Findings
@bbcmediaaction sums up research on social media in development, finds little evidence of impact, and notes that most researcher on the subject is focused on the Arab uprisings of 2011-2012.
Community
@GlobalIntegrity continues to set the standard for best practice in governance assessments. They’re about to release provisional 2016 African Integrity data for a 2 month peer comment and review phase. This is part of an effort to learn about how the data is used and to improve their methodologies. Their recent blogpost reflects on the general process and some of the most tricky methodological/practical challenges to actionable governance research, like how to balance comparability with country-fit.
@Andy_Tattersall argues that academic departments should have embedded technologists to help facilitate broader uptake and adoption of new technology tools for research. #notthehelpdesk
“Open Media Scholarship is a nonprofit site, established in 2017, dedicated to promoting open access (OA) in media, communication, and film scholarship and teaching. The site features OA journals, books, and resources, along with searches for OA articles and datasets. The rationale for Open Media Scholarship is that media scholars, for a variety of reasons, should be at the forefront of the OA movement.”
In the Methodological Weeds
Prediction and Inference from Social Networks and Social Media: a new book, with focus on “realistic social network topologies, awareness of user activities, topic and trend generation, estimation of user attributes from their social content, and behavior detection.” Whoa. Even a chapter on MOOC discussion forums.
Academic Opps
Hires:
- OGP needs national researchers to review national action plan implementation in 19 countries. Great international networks, demanding but important work. Get in! (Canada, El Salvador, France, Ghana, Honduras, Italy, Liberia, Lithuania, Malawi, Mexico, Macedonia, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Sri Lanka, South Africa, South Korea, Ukraine, United States)
- Data Science Postdoc at @BerkeleyISchool w/ focus on #dataviz #machinelearning #ethics and field experiements (!!!)
- Postdoct in Digital Humanities, University of Exeter
Calls for Papers/Participation:
- Summer School: Digital Ethnography in Practice (2-30 June, Barcelona)
- Workshop: crisis informatics (Deadline ??, Colorado (US), 6 May)
- Special Issue in Problemi dell’informazione: Icons and power: Politics of images in the digital era (Deadline April 30)
Miscellanea & Absurdum
- Hacker News is offering some great discounts on lifetime VPN subscriptions for the next few days ($40-60).
- ICTworks collects the pros and cons on “5 Fantastic Guides to Developing Project Monitoring and Evaluation Programs“
- Small funding buckets on offer ($15k) to kick start grass roots #advox in the US, from @fightfortheftr .
- @aidtransparency has launched a tool to help orgs quality control their data before they publish it to AITI. We should make this for ALL data standards.
- The Money Shot Revisited: Changing Dynamics of Media Spectacle, Intensity and Excess (CFP)
