An Economists View of Web Science

Social Networking explained by an economic model of cost and benefit.

A Quiz on Privacy

Created for INFO2009 coursework.

Value in Web 2.0

COMP6051, COMP6052 Notes Social Networking Technologies: Value in Web 2.0

A Brief History of the Web

The Web is now so ingrained in our lives that it is easy to forget that it is less than twenty years old. But the History of Web goes back much further, to the pioneering technologists who built the first hypertext systems and the men and women before them who imagined great libraries of interconnected information that would augment human intellect and drive civilization forward. In this lecture we will explore the pre-digital origins of the Web, look at how it developed into the mass communication system we have today, and speculate on the next stages of its evolution in the context of Web Science and Social Media.

The New Web Literacy

Web 2.0 is sometimes described as the read/write web, giving everyday users the chance to create and share information as well as to consume information created by others. Social media systems are built on this foundation of participation and sharing, but what is the mindset of these users, and are they quite so everyday as we might suppose? The skills and attitudes held by users can be described as their literacy, and there has been a lot of debate over the last few years about how to describe these literacies, and design for them. One field that has been changed radically by this notion is Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) where a fierce debate has raged about the potential of a new generation of highly literate digital natives, and Edupunks have argued for open and personal systems that challenge traditional models of institutional control. In this session we look at the arguments surrounding digital literacy and examine TEL as an example of how social media can change an application domain.

Power and Influence

Like any form of human interaction and communication it is possible to view Social Media as a means for the powerful to influence and control the less powerful. But what is power on social media, how might we measure or affect it, and does it translate to the real world? In this lecture we will look at the philosophical definitions of power, and explore how it has been analysed in social networks and social media systems. We will also look at the characteristics of social networks that impact on power, including Homophily, Heterophily, CyberBalkanization and Thresholds of Collective Action. Finally we will ask what evidence there is that power in social media can affect what goes on in the real world, and explore some real and fictional examples of protest to see what the consequences of social media actually are on sometimes violent political debate.

This is Me: Digital Identities

Your Digital Identity is everything you create on the Web, but also what other people might say about you there. Photographs on social networking sites, logs of chatroom conversations, newspaper articles about your role in a play, or your sporting victory. Even if you don't post material to the Web yourself, there is a good chance somebody else does, and we believe it is worth knowing about some of the issues. This workbook is designed to help you raise your level of awareness and to think about some of the ways your DI might be affected. There are two workbooks linked here; one for students generally and one for students studying for the health professions.

Trust

Trust is a complex philosophical, social and technical notion, but it underlies many of our digital interactions including e-commerce and collective intelligence. In this lecture we will look at how different disciplines, including Psychology, Sociology and Economics have come to understand Trust through the lens of their own studies, aims and goals, and will explore how computer scientists and software engineers have implemented trust models based on policy, provenance and reputation. We will take a closer look at both Global and Local reputation-based trust, and see how assumptions of transitivity and asymmetry are useful. Finally we will explore trust issues around the largest known store of human knowledge: the Wikipedia

The Web 2.0 Development Survival Guide

Building software for Web 2.0 and the Social Media world is non-trivial. It requires understanding how to create infrastructure that will survive at Web scale, meaning that it may have to deal with tens of millions of individual items of data, and cope with hits from hundreds of thousands of users every minute. It also requires you to build tools that will be part of a much larger ecosystem of software and application families. In this lecture we will look at how traditional relational database systems have tried to cope with the scale of Web 2.0, and explore the NoSQL movement that seeks to simplify data-storage and create ultra-swift data systems at the expense of immediate consistency. We will also look at the range of APIs, libraries and interoperability standards that are trying to make sense of the Social Media world, and ask what trends we might be seeing emerge.

Privacy

Privacy is a concept that has been with us for hundreds of years, but it is relatively recently (the last 130 years or so) that it has been seen as something that needs protection as a legal right. Technology has presented many challenges to privacy, from the printing press to recording devices to communication hacking, but Social Media seems to present something new - a phenomenon of people giving up their personal information to an extent that would be considered extraordinary just a generation ago. In this lecture we look at attitudes and behaviors around privacy, see how social norms have shaped our expectations of privacy, and how we have come to trade our privacy for value, making complex (and sometimes ill-informed) risk decisions. We will also explore how people really behave on Social Media systems, to see whether we (as a society) should be concerned about modern attitudes to privacy, and whether there are any advantages that might balance that concern. Finally we look at how technology can be applied to the problems of privacy, both as a preventative measure, but also by aiding transparency and helping people to make better privacy decisions. These slides were updated for 2014.

Pecha Kucha: Bay 8

Abstract Following the success of Bay 9's Pecha Kucha, this week Bay 8 are providing the next instalment of the newly established tradition of Pecha Kucha. In 6m40s and 20 slides, each member of Bay 8 will introduce themselves, explaining their background and research interests, so you can put a name to the face, and chat after the event if you have common interests. These mini talks aim to support the collaborative nature of WAIS by introducing each member to the wider group. This week the bay members and Pecha Kuchas are: - The Public Health Analogy in Web Security (Huw) - Social Networking Features in Digital Behaviour Change Interventions (Roushdat) - Computers, Psychology and a lot of coffee (Anna) - Law, computer science and that annoying thing you have to say you’ve read before you can use a website (Emma)