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'Big Data'

Snurb — Friday 12 October 2018 06:53

The Affective Politics of Information Warfare

‘Fake News’ | 'Big Data' | Social Media | AoIR 2018 |

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Megan Boler, who continues our focus on algorithms. She begins by noting a concern about the affective politics of information warfare, as well as about the increasing targetting of emotions through social media activity.

Such developments have become a great deal more visible since Brexit and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We have seen many revelations about the use of marketing and behavioural science in targetting and affecting users’ emotions, and all sides of politics have realised the importance of emotion in increasing political polarisation and hyperpartisanship.

Large-scale affects of confusion …

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Snurb — Thursday 11 October 2018 10:23

Towards Indigenous Understandings of Artificial Intelligence

Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | AoIR 2018 |

Well, we’re finally here: AoIR 2018 in Montréal has begun. We start with the keynote by Jason Lewis, who addresses the continuing rise of white supremacy in recent years. He begins by referencing the novel Riding the Trail of Tears, which discusses a retracing of the removal of the Cherokee from their traditional lands through virtual technology, and the possibility of Indigeneity in a digital earth.

But such a perspective clashes with white supremacy, which is well established in societal power structures even without further action to entrench it more deeply. Jason compares this with the multi-layer hardware and …

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Snurb — Thursday 19 July 2018 22:50

The Spider’s Web of Third-Party Web Applications

Industrial Journalism | 'Big Data' | Social Media | SM&S 2018 |

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Aske Kammer. He begins by noting that there is a resource exchange between media organisations and third party platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By embedding social media sharing tools or topical advertisements on their own pages, media organisations provide a window for third-party data capture in exchange for the platforms’ services.

For the user, this manifests in multiple server calls as they access the media organisation’s content; in addition to the media organisation, their devices also access various content elements from a range of other platforms. This is not …

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Snurb — Monday 28 May 2018 22:33

Positioning Computational Research as an Ongoing Process

'Big Data' | Social Media | ICA 2018 |

The next presentation in this ICA 2018 session is by Drew Margolin, who highlights the growing use of computational methods in communication, and therefore the need to further scrutinise the methods that are popular here. Truth is revealed and reviewed through a succession of studies.

Success therefore depends on collective efficiency at testing and corroborating ideas, and replacing discarded ideas with new work. Existing theory must be tested for its relevance, by applying it to explain observable patterns in the available data; observations must also be used to generate hitherto unimaginable hypotheses. This should also encourage multi-causal explanations through causal …

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Snurb — Monday 28 May 2018 22:23

New Approaches to Automated Image Analysis

'Big Data' | Social Media | ICA 2018 |

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Theo Araujo, whose focus is especially on analysing image content from social media. There are a number of API solutions now becoming available for the analysis of such images, including from Google and Microsoft. The project tested such image analysis tools in the context of the visual self-representation of companies discussing their corporate social responsibility.

Such image recognition platforms may not necessarily produce intuitive or meaningful results. The project automatically extracted the most salient labels these tools had provided for the images, and then computationally grouped these into a number of overarching topics …

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Snurb — Monday 28 May 2018 22:16

The Limitations of Twitter as a Data Source

'Big Data' | Social Media | Twitter | ICA 2018 |

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Fabian Pfaffenberger, who also highlights the unreliability of Twitter data. The API’s 1% sample is extremely biased, and the search API is also unreliable in what it delivers; historical data is especially incomplete as the search API delivers only tweets posted in the past 6-7 days and will not include deleted tweets or tweets from subsequently deleted or suspended accounts.

User information is also incomplete, and geodata is largely unreliable and limited to some 1% of all tweets. Further, genuine users are mixed with bots in the datasets – better bot …

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Snurb — Monday 28 May 2018 22:10

The Unreliability of the Twitter API

'Big Data' | Social Media | Twitter | ICA 2018 |

I’ve now moved on to an ICA 2018 high-density session on computational methods, which starts with Rebekah Tromble. She begins by noting the uncertainty about what Twitter data actually represent, and her project was to explore these questions.

Keyword query data collected via the Twitter API are not representative of the underlying population: it returns representative, but not necessarily complete data. When the rate limits are hit, the data are truncated, though not on the basis of specific features. The biases that result from such selection are likely to be substantial.

What factors drive such search API sampling, then? Content …

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Snurb — Monday 28 May 2018 17:45

Understanding the Factors That Affect Facebook’s Algorithmic Profiling of Users

Politics | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Facebook | ICA 2018 |

The first ICA 2018 session I’m seeing this Monday morning is on echo chambers, and starts with Kelley Cotter and Mel Medeiros, who outlines the processes by which social media platforms generate algorithmic identities for their users. These identities determine what kind of content users encounter in their (algorithmically curated) newsfeed.

The project then examined how this works in practice: it conducted a survey of Facebook users and asked participants to provide their downloaded Facebook data for comparison. The Facebook data include aspects such as the pages they’ve liked, and the interests inferred (correctly or incorrectly) from these pages. From …

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Snurb — Saturday 26 May 2018 21:28

The Datafication Logics of Social Media Profile-Making

'Big Data' | Social Media | ICA 2018 |

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Lukasz Szulc, who shifts our attention to our digital profiles. Profile making is now ubiquitous in digital culture, especially of course in social networking sites and with the continuing move towards a platformisation of the Internet. Through our increased use of mobile devices they have also become more pervasive.

Profiles are how we write ourselves into digital being: they enable and suggest different ways of presenting ourselves, and foreclose others; and they are deeply enmeshed with the architectures, design, and governance of social media. Through this, social media platforms build certain …

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Snurb — Saturday 26 May 2018 21:09

The Materiality of Big Data Technologies

Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | ICA 2018 |

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Zane Cooper, whose interest is in the material constitution of big data. Big data make use of earth and labour that do not easily track with its digital manifestations: they generate a long supply chain of physical hardware that supports the big data cloud. There is therefore a need to distinguish between what big data infrastructures are (their constitutional logic) and what they do (their operational logic).

The metaphor of contamination might be valuable here. Contamination is collaboration in the service of ‘precarious survival’; it is a building and a working …

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