Episodes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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/
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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/
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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