FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research is seeking interns for 2014. For these positions, we are looking for graduate students from Computer Science, Information Science, Design, Media Studies, Social Science, and other fields with a focus on social computing and social media. FUSE Labs is a research and development lab at Microsoft Research focused on the design, study, and …
Continue reading MSR FUSE Labs 2014 internships in the Seattle area
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 …
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 …
* 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
Write up by Andrés Monroy-Hernández and Elena Agapie, building on the work of J. Nathan Matias Motivated by the disappearance of local newspapers, this past summer, we started to explore new ways of supporting community news production through collaborative writing tools. The first incarnation of this is NewsPad, a system for neighborhood communities to collaboratively to report on local events such as …
(Originally written for TIME Magazine) We’re afraid of and afraid for teenagers. And nothing brings out this dualism more than discussions of how and when teens should be allowed to participate in public life. Last week, Facebook made changes to teens’ content-sharing options. They introduced the opportunity for those ages 13 to 17 to share their updates and …
Continue reading Keeping Teens ‘Private’ on Facebook Won’t Protect Them
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
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
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, …
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
Social Media Collective 