The Social Media Collective extended family compiled a bibliography on the digital divide (including gender gaps) and ICTD. Thanks to all of those who contributed! Allen, Steven G. 2001. "Technology and the Wage Structure." Journal of Labor Economics 19:440-483. Anderson, B. 2005. "The value of mixed-method longitudinal panel studies in ICT research." Information, Communication & Society 8:343-367. …
Continue reading Reading list on the digital divide/digital inclusion
(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? …
Last Thursday and Friday, moderators of many of Reddit's most popular discussion groups "blacked out" their subreddits, preventing access to parts of the site by Reddit subscribers and cutting off some of the company's advertising revenue for half a day. What may not have started as a protest quickly became one, with many moderators complaining …
Continue reading What Just Happened on Reddit? Understanding The Moderator Blackout
Join us today, Thursday July 9 at 3pm ET (9pm CET), to listen to SMC's Mary L. Gray on a special Theory of Everything's online discussion on life in the sharing economy. Benjamen Walker and Andrew Callaway, the official Theory of Everything instapoder, will also be hosting. Mary is currently researching labor and the sharing economy in the Social …
Continue reading Today– Online event with Mary L. Gray @3pm (ET) on labor and the sharing economy
As we say goodbye to the *amazzzzing* Rebecca Hoffman <serious sad face emoji>, we have the solace of welcoming Andrea Alarcón to SMC's ranks. Andrea received her MSc degree from the Oxford Internet Institute, and her BSc in online journalism from the University of Florida. She has researched ICT4D, online language barriers and data collection by international corporations in developing nations. …
Continue reading Hello Andrea (SMC’s 2015-16 Research Assistant Extraordinaire!)
What would be a sustainable and inclusive approach to child safety online? Today at the Berkman Center, Mitali Thakor presented her research on human trafficking and moderated a discussion of how we see and respond to issues of child safety. Mitali Thakor is a PhD student at MIT's history and science of technology program, who studies …
Continue reading Imagining a Sustainable and Inclusive Approach to Child Safety Online
Today at the Berkman Center, our summer PhD Interns gave a series of short talks describing our research and asking for feedback from the Berkman community. This liveblog summarizes the talks and the Q&A (special thanks to Willow Brugh for collaborating on this post). Mary Gray, senior researcher at Microsoft Research, opened up the conversation …
What does it take to keep online communities going? With over 550,000 public subreddits, many of which are active, the communities on the site rely on ongoing effort by a large number of volunteer moderators. In my research, I'm excited to learn more from redditors how they see the work of moderation and why they do it.
A very similar version of this blog post originally appeared in Culture Digitally on June 5, 2015. Words Matter. As I write this in June 2015, a United Nations committee in Bonn is occupied in the massive task of editing a document overviewing global climate change. The effort to reduce 90 pages into a short(er), …
Continue reading Discourse Matters: Designing better digital futures
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
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