Study Skills: Precis and Argumentation

Society is catching up with the implications of the Web; its use is not straightforward and well-understood. Web Scientists will need to be able to handle arguments about equivocal perspectives on the Web's impact.

Networks 3: Social Structures

A brief look at the post-industrial, network society, freed from manual labour and liberated from place.

E-government / E-democracy

In what ways does the web change the ways we interact with government and change the ways we engage in politics?

Social Networks and Actors

A discussion about Actor Network Theory

jhofman's data and networks Bookmarks on Delicious

A list of many network datasets

Methods and Methodology: COMP6049

Slides and exercises for class on methods and methodology to web science masters. Explores inter-disciplinarity and disciplinary differences

Algorithmic Complexity and Computability

High-level introduction for web science students, rather than for computer science students.

Bioinformatics & Operational Research

Challenges for Web Science - applications in Bio & OR

Transparency & Privacy

The Transparency Agenda of the 2010/1 UK Coalition government promises to revolutionise government, public services and public engagement, by ‘holding politicians and public bodies to account, reducing the deficit and delivering better value for money in public spending, and realising significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites using public data’, to quote the then Prime Minister. This is an ambitious programme with laudable aims, yet it naturally has limits.

Cyber Crime

Talk given by Gary Kibby from SOCA at the Web Science Industry Week in Dec 2012. Readings and task taken from previous years.

What is Cybercrime and what do we do about?

A guest lecture by Professor David S.Wall from the University of Durham. This talk will explore the way that networked technology has transformed criminal behaviour. The first part will map out cybercrimes and identify the challenges they pose for both criminologists and also regulators. The second part will show that cybercrimes are informational, networked and global. In this section it will also be shown that cybercrimes are highly disorganised forms of offending when compared to the organisation of more 'traditional' crimes, but display some new organisational logics of their own. The third part of the talk will illustrate how the 'culture of fear' that has arisen around cybercrime has placed demands upon government and police - demands that, for reasons related to the distinct nature of cybercrimes, are hard to resolve. The fourth and final part will look at the new policing arrangements that are designed, it is argued here, to close the reassurance gap.

Remote and Connected

The Web offers new possibilities to link remote and rural places into economic, political and social activities in ways that transcend earlier restrictions of distance. Dyroy Kommune, off the northern coast of Norway, welcomes Web Science students to undertake research on its digital strategy.

Identity is the new Money

Three things to think about and Three possible futures to discuss

COMP6037 - Readings

Attached are the readings from past and present COMP6037 lectures.