Oxford Internet Institute - Blogs

Mapping Wikipedia edits from Europe

Sat, 12 May 2012 12:34:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 12 May 2012 at 13:34PM

I'm still playing with our database of Wikipedia edits (which tells us how many contributions to the encyclopedia originate in each country) and made two more maps of Europe. The height of each country represents the number of edits originating in that place. The shading indicated the number of edits per Internet user (darker reds meaning [...]

Hiring a part-time research assistant to do statistical, spatial, and social analysis

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:28:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 8 May 2012 at 17:28PM

Bernie Hogan and I are hiring a part-time Research Assistant to carry out research into the geography and social structure of Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa through large-scale data analysis. The position will involve the analysis of the corpus of Wikipedia text, user-pages and history files and the use of statistical techniques [...]

Augmented information and the reproduction of visibility

Fri, 04 May 2012 10:23:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 4 May 2012 at 11:23AM

I spend a lot of time thinking about the geographies of information that augment our planet (e.g. see a paper on augmented realities and uneven geographies that I recently wrote with Matt Zook). And many people ask me why the layers of information about place really matter. Who cares if London is covered by a denser cloud of information than Lagos? [...]

Changing Higher Learning Forever?

Fri, 04 May 2012 09:03:46 GMT

Cristobal Cobo on 4 May 2012 at 10:03AM

The first time that I hear about the MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses, video) I thought that it was a crazy idea (I didn’t liked at all). It sounded to me as using the Internet instead of television to broadcast educational contents without caring who, where and how to learn. But after exploring with more details the ideas of Siemens (in [...]

Network Effects–We Missed the Inframarginals

Wed, 02 May 2012 15:34:49 GMT

Rough Consensus on 2 May 2012 at 16:34PM

When discussing the internet, the economic concept that seems to have made the largest dispersion into popular discourse is the concept of ‘network effects’. “Facebook is unconquerable because of positive network externalities.” “Product X must reach the tipping point so that network effects can take over,” [...]

Mapping #kony2012 on Twitter (part 2)

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 30 April 2012 at 14:00PM

Following on from my last post about mapping #kony2012 on Twitter, I also wanted to offer up a map that shows the proportion of tweets from each country that made reference to the viral video or the LRA leader (or both). We've already seen that most tweets referencing Kony were published from North America, and Western Europe, but this map tells [...]

Losing a Grip on Your Facebook Account? You’re Not the Only One

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:48:08 GMT

Rough Consensus on 30 April 2012 at 12:48PM

Having a Facebook page is becoming more and more of a liability. Surely we’ve heard it all before, though. Journalists, authors, bloggers, and even occasionally incredulous Masters’ students love talking about the potential negative Facebook effects, from loss of self-esteem to increased anxiety or jealousy. But there’s a much more tangible one: [...]

Draft Paper: Understanding the Mechanics of Online Collective Action Using 'Big Data'

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 15:45:35 GMT

Government on the Web on 29 April 2012 at 16:45PM

Type: Paper Experiment?: No Collective Action Citizen-Government Interactions Big Data [...]

Non-users and Ex-users: Gender and Age

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 13:38:43 GMT

OxIS Blog on 28 April 2012 at 14:38PM

In this post we explore some basic demographic characteristics of non-users and ex-users of the Internet. The first graph shows that the proportions of non- and ex-users among men and women are almost identical. The proportion of non- and ex-users is only 3 percentage points bigger among female population. This difference is within the margin of [...]

Razoabilidade na Rede: além da neutralidade

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 03:29:44 GMT

Marcelo Thompson on 28 April 2012 at 04:29AM

Nota para auxiliar no debate sobre a neutralidade da rede no contexto do Marco Civil da Internet no Brasil (PL No. 2126 de 2011). Neste momento em que pensamos em adotar uma Constituição para a Internet no Brasil, não devemos nela inserir princípio incompatível com os valores e princípios que Constituições abraçam. Nenhuma Constituição, como regra [...]

Mapping Wikipedia edits from South America

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:09:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 26 April 2012 at 11:09AM

If you've ever wondered where edits to Wikipedia come from in South America, the map below might be useful to you. The answer is that almost half of all edits to Wikipedia from South America come from Brazil. These data are actually not that surprising considering that there are almost 80 million Internet users in the country (and Brazil is [...]

Prof Helen Margetts serves on UK Digital Advisory Board

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:49:32 GMT

Government on the Web on 26 April 2012 at 16:49PM

OII Director Helen Margetts is one of twelve expert members of the new Digital Advisory Board in the UK. Chaired by UK Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox, the board will support the UK Government to deliver a revolution in online services. [View the story "Digital Advisory Board appointed for Government" on Storify] [...]

EngageU: Challenges of assessment & public engagement

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:07:22 GMT

Monica Bulger on 25 April 2012 at 16:07PM

Funding bodies are increasingly requiring evidence of impact for higher education efforts in outreach and public engagement, yet measuring this impact is challenging. A review of current practice combined with interviews of public engagement experts in the UK underscored the degree to which outcomes of public engagement and outreach efforts are [...]

Child protection study underway

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:17:28 GMT

Monica Bulger on 25 April 2012 at 13:17PM

Vicki Nash and I were successful in our bid to the Fell Fund to examine how risk and harm are used in literature addressing children’s use of the Internet. Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova, a recent graduate of Loughborough University, joined us in December and has been making swift progress through the mountain of relevant literature. To date, we [...]

Sustainability Workshop

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:03:38 GMT

SECT Project on 24 April 2012 at 12:03PM

On Friday 20th April, we held a workshop on EEBO-TCP and sustainability at the Lincoln EPA Centre at the University of Oxford. A group of 20 editors, academics, digital technology specialists, and JISC representatives discussed how EEBO-TCP is used in research and teaching, and how we should approach the challenge of making the corpus sustainable [...]

O Mundo Pela Wikipédia

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:30:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 20 April 2012 at 09:30AM

Some work done by Monica Stephens, Scott Hale and myself just got picked up by the Brazilian magazine Exame. The spread offers an alternate visualisation to the data that we're collecting about the geographies of Wikipedia. It also includes penguins. I don't speak Portuguese, so am not sure what the penguins have to do with Wikipedia. [...]

The geolinguistic contours of digital content in Spain

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 08:30:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 23 April 2012 at 09:30AM

Following up on our post about augmented realities and uneven geographies, we wanted to post a few more maps that came out of the project. This first one compares content indexed (by Google Maps) in Spanish (Castilian) to content in Catalan. Throughout much of the Catalonian region in the Northeast coastal areas there is considerable more [...]

Where do tweets come from? (part 2)

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:15:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 16 April 2012 at 15:15PM

I realise that the graph in my last post about the geography of tweets is hard to read, so am uploading the chart below so that you can get a better sense of where content in Twitter comes from. It shows us that over half of the world's content comes from the US and Brasil alone! Again, all of the caveats of these data are listed in the [...]

Video of my DFID talk is now online: "Digital Divides - The Potential of the Internet for Development"

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 17:09:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 13 April 2012 at 18:09PM

On March 29, I was invited by Michael Anderson to give a talk at DFID to extend some of the work that I presented at the London Cyberspace Conference last year. DFID have now uploaded my audio and slides and you can watch/listen to the talk below. The idea behind the talk is that while it is important to not forget the [...]

Civic by default - when opting in is not a choice

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:54:23 GMT

OxIS Blog on 13 April 2012 at 13:54PM

This is a guest post by OII Research Fellow Rebecca Eynon and Anne Geniets. They discuss the topical issue of the UK's digital inclusion strategy, discussed at last week's OII workshop on low and discontinued Internet use by young people in Britain. Published: 13 April 2012. On 23 March 2012, the Oxford Internet Institute saw stakeholders [...]

Where do tweets come from?

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:11:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 13 April 2012 at 12:11PM

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a map of all georeferenced tweets mentioning the #kony video. The patterns were interesting, but not entirely unexpected. A more interesting question though, would be to see what percentage of all tweets from each country reference #kony: in order to get a better sense of how focused people were on the event. [...]

Introducing the SECT project

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:54:14 GMT

SECT Project on 13 April 2012 at 10:54AM

SECT: Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition is an 18-month project, running from 1st February 2012 until 31st July 2013, funded by JISC under their Digital Preservation and Curation strand. SECT is based at the Bodleian Libraries, together with its parent project, the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, which began work in [...]

Cities and the Internet: New Perspectives

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:47:21 GMT

William H. Dutton on 6 April 2012 at 14:47PM

I’ve certainly been involved in research on the role of new information and communication technologies in shaping local and urban communities, such as with my work on Wired Cities from the late-1970s, when interactive cable communication was expected to support local and interactive communication in ways that would support community. Later I [...]

Interactive Wikipedia mapping tool

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:50:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 3 April 2012 at 17:50PM

We know by now that all online platforms have distinct, and highly uneven, geographies. Wikipedia is no exception: and we therefore decided to make a tool that would allow people to explore what, and where, the world's most popular encyclopedia represents. The tool, made by the excellent team at TraceMedia, as well as [...]

Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI’12)

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 13:04:40 GMT

Joss Wright on 31 March 2012 at 14:04PM

Following on from the fantastically interesting FOCI workshop last year, I am co-chairing this year’s FOCI workshop along with Roger Dingledine of the Tor Project. The workshop will again be co-located with USENIX Security, which is being held this year in Bellevue, Washington in August. Although FOCI revolves around USENIX Security, and [...]