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 a process of 'holistic contextualisation', which aims to examine comprehensively why people do what they do, online and offline. This studiously avoids any simplistic concentrations on online or offline activities, as people are almost always operating across both spaces. One core principle of this is the idea of 'polymedia', which builds on the fact that cost and access barriers to most media have decreased to the point that people no longer choose their media based on such factors, but instead on other – social and moral – considerations. (The moral judgment comes in as people assess others' uses of specific media: is it appropriate to break up a relationship via social media, for instance?)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 studies and their applications in the creative industries.

Participants will work with leading researchers, engage in hands-on workshop activities and will have the opportunity to present and get feedback on their own work.

The Summer School will offer a range of introductory hands-on workshops in topics such as:

• Digital ethnography
• Issue mapping
• Social media data analytics
• Software and mobile app studies
• Analysing visual social media
• Geo-spatial mapping
• Data visualisation
• Agent-based modelling
• Web scraping

The program will be conceptually grounded in the problems of public communication and privacy, digital media production and consumption, and the ethical issues associated with big data and digital methods in the context of digital media environments. There will be talks on these topics in addition to the workshops.

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 also used to signify a radical break from the immediate past. Such terms are often understandably criticised as hype (Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion is an obvious example).