(or, "Hopefully 4chan Won't Hear About This Contest") The social-media-ification of everything continues. If you've got time for some late-summer procrastination, thanks to the Internet you can choose the design of my house. As you may have read here two weeks ago, I'm crowdsourcing it. The first competition is over and I received 16 entries -- …
Category: Reflections
I crowdsourced the design of my house
(or, "The Social-Media-ification of Everything") The architecture crowdsourcing Web site Arcbazar has been called "The Worst Thing to Happen To Architecture Since the Internet Started." The site also got some press recently by running a parallel, unauthorized architecture competition for the "people's choice" for the design of the Obama Presidential Library. I've decided to use arcbazar.com …
Why I Am Suing the Government
(or: I write scripts, bots, and scrapers that collect online data) [This is an old post. SEE ALSO: The most recent blog post about this case.] I never thought that I would sue the government. The papers went in on Wednesday, but the whole situation still seems unreal. I’m a professor at the University of Michigan and a social …
The OKCupid data release fiasco: It’s time to rethink ethics education
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 …
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The paradox of automation’s “last mile”
My collaborator, Siddharth Suri, and I have spent nearly 2 years studying a nascent but rapidly expanding piece of the platform economy that we call “crowdwork.” Right now, crowdwork — millions of people around the world working in concert with programmers issuing tasks to an API — fuels automation of the internet. This work requires people to contribute responses, …
My First Year On The Rural Side of the Digital Divide
This post originally appeared on Cyborgology as part of its "Small Town Internet" issue. Since I was thinking about several SMC members' research while writing this, and worked on this post while co-writing with Jessa Lingel, I thought it apropos to post it here as well. There's a lot more to be said about rural …
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Platformation: Greetings from the future of work!
On September 9, 2015, the Data & Society Research Institute hosted Platformation, a one-day summit that brought together a diverse group of stakeholders to discuss platform economies and the labor that fuels them. Participants included platform business leaders, researchers, labor organization representatives, policy experts, and those contributing labor to this growing sector. You can read the full …
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2015 Advice for Your 856-Year-Old Ph.D.
(or, What's New About Getting an Old Degree?) I'm delighted to be teaching an intro seminar for all the new Ph.D. students in my department's graduate program. One of my goals is to give these students a place to talk about the environment of graduate school itself. How does getting a Ph.D. work? What do you need to know? …
A Research Agenda for Accountable Algorithms
What should people who are interested in accountability and algorithms be thinking about? Here is one answer: My eleven-minute remarks are now online from a recent event at NYU. I've edited them to intersperse my slides. This talk was partly motivated by the ethics work being done in the machine learning community. That is very exciting and …
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Should You Boycott Traditional Journals?
(Or, Should I Stay or Should I Go?) Is it time to boycott "traditional" scholarly publishing? Perhaps you are an academic researcher, just like me. Perhaps, just like me, you think that there are a lot of exciting developments in scholarly publishing thanks to the Internet. And you want to support them. And you also …
Social Media Collective 