Web Futures: Inclusive, Intelligent, Sustainable The 2020 Manifesto for Web Science

International audienceThis Manifesto was produced from the Perspectives Workshop 18262 entitled "10 Years of Web Science" that took place at Schloss Dagstuhl from June 24-29, 2018. At the Workshop, we revisited the origins of Web Science, explored the challenges and opportunities of the Web, and looked ahead to potential futures for both the Web and Web Science. We explain issues that society faces in the Web by the ambivalences that are inherent in the Web. All the enormous benefits that the Web offers-for information sharing, collective organization and distributed activity, social inclusion and economic growth-will always carry along negative consequences, too, and 30 years after its creation negative consequences of the Web are only too apparent. The Web continues to evolve and its next major step will involve Artificial Intelligence (AI) at large. AI has the potential to amplify positive and negative outcomes, and we explore these possibilities, situating them within the wider debate about the future of regulation and governance for the Web. Finally, we outline the need to extend Web Science as the science that is devoted to the analysis and engineering of the Web, to strengthen our role in shaping the future of the Web and present five key directions for capacity building that are necessary to achieve this: (i), supporting interdisciplinarity, (ii), supporting collaboration, (iii), supporting the sustainable Web, (iv), supporting the Intelligent Web, and (v), supporting the Inclusive Web. Our writing reflects our background in several disciplines of the social and technical sciences and that these disciplines emphasize topics to various extents. We are acutely aware that our observations occupy a particular point in time and are skewed towards our experience as Western scholars-a limitation that Web Science will need to overcome

RESEARCH ETHICS PRACTICES IN A CHANGING SOCIAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE

In our work we study practical approaches to internet research ethics with a logitudinal perspective. We have interviewed more than 40 social media researchers in 2013-2014 using a semi-structured qualitative interview approach. From these interviews we gained insights into the challenges of everyday research practices at the various stages of the research process, as well as into motivations for specific approaches and critical reflections on research design and decision making, particularly concerning research ethics. At the end of 2019 we started re-interviewing the participants in our study and will continue to do so over the next months. In addition to questions about the details of everyday data work and the rationales behind (ethical) decision making, we are asking participants what has changed in the way they conduct research with social media. Based on our interviews as well as the ongoing discussions of Internet Research Ethics in the community, this paper focuses on the ethical dimensions of social media research practices and how they have evolved over the past years. Between our two interview periods, the social media landscape has witnessed several changes, including incidents like the "Cambridge Analytica scandal", which have also created ethical discussions in the broader public. By asking researchers about their everyday work, our research contributes to a look behind the scenes of "life as an internet researcher", as phrased in the list of topics in the call for papers

Perspective: Acknowledging Data Work in the Social Media Research Lifecycle

This perspective article suggests considering the everyday research data management work required to accomplish social media research along different phases in a data lifecycle to inform the ongoing discussion of social media research data’s quality and validity. Our perspective is informed by practical experience of archiving social media data, by results from a series of qualitative interviews with social media researchers, as well as by recent literature in the field. We emphasize how social media researchers are entangled in complexities between social media platform providers, social media users, other actors, as well as legal and ethical frameworks, that all affect their everyday research practices. Research design decisions are made iteratively at different stages, involving many decisions that may potentially impact the quality of research. We show that these decisions are often hidden, but that making them visible allows us to better understand what drives social media research into specific directions. Consequently, we argue that untangling and documenting choices during the research lifecycle, especially when researchers pursue specific approaches and may have actively decided against others (often due to external factors) is necessary and will help to spot and address structural challenges in the social media research ecosystem that go beyond critiques of individual opportunistic approaches to easily accessible data