In exciting news, Stacy Blasiola, R. Stuart Geiger and I are announcing a call for papers for a Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media Special Issue. Please pass on to your networks, or even better, send us an abstract. Call for Papers Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media Special Issue Old Against New, or a …
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The Hidden Biases in Big Data
Image credit: Harvard Business Review. SMC Principal Researcher Kate Crawford reached the number-one slot on the "Most Read" list of the Harvard Business Review this week with her sharp and insightful blog post on the weaknesses of big data. Debunking the commonly held belief that "numbers speak for themselves" in large data sets, Kate brings …
Personal Twitter Use Over Time
Have you downloaded your Twitter archive? Would you like to? Do you want to talk about it? Nancy Baym and Jean Burgess are seeking to interview people about how their Twitter use has changed over time. We are seeking Twitter users in the Boston area who have or can get their Twitter archive (For instructions …
Look Who Stopped By: Jason Mittell
We get a lot of wonderful and interesting visitors here at SMC. Today, we had the pleasure of spending time with Jason Mittell, Chair of the Department of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. SMC: So what brings you to MSR today? JM: Visiting with Nancy Baym, and chatting to just see how things work …
CAUTION!! Boundary Work Ahead for Internet Studies
This past October, Mary was one of the plenary speakers at the Association of Internet Researchers IR13.0. Below is the text from her presentation. Suggested citation: Gray, Mary L. “ ‘CAUTION!! Boundary Work Ahead for Internet Studies ...or, Why the Twilight of the 'Toaster Studies' Approach to Internet Research is a Very, Very Good Thing”. Paper …
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Measuring Networked Social Privacy
Xinru Page, Karen Tang, Fred Stutzman and I are organizing a two-day workshop on measuring networked social privacy at the CSCW 2013 conference next spring. We are inviting researchers from diverse backgrounds to come and work with us on what would it look like to "measure" networked social privacy in rigorous, productive ways. Please pass …
Digital In/Justice
I want to recommend a new post at Culture Digitally, "Digital In/Justice," both because it may be of interest to the readers of this blog, and because it features Microsoft Research's Mary Gray. Culture Digitally arranges occasional dialogues, in which two or more scholars go back and forth in conversation on a topic they are …
Can objects be evil? A review of “Addiction by Design”
Schüll, Natasha Dow. (2012) Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Addiction by Design is a nonfiction page-turner. A richly detailed account of the particulars of video gaming addiction, worth reading for the excellence of the ethnographic narrative alone, it is also an empirically rigorous examination of users, designers, and …
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SMC seeks a Research Assistant
Call for Research AssistantMicrosoft Research (MSR) is looking for a Research Assistant for its Social Media Collective in the New England lab, based in Cambridge,Massachusetts. The Social Media Collective consists of Nancy Baym, danah boyd, Kate Crawford, Megan Finn, and Mary L. Gray, as well as faculty visitors and Ph.D. interns. An appropriate candidate will …
Book club digest: Networked
At SMC, we regularly meet to discuss interesting books in our field. These discussions tend to spark conversations about a variety of related topics. In an effort to be more inclusive, we thought we’d share the questions that our conversation sparked in the hopes that the SMC community would share your thoughts about these issues …
Social Media Collective 