We’re imagining, studying, and building public spaces and public goods on the internet.
Research
Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube
Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media
by Ryan McGrady, Kevin Zheng, Rebecca Curran, Jason Baumgartner, and Ethan Zuckerman
Understanding the content on YouTube as a whole by random sampling from its 13 billion videos. There’s a lot of gaming, not a lot of people speaking English, and most videos don’t have comments or likes. Does that mean YouTube is full of failed creators? No, it means most people on YouTube are using it in very quotidian ways.
Software
News
- Isaac Brickman publishes “A Taxonomy of Middleware”
- The BBC profiled Ryan McGrady’s research.
- Ifat Gazia publishes “Proactive Blocking through the Automated Identification of Likely Harassers” in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety.
- Virginia Partridge presents “Here Be Livestreams: Trade-offs in Creating Temporal Maps of Reddit” at the ACM Web Science Conference.
Recent Posts
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A Taxonomy of Middleware: How User Tools Can Improve Social Media
Read more: A Taxonomy of Middleware: How User Tools Can Improve Social MediaSocial media platforms have proven to provide users with a space to connect that is non-existent in the physical world. However, users struggle with mental health concerns, disinformation, and more. Social media’s issues have a wide range of implications for these individuals and society as a whole. Middleware—third-party services that give users more control over…
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Recap: Interntional Conference on Computational Social Science
Read more: Recap: Interntional Conference on Computational Social ScienceA few weeks ago, several hundred academics, students, and professionals gathered at the University of Pennsylvania for the 10th International Conference on Computational Social Science: two-and-a-half days packed with presentations and posters. This post attempts to highlight some of the work I found most exciting and briefly summarizes the presentations Kevin Zheng and I gave…