July 2018 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

CfP Special Issue on Social and Cultural Biases in Information, Algorithms, and Systems
by Robert Jäschke 17 Jul '18

17 Jul '18

*Call for Papers* Special Issue on “Social and Cultural Biases in Information, Algorithms, and Systems” Online Information Review (SSCI journal by Emerald Insight; 2016 Impact Factor: 1.534) http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/call_for_papers.htm… Computer algorithms and analytics play an increasing role in citizens’ lives, as they underlie the popular information services and “smart” technologies, which are rapidly being adopted across sectors of society, from transportation to education to healthcare . Algorithms allow the exploitation of rich and varied data sources, in order to support human decision-making and/or take direct actions; however, there are increasing concerns surrounding their transparency and accountability. There is growing recognition that even when designers and engineers have the best of intentions, systems relying on algorithmic processes can inadvertently result in serious consequences in the social world, such as biases in their outputs that can result in discrimination against individuals and/or groups of people. Recent cases in the news and media have highlighted the wider societal effects of data and algorithms, and have highlighted examples of gender, race and class biases in popular information access services. It is important to note the complexity of the problem of social and cultural biases in algorithmic processes. For instance, recent research shows that word embeddings, a class of natural language processing techniques that enable machines to use human language in sensible ways, are quite effective at absorbing the accepted meaning of words (Caliskan et al., 2017). These algorithms also pick up on the human biases, such as gender stereotypes (e.g., associating male names with concepts related to career, and female names with home/family) and racial stereotypes (e.g., associating European-/African-American names with pleasant/unpleasant concepts) embedded in our language use. These biases are “accurate” in that they are comparable to those discovered when humans take the Implicit Association Test, a widely used measure in social psychology that reveals the subconscious associations between the mental representations of concepts in our memory (Greenwald et al., 1998). The biases inherent in word embeddings provide a good illustration for the need to promote algorithmic transparency in information systems. Word embeddings are extensively used in services such as Web search engines and machine translation systems (e.g., Google Translate), which rely on the technique to interpret human language in real time. It may be infeasible to eradicate social biases from algorithms while preserving their power to interpret the world, particularly when this interpretation is based on historical and human-produced training data. In fact, another way of viewing such unconscious biases is as sources of ‘knowledge diversity’; what one thinks are the true facts of the world, and how one uses language to describe them, is very much dependent on local context, culture and intentions. An alternative approach would be to systematically trace and represent sources of ‘knowledge diversity’ in data sources and analytic procedures, rather than eliminate them (Giunchiglia et al., 2012). Such approaches would support accountability in algorithmic systems (e.g., a right to explanation of automated decisions, which to date has proven very challenging to implement). In addition, these approaches could facilitate the development of more “fair” algorithmic processes, which take into account a particular user’s context and extent of “informedness” (Koene et al., 2017). The *purpose* of the special issue is to bring together researchers from different disciplines who are interested in analysing and tackling bias within their discipline, arising from the data, algorithms and methods they use. The theme of the special issue is social and cultural biases in information, algorithms, and systems, which includes, but is not limited to, the following areas: - Bias in sources of data and information (e.g., datasets, data production, publications, visualisations, annotations, knowledge bases) - Bias in categorisation and representation schemes (e.g., vocabularies, standards, etc.) - Bias in algorithms (e.g., information retrieval, recommendation, classification, etc.) - Bias in the broader context of information and social systems (e.g., social media, search engines, social networks, crowdsourcing, etc.) - Considerations in evaluation (e.g., to identify and avoid bias, to create unbiased test and training collections, crowdsourcing, etc.) - Interactions between individuals, technologies and data/information - Considerations for data governance and policy As the topic is highly interdisciplinary, we expect that this will be reflected by the submissions. We intend to invite authors from multiple disciplines, including data/information science, computer science, the social sciences, and psychology. The resulting special issue may also be of great interest to practitioners (e.g., in government, non-profit organisations, or companies) and educators (e.g., in digital literacy). *Submission and Publication* Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished papers. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and judged on correctness, originality, significance, quality of presentation, and relevance to the special issue topics of interest. Submitted papers should not have appeared in or be under consideration for another journal. Instructions for authors: http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?i… Paper submission via https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/oir Please select the correct issue to submit to: “Social and Cultural Biases in Information, Algorithms, and Systems”. *Important Dates* - Submission Deadline: October 2018 - First Round Notification: December 2018 - Revision Due Date: February 2019 - Final Notification: April 2019 - Final Manuscript Due Date: June 2019 - Publication Date: July 2018 *Guest Editors* Dr. Jo Bates, Information School, University of Sheffield, UK Prof. Paul Clough, Information School, University of Sheffield, UK Prof. Robert Jäschke, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany Prof. Jahna Otterbacher, Open University of Cyprus Prof. Kristene Unsworth, Stockton University, New Jersey, USA -- Prof. Dr. Robert Jäschke Humboldt University Berlin & L3S Research Center Hannover < https://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~jaeschkr/ >>><<< +49 (0)30 2093-70960 > < World Literature: http://weltliteratur.net/ >< http://bibsonomy.org/ >

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Rethinking higher education in the service of humanity
by Dr. Patrick Blessinger 16 Jul '18

16 Jul '18

Dear Colleagues, If you like, please share new article: *Rethinking higher education in the service of humanity* <http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20180711094726636> http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20180711094726636 -- *Dr. Patrick Blessinger* University World News <http://www.universityworldnews.com/search.php?query=blessinger&type=all&mod…> Higher Education Tomorrow <http://www.patrickblessinger.com/> UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab <http://en.unesco.org/inclusivepolicylab/users/patrick-blessinger> St. John's University, New York City <http://www.stjohns.edu/academics/bio/patrick-blessinger-edd> Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education <http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=jar…> Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning <http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/books/series.htm?id=2055-3641>

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The 34th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2019): Second Combined Call for Papers
by Announce Announcements 16 Jul '18

16 Jul '18

*** SECOND COMBINED CALL FOR PAPERS *** The 34th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2019) St. Raphael Resort, Limassol, Cyprus, April 8-12, 2019 http://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy/~george/lm/lm.php?tk=YWlyLUwJCQlhaXItTEBsaXN0c2Vydi… For the past thirty-three years the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) has been a primary and international forum for applied computer scientists, computer engineers and application developers to gather, interact and present their work. The ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP) is the sole sponsor of SAC. The conference proceedings are published by ACM and are also available online through ACM's Digital Library. The 34th Annual SAC meeting will be held in April 2019 in Limassol, Cyprus, and is hosted by the University of Cyprus. The conference features the following tracks: · Intelligent Robotics and Multi-Agent Systems (IRMAS) · Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) · Information Access and Retrieval (IAR) · Software Verification and Testing (SVT) · Computational Intelligence and Video & Image Analysis (CIVIA) · Social Network and Media Analysis (SONAMA) · Selected Areas of Wireless Communications and Networking (WCN) · Recommender Systems: Theory and Applications (RS) · Computer Security (SEC) · Web-based Technologies for Interactive Computing Education (WICE) · Data Mining (DM) · Usability Engineering (UE) · Cloud Computing (CC) · Privacy by Design in Practice (PDP) · Advances in COMputational Biomedical Imaging (COMBI) · Operating Systems (OS) · Software Platforms (SP) · Decentralized Applications (DAPP) with Blockchain, DLT and Crypto-Currencies (DAPP) · Databases and Big Data Management (DBDM) · Requirements Engineering (RE) · Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) · Software Architecture: Theory, Technology, and Applications (SA-TTA) · Internet of Things (IoT) · Sustainability of Fog/Edge Computing Systems (SFECS) · Software-intensive Systems-of-Systems (SiSoS) · Data Streams (DS) · Programming Languages (PL) · Business Process Management & Enterprise Architecture (BPMEA) · Microservices, DevOps, and Service-Oriented Architecture (MiDOS) · Health Informatics (HI) · Dependable, Adaptive, and Secure Distributed Systems (DADS) · GeoInformation Analytics (GIA) · Knowledge and Language Processing (KLP) · KomIS: Knowledge Discovery meets Information Systems (KomIS) · Next Generation Programming Paradigms and Systems (NGPS) · Communication, Computing and Networking in Internet of Vehicles (CCNIV) · Bioinformatics (BIO) · Embedded Systems (EMBS) · Digital Life for Human Well-being (DLHWB) · Networking (NET) · Semantic Web and Applications (SWA) · Mobile Computing and Applications (MCA) · Software Engineering (SE) · Variability and Software Product Line Engineering (VSPLE) · Smart Human Computer Interaction (HCI) · Web Technologies (WT) · Machine Learning and its Applications (MLA) More information about the topics covered by each track and submission instructions are available on the conference web site and the web sites of the tracks themselves (accessible from the conference web site). Important Dates · Sept 10, 2018: Submission of papers · Nov 10, 2018: Author notification · Nov 25, 2018: Camera-ready copies · Dec 10, 2018: Author registration Committees http://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy/~george/lm/lm.php?tk=YWlyLUwJCQlhaXItTEBsaXN0c2Vydi…

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Second call for papers: The Web that Was (June 2019, Amsterdam)
by Michael Stevenson 16 Jul '18

16 Jul '18

The Web that Was: Archives, Traces, Reflections A three-day conference, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, June 19-21, 2019. The third biennial RESAW (Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials) conference. Organized by the University of Amsterdam. *** Keynote speakers *** Megan Ankerson, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, University of Michigan Wendy Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair, Simon Fraser University Florian Cramer, Professor of Applied Research, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences Olia Lialina, Professor of New Media, Merz Akademie Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication, Stanford University *** Special event *** The conference will host a lecture-performance by Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam) and guests on the history and preservation of Amsterdam’s early internet culture. *** Call for contributions *** As the first generation of web users goes grey, it's clear that the internet they remember is no longer around. The early web is now simply another object of nostalgia. Tech anniversaries are a dime a dozen, while once cool digital aesthetics have made several ironic comebacks. All of this reinforces a sense that we've left behind a digital history that was as clunky and slow as it was idealistic and naïve. How can we rethink this relationship to the web's past and the past web? This question is crucial today as the open web continues to lose ground to platforms and apps. How can this history be reconstructed and re-evaluated, and how are web archives and web histories impacted by technological change? What do traditional problems of preservation and historiography look like at scale? And what stories capture the diverse transformations and continuities that mark nearly 30 years of web history? There is of course no single web history, materially or conceptually speaking. There is instead a politics of archives, technologies and discourses that needs to be uncovered. How can we expand our view of web history beyond Silicon Valley and celebrated cases? And how can we reveal the technological, social and economic contexts that have shaped not just the present web, but how we access its past? What role do archives play in uncovering the histories of the web, platforms and apps, as well as their production and usage contexts? This conference aims to bring together scholars, archivists and artists interested in preserving, portraying and otherwise engaging with the web that was. In addition to paper submissions, we invite proposals for audiovisual installations, posters, software demos, or other media that connects to the conference themes. Submissions in the form of an abstract may relate to, but are not limited by, the following topics: * Web and internet histories * Historicizing the web and digital culture * Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and critiquing periodizations * Past futures and paths not taken * Platformization and the changing structure of the web * Social imaginaries of the early web * Archives and access * Research methods for studying the archived web * Methods for platform and app histories * Ethics of (studying) web archives * Technicity of web archives * Software histories * Archived audiences and histories of internet use * Identity, intersectionality and web history * Digital activism and web history * Histories of net criticism * Media industries and their online histories * Web histories elsewhere: forgotten and marginalized web cultures * Realtime, time travel and other web temporalities * Future histories and the archive of tomorrow *** Submissions *** Submissions are welcomed from all fields and disciplines, and we would particularly encourage postgraduate students and early career researchers to participate. * Individual papers of 20 minutes length (750-word abstract and a short author bio of 100-150 words). * Panel sessions consisting of three individual papers, introduced by a chair (750-word abstract for each paper, a brief description of 300 words of the purpose of the panel, and a short author bio of 100-150 words for each speaker). * Posters, demonstrations, and audio/video/interactive installations (short abstract of no more than 300 words, a list of A/V or other requirements, and a short author bio of 100-150 words) * Workshops (a 500-word rationale for the workshop, including discussion of why the topic lends itself to a workshop format, and a short author bio of 100-150 words for the workshop organiser(s)). Deadline for submission is 19 October 2018. Acceptance will be on the basis of double-blind peer review. *** Timetable *** May 2018 - dates out June 2018 - first call for papers July 2018 - second call for papers August 2018 - third call for papers September 2018 - final call for papers and submissions open 19 October 2018 - submission of abstracts December 2018 - notification of acceptance 19-21 June 2019 - conference *** Organizing Committee *** Anne Helmond, University of Amsterdam, NL Michael Stevenson, University of Amsterdam, NL In collaboration with the RESAW Conference Committee: Niels Brügger, Aarhus University, DK (organiser 2015) Jane Winters, University of London, UK (organiser 2017) Valérie Schafer, University of Luxembourg, LU (coming organiser 2021) *** Program Committee *** Susan Aasman, University of Groningen, NL Gerard Alberts, University of Amsterdam, NL Megan Ankerson, University of Michigan, USA Anat Ben-David, The Open University of Israel, IL Josephine Bosma, independent art critic and theorist, NL Sally Chambers, Ghent University, BE Frédéric Clavert, C2DH Luxembourg Annet Dekker, University of Amsterdam, NL Matthew Fuller, Goldsmiths, UK Sophie Gebeil, Aix-Marseille University, FR Robert W. Gehl, University of Utah, USA Daniel Gomes, arquivo.pt, PT Stefania Milan, University of Amsterdam, NL Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo, CA Francesca Musiani, CNRS, FR Claude Mussou, Ina, FR Janne Nielsen, Aarhus University, DK Camille Paloque-Berges, CNAM, FR Thomas Poell, University of Amsterdam, NL Bernhard Rieder, University of Amsterdam, NL Marta Severo, University of Paris Nanterre, FR Kees Teszelszky, Koninklijke Bibliotheek/Royal Library, NL Fred Turner, Stanford University, USA Peter Webster, Webster Research & Consulting, UK Katrin Weller, GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, DE *** Sponsors *** The conference is financed in part by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) as part of the research program Innovational Research Incentives Scheme Veni in connection with the projects “The Web that Was” (275-45-006) and “App ecosystems: A critical history of apps” (275-45-009). *** Contact *** Website: https://www.thewebthatwas.net Email: organizers(a)thewebthatwas.net

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NLP for sentiment analysis of social media comment
by Nina Lasek 16 Jul '18

16 Jul '18

Dear all, most sentiment analyses of social media comments I know use dictionary-based approaches (e.g. sentigstrength). However, I am wondering if researchers also use Natural Language Processing approaches to examine the sentiment of social media comments; I am still an absolute beginner in this field, hence I would be very glad if somebody could point me to useful papers/tutorials/software for doing NLP based sentiment analyses? Many thanks, Nina

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For those attending ISA World Congress of Sociology
by David Dueñas Cid 15 Jul '18

15 Jul '18

Dear AOIRs, I don't know if this is the place where to debate this issue, if not, just tell me and I will find another way of doing so. Next week will take place the ISA World Congress of Sociology in Toronto, where I plan to take part with, I guess, many other members of this list of distribution. As it usually happens in big/generalistic conferences, checking the program to find interesting presentations focused on internet and society represents a big effort of patience. Commonly, internet scholars are widely distributed in different Research Comittees, showing the diversity of our researh topics and making difficult the connection between us. An interesting congress schedule, as a result, means a complicated set of overlapped presentations amongst which one needs to blind-decide what to see and what to discard. There, my debate/question/almost-proposition: *Does anybody feels like trying to discuss something for next ISA conferences in order to gather "Internet Sociology" scholars/contents? * I am not aware of the internal processes of ISA, I do not know if it is possible to create a new "Reserch Comittee" on this topic, or, even, if it would be convenient. Or if, simply, we could think on different way of organizing the information regarding this topic on ISA Conferences (having some sort of inter-group label to identify the topic). Even that, I think that it might be an interesting debate. If there is some people interested, maybe we could: *1) Use this mail as a discussion thread* *2) Find a moment/place to meet in Toronto next week and talk face-to-face about it.* Best regards, David Duenas-Cid _______________________________ *Dr. David Dueñas-Cid *Researcher *Tallinn University of Technology* *Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance *Akadeemia tee 3 EE-12618 Tallinn

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Re: [Air-L] NLP for sentiment analysis of social media comment
by Caroline Haythornthwaite 15 Jul '18

15 Jul '18

Some references that will help on this topic. Chapter 32: Sentiment Analysis, Mike Thelwall, In The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473983847.n32 — and other chapters in this book. My review of the book briefly summarizes what’s in each chapter — I recommend the whole collection! Haythornthwaite, C. (2017). Review of Luke Sloan and Anabel Quan-Haase (Eds.)(2017) “The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods”, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Journal of the Association of Information Science and Technology, 69(9), 625-630.. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23957/full. Other work See that of Anatoliy Gruzd and his social media lab (http://socialmedialab.ca/author/gruzd/) and the Netlytic program for text analysis (http://socialmedialab.ca/apps/netlytic/) With Anatoliy and colleagues we have just finished a paper on the human coding side of NLP (but not gone on to the automated analysis yet) of some Reddit subreddits. This is the forthcoming paper (also a HICSS conf paper from Jan 2018, but the paper has results of applying the coding). Kumar, P., Gruzd, A., Haythornthwaite, C., Gilbert, S., Esteve del Valle, M. & Paulin, D. (January 2018). Learning in the wild: Coding Reddit for learning and practice. 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Big Island, HI. Haythornthwaite, C., Kumar, P., Gruzd, A., Gilbert, S., Esteve Del Valle, M., & Paulin, D. (2018, in press). Learning in the Wild: Coding for Learning and Practice on Reddit. Learning, Media and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1498356 /Caroline > Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2018 14:51:08 +0000 > From: Nina Lasek <Nina.Lasek1(a)hotmail.com> > To: "air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org" <air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org> > Subject: [Air-L] NLP for sentiment analysis of social media comment > Message-ID: > <VI1PR0202MB35045F32EFFEBDFF29E8D915A85F0(a)VI1PR0202MB3504.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > Dear all, > > most sentiment analyses of social media comments I know use dictionary-based approaches (e.g. sentigstrength). However, I am wondering if researchers also use Natural Language Processing approaches to examine the sentiment of social media comments; I am still an absolute beginner in this field, hence I would be very glad if somebody could point me to useful papers/tutorials/software for doing NLP based sentiment analyses? > > Many thanks, > Nina > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2018 15:15:21 +0000 > From: "Astvansh, Vivek" <astvansh(a)iu.edu> > To: Nina Lasek <Nina.Lasek1(a)hotmail.com>, "air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org" > <air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org> > Subject: Re: [Air-L] NLP for sentiment analysis of social media > comment > Message-ID: <1531581325827.65343(a)iu.edu> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > Hi, Nina: > > Yes; some scholars (particularly in the past, when field-specific dictionaries, such as one in finance, were not available) used their own supervised machine-learning method. This method comprised: (a) using human beings (e.g., MTurkers) to classify text into positive, negative, and neutral sentiment, (b) using this human classification to train a classifier (Lasso or support vector machine), and lastly, (c) using the trained model to classify the holdout sample. As you can guess, this is quite some work and perhaps not required when the relevant dictionary is readily available and you have a program that uses this dictionary to classify text. > > You can search Google Scholar to find articles that use human annotations and machine-learning classifiers and follow this supervised machine-learning approach. > > Best wishes! > Vivek Astvansh > Assistant Professor of Marketing > Kelley School of Business, Indiana University Bloomington >

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Including screennames with tweets
by Hayes, Rebecca M 14 Jul '18

14 Jul '18

Dear All, Can you please weigh in on the decision to include or not include screennames when we cite tweets in a book? The book is on new media and crime, and we are using tweets in a few places as examples of some different discussions. We are back and forth on whether we should include the screennames and at others or disclude them. The arguments we have seen thus far, are to include them because it was made public and we are citing someones words. The other argument is to disclude them as the person did not consent to have it printed in that way persay, and the screenname attached in our book could be used to find and harass the person. What are your thoughts? Thank you, Becky

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Re: [Air-L] Including screennames with tweets
by QCENTRAL 14 Jul '18

14 Jul '18

Hey all, Really enjoying this thread. There’s a great presentation by Melissa Cheyney and Lisa Leventhal, offered by Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research, called “Reviewing Research on Data from Social Media Posts: When is it Within our Scope?” https://youtu.be/hpqgTp9qlJY Their presentation does a very nice job of outlining ways to think through when, how, if you deanonymize people’s social media posts. TL;DR (from a person who spends a LOT of time thinking about this): Funny to see this conversation seem so fresh…we’ve been thinking about this for a long time and there’s a ton of established norms at our fingertips, including the ethics docs written by AoIR. But, definitely, this stuff can be hard. There isn’t one right answer. Every research question will come with its set of ethical concerns. For me, the quickest route to figuring out what to do with any online data is to ask myself “Who benefits from what I do?” For researchers doing scholarship in the public’s interest (e.g., if you’re a student or faculty member at an institution of higher ed or organization meant to serve the public interest or want your research to contribute to our understanding of the world), then, first and foremost, the people we involve in our research—willingly, we hope, but sometimes caught in our dragnets—get first dibs on benefits. At the very least, our obligation is to respect people’s autonomy—their right to choose—and do our best not to introduce more risks to their lives because they participated in our research. Once their needs are met, all other stakeholders—from the individual researcher and her institution/company to Science (!) get to benefit. So, if I list a person’s Twitter handle because Twitter’s TOS says that I should, who benefits? Does the participant, first and foremost benefit or, at least, not suffer from my decision, especially if I had no way to give them a say in the matter? That’s one way to approach these questions. For me, it’s the best way to know that I’m always advancing the interests of the human participant over my own interests (and that’s my obligation as a researcher…if I want to advance my own interests first I should probably not be a researcher for the public interest). For those who might say “but I can’t find out if someone wants to be a part of my research from scraping their tweets?” I’d say: yep. That’s an ethical dilemma that sprouts from your methodology. So, what are you going to do to at least try to respect this human being providing you awesome tweets for analysis?” One easy thing we can do: don’t name them in ways that set them up for Doxxing, even if you don’t think they should care about that or that it’s likely to happen (you don’t know if they have ex-lovers stalking them who’d love to have their name in your pub to add further flames to the fire). At the very least ask: “who benefits from me listing their Twitter handle?” If they aren’t at the top of the list, then there’s work to do to make sure they aren’t taking the fall when other people advance from the use of their names. Stopping there. : ) Mary -- -- Mary L. Gray Senior Researcher and Ethics Advisory Board Chair Microsoft Research Associate Professor School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering Affiliate Faculty of Anthropology, Gender Studies, and The Media School Indiana University Fellow Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society Harvard University 1. Re: Including screennames with tweets (Craig Hamilton) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2018 19:32:28 +0000 From: Craig Hamilton This is a great discussion, and I?m glad to be part of it. It occurs to me that the fact people on this list in particular don?t have a hard and fast answers demonstrates what a tricky issue this is. I don?t have the answer either, but for what its worth I can share my own approach and thoughts. I?ve collected from Twitter and other social media channels for a project dating back to 2013. The tweets in my particularly instance are volunteered to a specific, unique hashtag (#harkive), rather than harvested from keywords. Even so, I?ve taken the decision not to use usernames in articles/chapters/presentations. I provide a way via my project website for people to have their data permanently removed but, as I guess we all know, anyone who enters the text of a tweet into Google will almost certainly be able to find the original author if they want to. Once a tweet and/or a username is printed in a physical book, or a PDF made available online, then I would see that as beyond my control - in other words, removing a tweet from my database would not remove it from the copies in circulation. My feeling is that excluding usernames mitigates potential risks somewhat, but it doesn?t remove those risks entirely. If I were working with data harvested from keywords - and if consen! t had not been given - then I would have misgivings about both verbatim quotes and usernames, and certainly if the subject matter of the tweets and/or article had any obvious potential to cause harm. Kind regards Craig On 13 Jul 2018, at 19:13, Tarleton L. Gillespie <tlg28(a)cornell.edu<mailto:tlg28@cornell.edu>> wrote: I think someone who administers IRB would disagree. Even if we take tweets to be public statements, and even if we the users in this case fully understood them as public, there are different values to think about. As researchers, our obligation is to recognize that including people in our work, however valuable to the research, can come at a cost for the people made into subjects of that research; part of the commitment to being a researcher then means respecting people's autonomy and treating them ethically, "not only by respecting their decisions and protecting them from harm, but also by making efforts to secure their well-being" (http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/EP/EP713_ResearchEthics/EP713_Re…) Instead of "If you choose to exclude, you will have to explain why" I think IRB principles would say it?s the reverse: if you're including the identity of your research subjects, you will have to explain why -- and probably to them. Paula, by the end your comment seems to imply that what's at issue is whether to quote the tweet itself ("very risky"), but I think all that is being discussed here is identifying its author. I totally have the gut instinct to want to credit people, it's deeply ingrained in how we work. But the tweets in this case are not secondary sources of scholarship, they're being selected and used as examples. Other tweets could similarly have been chosen to make the same point. Their value is not that they were posted by person X, but that they sound a certain way or address a certain topic. I would err on the side of protecting the person, because I can't anticipate the harm and can't anticipate their framework for understanding and can't anticipate how they'd feel about their words being used as an object of my research -- unless, of course, I sought their actual consent, as Casey suggested. This conversation is really helping me think about this, thanks all. Tarleton ?On 7/13/18, 1:46 PM, "Air-L on behalf of paula todd" <air-l-bounces(a)listserv.aoir.org<mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of paulatoddmedia(a)gmail.com<mailto:paulatoddmedia@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi, a few thoughts ... Screen names are often creations/public projections and forms of agency, important/expressive in their own way. Signature selections are integral to the full social media message. Exclusion, then, is a form of censorship. If you choose to exclude, you will have to explain why. If the only reason is because someone who uses social media may not understand that their content is public and can therefore (legally) be reproduced or re-mediated on any platform, the same logic could apply to reproducing public content of any type. Very risky. The only cases I could justify such editorializing (selecting which parts of a communication to share) parallel general defamation and hate speech limitations. Social media is public, and of the public sphere; those who want to create private/privileged communication use peer-to-peer, offline, direct messaging, telephone *et al.* Paula *Paula Todd* B.A., LLB.(J.D.), PhD Can. (Digital Journalism) York & Ryerson Universities Toronto, Canada On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 2:23 AM, Hayes, Rebecca M <hayes2r(a)cmich.edu<mailto:hayes2r@cmich.edu>> wrote: Dear All, Can you please weigh in on the decision to include or not include screennames when we cite tweets in a book? The book is on new media and crime, and we are using tweets in a few places as examples of some different discussions. We are back and forth on whether we should include the screennames and at others or disclude them. The arguments we have seen thus far, are to include them because it was made public and we are citing someones words. The other argument is to disclude them as the person did not consent to have it printed in that way persay, and the screenname attached in our book could be used to find and harass the person. What are your thoughts? Thank you, Becky _______________________________________________ The Air-L(a)listserv.aoir.org<mailto:Air-L@listserv.aoir.org> mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/ listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org<http://air-l-aoir.org> Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ - _______________________________________________ The Air-L(a)listserv.aoir.org<mailto:Air-L@listserv.aoir.org> mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L(a)listserv.aoir.org<mailto:Air-L@listserv.aoir.org> mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ ------------------------------ Subject: Digest Footer _______________________________________________ The Air-L(a)listserv.aoir.org<mailto:Air-L@listserv.aoir.org> mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ ------------------------------ End of Air-L Digest, Vol 168, Issue 19 **************************************

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Call for Papers: Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University
by Mark Carrigan 14 Jul '18

14 Jul '18

*Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University**December 13th-14th, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge* In recent discussions of capitalism, the notion of the ‘platform’ has come to play a prominent role in conceptualising our present circumstances and imagining our potential futures. There are criticisms which can be raised of the platform-as-metaphor, however we believe it provides a useful hook through which to make sense of how socio-technical innovations may be leading to a new phase of capitalist accumulation. To talk of ‘platform capitalism’ in this sense does not exclude consideration of parallel notions such as digital capitalism, data capitalism and surveillance capitalism but rather seeks to frame these considerations through a focus upon the platform as a novel assemblage. While research into social media and the sharing economy is relatively advanced, the increasing centrality of platforms to the operation of the university remains understudied and undertheorised. Our conference seeks to rectify this, raising the possibility of the ‘platform university’ as a provocation to stimulate discussion concerning platforms, the commercial and academic science they depend upon and contribute to reshaping, as well as their implications for the future of the university. We see the university as a case study for inquiry into platforms, but also as a horizon of change within which the social sciences seek to address these processes. We invite papers which address the full range of questions posed by these considerations, including topics such as: - *The ontology of platforms* - *The epistemology of platforms* - *Methodological challenges in studying platforms* - *The transformation of the social sciences* - *The politics and political economy of platforms* - *Platforms as evaluative infrastructures* - *Platform education and the platform university * There will be a keynote by Ben Williamson <https://www.stir.ac.uk/people/18084> on *The expanding data infrastructure of higher education: public-private policy networks and platform plug-ins*. We welcome abstracts of 500 words or less by July 31st 2018, sent to mac228(a)cam.ac.uk. Please include a brief biographical note, as well as three key words to categorise your submission. We also plan to publish a select set of papers as a special issue or edited book and are in conversation with journal editors and publishers. We hope to have limited travel and accommodation funding available for unfunded PhD students and post-docs but cannot confirm this at present.

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