The Summer School is a training program, where participants receive a certificate of completion. It is also an intensive (and rewarding) workshop environment, where participants work in teams, tracing and mapping data, objects and issues. DMI also invites special guests as resource people to present their research and projects in morning lectures. There is a final presentation where the Summer School accomplishments are presented to participants and invitees.

Below please find the call for participation. Please note that the application deadline is Friday 4 May 2012. Candidates will be notified on Tuesday 8 May 2012.

Feel free to forward the call to interested individuals.

Looking forward to your application and to the Summer School,

the Digital Methods team

Call for participants
Digital Methods Summer School 2012
New Media and Digital Culture
Dept. of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam
25 June – 6 July 2012

https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/DmiSummer2012

Reality mining, and the limits of digital methods
When it becomes simple to trace your friend’s network, your movements online and even the provenance of the can of Coke next to your computer screen, reality becomes subject to prediction and to speculation — in both the financial and the philosophical sense. This transparency discourse is limited by access to data. Indeed, our actions often generate effect far in excess of our own awareness — how “open” is the open graph really? The concept of “ethical traceability” has been developed for instance as a regulatory discourse to ensure the security of supply chains, yet in spite of the proliferation of digital traces, consumers have only very limited access to these logistical data. How then do we use digital methods to become more “aware”? Can we adapt our methods to work in recommended or relatively closed environments? How do we use devices to test their claims, but also to reveal and circumvent their blind alleys?

After developing a semiotics and structuralism of the link and the network, we explore how digital methods deal with notions of absence. Building on past work in post-demographics and networked content, these workshops will unpack the paradox of online awareness, from social recommendation devices to product and service review sites. Building tools and working with leaked data, our approach this time will be to go beyond merely tracing things in order to make mute objects speak.

About “Digital Methods” as Concept
Digital methods is a term coined as a counter-point to virtual methods, which typically digitize existing methods and port them onto the Web. Digital methods, contrariwise, seek to learn from the methods built into the dominant devices online, and repurpose them for social and cultural research. That is, the challenge is to study both the info-web as well as the social web with the tools that organize them. There is a general protocol to digital methods. At the outset stock is taken of the natively digital objects that are available (links, tags, threads, etc.) and how devices such as search engines make use of them. Can the device techniques be repurposed, for example by remixing the digital objects they take as inputs? Once findings are made with online data, where to ground them? With more online data?

About the Summer School
The Digital Methods Summer School, founded in 2007 together with the Digital Methods Initiative, is directed by Professor Richard Rogers, Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. The Summer School is one training opportunity provided by the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI). DMI also has a Winter School, which includes a mini-conference, where papers are presented and responded to. Winter School papers are often the result of Summer School projects. The Summer School is coordinated by two PhD candidates in New Media at the University of Amsterdam, or DMI affiliates. This year the coordinators are Lonneke van der Velden and Marc Tuters both of the University of Amsterdam. The Summer School has a technical staff as well as a design staff. The Summer School also relies on a technical infrastructure of some five servers hosting tools and storing data. Participants bring their laptops, learn method, undertake research projects, make reports, tools and graphics and write them up on the Digital Methods wiki. The Summer School concludes with final presentations. Often there are guests from non-governmental or other organizations who present their issues. For instance, Women on Waves came along during the 2010 Summer School. Digital Methods people are currently interning at Greenpeace International and the Global Reporting Initiative.

Previous Digital Methods Summer Schools, 2007-2011: https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/DmiSummerSchool

2011 Summer School flickr stream: http://bit.ly/q9fepW

The Digital Methods Initiative was founded with a grant from the Mondriaan Foundation, and the Summer School is supported by the Center for Creation, Content and Technology (CCCT), University of Amsterdam, hosted by the Faculty of Science with support from Platform Beta.

Summer School Training Certificate
The Digital Methods Summer School issues completion certificates to participants who follow the Summer School program, and complete a significant contribution to a Summer School project. For previous Summer School projects, see for example https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WikipediaAsASpaceOfControversy.

Applications & Fees
To apply for the Digital Methods Summer School, 25 June – 6 July 2012, please send a one-page letter explaining how digital methods training would benefit your current work, and also enclose a CV. Mark your application subject header, “DMI Training Certificate Program 2012.” The deadline for applications for the Summer School is Friday 4 May 2012. Notices will be sent on Tuesday 8 May 2012. Please address your application email to the Summer School coordinators, Lonneke van der Velden and Marc Tuters, and send to info [at] digitalmethods.net. Informal queries may be sent to Lonneke or Marc, lonneke[at] digitalmethods.net or marc[at] digitalmethods.net.

The Summer School costs EUR 295 per person. Accepted applicants will be informed of the bank transfer details upon notice of acceptance to the Summer School. The fee must be paid by 11 June 2012.

Logistics: Travel & Accommodation
Generally, participants must arrange their own travel and accommodation. The Digital Methods Summer School offers a limited number of Amsterdam apartments for reasonable rates, checking in on Saturday, 23 June and checking out on Saturday, 7 July. These are single apartments with cooking facilities. Doubles also may be available. For housing requests, please write to the Summer School organizers, who will inform you about availability. Once an apartment is reserved, the rent (and cleaning fee) should be paid together with the Summer School fee by 11 June.

Summer School Schedule
The Summer School meets Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and all participants also work on the Tuesdays and Thursdays. Please bring your laptop. We will provide abundant connectivity. We start generally at 9:30 in the morning, and end around 5:30. On the last Friday we have a boat trip through the canals of Amsterdam.

Summer School Location
New Media & Digital Culture, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, Turfdraagsterpad 9, 1012 XT Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Rooms 0.13 & 0.04. Morning lectures

Digital Methods Winter School 2012 Revisited

We have a bonus session that draws upon the Digital Methods Winter School 2012, “Interfaces for the Cloud” and API critique. We have invited Metahaven, the critical Dutch design group, to present their work that actually renders the politics of the cloud.

We look forward to welcoming you to Amsterdam in the Summertime!

See Anne Helmond’s blog for the slides and notes of her introduction to APIs and API critiques. The project pages of the workshop can be found on the Digital Methods Winterschool 2012 wiki page. Also, winterschool participant Jean-Christophe Plantin wrote a blogpost inspired by the winterschool on “The Internet as a software: repurposing API for online research.“

The Digital Methods Initiative is holding its fourth annual Winter School on 25-27 January 2012 at Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. To gain a sense of the atmosphere of the DMI Winter School, see the report from the first one, “Digital Methods: First Steps” (Stevenson/Rogers, 2009).

Digital Methods Winter School Mini-conference
The mini-conference provides the opportunity for digital methods and allied researchers to present short yet complete papers (5,000-7,500 words) and serve as respondents, providing feedback. Often the work presented follows from previous Digital Methods Summer Schools. The mini-conference accepts papers in the general digital methods and allied areas: the hyperlink and other natively digital objects, the website as archived object, web historiographies, search engine critique, google as globalizing machine, cross-spherical analysis and other approaches to comparative media studies, device cultures, national web studies, wikipedia as cultural reference, the technicity of (networked) content, post-demographics, platform studies, crawling and scraping, graphing and clouding, and similar.

Digital Methods Winter School Workshop
For the Winter School Workshop the theme is API critique, where we seek to build interfaces on the cloud, in particular connecting with select APIs, pulling in and curating the data, learning from dominant algorithms, and repurposing them for social and cultural research. There will be dedicated teams working on big data company APIs, and proposing interfaces (with tools) onto the cloud, or however we may wish to call the source of the data streams. The critique of APIs follows from working with them. There also will be interface design for curated data, and a separate stream on data curation.

Key dates
20 December 2011: Submission of paper titles, abstracts and bios
21 December 2011: Notifications
20 January 2012: Submission of complete papers (5,000-8,000 words)
21 January 2012: Program and schedule
25-27 January 2012: DMI Mini-conference and Workshop

Tentative Winter School Schedule
25 January 9.30-5 Mini-conference, per paper: 10-minute presentations, two 5-minute responses, 5-minute Q&A
26 January 9.30-5 Workshop, with morning mini-talks, introducing the streams (API critique, Data interface design, Data curation)
27 January 9.30-5 Workshop, with morning talk (“The politics of the cloud”)

About
The Digital Methods Winter School is part of the Digital Methods Initiative, Amsterdam, dedicated to reworking method for Internet-related research. The Digital Methods Initiative holds the annual Digital Methods Summer Schools (five to date), which are intensive and full time 2-week undertakings in late June, early July. The coordinators of the Digital Methods Initiative are Sabine Niederer and Esther Weltevrede (PhD candidates in New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam), and the director is Richard Rogers, Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam. Digital methods are online at http://www.digitalmethods.net/.

After Cyberspace: Data-rich Media

The Digital Methods Summer School, now in its fifth edition, trains post-graduates, PhD candidates and motivated students and scholars in how to undertake Web research after cyberspace. The idea of “after cyberspace” is an invitation to think through and study the web without resort to the traditions informing “virtual” and “cyber” corporality, politics and identity. Rather the web, first with locative technology, later with language and national webs, and more recently with college and corporate networking software (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) continues to be grounded.

In the 2011 Digital Methods Summer School we will pay homage to cyberspace, in the opening, by presenting thought on a particular strand of media coverage about WikiLeaks, where cybergurus and cyberwar experts reappear on the scene. Just as importantly, we will ask, how to make use of the leaks, and their containers, for research purposes? From data-driven journalism to bespoke cablegate engines, does WikiLeaks spawn an online ecology of tools, visualizations and other substantive practices and outputs? Is such an ecology typical for data platforms? For comparative purposes, we will introduce and study the tool and visualization universes of Twitter as well as Wikipedia, both of which are examples of data-rich media. We would like to learn from platform media analytics and apply it to other data-rich media, so as to further develop tools for cultural diagnostics. One challenge is the question of device effects. For example, when comparing the Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedia entries for the Srebrenica Massacre, does Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view” policies overdetermine the content, perhaps neutralize it, or can one read culturally distinctive views on the events?

Another strand of study is networked content, which is thought of as online content held together, maintained or even co-authored by software and bots. The interplay of search engines and content interests us this year, not just because Wikipedia articles are routinely at the top of Google results. (The relationship between Google and Wikipedia remains understudied.) But there is also content seemingly authored for engines first and readers only second, as in the case of “demand media.” We would like to study efforts that seek to fill in engine results with content, reopening the question of engine epistemology. Presentations will include work on engine log analysis. Apart from (Google) flu trends, are log analyses able to identify and geo-locate cultural and political preference?

About “Digital Methods” as Concept
Digital Methods is a term coined as a counter-point to virtual methods, which typically digitize existing methods and port them onto the Web. Digital Methods, contrariwise, seek to learn from the methods built into the dominant devices online, and repurpose them for social and cultural research. That is, the challenge is to study the info-web and the social web with the tools that organize them. There is a general protocol to digital methods. At the outset stock is taken of the natively digital objects that are available (links, tags, threads, etc.) and how devices such as search engines make use of them. Can the device techniques be repurposed, for example by remixing the digital objects they take as inputs?

Digital Methods are online at http://www.digitalmethods.net/

About the Summer School
The Digital Methods Summer School, founded in 2007 together with the Digital Methods Initiative, is directed by Professor Richard Rogers, Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. The Summer School is one training opportunity provided by the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI). DMI also has a Winter School, also known as the mini-conference, where papers are presented and responded to. Winter School papers are often the result of Summer School projects. The Summer School is coordinated by two PhD candidates in New Media at the University of Amsterdam, or affiliates. This year the coordinators are Anne Helmond (University of Amsterdam) and Carolin Gerlitz (Goldsmiths, University of London). The Summer School has a technical staff as well as a design staff. The Summer School also relies on a technical infrastructure of some five servers hosting tools and storing data. Participants bring their laptops, learn method, undertake research projects, make reports, tools and graphics and write them up on the Digital Methods wiki. The Summer School concludes with final presentations. Often there are guests from non-governmental or other organizations who present their issues. Women on Waves came along during the 2010 Summer School. Greenpeace International, based in Amsterdam, will be invited in 2011.

Previous Digital Methods Summer Schools, 2007-2010, http://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/DmiSummerSchool.

The Digital Methods Initiative was founded with a grant from the Mondriaan Foundation, and the Summer School is supported by the Center for Creation, Content and Technology (CCCT), organized by the Faculty of Science with sponsorship from Platform Beta.

Summer School Training Certificate
The Digital Methods Summer School issues completion certificates to participants who follow the Summer School program, and complete a significant contribution to a Summer School project. For previous Summer School projects, see for example http://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/WikipediaAsASpaceOfControversy.

Applications & Fees
To apply for the Digital Methods Summer School, 27 June – 8 July 2011, please send a one-page letter explaining how digital methods training would benefit your current work, and also enclose a CV. Mark your application “DMI Training Certificate Program.” The early bird application deadline is 7 March 2011. Early bird candidates will be informed on 7 April 2011. The regular deadline for applications for the Summer School is 8 April. Notices will be sent on 15 April. Please address your application email to the Summer School coordinators, Anne Helmond and Carolin Gerlitz, and send to info digitalmethods.net. Informal queries may be sent to Anne or Carolin, anne [at] digitalmethods.net or c.gerlitz [at] digitalmethods.net.

The Summer School costs EUR 295 per person, which covers the (travel) costs of the non-technical teaching staff and the catered, canal boat trip upon conclusion of the Summer School. Accepted applicants will be informed of the bank transfer details upon notice of acceptance to the Summer School. The fee must be paid by 15 May 2011.

Logistics
Participants must arrange their own travel and accommodation. Please bring your laptop. We will provide abundant connectivity.

Summer School Location
New Media & Digital Culture
University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
the Netherlands
Rooms 0.13 & 0.04

We look forward to welcoming you!

The Australian user (IP address 165.142.249.81) is hardly a Wiki novice, with a thousand edits listed in their profile. The user is also warned numerous times by Wikipedia editors to refrain from vandalizing content on the site:

“This is the last warning you will receive for your disruptive edits, such as those you made to Talk:Whaling in Japan ‎. If you vandalize Wikipedia again, you will be blocked from editing. Toddst1 (talk) 15:54, 7 January 2010 (UTC).”

The user’s edit history, as provided by Wikipedia, covers a wide variety of topics including music; football; the Australian 50 dollar bill; Irish politics; politicians’ biographies; judges in the Australian judiciary; whaling in Japan; sluts; shit; and an edit war on the Australasian Intervarsity Debating Championships. In one edit, for the entry on “Bung”  (an apparatus used to seal a container) the user attempts this inclusion:

“Over 80% of males understand what a “bung” is, in contrast to only 5% of females. The reasons for this discrepency (sic) are unknown, but some authors have speculated that a fascination with trivial issues, unicorns and fashion may be to blame.”

Alongside other attempted edits of Assange’s page like those about the details of his custody battle and reputation and alleged rape charges, this user’s edit would seem harmless. It signals intent on the part of someone in the Department of Justice to contribute to Assange’s rich life and biography, without any political intent. But surely this breaks with protocol in the Department? Perhaps this user is giving a virtual “high five” to another North Melbourne Football Club fan but there is no guarantee that this user did not attempt other edits from a different IP address. Previously, the practice of geo-locating anonymous editors of Wikipedia resulted in scandals, and in governments and corporations banning their employees from editing Wikipedia. This Wikipedia edit is of another order but it also seems as if many of the contributions from this user are not positively and/or constructively contributing to the site. Who is this user? A bored intern? Does the Department take Wikipedia seriously? Are they monitoring this activity amongst staff? And if they are then what else can we assume?

This post is based on a Digital Methods for Internet Research assignment for the New Media Masters Course at the University of Amsterdam by Natalie Dixon.

Slide 1:
Hi, I’m Anne and this is Esther and we are PhD’s at the University of Amsterdam with the Digital Methods Initiative. We will be showing the first results of a mapping project on the Dutch Blogosphere. It is a work in progress.

Slide 2:
Author on the Dutch blogosphere, Frank Schaap, distinguishes between two types of blogs: linklogs and lifelogs. Linklogs primarily post links to other websites (right), whereas Lifelogs primarily post details about their personal life and everyday experiences (left).

Slide 3:
The current Dutch blogosphere, however, seems to be characterized by the many references to social media platforms. Did the Dutch blogosphere transform from link- and lifelogs into platform-oriented blogs?

Slide 4:
Our aim is to map the changing linking practices of blogs in order to empirically analyze this shift. Following the definition of the blogosphere as the collection of all blogs and their interconnections we aim to map and characterize the Dutch blogosphere. So… which blogs?

Slide 5:
Well, good question! Starting points are very important! This collection of blogs is compiled from several expert sources, namely: lists from Frank Schaap, Merel Roze, Flabber, Frank Meeuwsen and Arie Altena.

Slide 6:
We used the Issue Crawler; a software tool that locates and visualizes networks on the web. It crawls the startingpoints, which means that it follows the hyperlinks from one page to the next, then analyzes and visualizes these connections.

Slide 7:
So what is the Dutch blogosphere? It is what the Dutch blogs link to. This means it also includes non-blogs. Moreover, these apparent strangers in our midst characterize the current Dutch blogosphere.

Slide 8:
First of all, there is a densely linked Dutch blogosphere. This snapshot from June 2010 shows the top 100 prominent blogs and related websites including news sites and social media platforms.

Slide 9:
When we zoom in we can see the links between the nodes and clusters made visible. What you see here is a literary cluster that includes professional writers like Ivo Victoria, Merel Roze, and Walter van den Berg.

Slide 10:
This second cluster is a marketing and technology cluster. It includes Bright, Frankwatching, and Dutch Cowboys. The latter is on the fringe of the networkcluster because, as you can see, it does not link back.

Slide 11:
In this detailed view of map we see the prominence of social media platforms in the Dutch blogosphere, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. These platforms are most prominent within the marketing & technology and news & opinion cluster.

Slide 12:
One of the most central nodes, the micro-blogging platform Twitter is also the largest node in the Dutch blogosphere. When we look at the statistics we see that Twitter almost receives 35 thousand links from the rest of the network.

Slide 13:
Analyzing the links from the current Dutch blogosphere, platforms take a central and prominent position within it. How would one do an analysis on the historical Dutch blogosphere? Was the early 2003 blogosphere indeed organized around lifelogs and linklogs?

Slide 14:
Well, the historical Dutch blogosphere is a work in progress. The first question is: Which starting points to use? We took all the blogs on the Loglijst, a blog indexing site that was started in 2001. The Loglijst scraped and indexed Dutch blogs.

Slide 15:
However, when we checked all the blogs listed in the Loglijst for their response code, or put differently, check to see if they are still online and alive, we notice that many popular blogs from 2003 are no longer online.

Slide 16:
Fortunately, many of the “dead” blogs live on in the Internet Archive which has archived millions of pages from 1996 onward. One can revisit blogs from the past through their WayBackMachine which is the interface to the archive.

Slide 17:
The Internet Archive allows one to search for the history of one specific website or blog and as such privileges single site histories. When entering a URL the output is a list of archived snapshots ordered by date. (asterixes indicate changes to the website)

Slide 18:
This is one of the earliest archived Dutch blogs from 1999. We are automatically going to look up all the blogs from the starting list with one of our tools. Then rip all the links within the blogs and create network visualizations like we have seen before.

Slide 19:
The Dutch blogosphere is an under studied object and we wish to contribute by mapping its history. This proposed study enables us to create collections from the Dutch blogosphere for every year between 1999 and 2009, and compare and analyze these pasts states of the Dutch blogosphere.

Slide 20:
Thank you for your attention, kthnxbai, see you on digitalmethods.net

Research question

What is the imagery of the diaspora on the French blogging/social networking site Skyrock?

Method

1. query Google Images for the top three immigrant groups in France²: Algeria, Portugal and Marocco Query for country name and nationality (male/female): algerie, algérien, algérienneportugal, portugais, portugaise maroc, marocain, marocaine within skyrock.com, eg: algerie site:*skyrock.com
2. download top 100 images with DownThemAll.
3. count and categorize images:
   flag, map, love and pride, ethnic, social/people, sports, other
4. scale images according to size

Visualization

Findings

Country flags (often associated with images of love and pride) are very important in the imagery displayed on the Skyrock network profiles for all three countries and their nationalities. There is, however, a crucial gender difference between women and men. Women seem to favor “social” images (especially self-portrait avatars) and ethnic representations (food, dresses, traditional clothing) over flags. For men sport images play an important role in the imagery displayed on their profiles, except for Moroccan men. This can be explained by the fact that the analysis was done during the World Cup 2010 in which Morocco did not participate. Many images mix the above stated categories, for example flag & love/pride, sport & love/pride, flag & social. In this case, colors representing the country are crucial. The colors of the flags play a unification/identification role in such a way that color could be considered here as the main signifier of national/cultural belonging.

Wiki project page.

1. #14 website (across all categories) in Traffic Rank in France according to Alexa.
2. Source: Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques

Prof. Richard Rogers started with situating Digital Methods within the field of Internet Studies as one of the three strands that deals with the computational turn within Humanities. The first project on Facebook activism was presented by PhD candidate Lonneke van der Velden. The project addresses the claim of Facebook as a form of slactivism by looking at what types of activism Facebook enables. The second presentation by Catalina Iorga looks at the myth of data-driven citizen journalism by asking: “Do non-mainstream digital media (e.g. citizen blogs) directly reference Afghan War Diary individual document pages?

The second theme track contained two projects dealing with Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 analysis and multiple times online. PhD candidate Anne Helmond talked about how the social web has new means of recommending that do not rely on the traditional fundamental unit of analysis in Web 1.0, the link. To what extent do we have new web currencies such as the Like or the (re)Tweet and what type of content is being Liked? In Pace Online PhD candidate Esther Weltevrede addressed the multiplicity of time online by looking at how spheres handle time differently by asking: “How is the temporality of content handled by engines and platforms?” It further complicates the notion of multiplicity by looking at both the update cycles of content (freshness) and the update cycle of the engines (relevance).

PhD candidate Sabine Niederer introduced the final session on the web as a problem for content analysis and asks: “What type of content analysis can be done with the Web.” When the method follows the medium the question becomes: “How to let content speak for itself with no coding, or labeling the (sub) discourses?” The research project on ‘Controversy on Twitter,’ presented by Assistant Professor Thomas Poell, asks how controversy is organized on Twitter. The project focusses on the controversy of the Ground Zero Mosque and looked at (1) how much of the activity was organized through labels and hash tags, (2) which labels and hash tags were used when tweeting about the issue and which parties aligned with these labels and hash tags, (3) if hash tags organize different accounts of the controversy.

Finally, teacher and Digital Methods Initiative’s lead tool developer Erik Borra talked about repurposing Google’s related search for research. This new tool can provide: an overview of the organization of a content space, insights into query design, starting points, identification of programs and anti-programs and classification and organization.

Digital Methods: Seemingly Intractable Issues
By Richard Rogers and the Digital Methods Summer School Group including PhD candidates in New Media & Digital Culture

Organized by: New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam
Date & Time: Thursday, 23 September 2010, 11:00am – 1pm
Location: University Library, De Doelenzaal (Room C.007), Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam
Admission: free

The new media lecture is dedicated to digital methods, a term and program of research developed since 2007 at the University of Amsterdam [1]. Digital methods seek to analyze Web data in order to make findings about societal conditions and cultural change. Among the basic problems faced by digital methods researchers is the question of the status of Web data. Often considered messy, dirty, incomplete and otherwise reputationally challenged, under which conditions may Web data be seen as robust? Another set of fundamental problems concerns the idea of the Web as virtual, representational or otherwise having a special, ungrounded status. Where does the study of online culture end, and social and cultural research begin? When may the allegedly virtual be considered the baseline against which the real is measured and judged?

The Web also has its recent specificities, which pose particular problems for digital methods researchers. Among them is the emergence of a new Web ‘currency’ – the ‘like’ and the ‘share’ buttons in social media. Digital methods, like search engines, have customarily relied on the hyperlink as a main unit of analysis. Are likes and shares challenging hyperlinks as the dominant, underlying calculation units of the Web? How would such acknowledgments change hierarchies of credibility on the Web, such as lists of relevant sources, or relevance more generally? In the case of the Gulf oil spill, do people tweet mainly news, and ignore governmental and scientific URLs? Do official information channels suffer in Web 2.0 ranking cultures? A second issue to be treated is the different paces per online space, exemplified by whether and when the ages of hyperlinks, posts and tweets matter. How do currency objects, particularly freshness, organize content per sphere? That is to say the pace of the various spheres vary, and comparing the websphere, the blogosphere, news sphere and the status update space (for example) should take into account how freshness is handled. Can the distinctive pacings be built into cross-spherical analysis — a technique that ultimately investigates the quality of different online media spaces? Finally, from critiques of the web as workspace of amateurish content to the demise of directories and other librarian practices online, the Web has issues with content. Indeed, content is continually at risk on the Web from spambots and other content spoiling practices that foul especially wikis and comment spaces. In order to keep content intact, software bots, settings and other code are deployed, making content a rather technical affair online. Thus the Web may pose a problem for ‘content analysis,’ unless its technicity is considered.

The presentation also includes findings from projects undertaken during the Digital Methods Summer School which explored popular claims about the Web. Among the research questions posed are, is there substance to the claim that Facebook is incapable of hosting activism? How do social media change the composition and the activities of social movements? The research projects to be presented include an investigation into two new forms of journalism. One emerging area of online investigative activity is “data-driven journalism.” Arguably, interest in such a practice has been prompted by such seemingly diverse developments as the availability of online data visualization software (Wordle and IBM’s Many Eyes), governmental data sets (data.gov), and leaked documents (as on wikileaks.org). Hans Rosling’s Ted Talk about the Gapminder software was entitled, “No more boring data.” The Guardian called its reporting on the Afghan war diary “datajournalism.” To investigate data-driven, citizen journalism we inquired into the use of the Afghan war diary – a set of official U.S. military reports detailing incidents in the war in Afghanistan. Are these documents and data being referenced by ‘citizen journalists,’ bloggers and other writers unaffiliated with traditional news organizations? The findings from the case study may go some way in developing what could be called the myth of citizen journalism.

_______________

About this lecture

The presentation is a culmination of the 2010 Digital Methods Summer School by the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), a co-production of New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and the Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam, with generous support from the Faculty of Science, UvA. The Digital Methods Initiative and the Digital Methods Summer School are online at http://www.digitalmethods.net/.

_______________

About the speakers

Richard Rogers holds the Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Thomas Poell is Assistant Professor; Erik Borra is Docent; Anne Helmond, Sabine Niederer, Lonneke van der Velden and Esther Weltevrede are PhD candidates; and Catalina Iorga is a Research Master’s candidate, all in New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam.
_______________

Significant URLs
http://www.digitalmethods.net/
http://www.govcom.org/

_______________

[1] See R. Rogers (2009). The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods. Amsterdam University Press.
Hard copy: http://tinyurl.com/yb8vwlc
Pre-print: http://www.govcom.org/publications/full_list/oratie_Rogers_2009_preprint.pdf

From 28 June – 9 July 2010 we organized a Digital Methods Training Certificate Program which is a two-week intensive training and skill acquisition program. This project is one of project outcomes of the first weeks of the DMI Summerschool 2010.

A Protest’s Web

This project aims to comparatively explore the linking modes of one website and two social media platforms used by protesters of the G20 Toronto Summit; the starting point is provided by one of the largest protest groups on Facebook, RESIST TORONTO G20 SUMMIT 2010 (over 6,800 members) and its affiliated Web spaces: the G8/G20 Toronto Community Mobilization website and the @g20mobilize (more than 1,400 followers) Twitter account listed on aforementioned website.

Thus, we ask: ‘What is the platform dependency of the RESIST TORONTO G20 SUMMIT 2010 Facebook group, the G8/G20 Toronto Community Mobilization website and the @g20mobilize Twitter account, respectively?’ In other words, what other Web spaces do the selected social media platforms – Facebook in particular – and website rely on? What are the cross-syndication practices of the Facebook group, its associated site and Twitter account?

Methodology

We looked at the linking practices of the three web spaces used by the G20 Toronto Summit by looking at the outlinks within these three different spaces.

Webspace 1: Facebook

Collect all outlinks from the RESIST TORONTO G20 SUMMIT 2010 Facebook group:

1. Go to the separate Links page of the group.
2. Manually compile a list of all subpages of the Links page by copying and pasting respective URLs into a separate file.
3. Submit the Links subpages URL list to the Link Ripper.
4. Insert the Link Ripper output in the Harvester in order to alphabetize the obtained URLs and remove textual descriptions.
5. Manually clean the Harvester output by excluding an ‘exclude’ list of previously compiled Facebook interface links (the ‘About’, ‘Advertising’ or ‘Developers’ links on the bottom of the page, to name just a few).
6. Extract the host websites of the abomentioned outlink set by inserting the list into the Harvester and checking the ‘Only return hosts’ box.
7. Count the URLs in the final list.
8. Visualize the results in a tag cloud created with the Tag Cloud Generator.

Webspace 2: Twitter

Collect all outlinks from the @g20mobilize Twitter account:

1. Go to the @g20mobilize page on by Twitter.
2. Manually select the text column containing all tweets since the first tweet (May 12th, 2010) to the time of data collection (5th of July, 2010).
3. Insert the output into the Harvester so as to compile an alphabetical list of the URLs and eliminate additional text.
4. Submit the obtained list to the Expand Tiny URLs tool in order to enlarge Twitter-specific short links to full URLs.
5. Extract the host websites of the abomentioned outlink set by inserting the list into the Harvester and checking the ‘Only return hosts’ box.
6. Count the URLs in the final list.
7. Visualize the results in a tag cloud created with the Tag Cloud Generator.

Webspace 3: Official website

Collect all outlinks from the G8/G20 Toronto Community Mobilization website:

1. Go to the G8/G20 Toronto Community Mobilization website.
2. Manually compile a list of the all the pages of the G8/G20 Toronto Community Mobilization website by copying and pasting respective URLs into a separate file.
3. Submit all pages URL list to the Link Ripper.
4. Insert the Link Ripper output in the Harvester in order to alphabetize the obtained URLs and remove textual descriptions.
5. Manually clean the Harvester output by excluding compiled interface links (e.g. the ‘Calendar’ and ‘Opensource technology advertising’ links on the left and bottom of the page).
6. Extract the host websites of the abomentioned outlink set by inserting the list into the Harvester and checking the ‘Only return hosts’ box.
7. Count the URLs in the final list.
8. Visualize the results in a tag cloud created with the Tag Cloud Generator.

Linking practices visualized per space

In the tagclouds social media platforms (photo, video and document sharing sites, blog platforms and social networking platforms) are indicated in orange.

Webspace 1: Facebook

Preliminary Findings and Further Questions
An overview of the harvested outlinks shows that the RESIST TORONTO G20 SUMMIT 2010 Facebook group heavily relies on YouTube; 29% of the links shared by the Facebook group’s members route predominantly to video content, but also channels and users of the video sharing platform.

Another interesting aspect is a certain degree of internal depedency demonstrated through linking to other groups, pages, events or photos within Facebook; this subset of links accounts for 10% of the entire set. In terms of Facebook as a space for activism, a potential question would be: what are the issues present in the Facebook-hosted content that the RESIST TORONTO G20 SUMMIT 2010 links to? More specifically, to what extent do issues brought forth in this particular group overlap with those presented in the linked groups, pages or events? Or, in more generally speaking, does Facebook offer the possibility to create a coherent alternative place for political activism?

Given the resistance online group’s strong reliance on YouTube content, another question that arises is where else on the Web are these videos referenced? That is to say, what actors make use of this particular audio-visual material and in what issue configurations does it reoccur? Furthermore, what are the cross-linking policies of the actors that engage with these videos? Do they link to each other or to issue-specific social media platforms (like the Facebook group or Twitter account analyzed in this work)? Do they refer to mainstream news media or stay within the alternative framework suggested by the results of the Facebook link examination (for instance, links to progressive news outlet rabble.ca constitute almost 10% of entire URL set)?

Webspace 2: Twitter

Preliminary Findings and Further Questions
The most prominent space referenced by @g20mobilize tweet links is the associated G8/G20 Toronto Community Mobilization site with approximately 25% of the 47 links. A second level of internal dependency becomes visible: while the Facebook group maintains a basic level of reliance on other Facebook-hosted material – a phenomenon that can be explained through the opportunity to post content that each group member has -, the Twitter account aligns itself with the official website, potentially alluding to a more centralized, coherent approach due to administration of the account by one person, for example.

Another type of signifcant allegiance is to the idea of ‘alternative reporting’ proposed by the G20 Alt Media Center, a website that encourages protesters to tag social media platform posts – on YouTube, Flickr or Twitter – with ‘#g20report’. This is reflected not only by the fact that 16% of the URL set directs to the Toronto Media Coop, the official news provider on the G20 Alt Media Center frontpage, but also by the ubiquity the abovementioned ‘#g20report’ tag, which is present in 62% of tweets.

However, it should be taken into account that only 12% of Twitter posts actually link to other pages. In addition to this, nearly half – 44%, to be specific – of the tweets were posted during the 26th and 27th of June, respectively, the official G20 Toronto Summit conference dates. Considering these two aspects – the scarcity of links and the event-focused approach -, it could be hypothesised that the @g20mobilize account is a temporally-anchored platform, aimed at taking the pulse of the ‘here’ and ‘now’. A question that follows from this assumption is: what are the issues and actors mentioned in the @g20mobilize‘s version of the protests? Is the Twitter account used as a means of information, a support rallying tool, or both?

Webspace 3: Official website

Preliminary Findings and Further Questions
Of particular interest is that, similarly to @g20mobilize, the website does not refer to Facebook – though there is a constant right-hand link in the website’s template – and YouTube to the same extent shown by the RESIST TORONTO G20 SUMMIT 2010 Facebook group refers to YouTube and Facebook itself. In other words, there seems to be a certain degree of linking dissonance in the G20 Toronto Summit cross-syndication practices; while the Facebook group, as a social media platform, heavily relies on other social media platforms, both the @g20mobilize account and the G8/G20 Toronto Community Mobilization site mostly refer to official partners such as the latter Web space and Toronto Media Coop, respectively.

The Toronto Media Coop, an indicator of ‘alternative reporting’ as explained above, appears to be a slightly more prominent space, but not significantly due to the relatively low number of mentions, which accounts for only 4.54% of the total number of links. Nevertheless, the even outlink distribution portrayed by the tag cloud points to another question: what is the relationship between the mainstream media (such as the localToronto CTV or the Toronto Star) and alternative entities (Toronto Media Coop and The 2010 People’s Summit, a civil society alternative “counter Summit”)? Does ‘alternative reporting’ make use of established news resources? Does mainstream journalism acknowledge alternative online spaces?

Linking Practices Compared

The next step in looking at platform dependency of the three spaces is a cross-comparitive analysis of their linking practices. To what extend do the webspaces for organizing and informing about the G20 protests rely on social media platforms? What are the shared platforms by the three media spaces and who are the common actors?

Method

1. Input all three final link sets into the Triangulate tool.
2. Extract the common links.
3. Visualize the results by manually creating a matrix that vertically features the three platforms and horizontally displays the set of linking commonalities. In order to compare the amount of links in an equitable fashion, the bubbles are scaled proportionally; for example, out of Facebook’s total of 627 links, 182 link to YouTube, yielding 29% of the set. Normalization of the dataset.

Preliminary Findings and Further Questions

RESIST TORONTO G20 SUMMIT 2010, @g20mobilize, G8/G20 Toronto Community Mobilization have six common Web spaces in their outlink sets: two social media/ content-sharing platforms (Facebook and YouTube), the websites of two mainstream, Toronto-based newspapers (the Toronto Star, and the Globe and Mail), and last but not least, the alternative, collaborative online news source Media Coop. This heterogeneous mix of mainstream coverage, alternative reporting, but also exclusively online news sources, Web instatiations of print and television entities, and sharing platforms deserves further investigation. A question to be followed upon is: what are the linking modes of the six most prominent spaces in the cross-syndication of G20 Toronto Summit protest content?

From the preliminary findings we can formulate several larger issues that may be addressed for further research: First, the self-referentiality of Facebook has media effects: does using Facebook constrain to a single platform? On top of Facebook’s internal dependency it heavily relies on content hosted on the videosharing platform YouTube. Within the Facebook group YouTube is heavily linked to, however YouTube does not link out (linking practices within YouTube mainly occur in the comments). Hypothesis: Content platforms are self-referential and do not link outside. Second, the hypothesis that the further we move away from 2.0 technologies/social media the less you refer to them.

Further research

Given the prominence of YouTube within the Facebook group and it’s presence in the two other web spaces, where else are the YouTube videos that are referred to located? What are the other platforms, besides Facebook, where this content is syndicated?

Method: collect all inlinks to the YouTube movies and visualize linking websites in a tagcloud (in a next version all similar top-level-dmains should be merged, eg. national Facebook versions should be merged into Facebook.com).

Project presentation file