Your Guide to the SMC at AoIR 2023

We are very proud to announce that more than 30 current and past Social Media Collective researchers will be presenting their work at this year’s Association of Internet Researchers conference in Philadelphia. The SMC and AoIR go way back—the SMC’s Senior Principal Research Manager Nancy Baym led organizing efforts for the first AoIR conference in …

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Playing to the NYC Crowd and other SMC outings

As I hope you've heard by now, the SMC is publishing books like mad. Tarleton Gillespie's Custodians of the Internet is blazing a trail through the content moderation debate, Mary Gray and Sid Suri's Ghost Work will be out in May, and my own Playing to the Crowd has hit the road seeking readers. In that vein, here are some upcoming …

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Re-assembling the Assembly Line: Digital Labor Economies and Demands for an Ambient Workforce

Watch Mary Gray's talk at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society where she discusses her findings from a two-year collaborative study on crowdwork --“the process of taking tasks that would normally be delegated to an employee and distributing them to a large pool of online workers, the ‘crowd,’ in the form of an open call." In …

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Presentation; Between Platforms and Community: Moderators on Reddit

Presentation by intern Nathan Matias on the project he worked on during the summer at the SMC. He has continued to work on his research, so in case you have not read it here is a more updated post on his work: Followup: 10 Factors Predicting Participation in the Reddit Blackout. Building Statistical Models of …

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Co-creation and Algorithmic Self-Determination: A study of player feedback on game analytics in EVE Online

We are happy to share SMC's intern Aleena Chia's presentation of her summer project titled "Co-creation and Algorithmic Self-Determination: A study of player feedback on game analytics in EVE Online".   Aleena's project summary and the videos of her presentation below: Digital games are always already information systems designed to respond to players’ inputs with …

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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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