WebSci '16: ACM Web Science Conference May 22, 2016-May 25, 2016 Hannover, Germany. You can view more information about this proceeding and all of ACM�s other published conference proceedings from the ACM Digital Library: http://www.acm.org/dl.
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Discovery Science, DS 2023, which took place in Porto, Portugal, in October 2023. The 37 full papers and 10 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 133 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Machine learning methods and applications; natural language processing and social media analysis; interpretability and explainability in AI; data analysis and optimization; fairness, privacy and security in AI; control and spatio-temporal modeling; graph theory and network analysis; time series and forecasting; healthcare and biological data analysis; anomaly, outlier and novelty detection.
This book provides practical information about web archives, offers inspiring examples for web archivists, raises new challenges, and shares recent research results about access methods to explore information from the past preserved by web archives. The book is structured in six parts. Part 1 advocates for the importance of web archives to preserve our collective memory in the digital era, demonstrates the problem of web ephemera and shows how web archiving activities have been trying to address this challenge. Part 2 then focuses on different strategies for selecting web content to be preserved and on the media types that different web archives host. It provides an overview of efforts to address the preservation of web content as well as smaller-scale but high-quality collections of social media or audiovisual content. Next, Part 3 presents examples of initiatives to improve access to archived web information and provides an overview of access mechanisms for web archives designed to be used by humans or automatically accessed by machines. Part 4 presents research use cases for web archives. It also discusses how to engage more researchers in exploiting web archives and provides inspiring research studies performed using the exploration of web archives. Subsequently, Part 5 demonstrates that web archives should become crucial infrastructures for modern connected societies. It makes the case for developing web archives as research infrastructures and presents several inspiring examples of added-value services built on web archives. Lastly, Part 6 reflects on the evolution of the web and the sustainability of web archiving activities. It debates the requirements and challenges for web archives if they are to assume the responsibility of being societal infrastructures that enable the preservation of memory. This book targets academics and advanced professionals in a broad range of research areas such as digital humanities, social sciences, history, media studies and information or computer science. It also aims to fill the need for a scholarly overview to support lecturers who would like to introduce web archiving into their courses by offering an initial reference for students.
A proposal to repurpose Web-native techniques for use in social and cultural scholarly research. In Digital Methods, Richard Rogers proposes a methodological outlook for social and cultural scholarly research on the Web that seeks to move Internet research beyond the study of online culture. It is not a toolkit for Internet research, or operating instructions for a software package; it deals with broader questions. How can we study social media to learn something about society rather than about social media use? Rogers proposes repurposing Web-native techniques for research into cultural change and societal conditions. We can learn to reapply such “methods of the medium” as crawling and crowd sourcing, PageRank and similar algorithms, tag clouds and other visualizations; we can learn how they handle hits, likes, tags, date stamps, and other Web-native objects. By “thinking along” with devices and the objects they handle, digital research methods can follow the evolving methods of the medium. Rogers uses this new methodological outlook to examine such topics as the findings of inquiries into 9/11 search results, the recognition of climate change skeptics by climate-change-related Web sites, and the censorship of the Iranian Web. With Digital Methods, Rogers introduces a new vision and method for Internet research and at the same time applies them to the Web's objects of study, from tiny particles (hyperlinks) to large masses (social media).
How to use data as a tool for empowerment rather than oppression. Big data can be used for good, from tracking disease to exposing human rights violations, and for bad, implementing surveillance and control. Data inevitably represents the ideologies of those who control its use; data analytics and algorithms too often exclude women, the poor, and ethnic groups. In Data Action, Sarah Williams provides a guide for working with data in more ethical and responsible ways. Williams outlines a method that emphasizes collaboration among data scientists, policy experts, data designers, and the public. The approach generates policy debates, influences civic decisions, and informs design to help ensure that the voices of people represented in the data are neither marginalized nor left unheard.
The last twenty years have seen an explosion in the development of information technology, to the point that people spend a major portion of waking life in online spaces. While there are enormous benefits associated with this technology, there are also risks that can affect the most vulnerable in our society but also the most confident. Cybercrime and its victims explores the social construction of violence and victimisation in online spaces and brings together scholars from many areas of inquiry, including criminology, sociology, and cultural, media, and gender studies. The book is organised thematically into five parts. Part one addresses some broad conceptual and theoretical issues. Part two is concerned with issues relating to sexual violence, abuse, and exploitation, as well as to sexual expression online. Part three addresses issues related to race and culture. Part four addresses concerns around cyberbullying and online suicide, grouped together as ‘social violence’. The final part argues that victims of cybercrime are, in general, neglected and not receiving the recognition and support they need and deserve. It concludes that in the volatile and complex world of cyberspace continued awareness-raising is essential for bringing attention to the plight of victims. It also argues that there needs to be more support of all kinds for victims, as well as an increase in the exposure and punishment of perpetrators. Drawing on a range of pressing contemporary issues such as online grooming, sexting, cyber-hate, cyber-bulling and online radicalization, this book examines how cyberspace makes us more vulnerable to crime and violence, how it gives rise to new forms of surveillance and social control and how cybercrime can be prevented.
The loss of credibility of traditional media and democratic institutions points to the important challenges for the democratic system. Social networks have allowed new political and social actors to disseminate their messages, which has raised diversity. However, it has also lowered the standards for the circulation of messages and has increased disinformation and hate speech. Contemporary Politics, Communication, and the Impact on Democracy addresses communication and politics and the impact on democracy. This book offers a valuable contribution regarding the challenges and threats faced by traditional and stable democracies while disinformation, polarization, and populism have a main role in the present hybrid communicative scenario. Covering topics such as digital authoritarianism, emotional and rational frames, and political conflict on social media, this is an essential resource for political scientists, communication specialists, analysts, policymakers, politicians, critical media scholars, graduate students, professors, researchers, and academicians.
This book scrutinizes the media portrayals of (ethnic/religious) minorities in Germany, encompassing the fields of public affairs, media effects, political communication, multiculturalism, populism in the media and politicized uses of collective identities. It compares the political discourse (Bundestag plenary protocols) with the mainstream discourse (mainstream press) in Germany over the sample period of 2009-2015, and explores a multi-layered debate from different perspectives by combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Moreover, this research intends to detect, analyze and connect the dots between recurrent themes, news stories, actors, events and ideologies within the delicate debate on minorities in Germany’s multicultural society. The mixed-methods approach includes content analysis, template analysis, relational discourse analysis, latent class cluster analysis and multinomial logistic regression. The interdisciplinary approach of this research presents various aspects of social sciences, such as media and communication studies (agenda-setting theory), social psychology (social-identity theory), media sociology (discursive power), political science (right-wing populism) and anthropology (race and ethnicity). This extensive research is meant to contribute to existing political efforts and academic studies, in order to fully grasp the dynamics of German immigration and integration policies.
This book addresses the question of how researchers can conduct independent, ethical research on mal-, mis- and disinformation in a rapidly changing and hostile data environment. The escalating issue of data access is thrown into sharp relief by the large-scale use of bots, trolls, fake news, and strategies of false amplification, the effects of which are difficult to quantify due to a corporate environment favouring platform lockdowns and the restriction of access to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). As social media platforms increase obstacles to independent scholarship by dramatically curbing access to APIs, researchers are faced with the stark choice of either limiting their use of trace data or developing new methods of data collection. Without a breakthrough, social media research may go the way of search engine research, in which only a small group of researchers who have direct relationships with search companies such as Google and Microsoft can access data and conduct research. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Information, Communication & Society.
This two volume set (CCIS 858 and CCIS 859) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Digital Transformation and Global Society, DTGS 2018, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May/June 2018. The 75 revised full papers and the one short paper presented in the two volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 222 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on e-polity: smart governance and e-participation, politics and activism in the cyberspace, law and regulation; e-city: smart cities and urban planning; e-economy: IT and new markets; e-society: social informatics, digital divides; e-communication: discussions and perceptions on the social media; e-humanities: arts and culture; International Workshop on Internet Psychology; International Workshop on Computational Linguistics.