Last year, Gilad Lotan and I spent some time analyzing the #YoSoy132 protests in Mexico using data from Twitter. Several articles and even books about #YoSoy132 have come out since. For example, De Mauleón wrote an excellent piece for Nexos (in Spanish) that resembled some of our own analysis. Sadly, Gilad and I got busy and abandoned the project, but …
Category: Uncategorized
Journal articles that change how you think
Today I was running a seminar at the MIT Center for Civic Media on the journal article as form: its affordances and limitations. We talked about the shifts in how academics reach audiences, as well as the economic, political and institutional forces that surround journal publishing. Out of curiosity, I asked on Twitter about people's …
MSR Social Media Collective 2014 PhD internships now open
* APPLICATION DEADLINE: JANUARY 31, 2014 * Microsoft Research New England (MSRNE) is looking for PhD interns to join the Social Media Collective for Summer 2014. We are looking primarily for social science/humanities PhD students (including communication, sociology, anthropology, media studies, information studies, science and technology studies, etc.). The Social Media Collective is a collection …
Continue reading MSR Social Media Collective 2014 PhD internships now open
An Anarchist Ethic for the Treatment of Trolls
This post is in response to hearing Tarleton Gillespie’s AoIR plenary talk on SNS’ responses to trolling. First, a nod to Lisa Nakamura’s point that when we talk about discriminatory acts as trolling, it potentially deescalates the real harm engendered by racist, sexist and demeaning behaviors. This in fact reminds me of boyd and Marwick’s …
Continue reading An Anarchist Ethic for the Treatment of Trolls
Multilingual Interactions through Machine Translation—Numbers from Socl
For the past two years, social media platforms have been rolling out machine translation in the hopes of enabling multilingual interactions. However, the people interacting in these platforms often know each other already, and have a language in common (i.e., friends). But what happens when machine translation is used to facilitate interactions among strangers, who perhaps have common interests but not …
Continue reading Multilingual Interactions through Machine Translation—Numbers from Socl
Art, Activism and Political Consciousness
Earlier this week, I caught Molly Crabapple’s talk at the Berkman Center, where she gave a determined defense of the value of art, and particularly activist, hand-drawn art, in the midst of participatory media. In particular, I was struck by her comment that camera phones enable protestors to rob authority figures of anonymity, for example, …
Account Sharing in the Context of Networked Hospitality Exchange
When it comes to designing web services, an individual user is often taken as the starting point. In many cases, it's a good, practical assumption to make. It can, however, prove to be problematic when it comes to the so called 'sharing economy' where people share resources, such as physical space and tangible items, with …
Continue reading Account Sharing in the Context of Networked Hospitality Exchange
Job Opening: MSR PhD Intern/Research Assistant (Bangalore, India)
Job Title: MSR PhD Intern/Research Assistant Regional Area: Bangalore/Hyderabad, India Primary Background: Anthropology Secondary Background: Journalism, Media, or Communication Studies Microsoft Research is looking for a junior researcher (students recently graduated from or currently enrolled in a Masters or PhD level program) to collaborate on an ethnographic study of crowdsourcing. Project responsibilities will primarily involve …
Continue reading Job Opening: MSR PhD Intern/Research Assistant (Bangalore, India)
Tumblr, NSFW porn blogging, and the challenge of checkpoints
After Yahoo's high-profile purchase of Tumblr, when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said that she would "promise not to screw it up," this is probably not what she had in mind. Devoted users of Tumblr have been watching closely, worried that the cool, web 2.0 image blogging tool would be tamed by the nearly two-decade-old search giant. One population of Tumblr …
Continue reading Tumblr, NSFW porn blogging, and the challenge of checkpoints
Help us expand relationship-app study to NYC, Philadelphia, and beyond!
UPDATE: We're now in the process of expanding this study to include other relationship apps besides Couple, including: Avocado, Between, Duet, LoveByte, etc. If you use one or more of these apps, we'd love to connect! Since our earlier call for participants, I’ve been scouring the Boston area looking for people to interview who use the relationship-app, …
Continue reading Help us expand relationship-app study to NYC, Philadelphia, and beyond!
Social Media Collective 