'Big Data'

The next speakers in this iCS Symposium are Anamaria Dutceac Segesten and Michael Bossetta, who describes the decline of API access as a possible blessing in disguise, as it forces us to explore new and additional sources of data on online communication. One approach to doing this is to pursue academic partnerships with commercial enterprises – for instance, with news publishers or civil society organisations.

This project worked in partnership with a political marketing company that provides data-driven political marketing strategies for actors in multiple countries around the world. The company develops its own tools and gathers its own data …

The second day at the iCS Symposium at IT University Copenhagen starts with a keynote by Lina Dencik. She explores the difficulties in researching the datafied society, building on several of the projects currently underway at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University. This work must involve researchers, but also civil society actors, practitioners, journalists, and others.

The datafied society represents an immensely fast-moving space; there are constant updates on development projects, company initiatives, government actions, data scandals, etc. As researchers, it is important to introduce a sense of slowness into this environment from time to time, in order to …

My own keynote closes the first day of the iCS Symposium “Locked out of Social Platforms: An iCS Symposium on Challenges to Studying Disinformation”. Here are the slides:

The last paper in this AoIR 2018 session was mine, presenting on our TrISMA project to gather social media data in Australia at scale. Here are the slides:

The third speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Harsh Taneja, who promises to present an alternative history of big data. At present, many big data datasets are highly platform-specific, such data can generally be accessed via platform APIs or scraped from platform Websites. But big data research existed before the Internet: Harsh points here to the early days of advertising-supported broadcasting, when advertisers first required audience measurements.

This was done at first through self-reporting, for instance through phone surveys. Soon, however, people like Arthur C. Nielsen developed audience measurement devices, which produced a first kind of big data on …

The next speaker in our AoIR 2018 session is Ericka Menchen-Trevino, whose research interest is on the study of selective exposure; this is often studied through surveys or lab experiments, but can be usefully complemented with Web history data. Such an integration between conventional social science data and digital trace data provides a blueprint for new possibilities across a range of research interests, in fact.

Conventional social science broadly distinguishes between quantitative and qualitative data and methods, but this distinction is not particular useful when working with digital trace data. These data are usually collected by the researcher for a …

I’ve spent the morning in an AoIR Executive meeting, but I’m back for the second session on this Friday morning at AoIR 2018 – and I also have a paper in this session. First off is Rasmus Helles, though, who presents the People’s Internet Project: a major global study, supported by the Carlsberg Foundation, that seeks to map out global variations in Internet development.

This takes the citizen as a point of departure, and employs a range of methods for studying Internet use: it uses big data on Web traffic from ComScore; engages in local ethnographies of Internet users; conducts …

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 …

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 …

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 …