This piece is also published on medium.com In mid 2016, we confront another ethical crisis related to personal data, social media, the public internet, and social research. This time, it’s a release of some 70,0000 OKCupid users’ data, including some very intimate details about individuals. Responses from several communities of practice highlight the complications of …
Continue reading The OKCupid data release fiasco: It’s time to rethink ethics education
What factors lead users in an online platform to join together in mass collective action to influence those who run the platform? Today, I'm excited to share that my CHI paper on the reddit blackout has received a Best Paper Honorable Mention! (Read the pre-print version of my paper here) When users of online platforms complain, we're often …
Continue reading How Do Users Take Collective Action Against Online Platforms? CHI Honorable Mention
Three weeks ago, I shared dataviz and statistical models predicting participation in the Reddit Blackout in July 2015. Since then, many moderators have offered feedback and new ideas for the data analysis, alongside their own stories. Earlier today, I shared this update with redditors. UPDATE, Sept 16, 9pm ET: Redditors brilliantly spotted an important gap in …
Today in Science, members of the Facebook data science team released a provocative study about adult Facebook users in the US "who volunteer their ideological affiliation in their profile." The study "quantified the extent to which individuals encounter comparatively more or less diverse" hard news "while interacting via Facebook’s algorithmically ranked News Feed."* The research found that …
(written up with Nikki Usher, GWU) Anyone tackling fieldwork these days can chose from a wide selection of digital tools to put in their methodological toolkit. Among the best of these tools are platforms that let you archive, analyze, and disseminate at the same time. It used to be that these were fairly distinct stages …
This Summer I became very interested in what I think I will be calling “legal portraits of digital subjects” or something similar. I came to this through doing a study on MOOCs with SMC this summer. The title of the project is “Students as End Users in the MOOC Ecology” (the talk is available online). …
Digital inequality scholarship is well-intentioned. It debunks myths about digital media’s inherent egalitarianism and draws attention to the digital dimensions of social inequalities. Digital inequality scholars have shown, for example, that people with access to networked media use those technologies in different ways, some of which are thought to be more beneficial than others. They …
Continue reading Why Digital Inequality Scholarship Needs Ethnography
Mary Gray, Mike Ananny and I are writing a paper on queer youth and "Glee" for the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting (yes, I have the greatest job in the world). This is a multi-methodological study by design, because traditional television viewing practices have become so complex. Besides traditional audience ethnography like interviews and participant …
Continue reading Using Off-the-shelf Software for basic Twitter Analysis
Social Media Collective 