Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the...
This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program. It is a...
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Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ’1990 Effect’
Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990? Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and...
View ArticleI Have Never Been Blogging
Looking at the latest stream of posts in my RSS reader from Graham Harman’s blog, I realize that I’ve been holding the wrong attitude about blogging. Harman is amazing on a number of levels, and if...
View ArticleTrace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices
This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data...
View ArticleStructural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books
So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social...
View ArticleThe Lives of Bots
I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a...
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Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology
I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription. As...
View ArticleClosed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial...
In the Wikipedia research community — that is, the group of academics and Wikipedians who are interested in studying Wikipedia — there has been a pretty substantial and longstanding problem with how...
View ArticleThe ethnography of robots: interview at Ethnography Matters
This was an interview I did with the wonderful Heather Ford, originally posted at Ethnography Matters (a really cool group blog) way back in January. No idea why I didn’t post a copy of this here back...
View ArticleAn apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious...
I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season,...
View ArticleBots and Cyborgs: Wikipedia’s Immune System
My frequent collaborator Aaron Halfaker has written up a fantastic article with John Riedl in Computer reviewing a lot of the work we’ve done on algorithmic agents in Wikipedia, casting them as...
View ArticleAbout a bot: reflections on building software agents
This post for Ethnography Matters is a very personal, reflective musing about the first bot I ever developed for Wikipedia. It makes the argument that while it is certainly important to think about...
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When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality...
I’ve written a number of papers about the role that automated software agents (or bots) play in Wikipedia, claiming that they are critical to the continued operation of Wikipedia. This paper tests this...
View ArticleBots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms
This is a new article published in Information, Communication, and Society as part of their annual special issue for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This year’s special issue...
View ArticleA dynamically-generated robots.txt: will search engine bots recognize...
In short, I built a script that dynamically generates a robots.txt file for search engine bots, who download the file when they seek direction on what parts of a website they are allowed to index. By...
View ArticleCome to the Trace Ethnography workshop at the 2015 iConference!
We’re organizing a workshop on trace ethnography at the 2015 iConference, led by Amelia Acker, Matt Burton, David Ribes, and myself. See more information about it on the workshop’s website, or feel...
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