Untangling the Web

Our guest for this episode is Brewster Kahle, a digital librarian who has spent his career intent on providing universal access to all knowledge. Kahle created the Internet's first publishing system, Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and two sites that help catalog the web by collecting data of books, web pages, music, television, and software: Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive. He also implemented the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web. In this episode, Brewster talks about expanding access to the published works of humankind through creating these systems. He emphasizes the importance of archives and elucidates how his systems work on a technical level. Lastly, Brewster reflects on the evolution of the Internet and his goal to help Internet users gain more control of their privacy and what they have access to online. Click here for this episode's transcript, and here for this episode's show notes.

Our guest for this episode is Howard Rheingold, a critic, writer, and teacher who specializes in the cultural, social, and political implications of modern communication media. Howard wrote about the earliest personal computers at Xerox PARC, and he was also one of the early users of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or The WELL, an influential early online community. In 1994, he was hired as the founding executive director of HotWired. He is the author of several books, including The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. In this conversation, Howard talks about transitioning from typewriters to computers and the potentials of virtual communities – to both serve as think tanks and form personal connections. He talks about recognizing “signals” of what was to come with telephones and computers and the early collective action that the smartphone encouraged. Finally, he describes five media literacies that everyone should master if they want to use social media well. Click here for this episode's transcript, and here for this episode's show notes.

Our guest for this episode is Safiya Noble, an associate professor of gender studies and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Safiya is the co-founder and faculty director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, an interdisciplinary research center focused on the intersection of human rights, social justice, democracy, and technology. She is also the author of the best-selling book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. Her nonprofit community work to foster civil and human rights, the expansion of democracy and intersectional racial justice is developing at the Equity Engine. In this conversation, Safiya debunks the idea that social media and search engine algorithms are purely mathematical and neutral, explaining how they're biased and can be discriminatory toward Black girls and Asian Americans in particular. She speaks about the dangers of tech companies conducting experiments on the public and the concerning lack of regulatory frameworks for technology. Finally, she explains her shift toward seeing herself as an abolitionist – who wants to abolish predictive technologies. Click here for this episode's transcript, and here for this episode's show notes.

Our guest for this episode is Vint Cerf, who is considered to be one of the fathers of the internet. Vint is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and currently serves as Google's vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist – we'll talk in this episode about how that title came to be. Vint has served in executive positions at places like the Internet Society and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and serves in advisory capacities at NIST and NASA. In this conversation, Vint talks about how the TCP/IP protocols (which provide internet-connected devices with a way to communicate with one another) came to be and his dedication to spreading the “internet religion” and making information available to all. He focuses much of the conversation on how we can expand the internet in various ways, by allocating more bit space for networks, improving its accessibility, and developing an interplanetary internet. Click here for this episode's transcript, and here for this episode's show notes.

Our guest for this episode is David Lazer, a Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. David is among the leading scholars in the world on misinformation, and he has also researched how we can use the web as a tool to improve our political system. He co-wrote the book Politics with the People: Building Directly Representative Democracy, which was published in 2018. In this episode, David talks about the potential for members of Congress to meet online with voters. He also discusses an online platform he helped to design called Volunteer Science, which houses a large pool of remote volunteers and lowers the startup costs of running experiments for researchers. Finally, he talks about his research on social media and big tech's algorithms and misinformation on the web – and a recent grant from the National Science Foundation that will fund some of this work. Read this episode's transcript here: https://sites.northwestern.edu/websciencepodcast/2021/02/05/983/ See this episode's show notes here: https://sites.northwestern.edu/websciencepodcast/2021/11/26/episode-29-show-notes/

Our guest for this episode is Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. Siva is a regular columnist for The Guardian as well as the author of Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford, 2018) and The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press, 2011), among other books. He focuses on how big tech companies – especially Google and Facebook – are permeating our lives. In this conversation, Siva talks about the creation of Google Books and why he thinks Google was the wrong choice to be a platform that houses the world's online library. He also talks about how authoritarian rulers have used Facebook to win elections and ties this fact into a discussion of the big tech companies' race to become “the operating system of our lives” – and to manage everything from our houses to our minds. Read this episode's transcript here: https://webscience.northwestern.edu/2021/02/04/episode-29-transcript/ See this episode's show notes here: https://webscience.northwestern.edu/2021/11/26/episode-29-show-notes/

Our guest for this episode is Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Sonia's research focuses on children and young people's media literacy and rights in the digital environment. She recently co-authored (with Alicia Blum-Ross) the book Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children's lives, published by Oxford U Press. In this episode, Sonia suggests we examine children's media use in more expansive ways, thinking beyond how much time children spend online and also considering how exactly they're engaging with screens. She also emphasizes that technology inequalities merit more attention and discusses children's rights and agency within the digital space. Click here for this episode's transcript, and here for this episode's show notes.

Our guest for this episode is Deborah McGuinness, Professor of Computer, Cognitive, and Web Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Deborah specializes in creating ontology-enabled research infrastructure for work in interdisciplinary settings. In this episode, Deborah explains how we can use ontologies to create programs that help us make the best decisions, from pairing wine and food to choosing to start a new medication. She shares her excitement about the potential intersections between health science and web science, detailing ways that medical professionals and web scientists can work together to elevate how we provide medical care. Click here for this episode's transcript, and here for this episode's show notes.

In this episode, we chat with Sandra González-Bailón, who is on the faculty at the Annenberg School for Communication. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, data mining, computational tools and political communication. She is the author of Decoding the Social World, published by MIT Press in 2017, and was also the keynote speaker of the ACM Web Science Conference in 2019. During this conversation, Sandra discussed some of her research about people's news exposure — and what it surprisingly revealed. She also explains how the medium of data that gets studied — the web v.s. apps data and desktop v.s. mobile data — can impact results. And she digs into how exactly research can help the world — but also that the world needs to know the right questions to ask. To hear all this and more, take a listen of this episode. Click here for this episode's transcript and here for this episode's show notes.

In this special 25th episode of Untangling the Web, we talk with one of the founders of web science, Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt. He's Principal of Jesus college and professorial Research Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Oxford. As information adviser to the United Kingdom government, he encouraged the release of many 1000s of public sector data sets. He was knighted in 2013 for services to science and engineering. During this episode, Nigel recounts some of those founding conversations and intentions surrounding the creation of the web science field, as well as some of his more recent work. Nigel, who was on the forefront of the Semantic Web, also explains exactly what that means -- and what the web might look like today if it had expanded. To hear to this and more, listen to this episode. Click here for this episode's transcript and here for this episode's show notes.

For this episode, we talk with Azeem Azhar, an entrepreneur, investor and author. Previously, he founded PeerIndex, a big data analytics firm acquired in 2015. And his first book, “The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society,” was just published this month. Azeem was an early user of the Web — he takes us back to those days and tells us about some of the first social media sites. Then, he describes what it was like when platforms like Facebook and Twitter were much more open, which also allowed more data to be collected. But he also brings us to the present, where we live in the “exponential age.” He breaks down exactly what that means and more in this latest episode. Click here for this episode's transcript and here for this episode's show notes

In this episode, we talk with journalist Rory Cellan-Jones. He's reported for BBC for 40 years, and for much of that time primarily focused on business and technology stories. He has covered everything from smartphones to social media and more. He's just published a new book, which he spoke about at this year's ACM Web Science conference. For this episode, Rory talks about some of the biggest and best stories of his career at BBC and beyond. He was there to see this generation's "model Ford" moment, when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. And he was the reporter whose question prompted Stephen Hawking to say AI could make humans obsolete. Rory reflects on these moments and what he calls the "social smartphone era" in this episode. Take a listen to hear this and more. Click here for this episode's transcript and here for this episode's show notes.

Our guest for this episode is Pablo Boczkowski, who is Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, as well as the founder and director of the Center for Latinx Digital Media. He's also the cofounder and the co-director of the Center for the Study of Media and Society in Argentina, and has been a senior research fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, Germany. In this episode, Pablo discusses his new book “Abundance,” which draws on research in Argentina — and explains why what some people term “information overload” could actually be thought of in less negative terms. He also makes a compelling argument for why studying the global south is a necessity — and why web science should take a more cultural perspective in tandem with technical advancements. To hear his talk about this and more, listen to this episode. Click here for this episode's transcript, and here for this episode's show notes.

For this episode, we talk with Taha Yasseri, an associate professor at the School of Sociology and a Geary Fellow at the Geary Institute for Public Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland. He has been a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI, and a Research Fellow at Wolfson College at the University of Oxford. He is interested in the dynamics of social machines on the Web. During this episode, Taha tells us all about dating on the Web -- from who initiates conversations (spoiler alert: there's a big gender gap) to what traits people value in a partner. Some of these are age-old questions, answered by new web science methods. And he discusses his research outside of that realm, from people and bots that "fight" on Wikipedia to how the web impacts our "collective memory." To hear to all this and more, listen to this episode. Click here for this episode's transcript, and here for this episode's show notes.

In this episode, we talk with Richard Rogers, a professor and chair of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. An award-winning author, he also is Director of the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), known for the development of software tools for the study of online data. He's interested in web epistemology -- and more -- and was co-chair for one of the very first Web Science conferences. In this episode, Richard digs into "digital methods" and what that really means, as well as the software his team has built to conduct research under the DMI. He brings us into some of his newest work, like the book he's working on called Mainstreaming the Fringe: How Misinformation Propagates in Social Media, but he also goes back to what started his path in web science. And he discusses a number of critical projects that has helped shed light on topics including issue drift and issue celebrities. To understand those terms and more, listen to this episode. Click here for this episode's transcript, and here for this episode's show notes.

In this episode, we talk with Sinan Aral, an award-winning researcher, entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the David Austin professor of Management, Marketing IT and Data Science at MIT, where he also directs MIT's initiative on the Digital Economy. And in 2020, he published his first book: The Hype Machine. During this conversation, Sinan gives us a "tour" of the book. He talks about how -- and why -- social media is built to hype us up, as well as how making social platforms interoperabile might just be the key to creating a better hype machine. And he walks us through why fake news travels so fast on social media -- faster than real news, and faster than it ever could even a decade ago. To hear about this and more, give a listen to this episode. Click here for this episode's transcript, and here for this episode's show notes.

In this episode, we talk with Matt Weber, a faculty member in the Department of Communication at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. With more than a decade of experience researching information ecosystems, organizations and communities, Matt focuses on the use of large scale web data to study processes of change. In addition, Matt has been an active member of the web science community. He's the program co-chair for the ACM 2021 Web Science Conference, and delivered a keynote at this year's conference. In this episode, Matt explains the process of web archiving, along with some of the questions it enables us to explore. He touches on how his own research, some of which centers on news media production, fits into all this. And he discusses some of the challenges and issues that surround web archiving, as well as pathways to solutions. To hear these insights and more, listen to this episode. Click here for this episode's transcript, and here for this episode's show notes.

For this episode, we talk with Emilio Ferrara, an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He's also a Research Team Leader for AI at USC's Information Sciences Institute and the Director of the Annenberg Networks Network, ANN for short. Earlier this year, Emilio became the Chair of the Web Science Trust Network of Laboratories (WSTNet for short). In this episode, Emilio discusses his vision for the next generation of Web Science, especially in light of his newly appointed chair position. And he also talks about some of his research into how bots and social media can manipulate conversations around vaccines and public health. He has a particular perspective on this area -- much before COVID-19, he was involved in a DARPA challenge surrounding bots engaged in vaccination debate. Then, in January 2020, right as the pandemic was coming on the horizon, Emilio's lab jumped on collecting data about bots spreading COVID-19 conspiracies. For insights into this and more, listen to this episode. Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

Our guest for this episode is Dr. Aleks Krotoski, an award-winning international broadcaster, author and academic. She studies and writes about technology and interactivity. Her book, “Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You,” based on her hit columns in the Guardian and Observer, was published in 2012. Since then, she's continued to break ground in academia and journalism, and she's currently a Visiting Fellow in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. During this episode, Aleks talks about how our online lives have become entangled with our offline ones. Her research has found that we bring our existing ideas about society to the virtual worlds we build. But unlike in the past, there's less space to play around with our identities online. And, there's more consequences -- for many people, the things they did 10 or 15 years ago still pop up when you search their name. What does that mean for our own growth, and how is the Web evolving, too? To hear all this and more, listen to this episode. Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

Our guest for this episode is Munmun De Choudhury, a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she leads the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab. Her research centers on using social media to better understand and improve mental health. She draws on an interdisciplinary approach, combining social computing, machine learning and natural language analysis with insights and theories from the social, behavioral and health sciences. In this episode, Munmun tells us what led to her research and why she wanted to focus on people's wellbeing. She emphasizes how web science can help progress the ways that we currently approach mental health, but also talks about the challenges in her research. And she gets into how people signal or share about their mental health on the Web. To hear all this and more, listen to this episode. Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

Our guest for this episode is Robert Ackland, a professor from the School of Sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra. Rob studies networks on the Web, and he established the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks -- VOSON for short -- to provide tools for research on this topic. During this episode, Rob talks about his early work with hyperlinks, as well as how he evolved his research and VOSON tools as the web entered the social media era. He explains how he got involved in web science, as his background is mainly in economics, as well as what he's interested in now. And he talks about how we could use social bots as a positive force for political deliberation, even as so much of research on bots focuses on their negative effects. To hear all this and more, listen to this episode. Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

In this episode, we talk with Jaime Teevan, chief scientist for Microsoft's Experiences and Devices. In this role, she's charged with creating the future of productivity. She also developed the first personalized search algorithm used by Bing and introduced microproductivity into Microsoft Office. This conversation centers around a report by Jaime Teevan and her colleagues at Microsoft, which is what they believe to be the world's largest synthesis of findings related to how people's work practices have evolved since the start of the pandemic. She gives insights into our “New Normal” — and what our “Next Normal” may look like, too. And she tells us how web science has informed this research. Most of us have felt the effects of the pandemic on the way we work, but Jaime breaks down why. To hear all this and more, listen to this episode. Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

For this episode, we talk with Danny Weitzner, a proud founding member of the Web Science Trust who will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming 2021 ACM Web Science virtual conference. He's a 3Com Founders Principal Research Scientist at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and also the founding director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative. His research interests include accountable systems, privacy, cybersecurity and online freedom of expression. During this conversation, Danny takes us back to the start of web science and explores challenges that are both old — but still relevant— and new. He talks specifically about what approaches we can take to address privacy on the web. For example, you may have heard of the panopticon, but do you know what countervailance means? Do you know why accountability is so important to privacy? Danny can explain. Most of all, he points out how crucial web science is to solving these problems. To hear about all this and more, listen to the full episode! Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

Ravindran (Ravi) Balaraman is our guest for this episode (23 min. long). He is the Mindtree faculty fellow and a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. And he also heads the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at IIT Madras, which is the leading interdisciplinary AI research center in India and India's first lab to join the Web Science Trust Network of laboratories from around the world. His research is pushing the boundaries of reinforcement learning, social network analysis, and data text mining. In this episode, Ravi explains the unique challenges that India faces in web science, including how displaced migrants feeling alienated from the Web. He also explains some solutions, like increasing access to devices with local languages programmed in. And Ravi talks about the importance of AI and how that can help or hurt in pursuits of different social goods, as well as just how explainable AI could get. To hear about all this and more, listen to the full episode! Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

Our guest for this episode is Eszter Hargittai, who is a professor and holds the chair of the Internet Use and Society in the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich, where she also heads the Web Use project research group. She's also one of the most cited web science researchers in the world. Her research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media, especially how differences in people's web skills and digital literacy influence what they do online. During this conversation, Eszter gets into why she wishes people would use the term "digital inequality" more, as well as how it means something different than "digital divide." She describes her research on how people's web skills vary, including her findings dealing with disability status and age. Eszter also discusses why she feels it's important to explore the challenges of studying web science, as well as have people shared how they overcome those difficulties, a topic on which she has (co-)edited three books. Plus, she shares a peek into what she's writing right now: a book about web use and COVID-19, which is based on a large data collection effort across three countries that she and her team completed in last April. To hear about about all this and more, listen to the episode! Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

Our guest for this episode is Deen Freelon, an associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. His research ranges from political expression through digital media to data science to computational methods. He has also served as principal investigator on grants from the Knight Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the US Institute of Peace. Not only does Deen make intellectual contributions to the fields of web science, communication studies, and more, but he also focuses on engaging and helping the general public with his insights. In this conversation, Deen tells us why it is so important to incorporate identity into web science research, and how that has influenced his own work. That includes his recent article on Black-presenting trolls and why disaggregating ideology from race was crucial to his insights. Deen also discusses the difference between disinformation and misinformation, as well as why there needs to be more research into left-leaning disinformation. And he describes what tools he's created to help other researchers as well as the general public -- coming up are developments to his "filter map" project. To hear about about all this and more, listen to the episode! Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

In this episode, we talk with Alex “Sandy" Pentland, who is one of the most cited web scholars at the crossroads of web science, network science, and computational social science. He's a professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, directs the MIT Connection Science Research Initiative, and heads MIT's Human Dynamics Group, among other accomplishments. His work has pioneered organizational engineering, wearable computing, modern biometrics, and more. In this conversation, Sandy brings insight to how data is the “new resource.” He talks about issues of data and privacy, as well as why people should have more control over their data. He also discusses what he learned in his study of signals and the mobile web, why wearable devices have a social dimension, and how the web can help respond to COVID-19. And he tells us the power of blockchain as the web evolves from not just a communication medium but also toward a transaction medium. To hear about this or more, listen to this episode! Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

In this episode, we talk with Gina Neff, whose work focuses on...work! No, that's not a typo — she's actually a sociologist who studies how web-based technologies are shaping the changing nature of work. Gina is a professor of Technology & Society at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, and has published three well-acclaimed books. In this conversation, Gina tells us about the cross between web science and work. She brings us through the early onset of the Web, discussing why an Internet industry would form in New York City, even though the Web is hypothetically worldwide. Part of the reason is that industries rely on social capital, which is easier built in person. That's precisely the type of interactions that we've largely lost during the pandemic and work-from-home era. And Gina touches on this too, talking about work done over web meetings and potential privacy concerns if workers get tracked at home. To learn about all this and more, press play! Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

Our guest for this episode is Brooke Foucault Welles. She recently co-authored the award-winning book, #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice. Brooke studies how online communication networks enable and constrain behavior, with particular emphasis on how these networks both enhance and mitigate marginalization. During this conversation, Brooke talks about just exactly what "hashtag activism" means, especially in the context of web science, and about her research into specific hashtags beyond her book. She tells us how these hashtags can impact public discourse, validate online participants and form networks of people online. But she also discusses why the web can be a difficult space for activists and how web science can work to change that. Listen to learn about these topics and more! Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

For this episode, we talk with Fil Menczer, whose work is awesome. No, seriously — he's the director of OSoMe, which is pronounced “awesome” and stands for the Observatory on Social Media. Fil's research spans web science, computational social science, network science, and data science. In this conversation, Fil gives insight into how information can spread on social media and be manipulated. He talks what astroturfing looks like and how bots can work. And he tells us the tools that the Observatory on Social Media has developed to combat some of these issues, including “Botslayer.” Despite the name of that tool, he also discusses why not all bots are “bad,” and what differentiates a good or neutral one from one that's harmful. Listen to learn about this and more! Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for this episode's show notes.

Today we talk with Jen Golbeck, who is known for her work in computational social network analysis. Her models for computing trust between people in social networks were amongst the first in the field. Now, she's a professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park. In this episode, she discusses her path to web science, her work in trust-based recommender systems, and how we can use web data to understand people's behaviors. But Jen isn't just interested in people — she's also become somewhat of an expert on dogs on the internet. Or more accurately, social media networks centered around pets. Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for show notes.

In this episode, we talk with Dame Wendy Hall, who was involved with creating the very field of web science. Wendy was a Founding Director of the Web Science Research Initiative, is the Managing director of the Web Science Trust, and became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2009. She explains some of her contributions to the field, as well as offers a perspective of how web science is changing under geopolitical forces, the pandemic, and more. Going beyond all this, she also dives into many of the ethical questions and challenges that web science posits. Click here for the transcript and here to access the show notes for this episode.

In this episode, we talk with Susan Halford, Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Futures at the University of Bristol in the UK. Susan has been at the forefront of championing a deeper engagement between social scientists and computer scientists in addressing questions confronting Web Science. She explains why this partnership is so important in advancing not only the future of the Web but also the future of society.

In this episode, we talk with Jim Hendler, Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US. Since those early days in the mid-2000s, Web Science has witnessed remarkable growth and attracted global attention. Jim points to some of the most significant contributions Web Science has offered society and argues why Web Science is relevant now more than ever …