The Metadata is the Message

The question "What is Web Science" is still frequently asked - even by authors of papers about Web Science. In this position paper we consider what part of the Web Science cycle makes this cycle emblematically "Web Science" rather than another form of either Law and Technology or Sociology and Technology or Computer Science and HCI. Based on our research developing and evaluating Semantic Web / Web 2.0 applications, and observations of current practice, we suggest that the particularity of Web Science is strongly correlated to a focus on human repurposing of particular Web technologies to support ever more rapid types of increased social contact. Based on this analysis, we ask how Web Science may help understand and shape this phenomenon, and what the implications may be for embracing this focus as a necessary criteria for assessing Web Science relevance of research work

Investigating ‘Churnalism’ in real time news

Language Use in Past and Presen

TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Archiving the Relaxed Consistency Web

The historical, cultural, and intellectual importance of archiving the web has been widely recognized. Today, all countries with high Internet penetration rate have established high-profile archiving initiatives to crawl and archive the fast-disappearing web content for long-term use. As web technologies evolve, established web archiving techniques face challenges. This paper focuses on the potential impact of the relaxed consistency web design on crawler driven web archiving. Relaxed consistent websites may disseminate, albeit ephemerally, inaccurate and even contradictory information. If captured and preserved in the web archives as historical records, such information will degrade the overall archival quality. To assess the extent of such quality degradation, we build a simplified feed-following application and simulate its operation with synthetic workloads. The results indicate that a non-trivial portion of a relaxed consistency web archive may contain observable inconsistency, and the inconsistency window may extend significantly longer than that observed at the data store. We discuss the nature of such quality degradation and propose a few possible remedies.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, CIKM 201

What\u27s New in Online News

Although traditional news services have made some of their product available online since the early 1990s the changes that have taken place in this arena over the past few years has been phenomenal. Distributing the news online has a significant impact on the traditional news cycle, the business model of news corporations, the work of journalists and the role of traditional news consumers among the general public. In addition to the online presence of the traditional news media, entirely new online news websites are emerging outside the mainstream media ownership, allowing both professional and amateur journalists a global forum for individual reports and opinions. In this paper, we revisit the results of the first phase of a longitudinal study of online news, conducted two years ago and compare those results with the current state of affairs. The most dramatic change that we are now witnessing in the news industry is the emergence of citizen journalism and the trend to the convergence of the roles of news producers and news consumers. Here we describe and discuss the lessons learnt from this change and build on these lessons to speculate on where this will take us in the futur

What\u27s new in online news?

This paper examines aspects of the field of Information Systems (IS) concerned with its diversity and with the rapid changes within the discipline that have been incurred by the continued evolution of the IS artefact. This examination is done in order to establish the suitability of the Cynefin framework, developed for knowledge management, as a suitable tool for sense-making in IS. A description and assessment of the Cynefin framework is provided with its varied applications in both organisational practice and research. The paper then applies the framework to make sense of some historical trends and contemporary issues of IS emphasising their diversity and changing nature. We conclude with speculation on how this approach may help guide future sense-making in IS research

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 2 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division 9 Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 12 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 14 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 16 Advertisements IEEE

Flaunting it on Facebook: Young adults, drinking cultures and the cult of celebrity

Copyright © Antonia Lyons; Tim McCreanor; Fiona Hutton; Ian Goodwin; Helen Moewaka Barnes; Christine Griffin; Kerryellen Vroman; Acushla Dee O’Carroll; Patricia Niland; Lina Samu Print publication available from: http://www.drinkingcultures.info/Young adults in Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ) regularly engage in heavy drinking episodes with groups of friends within a collective culture of intoxication to ‘have fun’ and ‘be sociable’. This population has also rapidly increased their use of new social networking technologies (e.g. mobile camera/ video phones; Facebook and YouTube) and are said to be obsessed with identity, image and celebrity. This research project explored the ways in which new technologies are being used by a range of young people (and others, including marketers) in drinking practices and drinking cultures in Aotearoa/NZ. It also explored how these technologies impact on young adults’ behaviours and identities, and how this varies across young adults of diverse ethnicities (Maori [indigenous people of NZ], Pasifika [people descended from the Pacific Islands] and Pakeha [people of European descent]), social classes and genders. We collected data from a large and diverse sample of young adults aged 18-25 years employing novel and innovative methodologies across three data collection stages. In total 141 participants took part in 34 friendship focus group discussions (12 Pakeha, 12 Maori and 10 Pasifika groups) while 23 young adults showed and discussed their Facebook pages during an individual interview that involved screencapture software and video recordings. Popular online material regarding drinking alcohol was also collected (via groups, interviews, and web searches), providing a database of 487 links to relevant material (including websites, apps, and games). Critical and in-depth qualitative analyses across these multimodal datasets were undertaken. Key findings demonstrated that social technologies play a crucial role in young adults’ drinking cultures and processes of identity construction. Consuming alcohol to a point of intoxication was a commonplace leisure-time activity for most of the young adult participants, and social network technologies were fully integrated into their drinking cultures. Facebook was employed by all participants and was used before, during and following drinking episodes. Uploading and sharing photos on Facebook was particularly central to young people’s drinking cultures and the ongoing creation of their identities. This involved a great deal of Facebook ‘work’ to ensure appropriate identity displays such as tagging (the addition of explanatory or identifying labels) and untagging photos. Being visible online was crucial for many young adults, and they put significant amounts of time and energy into updating and maintaining Facebook pages, particularly with material regarding drinking practices and events. However this was not consistent across the sample, and our findings revealed nuanced and complex ways in which people from different ethnicities, genders and social classes engaged with drinking cultures and new technologies in different ways, reflecting their positioning within the social structure. Pakeha shared their drinking practices online with relatively little reflection, while Pasifika and Maori participants were more likely to discuss avoiding online displays of drinking and demonstrated greater reflexive self-surveillance. Females spoke of being more aware of normative expectations around gender than males, and described particular forms of online identity displays (e.g. moderated intake, controlled selfdetermination). Participants from upper socio-economic groups expressed less concern than others about both drinking and posting material online. Celebrity culture was actively engaged with, in part at least, as a means of expressing what it is to be a young adult in contemporary society, and reinforcing the need for young people to engage in their own everyday practices of ‘celebritising’ themselves through drinking cultures online. Alcohol companies employed social media to market their products to young people in sophisticated ways that meant the campaigns and actions were rarely perceived as marketing. Online alcohol marketing initiatives were actively appropriated by young people and reproduced within their Facebook pages to present tastes and preferences, facilitate social interaction, construct identities, and more generally develop cultural capital. These commercial activities within the commercial platforms that constitute social networking systems contribute heavily to a general ‘culture of intoxication’ while simultaneously allowing young people to ‘create’ and ‘produce’ themselves online via the sharing of consumption ‘choices’, online interactions and activities