Huge news: we may have the chance to hire a new, full-time Principal Researcher for the SMC! We haven’t grown our permanent research team in more than a decade, even as the questions we study feel like they change about every hour and half. So this is exciting news for us, and may be exciting …
The latest issue of Media, Culture, and Society features an open-access discussion section responding to SMC all-stars danah boyd and Kate Crawford's "Critical Questions for Big Data." Though the article is only a few years old, it's been very influential and a lot has happened since it came out, so editors Aswin Punathambekar and Anastasia Kavada commissioned …
Hello! We wanted to post a quick update on the status of the 2015 SMC PhD Internship Program. The application season closed January 31 and we ended up with more than 240 stellar candidates to the program. Thank you for your patience with our application process and please forgive the delays in sending an update. The …
Continue reading Update on the 2015 SMC PhD Internship season
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]
A little over a year ago, JOBEM editor Zizi Papacharissi approached me, R. Stuart Geiger (UC Berkeley) and Stacy Blasiola (University of Illinois at Chicago) with the idea of a JOBEM special issue hat would be edited and authored by graduate students. We were excited to accept the invitation and set out for the adventure. The …
I'm intrigued by the reaction that has unfolded around the Facebook "emotion contagion" study. (If you aren't familiar with this, read this primer.) As others have pointed out, the practice of A/B testing content is quite common. And Facebook has a long history of experimenting on how it can influence people's attitudes and practices, even …
Continue reading What does the Facebook experiment teach us?
* 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
Two years ago, when I started working on issues related to human trafficking and technology, I was frustrated by how few people recognized the potential of technology to help address the commercial sexual exploitation of children. With the help of a few colleagues at Microsoft Research, I crafted a framework document to think through the …
Continue reading Addressing Human Trafficking: Guidelines for Technological Interventions
PBS Off Book features Alice talking about her and danah's research on teenage bullying and drama. A quick but excellent watch!
Does collaboration result in higher quality creative works than individuals working alone? Is working in groups better for functional works like code than for creative works like art? Although these questions lie at the heart of conversations about collaborative production on the Internet and peer production, it can be hard to find research settings where you …
Social Media Collective 