Our guest for this episode, (21 min. long) is Robert Ackland, a professor from the School of Sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra. Rob studies networks on the Web, and he established the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks — VOSON for short — to provide tools for research on this topic. 

During this episode, Rob talks about his early work with hyperlinks, as well as how he evolved his research and VOSON tools as we entered the social media era. He explains how he got involved in web science, as his background is mainly in economics, as well as what he’s interested in now. And he talks about how we could use social bots as a positive force for political deliberation, even as so much of research on bots focuses on their negative effects. To hear all this and more, listen to this episode.

Click here for this episode’s transcript, and click here for this episode’s show notes.