Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst

Author: idpiumass

  • What is a Logic?

    idpiumass
    2

    by Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Traditionally, field guides focus on the natural world, offering descriptions of different species or families that help readers identify them. As this field guide is focused on social media, we will need a different locus than species or families for our taxonomy. We’ve settled on “logics.” We use “logic,”…

  • 5 Main Takeaways from Randomly Sampling YouTube

    idpiumass
    0

    We’re excited to announce the publication of our paper, Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube, in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media. The article is the culmination of a long research project to better understand YouTube as a whole by producing a random sample of YouTube videos, analyzing their metadata, sending the…

  • The Facebook Studies series on Reimagining the Internet

    idpiumass
    0

    Facebook, after a very protracted saga that began with the Social Science One initiative, partnered with academics to allow them to research political data about the 2020 American presidential election on the platform. The first four studies from that research were published in Science and Nature this summer. We brought on three guests to talk…

  • “From Community Governance to Customer Service and Back Again: Re-Examining Pre-Web Models of Online Governance to Address Platforms’ Crisis of Legitimacy”

    idpiumass
    0

    Ethan and Chand cover the history of “trust and safety” and talk about what it will take to build a safe Internet, from the standpoints of both technology and content moderation. Published by Social Media and Society, September 2023.

  • We Mapped Reddit: Introducing RedditMap.social

    We Mapped Reddit: Introducing RedditMap.social

    idpiumass
    0

    By Ethan Zuckerman “Accents are just mouth fonts.” That brilliant observation is just one of the gems I found today on r/BrandNewSentence, an online community dedicated to collecting “sentences never before written, found in the wild”. Fans of these strange sentences also enjoy r/NatureIsMetal, which features images of animals being savage or brutal, and r/InstantKarma,…

  • Trust: A Reimagining Miniseries

    idpiumass
    0

    In March 2023, we ran a four-part miniseries called “trust,” where we talked about how trust works online from a bunch of different angles: free speech and platforms, gamer guilds, crypto and DAOs, justice, and more. These episodes are pretty unique in their feed, with each one covering a different topic through interview segments and…

  • The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet

    idpiumass
    134

    “The Three-Legged Stool” is the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure’s banner white paper: the culmination of our work here at the lab so far and our roadmap for our efforts in the coming years. It was written primarily by Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Michael Sugarman under the editorial direction of Ethan Zuckerman. Access “The Three-Legged Stool”…

  • Creating PublicSpaces by Geert-Jan Bogaerts, José Van Dijck, and Ethan Zuckerman

    idpiumass
    0

    In Digital Government: Research and Practice. Abstract: Institutions like public broadcasters and universities face conflicts of values when using surveillant digital tools: organizations bound to protect the privacy and respect their autonomy of their constituents – which we term “values-led organizations” – find those values undermined by tools they must use to conduct business online.…

  • How social media could teach us to be better citizens by Ethan Zuckerman

    idpiumass
    0

    In Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society – Special Issue on “Digital Citizenship.” Abstract: In 1995, social scientist Robert Putnam suggested that American civic life was weakening because people were retreating from public spaces. Local organizations from bowling leagues to men’s lodges, Putnam believed, helped train citizens in the mechanics of civics. People learn to…

  • Should You Leave Twitter for Mastodon?

    idpiumass
    0

    What follows is the text of a tweet thread Ethan Zuckerman issued last week. Below it are some additional tweets embedded focusing on the case for leaving Twitter Long thread – buckle up. TL:DR; yes, you should join Mastodon. But you should stay on Twitter as well. What we need are more and different online…

  • Yale Journal of Law and Technology: Forgetful Advertising, Imagining a More Responsible Ad System

    idpiumass
    0

    Chand and Ethan just published a long-in-the-making paper proposing a new system for targetted advertising that doesn’t rely on a surveillance model. Check it out in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology’s special issue “A Healthy Digital Public Sphere.”

  • Stanford Social Innovation Review: Solving Social Media’s ‘Local Paradox’

    idpiumass
    0

    Chand and Ethan dig into the problem that while local networks offer ways to connect with local community members, they also host much more severe mis- and disinformation.

  • Stanford Social Innovation Review: The Good Web

    idpiumass
    0

    Ethan lays out his vision for one of the key ideas we’re working on at iDPI, The Good Web.

  • Gobo.social

    idpiumass
    4

    Since 2017, we’ve been running Gobo.social as an experiment with you, the social media user, to explore how you could control what you see on platforms. Instead of Facebook’s algorithm or Twitter’s trending topics, you get to choose how the information from all of the people you follow is filtered.  We have some new ideas…

  • An Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media

    idpiumass
    0

    Ethan Zuckerman and Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci published the ebook An Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media with original artwork by Fiammetta Ghedini. he book is adapted from the Mapping Social Media” series of blog posts written by Ethan and Chand for the Knight Foundation, documenting the wide variety of ways social media is put together on…

  • New Approaches to Platform Data Research

    idpiumass
    0

    In March, we published iDPI’s first piece of research, New Approaches to Platform Data Research. This was written by Elizabeth Hansen-Shapiro, Michael Sugarman, Fernando Bermejo, and Ethan Zuckerman. Download the full report here. The white paper was originally commissioned by the NetGain partnership as a post-mortem on the Social Science One initiative. Ultimately, the research…

Exit mobile version