Social Humanities 2016

Social Humanities: Citizens at Scale in the Digital World

Social Media, Citizen Science, and Social Machines

• Convener: David De Roure
• Facilitator: Matthew Kimberley
• Hashtag: #sochums
• Computers: Students are required to bring and use their own laptops for this workshop. Please consult our Laptop Guidance for more information.  

Abstract:

The widespread engagement of citizens in the digital world brings new scales of interaction, democratization, and empowerment. Social media is a new lens onto society and a topic of study in its own right, instigating and mediating new social processes at scale. Citizen science has engaged millions of people in the process of discovery, with the Zooniverse project delivering projects across a diversity of disciplines—and now you can create your own projects. Meanwhile social media and digital editing come together in the notion of social editions, like Wikipedia, which challenge established notions of expertise with the wisdom of the crowd. 

Aimed at researchers of all backgrounds, this workshop explains how to design and study these systems, which we see as Social Machines—processes in which people do the creative work and machines do the administration, and where the ability to create new forms of social process is given to the world at large. By the end of the workshop, you will understand how to use social media and citizen science in your own research. In turn these insights inform the creation of the archive for tomorrow’s humanities scholarship in the digital world, and the future of research communication. 

Timetable

Schedule Details

Monday

11:00 - 12:30

Introductions
David De Roure

An overview of the week. Participants will have a chance to introduce themselves, say what they hope to get out of the week, and say something about their data or project.  Over the course of the week, we hope you will form lasting work relationships and new friendships.
 

Opening Zooniverse talk
Grant Miller

From Galaxy Zoo to the many projects in the Zooniverse, our platform engages citizens in research projects in humanities and many other disciplines. We present the story of the Zooniverse, and introduce Panoptes, its latest incarnation, which will be the platform for your projects this week.

14:00 - 16:00

Zooniverse Project Builder
Grant Miller

In this hands-on session, participants will be introduced to Panoptes, the Zooniverse project builder platform, and start setting up their own research crowdsourcing projects.

16:30 - 17:30

Individual projects

Members of the Zooniverse and summer school team will be available to work with you individually on setting up your projects.
 

Tuesday

11:00 - 12:30

Social Machines
David De Roure

In 1999, Tim Berners-Lee forecast the emergence of “Social Machines” – social websites where the human does the creative work and the machine does the administration, and where citizens are empowered to create new social processes at scale. Thus he anticipated Wikipedia, twitter and the many social media sites with large scale citizen engagement. We take a look at the social machines ecosystem, to better understand how we might study, design, and build social machines.

14:00 - 16:00

Software Sustainability and the Open Source Software Community 

Simon Hettrick

Collaborative development of software is an exemplar social machine, and at the same time an important topic for the Summer School. This talk will discuss software sustainability and the community activites of the Software Sustainability Institute. This will be one of the exemplars for discussion throughout the week, as we look later at scholarly social machines and at music social machines.
 

Designing Social Machines
Max van Kleek

An introduction and hands-on exercise in describing social machines, using the technique of sociograms by one of its inventors. This session will help you describe and design your own social machines, and look at your project through the social machines lens.

16:30 - 17:30

Individual projects

Members of the Zooniverse and summer school team will be available to work with you individually on setting up your projects.
 

Wednesday

11:00 - 12:30

Future of Research Communication
David De Roure

The academic paper has been our primary mechanism of research communication for over 350 years.  Is it still fit for purpose? David De Roure draws on the work of FORCE11 (Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship) to introduce the discussion.
 

Scholarly Social Machines
David De Roure and Pip Willcox

We see many websites appearing as new intermediaries emerge in the worlds of publishing and libraries. Here we look through the lens of social machines at the research communications ecosystem. We take a long view of social machines, looking back to the early modern theatre and towards a Web-enabled notion of social editions.

14:00 - 16:00

Engaging the Research Crowd
J. Stephen Downie

Engaging the crowd of researchers is a new paradigm for digital scholarship.  J. Stephen Downie conceived and runs an annual online event – the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation Exchange - which engages the global research community in shared tasks and outcomes, through its sociotechnical infrastructure.

Followed by a discussion of MIREX as a social machine

16:30 - 17:30

Individual projects go live!

Today we make our projects live for use by students across the summer school.
 

Thursday

11:00 - 12:30

How people make new words
Janet Pierrehumbert

Janet Pierrehumbert will provide a general introduction to computational linguistics and present her research, which uses large-scale online word games. How do people learn word-formation patterns? How do cognitive and social factors interact? How are people similar and how are they different? How do population-level properties of language arise? Janet will also talk about the dynamics of spontaneous on-line language.

14:00 - 16:00

Social Media Analytics: the Web Observatory and Analysing the Referendum
Dominic Difranzo

Social Media, and other new forms of data, provide an opportunity for social scientists to study new social process at the scale of the population and in real time. In this session we give an overview of the analysis of new forms of data, including social media, using the EU Referendum as a case study.

Analysing the Summer School
David De Roure

A group exercise in analysing the social media generated around the summer school, principally using twitter, and in visualizing and presenting the results.  The outcomes will be reported to the organisers and participants of the summer school in the closing session.

16:30 - 17:30

Individual projects

Members of the Zooniverse and summer school team will be available to review the progress of your projects.
 

Friday

11:00 - 12:30

Case study in creative industries: designing music social machines

David De Roure

Digital empowers creativity. Rather than consumers at the end of a pipeline of production, distribution and consumption, today citizens can re-use, repurpose and republish. We look at the digital music industry as a case study. What can research learn from an industry that is already digital end-to-end?

Followed by a hands-on session in generating and assembling music fragments.

14:00 - 16:00

Presentations
(all students)

Presentations of projects, group discussion and reflections. How can we take citizen science and social machines into our institutions or research?

16:30 - 17:30

Feedback and Round-up

The group will discuss their thoughts on the projects, on their experiences and on what they believe could be the next steps for Zooniverse and its role in Social Humanities.