Dr.

Mark Cot 27 July 2011

ACC 2005 Week 1 Lecture Notes

Week 1 Introduction to Digital Culture and Communication Lecture: What is digital culture? What is big social data? Tutorial: Introductions, assignment of reading presentations, and tutorial overview. Essential Reading: Lev Manovich. (2012 forthcoming) Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data. in Matthew K. Gold (ed.) Debates in the Digital Humanities Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press Online reading http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/04/new-article-by-lev-manovich-trending.html In big data society, people and organizations are divided into three categories: those who create data (both consciously and by leaving digital footprints), those who have the means to collect it, and those who have expertise to analyze it. (Lev Manovich) Imagine being able to study the collective intellectual space of the whole planet, seeing how ideas emerge and diffuse, burst and die, how they get linked together, and so on across the data set estimated to contain at least 14.55 billion pages. (Lev Manovich)

Introductory remarks
The following are just some of the key elements which comprise our digital landscape Digital Networks Distributed networks Data Social Networks Ubiquitous Connectivity Mobility Computationally-based research methods cultural analytics Ten years ago we might have been talking about the digital divide some have internet access, others do not Now we might speak of a new data analysis divide In social networks and with general online activity, what is most prevalentand most valuable to new media companiesis transactional data your everyday digital activities i.e. your Facebook posts, Tweets, blog entries, etc. typically guarded by new media companies where they seek to make biggest profits Social medias emergence has created new opportunities to study social and cultural processes and dynamics in new ways.

follow imagination, opinions, ideas, and feelings of hundreds of millions of people. the images videos create and comment conversations blog posts tweets, maps, track lists, follow trajectories in physical space. Before the emergence of the internet, and especially social media, there were two main ways to study social and cultural processes More specifically, there were two types of data that were produced i) surface data ii) deep data Surface data the many The realm of sociology, economics, political science Deep data the few The realm of anthropology, ethnography, psychology During the era of broadcast media (radio and TV), there was a different paradigm for studying data sampling Neilson TV ratings A small sample gets projected onto larger population Manovich highlights the clear limits of such a method when he compares the small sample to a low-resolution picture [When you expand it] you dont get any new details only larger pixels. Social media has been a game changer regarding the kind of data produced regarding social and cultural processes no longer a choice between data size and depth It is as if the inner workings of private worlds have been pried open because their inputs and outputs have become thoroughly traceable. (Bruno Latour) Problems and Challenges facing Deep data society 1) Who owns and has access to the data? Only social media companies have access to really large (surface-wise) and deep (detailed) social data (especially transactional data). So it is difficult to discover the following "how information spreads on Twitter (data: 100 million tweets)" "what geotagged Flickr photos tell us about peoples attention" 2) How authentic is online data? not a new question since ethnographers and sociologists who engage in long-term close-up research in the field face questions of authenticity Analysis of social data will only produce reliable results if social actors are authentic in their online self-created expressions (what they post to Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) and/or digital footprints they leave behind. there is always the filter of ' presentation' (Goffman) or 'performativity' (Butler)

3) Does computational analysis give real access to deep data? or is it something that can only come from ethnographers in the field? or do they access different types of data?

On one side, ethnographers spend years inside a particular community On another side, computer scientists never meet people in this community but have access social media and digital footprints Manovich proposes cultural analytics research He did this for digital image analysis (using You Tube videos) he calls it high-res visualization to explore cultural patterns uses computers to map the patterns in massive visual data sets from that, select the objects then examine manually Use computers map the patterns in massive visual sets select the objects examine manually. 4) The problem of the expert technical knowledge required to actually apprehend deep data knowledge of text mining knowledge of computational linguistics in short, knowledge of programming and data analytics The political economy of data? A political economic perspective would urge us to ask who owns what? who owns the data? who is able to access the data? There is a specific technological component related to such a political economic query Who has the technical means to analyze this data? Such computational analysis is at the core of the business model of companies like Google, and Facebook using algorithms (the real basis of Googles market value) [C]ompanies make money by analyzing patterns in the data they collect about our online and physical behavior, and target their offerings, ads, sales events, and promotions accordingly; in other cases, they sell this data to other companies. For the rest of us, there are tools out there but it is a challenge accessing the full depth of the deep data out there Manovich suggests searching for social media analytics or twitter analytics there are dozens of freely available tools Google Ngram Viewer, Trends, Insights for Search, Blogpulse, YouTube Trends Dashboard, Social Radar, Klout Check the Google analytics website actual data not available, only summaries What are the data repositories (archives) that made their information available to the Digging into Data research project? Deep data society research projects Digging into Data (Lev Manovich and NEH Office of Digital Humanities) Reality Media study (MIT) reality.media.mit.edu 100 MIT students given mobile which they used for 9 months special data capture software installed on phones 60 years of continuous data on daily human behavior

Computer Science department KAIST (South Koreas leading university for technology) What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? using a Twitter API, found out that over 85% of trending topics were headline news For further research projects, see the IEEE International Conference on Social Computing 2010 How does Manovich see the future of research? [W]e will see many more humanities and social science researchers who are equally good at most abstract theoretical arguments as well the latest data analysis algorithms which they can implement themselves.