Our guest for this episode (19 min. long) is Brooke Foucault Welles. She recently co-authored the award-winning book, #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice. Brooke studies how online communication networks enable and constrain behavior, with particular emphasis on how these networks both enhance and mitigate marginalization. 

During this conversation, Brooke talks about just exactly what “hashtag activism” means, especially in the context of web science, and about her research into specific hashtags beyond her book. She tells us how these hashtags can impact public discourse, validate online participants and form networks of people online. But she also discusses why the web can be a difficult space for activists and how web science can work to change that. Listen to learn about these topics and more!

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

 

For this episode (30 min. long), we talk with Fil Menczer, whose work is awesome. No, seriously — he’s the director of OSoMe, which is pronounced “awesome” and stands for the Observatory on Social Media. Fil’s research spans web science, computational social science, network science, and data science.

In this conversation, Fil gives insight into how information can spread on social media and be manipulated. He talks what astroturfing looks like and how bots can work. And he tells us the tools that the Observatory on Social Media has developed to combat some of these issues, including “Botslayer.” Despite the name of that tool, he also discusses why not all bots are “bad,” and what differentiates a good or neutral one from one that’s harmful. Listen to learn about this and more!

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

 

For this episode, (24 min. long) we talk with Jen Golbeck, who is known for her work in computational social network analysis. Her models for computing trust between people in social networks were amongst the first in the field. Now, she’s a professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park.

In this episode, she discusses her path to web science, her work in trust-based recommender systems, and how we can use web data to understand people’s behaviors. But Jen isn’t just interested in people — she’s also become somewhat of an expert on dogs on the internet. Or more accurately, social media networks centered around pets. 

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

 

In this episode, (26 min. long) we talk with Dame Wendy Hall, who was involved with creating the very field of web science. Wendy was a Founding Director of the Web Science Research Initiative, is the Managing director of the Web Science Trust, and became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2009. She explains some of her contributions to the field, as well as offers a perspective of how web science is changing under geopolitical forces, the pandemic, and more. Going beyond all this, she also dives into many of the ethical questions and challenges that web science posits.

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

 

For this episode, (20 min. long) we talk with Susan Halford, Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Futures at the University of Bristol in the UK. Susan has been at the forefront of championing a deeper engagement between social scientists and computer scientists in addressing questions confronting Web Science. Susan explains why this partnership is so important in advancing not only the future of the Web but also the future of society. She discusses her efforts to develop methods that leverage the new and emerging forms of data as well as her efforts at developing curricula to train the first generation of interdisciplinary Web Science scholars and practitioners.

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

 

In this episode, (27 min. long) we talk with Jim Hendler, Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in the US. Jim was one of the pioneers who envisioned the need to develop an interdisciplinary science of the Web. Since those early days in the mid-2000s, Web Science has witnessed remarkable growth and attracted global attention. Jim reflects on the rationale and origins of Web Science and how its research agenda has evolved over the past 15 years. He points to some of the most significant contributions Web Science has offered society and argues why Web Science is relevant now more than ever.

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