Former SMC Postdoctoral Researcher, Sarah Brayne (University of Texas at Austin), has recently published a piece in the American Sociological Review about police use of big data. The article is evidenced off over two and a half years of fieldwork with the Los Angeles Police Department -- including observations from ride-alongs in patrol cars and interviews …
Continue reading Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing
The 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) is being held in our very own Boston, MA this year. The Social Media Collective's Tarleton Gillespie (Microsoft Research, New England and Department of Communication/Department of Information Science, Cornell University) and Mary L. Gray (Microsoft Research, New England and Berkman Center for …
Katrin Tiidenberg (Aarhus University, Denmark and Tallinn University, Estonia) and SMC Principal Researcher Nancy Baym (Microsoft Research, New England) have recently published an article in Social Media + Society that analyzes how pregnancy is performed on Instagram. According to Tiidenberg and Baym, 'Pregnancy today is highly visible, intensely surveilled, marketed as a consumer identity, and feverishly …
Continue reading Learn It, Buy It, Work It! Performing Pregnancy on Instagram
SMC member Mary L. Gray (Microsoft Research, New England; Berkman Kein Center for Internet and Society) and colleague Siddharth Suri (Microsoft Research, New York) have published an article for the Harvard Business Review asking, "just how artificial is Artificial Intelligence?" Whether it is Facebook’s trending topics; Amazon’s delivery of Prime orders via Alexa; or the …
Continue reading “Just how artificial is Artificial Intelligence?”
December 7-13th is Computer Science Education Week! Recently, feminist media scholars have demanded we take seriously seriously the dearth of women and people of color in computing fields. This week presents the opportunity to broadcast professional role models to inspire young minority techies in pursuit of their STEM dreams, both in industry and in academia. …
The 17th annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers is being held this week (Oct 5-8) in Berlin, Germany. It is a thrill to see so many past and present SMC members presenting their latest work, especially with Kate Crawford as part of the conference’s plenary panel Thursday evening. Below is a cheat sheet …
Germaine Halegoua (University of Kansas), Alex Leavitt (Facebook), and Mary L. Gray recently published an article based on research conducted while Germaine was a Ph.D. Intern and Alex was a Research Assistant at MSR. The article, "Jumping For Fun?: Negotiating Mobility and the Geopolitics of Foursquare" was published in Social Media + Society and is available …
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