caucasus region. This is a diverse and politically tense region, with several intractable political conflicts.

The project focussed on Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgian, and pan-Caucasian groups on the social media platforms VKontakte – the "virtual Caucasus" space –, which is dominated by relatively young users and subdivides into a number of groups. These groups have overlapping memberships and distribute across a number of clusters; Caucasian and Georgian groups tend to have the highest betweenness centrality …

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 …