Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Web Science


Book Description

WebSci '16: ACM Web Science Conference May 22, 2016-May 25, 2016 Hannover, Germany. You can view more information about this proceeding and all of ACM�s other published conference proceedings from the ACM Digital Library: http://www.acm.org/dl.




Discovery Science


Book Description

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Discovery Science, DS 2023, which took place in Porto, Portugal, in October 2023. The 37 full papers and 10 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 133 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Machine learning methods and applications; natural language processing and social media analysis; interpretability and explainability in AI; data analysis and optimization; fairness, privacy and security in AI; control and spatio-temporal modeling; graph theory and network analysis; time series and forecasting; healthcare and biological data analysis; anomaly, outlier and novelty detection.




The Past Web


Book Description

This book provides practical information about web archives, offers inspiring examples for web archivists, raises new challenges, and shares recent research results about access methods to explore information from the past preserved by web archives. The book is structured in six parts. Part 1 advocates for the importance of web archives to preserve our collective memory in the digital era, demonstrates the problem of web ephemera and shows how web archiving activities have been trying to address this challenge. Part 2 then focuses on different strategies for selecting web content to be preserved and on the media types that different web archives host. It provides an overview of efforts to address the preservation of web content as well as smaller-scale but high-quality collections of social media or audiovisual content. Next, Part 3 presents examples of initiatives to improve access to archived web information and provides an overview of access mechanisms for web archives designed to be used by humans or automatically accessed by machines. Part 4 presents research use cases for web archives. It also discusses how to engage more researchers in exploiting web archives and provides inspiring research studies performed using the exploration of web archives. Subsequently, Part 5 demonstrates that web archives should become crucial infrastructures for modern connected societies. It makes the case for developing web archives as research infrastructures and presents several inspiring examples of added-value services built on web archives. Lastly, Part 6 reflects on the evolution of the web and the sustainability of web archiving activities. It debates the requirements and challenges for web archives if they are to assume the responsibility of being societal infrastructures that enable the preservation of memory. This book targets academics and advanced professionals in a broad range of research areas such as digital humanities, social sciences, history, media studies and information or computer science. It also aims to fill the need for a scholarly overview to support lecturers who would like to introduce web archiving into their courses by offering an initial reference for students.




Contemporary Politics, Communication, and the Impact on Democracy


Book Description

The loss of credibility of traditional media and democratic institutions points to the important challenges for the democratic system. Social networks have allowed new political and social actors to disseminate their messages, which has raised diversity. However, it has also lowered the standards for the circulation of messages and has increased disinformation and hate speech. Contemporary Politics, Communication, and the Impact on Democracy addresses communication and politics and the impact on democracy. This book offers a valuable contribution regarding the challenges and threats faced by traditional and stable democracies while disinformation, polarization, and populism have a main role in the present hybrid communicative scenario. Covering topics such as digital authoritarianism, emotional and rational frames, and political conflict on social media, this is an essential resource for political scientists, communication specialists, analysts, policymakers, politicians, critical media scholars, graduate students, professors, researchers, and academicians.




Negotiating Group Identities in Multicultural Germany


Book Description

This book scrutinizes the media portrayals of (ethnic/religious) minorities in Germany, encompassing the fields of public affairs, media effects, political communication, multiculturalism, populism in the media and politicized uses of collective identities. It compares the political discourse (Bundestag plenary protocols) with the mainstream discourse (mainstream press) in Germany over the sample period of 2009-2015, and explores a multi-layered debate from different perspectives by combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Moreover, this research intends to detect, analyze and connect the dots between recurrent themes, news stories, actors, events and ideologies within the delicate debate on minorities in Germany’s multicultural society. The mixed-methods approach includes content analysis, template analysis, relational discourse analysis, latent class cluster analysis and multinomial logistic regression. The interdisciplinary approach of this research presents various aspects of social sciences, such as media and communication studies (agenda-setting theory), social psychology (social-identity theory), media sociology (discursive power), political science (right-wing populism) and anthropology (race and ethnicity). This extensive research is meant to contribute to existing political efforts and academic studies, in order to fully grasp the dynamics of German immigration and integration policies.




Disinformation and Data Lockdown on Social Platforms


Book Description

This book addresses the question of how researchers can conduct independent, ethical research on mal-, mis- and disinformation in a rapidly changing and hostile data environment. The escalating issue of data access is thrown into sharp relief by the large-scale use of bots, trolls, fake news, and strategies of false amplification, the effects of which are difficult to quantify due to a corporate environment favouring platform lockdowns and the restriction of access to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). As social media platforms increase obstacles to independent scholarship by dramatically curbing access to APIs, researchers are faced with the stark choice of either limiting their use of trace data or developing new methods of data collection. Without a breakthrough, social media research may go the way of search engine research, in which only a small group of researchers who have direct relationships with search companies such as Google and Microsoft can access data and conduct research. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Information, Communication & Society.




Digital Transformation and Global Society


Book Description

This two volume set (CCIS 858 and CCIS 859) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Digital Transformation and Global Society, DTGS 2018, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May/June 2018. The 75 revised full papers and the one short paper presented in the two volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 222 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on e-polity: smart governance and e-participation, politics and activism in the cyberspace, law and regulation; e-city: smart cities and urban planning; e-economy: IT and new markets; e-society: social informatics, digital divides; e-communication: discussions and perceptions on the social media; e-humanities: arts and culture; International Workshop on Internet Psychology; International Workshop on Computational Linguistics.




Data Action


Book Description

How to use data as a tool for empowerment rather than oppression. Big data can be used for good, from tracking disease to exposing human rights violations, and for bad, implementing surveillance and control. Data inevitably represents the ideologies of those who control its use; data analytics and algorithms too often exclude women, the poor, and ethnic groups. In Data Action, Sarah Williams provides a guide for working with data in more ethical and responsible ways. Williams outlines a method that emphasizes collaboration among data scientists, policy experts, data designers, and the public. The approach generates policy debates, influences civic decisions, and informs design to help ensure that the voices of people represented in the data are neither marginalized nor left unheard.




The Social Fact


Book Description

How the structure of news, information, and knowledge is evolving and how news media can foster social connection. While the public believes that journalism remains crucial for democracy, there is a general sense that the news media are performing this role poorly. In The Social Fact, John Wihbey makes the case that journalism can better serve democracy by focusing on ways of fostering social connection. Wihbey explores how the structure of news, information, and knowledge and their flow through society are changing, and he considers ways in which news media can demonstrate the highest possible societal value in the context of these changes. Wihbey examines network science as well as the interplay between information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the structure of knowledge in society. He discusses the underlying patterns that characterize our increasingly networked world of information—with its viral phenomena and whiplash-inducing trends, its extremes and surprises. How can the traditional media world be reconciled with the world of social, peer-to-peer platforms, crowdsourcing, and user-generated content? Wihbey outlines a synthesis for news producers and advocates innovation in approach, form, and purpose. The Social Fact provides a valuable framework for doing audience-engaged media work of many kinds in our networked, hybrid media environment. It will be of interest to all those concerned about the future of news and public affairs.




The Routledge Handbook of Privacy and Social Media


Book Description

This volume provides the basis for contemporary privacy and social media research and informs global as well as local initiatives to address issues related to social media privacy through research, policymaking, and education. Renowned scholars in the fields of communication, psychology, philosophy, informatics, and law look back on the last decade of privacy research and project how the topic will develop in the next decade. The text begins with an overview of key scholarship in online privacy, expands to focus on influential factors shaping privacy perceptions and behaviors – such as culture, gender, and trust – and continues with specific examinations of concerns around vulnerable populations such as children and older adults. It then looks at how privacy is managed and the implications of interacting with artificial intelligence, concluding by discussing feasible solutions to some of the more pressing questions surrounding online privacy. This handbook will be a valuable resource for advanced students, scholars, and policymakers in the fields of communication studies, digital media studies, psychology, and computer science. Chapter 22 and Chapter 30 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.