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 …
Continue reading Playing to the NYC Crowd and other SMC outings
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 …
The Social Media Collective is showing up in force at Internet Research 16 in Phoenix, Arizona starting next week. Along with many friends of the SMC, there will be some of our permanent researchers (Nancy Baym, Tarleton Gillespie), postdocs current and past (Kevin Driscoll, Lana Swartz, Mike Ananny), past & present interns (Stacy Blasiola, Brittany …
During her summer with us at Microsoft Research, PhD candidate Stacy Blasiola did a qualitative analysis of how Facebook users make sense of News Feed and algorithmic systems. Take a look at the presentation she did on her findings. (Video 1) (Video 2) (Video 3) (Video 4)
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 …
Continue reading Presentation; Between Platforms and Community: Moderators on Reddit
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 …
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 …
Continue reading A Research Agenda for Accountable Algorithms
Our own Mary Gray was featured on C-SPAN's "The Communicators," discussing the ethical implications of personal data collection online and its use in commercial and academic contexts. You can watch this special here. via The Communicators | Communicators with Mary Gray [12/3]
Last week I tried to get a group of random sophomores to care about algorithmic culture. I argued that software algorithms are transforming communication and knowledge. The jury is still out on my success at that, but in this post I'll continue the theme by reviewing the interactive examples I used to make my point. I'm sharing them …
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). …
Social Media Collective 