In August I was privileged to deliver a keynote at the 2017 Eurocall conference, an established (and very welcoming) community researching Computer Assisted Language Learning. I gave the mid-conference plenary, and notionally talked about how Web Science has changed our understanding of why we have the Web we have. The slide for my talk, titled […]
Category: Web Science
Glorious
In the last few weeks Mark Bernstein, a leading light in digital culture, and an established figure in the hypertext and web community has posted a sequence of articles (Infamous, Careless, Thoughtless, Reckless and most recently Caring) on #Gamergate and that movement’s use of Wikipedia. Particularly the proposal by the Arbitration Committee to ban key editors who were taking issue with Gamergater’s actions, […]
Brutal Engineering
Over the last few months I have been co-organising a workshop for this year’s Web Science Conference on interdisciplinary; the aim is to collect together interdisciplinary experiences (from Coups and Calamities) and reflect on some of the disciplinary differences that make Web Science research so interesting. It has caused me to pause and reflect a […]
Reflections on the Web Science MOOC
Week Two of the Web Science MOOC has ended, and the MOOCsters move on from my material to Craig Webber’s week on crime and security online. So do I feel like Frodo and Sam in Return of the King, collapsing in relief as the sweeping gaze of Sauron moves of to another corner of Morder? […]
Building the Web Science MOOC
This week at the University of Southampton we launched the Web Science MOOC with FutureLearn, the course is a dizzying whirlwind of interdisciplinary coolness that acts as a primer for Web Science and includes a wide variety of topics from cybercrime to digital democracy. My week is on Networks, and runs in week two of […]
In Praise of the Ephemeral
There is a creeping view in our society that data is forever. For some reason whilst we are happy for our spoken words to vanish into the ether, our written words and media must be hewn in stone (or at least backed up at an off-site data centre). Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, […]
Rise of the Other Web
Isn’t the Web great? Isn’t it crazy and anarchic, vibrant and wild, unpredictable, awesome and thoroughly marvelous? Well it has been, but there is no guarantee that it will stay that way. I’ve been working with and researching Hypertext for nearly fifteen years. The Hypertext systems that I studied for my PhD were alternative contemporaries […]
Choosing our Science: Hypertext and Web Science
This blog post is an abridged version of a guest editorial I co-wrote for the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Special Issue on Web Science. The full editorial can be found in EPrints. Hypertext and the Web What is Hypertext? It is well known in our community that the word Hypertext was coined by […]
Thank you for the Music
For over two years now we have been able to download music online – and by music I of course mean music that you have rights to, music that you own, music with no Digital Rights Management (DRM). In fact the trickle of real music download sites became a flood when Amazon stepped in, and […]