Oxford Internet Institute - Blogs

New Media & Society Themed Section on 'Search'

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:01:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 23 May 2013 at 15:01PM

A themed section on 'search' that I put together with my colleagues Ralph Schroeder and Greg Taylor is now out in New Media and Society. The section includes the following pieces: 0 0 2013-04-04T10:51:00Z 2013-05-23T05:34:00Z 1 16 94 OII 1 1 109 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-GB JA X-NONE [...]

Postcards from Rwanda

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:30:07 GMT

Laura Mann on 20 May 2013 at 19:30PM

Last week I was in Rwanda for our project’s outreach meetings: a chance to share our preliminary findings and ideas with our research participants. My Uncle Martin asked me to send him a postcard and trying to be a dutiful niece, I checked out the postcards on offer. A postcard is a country’s chance to share its scenery with the world. This is how [...]

Open Rights Group Report: “Digital Surveillance”

Thu, 16 May 2013 20:33:36 GMT

Joss Wright on 16 May 2013 at 21:33PM

The Open Rights Group have recently released “Digital Surveillance – Why the Snoopers’ Charter is the wrong approach: A call for targeted and accountable investigatory powers”. The report sets out various arguments as to why the proposed Communications Data Bill in the UK, which aims to massively extend the scope of surveillance [...]

We're hiring: Quantitative Internet Geographer/Sociologist

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:36:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 14 May 2013 at 13:36PM

We're hiring a full-time researcher to work with Grant Blank, Bernie Hogan and myself at the Oxford Internet Institute (on a one-year contract in the first instance). The successful candidate will be working on two projects: (1) Helping us to continue our work on the geographies of Wikipedia. i.e. modelling and mapping patterns in Wikipedia data [...]

Online Crowd-sourcing of Scientific Data Could Document the Worldwide Loss of Glaciers to Climate Change

Tue, 14 May 2013 08:12:33 GMT

Policy and Internet Blog on 14 May 2013 at 09:12AM

There are about 300,000 glaciers worldwide, representing 69% of the world’s fresh water, and a dependable water supply to more than a billion people. Glaciers also provide a key (and very visible) indicator for climate change. Klaus Thymann, a director at Project Pressure — the world’s first crowdsourced archive of glacier images [...]

Don’t miss MuseumNext

Sun, 12 May 2013 21:30:23 GMT

Anne-Marie Oostveen on 12 May 2013 at 22:30PM

If you are in Amsterdam this week, don’t miss MuseumNext at the Beurs van Berlage. MuseumNext is Europe’s big conference on innovation and technology in museums. The aim is to provide a clear insight into how technology and media are shaping museums and the world around them. This year MuseumNext focuses on ‘What’s Next’. My colleague [...]

Future Internet Assembly: ‘from the lab into the real world’

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:32:24 GMT

Cristobal Cobo on 8 May 2013 at 11:32AM

‘From the lab into the real world’ [A User-Centered Approach] from Cristobal Cobo Romaní According to Wikipedia User-centered design is a ‘multi-stage problem solving process that not only requires designers to analyse and foresee how users are likely to use a product, but also to test the validity of their assumptions with regards to user [...]

Crowdsourcing Translation During Crisis Situations: Are ‘Real Voices’ Being Excluded from the Decisions and Policies it Supports?

Tue, 07 May 2013 07:58:47 GMT

Policy and Internet Blog on 7 May 2013 at 08:58AM

International NGOs and government actors have embraced crowdsourcing to manage the flood of information produced during crisis. However, when crowdsourced material crosses the language barrier into English, it often becomes inaccessible to the original contributors. Gwyneth Sutherlin is a doctoral student at the University of Bradford, where she [...]

Basic geo-lingusitic analysis on Chinese search engine result pages (SERPs)

Tue, 07 May 2013 02:19:11 GMT

Han-Teng Liao on 7 May 2013 at 03:19AM

This blog post provides some basic geo-linguistic analysis of the findings explained in the previous blog post. Geo-linguistic information can be extracted from the data to consider the geographic and linguistic factors of the web links . geo-IP First, based … Continue reading → [...]

Digital Oxford

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:46:43 GMT

Elizabeth Dubois on 6 May 2013 at 12:46PM

On May 4, 2013 I participated in a day long forum which kicks off the University of Oxford’s campaign to become digital – or at least to have some sort of vision for integrating digital technology into the workings of this very old institution. The meeting was attended by everyone from Oxford UP reps to museum curators to public relations [...]

“Wikipedias” (or its copycat) dominate “Chinese” search engine result pages (SERPs)

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:08:54 GMT

Han-Teng Liao on 6 May 2013 at 12:08PM

It has been reported that (and speculated why) the global leader of search engines Google has consistently favoured the global leader of user-generated encyclopedias Wikipedia by showing relevant pages frequently and prominently in the search engine result pages (thereafter SERPs) … Continue reading → [...]

Continental Internet hypothesis: the case of China’s Internet

Mon, 06 May 2013 07:46:52 GMT

Han-Teng Liao on 6 May 2013 at 08:46AM

After discussing the historical hypothesis of maritime Internet, this blog post will discuss the emerging continental Internet and how it is distinctive from the maritime Internet, using China’s Internet as a case. “Domestic” terrestrial versus “international” submarine cables? Technologically and … Continue [...]

Maritime Internet hypothesis: beyond the North Atlantic

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 07:41:56 GMT

Han-Teng Liao on 30 April 2013 at 08:41AM

I further argue that the Maritime Internet hypothesis is of great importance to Chinese Internet research and Chinese studies because of the following reasons. .... [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="auto"] Han Chinese population in the world[/caption] Continue reading → [...]

Gallery: the Shift to Asia (Submarine Cables)

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:27:19 GMT

Han-Teng Liao on 30 April 2013 at 05:27AM

Submarine communications cables make the global Internet, thereby indicating the uses, investment, expectations, geographic diffusion and historical dependencies of its development. Based on the figures and arguments made in this article , the two animated images below show how the … Continue reading → [...]

Wikipedians without borders

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:33:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 29 April 2013 at 14:33PM

Our team recently held a workshop for Wikipedia editors in Amman in order to discussion barriers to participation and representation in Wikipedia (with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa). The event had participants from all over the region (from Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Israel, The Palestinian Territories, [...]

New article published - Thai Silk Dot Com: Authenticity, Altruism, Modernity and Markets in the Thai Silk Industry

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 20:26:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 25 April 2013 at 21:26PM

An article that I had accepted into Globalizations has made its way into print: Graham, M. 2013. Thai Silk Dot Com: Authenticity, Altruism, Modernity and Markets in the Thai Silk Industry. Globalizations. 10(2) 211-230. The abstract is below, and you can access a pre-publication version at this link. The production of silk occupies a [...]

New book chapter: User Involvement in Future Internet Projects

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:32:00 GMT

Anne-Marie Oostveen on 24 April 2013 at 20:32PM

We have a chapter in the FIA 2013 book to be published by Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) next month [1]. In this chapter we address user involvement in the Future Internet community. We were interested to find out whether current FI projects support user-led innovation and in this way empower ordinary people, citizens and [...]

Time for Debate About the Societal Impact of the Internet of Things

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:32:22 GMT

Policy and Internet Blog on 22 April 2013 at 14:32PM

Despite the growing ubiquity and connectivity of the consumer devices and other objects that make up the “Internet of Things“, very little is understood about the likely social impacts of the technology. Jeremy Crump is chair of the BCS Internet of Things working group and a Director at Cisco Systems. In February 2013 he chaired a joint [...]

Information Communication and Society

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 15:31:52 GMT

William H. Dutton on 20 April 2013 at 16:31PM

Our journal, Information Communication and Society (iCS), has had a step-jump in its readership and role in the field over the last several years. The editor, Brian Loader, and I were recalling our first meeting in the late 1990s, when Brian first proposed the journal. We are in the midst of the 16th volume with subscriptions continuing to rise, [...]

The best and worst of social media: Liberal leadership candidates.

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:17:23 GMT

Elizabeth Dubois on 19 April 2013 at 16:17PM

Social media may feel pretty mundane for those of us who have more sets of log-in credentials than fingers and toes, but in the political game a lot of these tools are still very new. Social media favors the fun, the timely, the shareable, and the creative. Here is a re-cap of the best and worst attempts at social media use by Liberal leadership [...]

New Article published - Beyond the geotag: situating 'big data' and leveraging the potential of the geoweb

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:05:00 GMT

Mark Graham on 19 April 2013 at 15:05PM

An article that I worked on with Jeremy Crampton, Ate Poorthuis, Taylor Shelton, Monica Stephens, Matt Wilson, and Matt Zook -- Beyond the geotag: situating 'big data' and leveraging the potential of the geoweb -- has just been published in Cartography and Geographic Information Science as part of a special issue on "Mapping Cyberspace and Social [...]

Why Do (Some) Political Protest Mobilisations Succeed?

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:40:55 GMT

Policy and Internet Blog on 19 April 2013 at 13:40PM

Social media are helping researchers gain insights into how people self-organize, and how bottom-up dynamics facilitate or hinder the emergence of large political mobilisations. OII Research Fellow Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon discusses how the dynamics of message propagation and recruitment help explain why some mobilisations succeed, but most fail. [...]

Where do developers belong in development?

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:27:34 GMT

Linnet Taylor on 19 April 2013 at 11:27AM

If you’re someone with data analysis skills and a yearning to solve poverty/malaria/the mystery of bee mortality, now’s your time. There are numerous ‘big data’ initiatives emerging to connect development initiatives with people who can code, including programs based around GIS, mobile phone data, crowdsourced crisis reporting and [...]

Big Data: Tools and Access

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:10:26 GMT

Linnet Taylor on 17 April 2013 at 13:10PM

This is a group post from a session held at the Big Data: Rewards and Risks for the Social Sciences conference in March (http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/?id=557). Participants in the group were Chris Birchall, Michael Khoo, Cornelius Puschmann, Kalpana Shankar, Jillian Wallis, Janet Smart, Melissa Terras and Linnet Taylor. This is an account of the [...]

How much can one express in 140 characters? Comparison between English and other languages like Chinese

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 01:31:30 GMT

Han-Teng Liao on 16 April 2013 at 02:31AM

My findings show that the English/Chinese Ratio is at 3.63 and Japanese/Chinese ratio is at 1.34. It means that a twit (or a Sina Weibo message) of 140-character in Chinese language can convey 3.63 times of the English-written content or 1.34 times of Japanese content, at least in the case of Roslin's speech. Continue reading → [...]