Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web - WWW '16 Companion
This paper documents a study of the real-time Wikipedia edit stream containing over 6 million edi... more This paper documents a study of the real-time Wikipedia edit stream containing over 6 million edits on 1.5 million English Wikipedia articles, during 2015. We focus on answering questions related to identification and use of information cascades between Wikipedia articles, based on author editing activity. Our findings show that by constructing information cascades between Wikipedia articles using editing activity, we are able to construct an alternative linking structure in comparison to the embedded links within a Wikipedia page. This alternative article hyperlink structure was found to be relevant in topic, and timely in relation to external global events (e.g., political activity). Based on our analysis, we contextualise the findings against areas of interest such as events detection, vandalism, edit wars, and editing behaviour.
From a technical perspective, the Web is a distributed information architecture that is based on ... more From a technical perspective, the Web is a distributed information architecture that is based on the concepts of interaction (HTTP), format (HTML/RDF) and identification (URI) [5]. "Browsing", "navigating" and "information discovery" are the kinds of generic activities that web developers and information scientists concern themselves with, but the more common labels adopted by users to describe their online activities are Social Networking, Internet Video, Blogging, Online Banking, Open Source Development, Internet Porn, E-research and Internet Shopping. Specialist kinds of interaction (shopping baskets, playlists, blogrolls) are recognizable in all these activities, even though users may be simply "navigating web pages". Those web engineers and content providers building on the Web to provide Internet Shopping (e-commerce, b2b, secure financial transactions, product databases, stock control, warehouses and delivery) have different concerns to...
Whilst it is widely understood that the Web is a socio-technical phenomenon – produced by both hu... more Whilst it is widely understood that the Web is a socio-technical phenomenon – produced by both human and non-human actors – existing research tends to emphasize either the social or the technical rather than offering an integrative analytical framework. In contrast, this paper examines the affordances of Actor Network Theory (ANT) – derived from Social Science – in offering a better understanding of the Web as a socio-technical phenomenon. Our case study traces the evolution of the Linked Open Data Community (and specifically the Open Public Sector Community) which promises to shape the next iteration of the Web – the Semantic Web. The analysis highlights the formation of the network and relationships and interaction between important actors. We conclude with some remarks regarding possible disconnects within the network, and discuss the potential future usage of ANT as a framework to inform and analyse the Web as it evolves over time.
The recent emergence of ‘big data’ – large scale digitized data sets capturing commercial and tra... more The recent emergence of ‘big data’ – large scale digitized data sets capturing commercial and transactional activity – is both promising and challenging for social scientific research. On the one hand, these data offer information on ‘action in the wild’ – the things that people actually say and do, rather than what they say they do in surveys or interviews – and they do so at a scale rarely, if ever, approached by conventional social scientific research methods (Savage and Burrows 2007). On the other hand, these data pose a range of methodological, theoretical and philosophical challenges. How can we access and describe these data, make them manageable for social scientific research? What do these data show? And what are the ethics of working with these data?
A new kind of activity – fuelled by the capabilities that not only modern Web technologies offer,... more A new kind of activity – fuelled by the capabilities that not only modern Web technologies offer, but also as a change in social practices and expectations – has recently become the centre of much attention and discussion; it involves the curation and publication of Government data in free, open format. Open Government is set to become a major aspect of how citizens and governments communicate and share information with each other. In this paper, we examine impact of Open Data on the UK government. By exploring the social and technical developments, an analysis of the underlying structure and processes is performed; and the adoption of Open Data within the UK Government and its impact to the digital economy is discussed.
Studies have identified scale free networks – a real- world and man-made phenomena – in networks ... more Studies have identified scale free networks – a real- world and man-made phenomena – in networks such as the human brain, protein networks, market investments networks, journal co-citation networks and the World Wide Web. Common properties such as preferential attachment and growth enable these networks to be classified as scale-free, which belong to a family of networks known as “small-world” networks, characterized by a short network distance and high clustering coefficient. These properties can clearly be identified in networks such as the World Wide Web; a complex man-man network of documents and links that grows in uncontrollable manner, they produce the ‘rich-get- richer’ effect, where nodes increase their connectivity at the expense of younger less well connected ones. By mapping the complex real-world and man-made networks, these studies are helping improve our knowledge on the “weblike” world we live in. However, as many of these scale-free networks still yet to be discover...
This study explains how bots interact with human users and influence conversational networks on T... more This study explains how bots interact with human users and influence conversational networks on Twitter. We analyze a high-stakes political environment, the UK general election of May 2015, asking human volunteers to tweet from purpose-made Twitter accounts—half of which had bots attached—during three events: the last Prime Minister’s Question Time before Parliament was dissolved (#PMQs), the first leadership interviews of the campaign (#BattleForNumber10), and the BBC Question Time broadcast of the same evening (#BBCQT). Based on previous work, our expectation was that our intervention would make a significant difference to the evolving network, but we found that the bots we used had very little effect on the conversation network at all. There are economic, social, and temporal factors that impact how a user of bots can influence political conversations. Future research needs to account for these forms of capital when assessing the impact of bots on political discussions.
The role of ‘the user’ is critical to the development of Web Science, a discipline that seeks to ... more The role of ‘the user’ is critical to the development of Web Science, a discipline that seeks to promote a multi-disciplinary understanding of the Web with regards to its evolution and its future. In this paper, we address the formulation of ‘the user’ has in computer science and social science. Our aim is to explore how we might bring these different perspectives closer together to enhance our understanding of users, and hence to improve our ability to innovate new kinds of Web environment and, ultimately, a Web-enhanced society. At one level we can see the Web as simply a computer system ‘writ large’ such that an improved understanding of the user would be beneficial to technologists and sociologists alike. However, we suggest that the scale, scope and impact of the Web mean that we need to consider a new approach to understanding its users and usage.
This paper explores the factors that influence the human component in hybrid approaches to named ... more This paper explores the factors that influence the human component in hybrid approaches to named entity recognition (NER) in microblogs, which combine state-of-the-art automatic techniques with human and crowd computing. We identify a set of content and crowdsourcing-related features (number of entities in a post, types of entities, content sentiment, skipped truepositive posts, average time spent to complete the tasks, and interaction with the user interface) and analyse their impact on the accuracy of the results and the timeliness of their delivery. Using CrowdFlower and a simple, custom built gamified NER tool we run experiments on three datasets from related literature and a fourth newly annotated corpus. Our findings show that crowd workers are adept at recognizing people, locations, and implicitly identified entities within shorter microposts. We expect these findings to lead to the design of more advanced NER pipelines, informing the way in which tweets are chosen to be outs...
In recent years, there have been a rising number of Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives; a pol... more In recent years, there have been a rising number of Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives; a political, social and technical movement armed with a common goal of publishing government data in open, re-usable formats in order to improve citizen-to-government transparency, efficiency, and democracy. As a sign of commitment, the Open Government Partnership was formed, comprising of a collection of countries striving to achieve OGD. Since its initial launch, the number of countries committed to adopting an Open Government Data agenda has grown to more than 50; including countries from South America to the Far East. Current approaches to understanding Web initiatives such as OGD are still being developed. Methodologies grounded in multidisciplinarity are still yet to be achieved; typically research follows a social or technological approach underpinned by quantitative or qualitative methods, and rarely combining the two into a single analytical framework. In this paper, a mixed methods ...
In recent years there has been a growing interest toward the application of Web-based citizen sci... more In recent years there has been a growing interest toward the application of Web-based citizen science platforms. Such platforms use crowdsourcing techniques to support scientific advancements, and in several cases, have lead to new scientific discoveries which were not originally considered. Our work explores the highly successful Web-based citizen science platform, Zooniverse, a crowdsourcing platform with a userbase of over 1 million participants who volunteer their free time to support scientific enquiries. We focus on the growth of the Zooniverse platform, which has evolved from a rudimentary crowdsourcing platform where users were presented with tasks, into a platform which has become a rich community of citizen scientists, discussion, and interaction. Building upon existing research into the motivations and design considerations of developing and sustaining citizen science projects, this paper explores the space of citizen science engagement within the Zooniverse, and ask the ...
“Filter bubble”, “echo chambers”, “information diet” – the metaphors to describe today’s informat... more “Filter bubble”, “echo chambers”, “information diet” – the metaphors to describe today’s information dynamics on social media platforms are fairly diverse (Tufekci, 2016). People use them to describe the impact of the viral spread of fake, biased or purposeless content online, as witnessed during the recent race for the US presidency or the latest outbreak of the Ebola virus (in the latter case a tasteless racist meme was drowning out any meaningful content). This unravels the potential envisioned to arise from emergent activities of human collectives on the World Wide Web, as exemplified by the Arab Spring mass movements or digital disaster response supported by the Ushahidi tool suite.
This paper examines the process of adoption of ‘Linked Open Data’ within the UK Open Public Secto... more This paper examines the process of adoption of ‘Linked Open Data’ within the UK Open Public Sector Community. We use a social science approach – Actor Network Theory (ANT) – as an analytical framework which enables us to explore the formation and stabilisation of networks of actors. The analysis details the actors involved within the PSI community, examining their interrelations and interactions. We conclude with some remarks regarding the barriers and enablers within the network, and discuss the potential analysis of other Open Government data initiatives based on our approach.
The World Wide Web has provided unprecedented access to information; as humans and machines incre... more The World Wide Web has provided unprecedented access to information; as humans and machines increasingly interact with it they provide more and more data. The challenge is how to analyse and interpret this data within the context that it was created, and to present it in a way that both researchers and practitioners can more easily make sense of. The first step is to have access to open and interoperable data sets, which Governments around the world are increasingly subscribing to. But having ‘open’ data is just the beginning and does not necessarily lead to better decision making or policy development. This is because data do not provide the answers – they need to be analysed, interpreted and understood within the context of their creation, and the business imperative of the organisation using them. The major corporate entities, such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, have the capabilities to do this, but are driven by their own commercial imperatives, and their data...
Social networks provide a new and exciting way for individuals, businesses, organizations and gov... more Social networks provide a new and exciting way for individuals, businesses, organizations and governments to create and share information. Specific social networks such as the popular micro-blogging social network site, Twitter, provide individuals with an opportunity to disseminate information to a potentially global audience. In this paper we describe the ongoing development of ReFluence, which has been developed to visualize Twitter streams, providing a historic and real-time visualization of the growth of Twitter conversations between users, based upon the networks that form through the retweet feature. In addition to this, ReFluence also provides a way to identify and classify different users based on their Twitter behavior.
Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion - WWW '17 Companion, 2017
Link to publication record in Explore Bristol Research PDF-document This is the final published v... more Link to publication record in Explore Bristol Research PDF-document This is the final published version of the article (version of record). It first appeared online via International World Wide Web Conference Committee at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3051691. Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher.
Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web - WWW '16 Companion
This paper documents a study of the real-time Wikipedia edit stream containing over 6 million edi... more This paper documents a study of the real-time Wikipedia edit stream containing over 6 million edits on 1.5 million English Wikipedia articles, during 2015. We focus on answering questions related to identification and use of information cascades between Wikipedia articles, based on author editing activity. Our findings show that by constructing information cascades between Wikipedia articles using editing activity, we are able to construct an alternative linking structure in comparison to the embedded links within a Wikipedia page. This alternative article hyperlink structure was found to be relevant in topic, and timely in relation to external global events (e.g., political activity). Based on our analysis, we contextualise the findings against areas of interest such as events detection, vandalism, edit wars, and editing behaviour.
From a technical perspective, the Web is a distributed information architecture that is based on ... more From a technical perspective, the Web is a distributed information architecture that is based on the concepts of interaction (HTTP), format (HTML/RDF) and identification (URI) [5]. "Browsing", "navigating" and "information discovery" are the kinds of generic activities that web developers and information scientists concern themselves with, but the more common labels adopted by users to describe their online activities are Social Networking, Internet Video, Blogging, Online Banking, Open Source Development, Internet Porn, E-research and Internet Shopping. Specialist kinds of interaction (shopping baskets, playlists, blogrolls) are recognizable in all these activities, even though users may be simply "navigating web pages". Those web engineers and content providers building on the Web to provide Internet Shopping (e-commerce, b2b, secure financial transactions, product databases, stock control, warehouses and delivery) have different concerns to...
Whilst it is widely understood that the Web is a socio-technical phenomenon – produced by both hu... more Whilst it is widely understood that the Web is a socio-technical phenomenon – produced by both human and non-human actors – existing research tends to emphasize either the social or the technical rather than offering an integrative analytical framework. In contrast, this paper examines the affordances of Actor Network Theory (ANT) – derived from Social Science – in offering a better understanding of the Web as a socio-technical phenomenon. Our case study traces the evolution of the Linked Open Data Community (and specifically the Open Public Sector Community) which promises to shape the next iteration of the Web – the Semantic Web. The analysis highlights the formation of the network and relationships and interaction between important actors. We conclude with some remarks regarding possible disconnects within the network, and discuss the potential future usage of ANT as a framework to inform and analyse the Web as it evolves over time.
The recent emergence of ‘big data’ – large scale digitized data sets capturing commercial and tra... more The recent emergence of ‘big data’ – large scale digitized data sets capturing commercial and transactional activity – is both promising and challenging for social scientific research. On the one hand, these data offer information on ‘action in the wild’ – the things that people actually say and do, rather than what they say they do in surveys or interviews – and they do so at a scale rarely, if ever, approached by conventional social scientific research methods (Savage and Burrows 2007). On the other hand, these data pose a range of methodological, theoretical and philosophical challenges. How can we access and describe these data, make them manageable for social scientific research? What do these data show? And what are the ethics of working with these data?
A new kind of activity – fuelled by the capabilities that not only modern Web technologies offer,... more A new kind of activity – fuelled by the capabilities that not only modern Web technologies offer, but also as a change in social practices and expectations – has recently become the centre of much attention and discussion; it involves the curation and publication of Government data in free, open format. Open Government is set to become a major aspect of how citizens and governments communicate and share information with each other. In this paper, we examine impact of Open Data on the UK government. By exploring the social and technical developments, an analysis of the underlying structure and processes is performed; and the adoption of Open Data within the UK Government and its impact to the digital economy is discussed.
Studies have identified scale free networks – a real- world and man-made phenomena – in networks ... more Studies have identified scale free networks – a real- world and man-made phenomena – in networks such as the human brain, protein networks, market investments networks, journal co-citation networks and the World Wide Web. Common properties such as preferential attachment and growth enable these networks to be classified as scale-free, which belong to a family of networks known as “small-world” networks, characterized by a short network distance and high clustering coefficient. These properties can clearly be identified in networks such as the World Wide Web; a complex man-man network of documents and links that grows in uncontrollable manner, they produce the ‘rich-get- richer’ effect, where nodes increase their connectivity at the expense of younger less well connected ones. By mapping the complex real-world and man-made networks, these studies are helping improve our knowledge on the “weblike” world we live in. However, as many of these scale-free networks still yet to be discover...
This study explains how bots interact with human users and influence conversational networks on T... more This study explains how bots interact with human users and influence conversational networks on Twitter. We analyze a high-stakes political environment, the UK general election of May 2015, asking human volunteers to tweet from purpose-made Twitter accounts—half of which had bots attached—during three events: the last Prime Minister’s Question Time before Parliament was dissolved (#PMQs), the first leadership interviews of the campaign (#BattleForNumber10), and the BBC Question Time broadcast of the same evening (#BBCQT). Based on previous work, our expectation was that our intervention would make a significant difference to the evolving network, but we found that the bots we used had very little effect on the conversation network at all. There are economic, social, and temporal factors that impact how a user of bots can influence political conversations. Future research needs to account for these forms of capital when assessing the impact of bots on political discussions.
The role of ‘the user’ is critical to the development of Web Science, a discipline that seeks to ... more The role of ‘the user’ is critical to the development of Web Science, a discipline that seeks to promote a multi-disciplinary understanding of the Web with regards to its evolution and its future. In this paper, we address the formulation of ‘the user’ has in computer science and social science. Our aim is to explore how we might bring these different perspectives closer together to enhance our understanding of users, and hence to improve our ability to innovate new kinds of Web environment and, ultimately, a Web-enhanced society. At one level we can see the Web as simply a computer system ‘writ large’ such that an improved understanding of the user would be beneficial to technologists and sociologists alike. However, we suggest that the scale, scope and impact of the Web mean that we need to consider a new approach to understanding its users and usage.
This paper explores the factors that influence the human component in hybrid approaches to named ... more This paper explores the factors that influence the human component in hybrid approaches to named entity recognition (NER) in microblogs, which combine state-of-the-art automatic techniques with human and crowd computing. We identify a set of content and crowdsourcing-related features (number of entities in a post, types of entities, content sentiment, skipped truepositive posts, average time spent to complete the tasks, and interaction with the user interface) and analyse their impact on the accuracy of the results and the timeliness of their delivery. Using CrowdFlower and a simple, custom built gamified NER tool we run experiments on three datasets from related literature and a fourth newly annotated corpus. Our findings show that crowd workers are adept at recognizing people, locations, and implicitly identified entities within shorter microposts. We expect these findings to lead to the design of more advanced NER pipelines, informing the way in which tweets are chosen to be outs...
In recent years, there have been a rising number of Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives; a pol... more In recent years, there have been a rising number of Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives; a political, social and technical movement armed with a common goal of publishing government data in open, re-usable formats in order to improve citizen-to-government transparency, efficiency, and democracy. As a sign of commitment, the Open Government Partnership was formed, comprising of a collection of countries striving to achieve OGD. Since its initial launch, the number of countries committed to adopting an Open Government Data agenda has grown to more than 50; including countries from South America to the Far East. Current approaches to understanding Web initiatives such as OGD are still being developed. Methodologies grounded in multidisciplinarity are still yet to be achieved; typically research follows a social or technological approach underpinned by quantitative or qualitative methods, and rarely combining the two into a single analytical framework. In this paper, a mixed methods ...
In recent years there has been a growing interest toward the application of Web-based citizen sci... more In recent years there has been a growing interest toward the application of Web-based citizen science platforms. Such platforms use crowdsourcing techniques to support scientific advancements, and in several cases, have lead to new scientific discoveries which were not originally considered. Our work explores the highly successful Web-based citizen science platform, Zooniverse, a crowdsourcing platform with a userbase of over 1 million participants who volunteer their free time to support scientific enquiries. We focus on the growth of the Zooniverse platform, which has evolved from a rudimentary crowdsourcing platform where users were presented with tasks, into a platform which has become a rich community of citizen scientists, discussion, and interaction. Building upon existing research into the motivations and design considerations of developing and sustaining citizen science projects, this paper explores the space of citizen science engagement within the Zooniverse, and ask the ...
“Filter bubble”, “echo chambers”, “information diet” – the metaphors to describe today’s informat... more “Filter bubble”, “echo chambers”, “information diet” – the metaphors to describe today’s information dynamics on social media platforms are fairly diverse (Tufekci, 2016). People use them to describe the impact of the viral spread of fake, biased or purposeless content online, as witnessed during the recent race for the US presidency or the latest outbreak of the Ebola virus (in the latter case a tasteless racist meme was drowning out any meaningful content). This unravels the potential envisioned to arise from emergent activities of human collectives on the World Wide Web, as exemplified by the Arab Spring mass movements or digital disaster response supported by the Ushahidi tool suite.
This paper examines the process of adoption of ‘Linked Open Data’ within the UK Open Public Secto... more This paper examines the process of adoption of ‘Linked Open Data’ within the UK Open Public Sector Community. We use a social science approach – Actor Network Theory (ANT) – as an analytical framework which enables us to explore the formation and stabilisation of networks of actors. The analysis details the actors involved within the PSI community, examining their interrelations and interactions. We conclude with some remarks regarding the barriers and enablers within the network, and discuss the potential analysis of other Open Government data initiatives based on our approach.
The World Wide Web has provided unprecedented access to information; as humans and machines incre... more The World Wide Web has provided unprecedented access to information; as humans and machines increasingly interact with it they provide more and more data. The challenge is how to analyse and interpret this data within the context that it was created, and to present it in a way that both researchers and practitioners can more easily make sense of. The first step is to have access to open and interoperable data sets, which Governments around the world are increasingly subscribing to. But having ‘open’ data is just the beginning and does not necessarily lead to better decision making or policy development. This is because data do not provide the answers – they need to be analysed, interpreted and understood within the context of their creation, and the business imperative of the organisation using them. The major corporate entities, such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, have the capabilities to do this, but are driven by their own commercial imperatives, and their data...
Social networks provide a new and exciting way for individuals, businesses, organizations and gov... more Social networks provide a new and exciting way for individuals, businesses, organizations and governments to create and share information. Specific social networks such as the popular micro-blogging social network site, Twitter, provide individuals with an opportunity to disseminate information to a potentially global audience. In this paper we describe the ongoing development of ReFluence, which has been developed to visualize Twitter streams, providing a historic and real-time visualization of the growth of Twitter conversations between users, based upon the networks that form through the retweet feature. In addition to this, ReFluence also provides a way to identify and classify different users based on their Twitter behavior.
Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion - WWW '17 Companion, 2017
Link to publication record in Explore Bristol Research PDF-document This is the final published v... more Link to publication record in Explore Bristol Research PDF-document This is the final published version of the article (version of record). It first appeared online via International World Wide Web Conference Committee at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3051691. Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher.
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