Digital Methods Rogers, Richard
2013, 20130510, 2019-06-20
eBook
In Digital Methods , Richard Rogers proposes a methodological outlook for social and cultural scholarly research on the Web that seeks to move Internet research beyond the study of online culture. It ...is not a toolkit for Internet research, or operating instructions for a software package; it deals with broader questions. How can we study social media to learn something about society rather than about social media use? How can hyperlinks reveal not just the value of a Web site but the politics of association? Rogers proposes repurposing Web-native techniques for research into cultural change and societal conditions. We can learn to reapply such "methods of the medium" as crawling and crowd sourcing, PageRank and similar algorithms, tag clouds and other visualizations; we can learn how they handle hits, likes, tags, date stamps, and other Web-native objects. By "thinking along" with devices and the objects they handle, digital research methods can follow the evolving methods of the medium. Rogers uses this new methodological outlook to examine the findings of inquiries into 9/11 search results, the recognition of climate change skeptics by climate-change-related Web sites, the events surrounding the Srebrenica massacre according to Dutch, Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian Wikipedias, presidential candidates' social media "friends," and the censorship of the Iranian Web. With Digital Methods , Rogers introduces a new vision and method for Internet research and at the same time applies them to the Web's objects of study, from tiny particles (hyperlinks) to large masses (social media).
Extreme, anti-establishment actors are being characterized increasingly as ‘dangerous individuals’ by the social media platforms that once aided in making them into ‘Internet celebrities’. These ...individuals (and sometimes groups) are being ‘deplatformed’ by the leading social media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for such offences as ‘organised hate’. Deplatforming has prompted debate about ‘liberal big tech’ silencing free speech and taking on the role of editors, but also about the questions of whether it is effective and for whom. The research reported here follows certain of these Internet celebrities to Telegram as well as to a larger alternative social media ecology. It enquires empirically into some of the arguments made concerning whether deplatforming ‘works’ and how the deplatformed use Telegram. It discusses the effects of deplatforming for extreme Internet celebrities, alternative and mainstream social media platforms and the Internet at large. It also touches upon how social media companies’ deplatforming is affecting critical social media research, both into the substance of extreme speech as well as its audiences on mainstream as well as alternative platforms.
Instagram is currently the social media platform most associated with online images (and their analysis), but images from other platforms also can be collected and grouped, arrayed by similarity, ...stacked, matched, stained, labelled, depicted as network, placed side by side and otherwise analytically displayed. In the following, the initial focus is on Instagram, together with certain schools of thought such as Instagramism and Instagrammatics for its aesthetic and visual cultural study. Building on those two approaches, it subsequently focuses on other web and social media platforms, such as Google Image Search, Twitter, Facebook and 4chan. It provides demonstrations of how querying techniques create online image collections, and how these sets are analytically grouped through arrangements collectively referred to as metapictures.
Google results have been scrutinized over the years for what they privilege, be it the surface web, the powerful, optimized webpages, the personalized and/or their own properties. For some time now, ...another type of Google returns also has been the source of attention: the offensive result. The following revisits a selection of offensive and other problematic results found by journalists and researchers alike. In a technique termed ‘algorithmic probing’, the prompting queries are re-run to study what has come of these results in Google Web and Image Search but mainly in Google Autocompletion. The question concerns a different kind of privileging – Google's hierarchy of concerns – or the extent to which certain categories as well as languages are moderated and others less so. In all, it was found that Google heavily moderates religion, ethnicities and sexualities (albeit with gaps) but leaves alone stereotypes of gendered professions as well as ageism. It also moderates to a greater degree in English compared to southern European and Balkan languages. The article concludes with a discussion of the stakes of Google's moderation, including its uneven coverage.
Nosema spp. fungal gut parasites are among myriad possible explanations for contemporary increased mortality of western honey bees (Apis mellifera, hereafter honey bee) in many regions of the world. ...Invasive Nosema ceranae is particularly worrisome because some evidence suggests it has greater virulence than its congener N. apis. N. ceranae appears to have recently switched hosts from Asian honey bees (Apis cerana) and now has a nearly global distribution in honey bees, apparently displacing N. apis. We examined parasite reproduction and effects of N. apis, N. ceranae, and mixed Nosema infections on honey bee hosts in laboratory experiments. Both infection intensity and honey bee mortality were significantly greater for N. ceranae than for N. apis or mixed infections; mixed infection resulted in mortality similar to N. apis parasitism and reduced spore intensity, possibly due to inter-specific competition. This is the first long-term laboratory study to demonstrate lethal consequences of N. apis and N. ceranae and mixed Nosema parasitism in honey bees, and suggests that differences in reproduction and intra-host competition may explain apparent heterogeneous exclusion of the historic parasite by the invasive species.
Ushering in the contemporary ‘fake news’ crisis, Craig Silverman of Buzzfeed News reported that it outperformed mainstream news on Facebook in the three months prior to the 2016 US presidential ...elections. Here the report’s methods and findings are revisited for 2020. Examining Facebook user engagement of election-related stories, and applying Silverman’s classification of fake news, it was found that the problem has worsened, implying that the measures undertaken to date have not remedied the issue. If, however, one were to classify ‘fake news’ in a stricter fashion, as Facebook as well as certain media organizations do with the notion of ‘false news’, the scale of the problem shrinks. A smaller scale problem could imply a greater role for fact-checkers (rather than deferring to mass-scale content moderation), while a larger one could lead to the further politicization of source adjudication, where labelling particular sources broadly as ‘fake’, ‘problematic’ and/or ‘junk’ results in backlash.
Get 12 months FREE access to the Digital Methods Manual (an abridged, interactive eBook that provides handy step-by-step guidance to your phone, tablet, laptop or reading device) when purchasing ...ISBN: 9781526487995 Paperback & Interactive eBook. Teaching the concrete methods needed to use digital devices, search engines and social media platforms to study some of the most urgent social issues of our time, this is the essential guide to the state of the art in researching the natively digital. With explanation of context and techniques and a rich set of case studies, Richard Rogers teaches you how to: Build a URL list to discover internet censorship Transform Google into a research machine to detect source bias Make Twitter API outputs comprehensible and tell stories Research Instagram to locate 'hashtag publics' Extract and fruitfully analyze Facebook posts, images and video And much, much more.
Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es, ein Grundverständnis von digitalen Methoden und ihrer Anwendung zu vermitteln, insbesondere im Hinblick auf die Nutzung von Software bei dieser Art der Forschung. Dazu ...wird in einem ersten Schritt argumentiert, warum es bei einer Forschung mittels digitaler Methoden nicht darum geht, Webdaten im Vergleich mit der sozialen Welt jenseits des Webs zu „überprüfen“. Vielmehr geht es darum, das Web in seiner eigenen Spezifik für die Forschung nutzbar zu machen. Entsprechend setzen digitale Methoden bei „nativ“, d. h. originär digitalen Daten an und unterscheiden sich so von anderen Methoden des Computational Turn in den Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften. Dies konkretisiert sich in der Forschungspraxis der digitalen Methoden, die anhand der Nutzung des Internet Archive, der Google Websuche, von Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter und YouTube sowie plattformübergreifenden Studien veranschaulicht wird. Solche Beispiele machen deutlich, dass es bei digitalen Methoden um eine spezifische „Wiederverwendung“ von Online-Daten geht, ähnlich wie bei anderen non-responsiven Methoden.
Regulatory agencies have recently recommended a Quality by Design (QbD) approach for the manufacturing of therapeutic molecules. A QbD strategy requires deep understanding at the molecular level of ...the attributes that are crucial for safety and efficacy and for insuring that the desired quality of the purified protein drug product is met at the end of the manufacturing process. A mass spectrometry (MS)-based approach to simultaneously monitor the extensive array of product quality attributes (PQAs) present on therapeutic molecules has been developed. This multi-attribute method (MAM) uses a combination of high mass accuracy / high resolution MS data generated by Orbitrap technology and automated identification and relative quantification of PQAs with dedicated software (Pinpoint). The MAM has the potential to replace several conventional electrophoretic and chromatographic methods currently used in Quality Control to release therapeutic molecules. The MAM represents an optimized analytical solution to focus on the attributes of the therapeutic molecule essential for function and implement QbD principles across process development, manufacturing and drug disposition.