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The final day of AoIR 2015 has dawned, and it begins with a paper by Samuel Woolley; his interest is in political bots. Bots are software tools that automate human tasks on the Web; political bots, then, are social bots that engage with human users, largely through social media, to promote specific political causes.

The project has built a broad dataset of events that bots were involved in, is engaging with bot coders on an international basis, and will use this to build computational theory. The focus here is on stage one, though: the collection of cases in which political …

Finally in this AoIR 2015 session, we move on to Greg Elmer, one of the editors of Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data. His contribution is focussed on the practice of collecting data from social media sites, some of which is done using some very simple Web scraping tools (as Edward Snowden did at the NSA, apparently).

Scraping is now a common practice in a number of contexts; some sites scrape from mainstream news sites in order to gain better search rankings, for example. Google briefly introduced a tool to identify where site content had been scraped …

The next speaker in the Compromised Data session at AoIR 2015 is Robert Gehl, whose focus is on the effects of corporate social media. There is a conflict between the critiques of proprietary social media spaces and the obvious pleasures of using social media; what do we do about this?

Robert suggests that we make our own, by building alternatives to the standard commercial social media platforms. This proceeds by critical reverse engineering: taking apart existing artefacts to produce new and alternative artefacts that bear a relation to the old while striving towards justice.

There are four points of contact …

My QUT DMRC colleague Jean Burgess and I are next at AoIR 2015, presenting the core points from our chapter "Easy Data, Hard Data" in the Compromised Data collection. (The slides are below.) The chapter thinks through the pragmatics and politics of being social media researchers in a complex and precarious environment, and thus builds on David Berry's work on the computational turn in humanities and social science research.

This turn towards large data is instrumental as well as transformational – it has exciting practical dimensions as new but unevenly distributed and challenging research opportunities arise, but …

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Joanna Redden, another contributor to the Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data collection. She focusses especially on how data are being used by governments, and how this impacts particularly on issues of poverty and inequality. Her work is based on interviews with public servants and consultants in Canada, and builds a picture of how and where data are being used in the government.

Data here include government-owned and -created data, as well as from other sources and services including social media. How can we unblackbox and make transparent these uses and …

The final panel at AoIR 2015 for today is the Compromised Data panel, celebrating the release of the book of the same name. Ganaele Langlois starts us off by highlighting the key themes of the book: data are now crucial to building the social, and the gaps and omissions in the data therefore have very significant impacts.

Governments such as the Harper government in Canada, which has just been removed from office, seek to hide some forms of data because it is politically expedient to do so, and so data are political; data are also shaped by the sources we …

The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2015 is Helen Kennedy, whose interest is in how people interact with data visualisations. This is very important in the context of the current datafication trend. But existing literature in this field lacks a user-centred knowledge base – much is driven by designers' instincts of what constitutes a good data visualisation. It mobilises narrow definitions and measures of effectiveness and provides little information about participants, while ignoring social and cultural factors.

This work, then, could learn from media and cultural studies work that investigates how audiences engage with media texts. Helen's work …

The next AoIR 2015 speaker is Anna Sophia Kümpel, whose interest is in news usage patterns and their effects on political participatory behaviours. Mass media remain identified as a crucial determinant of political participatory behaviour, though their exact effects on participation remain disputed. One new factor which emerges in addition to this in more recent times is the question of which devices are being used.

Anna's project used a representative sample of German media users, and asked participants about how they learnt about news events, how they obtained further information, and what devices they used as they did so, as …

I arrived a little late to Tanja Aitamurto's AoIR 2015 paper about crowdsourced journalism in northern Europe, where news sites used their readers to gather data on homeloan terms, for instance – crowdsourcing is thus defined as a mechanism for collaborative problem-solving that is driven by the initiator of the project; the locus of power therefore remains with the media organisation.

Another crowdsourced journalistic project examined the trading documents of a large number of stock market brokers to identify cases of short-stock selling; here, the project revealed serious misconduct an a Finnish bank executive was fired.

Crowdsourcing may involve readers …

The final presenter in this AoIR 2015 session is Luca Rossi, who shifts our attention to Italian politics. His interest moves beyond elections, too, as elections represent a very specific political moment. Internet and social media use in Italy is still relatively limited – in 2012, only 62% of the population were online, and the main source of information remains television.

At the same time, some 36% of Italian social media users engage in political debate – an unusually high number. This may be due in part to the substantial connections between mainstream media and the political establishment in Italy …