The report on my Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund -supported project is now out! It is called “What Comes After FOSS? Inklings From Three Communities of Practice.” Summary: Technologists jointly producing and freely sharing software have had a decisive impact on our digital infrastructure. Their work has been shaped not just …
Thanks to the popularity of the 2019 documentary (which, full disclosure, I haven’t watched), the case of Cambridge Analytica comes up quite often in circles where people are critical of technology. This makes me cringe a little bit each time, because I don’t think the case really illustrates …
After a year away on a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, I am back on campus with my regular teaching and advisement load. As in previous years, I will be teaching Fieldwork NL, Regional Dialogues, Ethics in Contemporary Ethnographic Research as well as a Digitization and Media …
The other day, I requested an article from the library, and today the librarian sent me a file with a suffix I did not recognize: .acsm . Not only that; the file was too small to contain the full article text. I know our librarians don’t make mistakes, and after …
I’m getting my head into my new research project. Back in February, I got to kick off my research project during a great meeting of Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund grantees. As a reminder, my project tries to answer the question “What Comes After FOSS?” and focuses on communities of …
The Argentinian filmmaker Fernando Birri responding to the question “What is ‘utopia’ for?”, as quoted by the Revolutionary Picnic Collective ( 2013 ): I ask myself this question every morning, because utopia is like the horizon. You walk two or ten steps forward and it’s still two or ten steps further …
I initally posted this essay to Tumblr on February 1, 2011. There it was liked or reblogged 13 times—it practically went viral!—and it was also cited in a few artworks and even in an academic book or two. Tumblr is no longer what it was then, so for …
Miniflux is a great feed reader. I’ve been using it for a number of years. The server I’ve been using was due for a replacement, and in that process I decided to move everything to NixOS. Since I use it on my laptop, desktop and another server, I …
Cory Doctorow gifted us the term “ enshittification ” as a handy label for how the internet plus capitalism turns everything to crap. Long before we learned we are living in an enshittocene created by platform monopolies, other pungent notions were around to make sense of our technologically saturated environments. the crapularity …
I am immensely proud to announce that, as of this week, On Display: Instagram, the Self, and the City is published. Please join Justus and me to celebrate at our book launch event at Spui25 on Wednesday, January 10, at 14:30. Zeynep Tufekci will join us for a conversation …
Hey John, what are you up to these days? Writing and Research Since the start of this semester, I have been working with Marije Peute on our Coming of Age on Instagram project. We’ve been busy writing a paper, planning a workshop for the DMI Winter School, organizing panels …
Yesterday, the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund announced its new cohort of grantees, and I am one of them! There’s a page on the DIIF site about the project I proposed, and my Institute posted a little news item following the announcement as well. This note tries to expand on …
Rising scholars from around the world regularly contact me because they would like to pursue a PhD at Leiden University under my supervision. I like getting these inquiries because often the proposed research is enticing. Unfortunately, that alone is not enough. There are a few important practical issues to consider …
The latest edition of the Data Science Community Newsletter contains some illuminating remarks about frequent preoccupations of mine: ethics review, “open science” practices such as data sharing, and the relation between the two. It was particularly interesting to me as someone who is involved in reviewing research here in the …
Collingwood’s concern in this little book 1 is to clarify the idea of nature as it underlies both natural science and philosophy. Saying that science is “based” on nature does not mean that the idea of nature is worked out first and all further scientific investigation proceeds from it …
Last August, I listened to a presentation about OpenAlex hosted (online) by CWTS. OpenAlex provides an “open and comprehensive catalog of scholarly papers, authors, institutions, and more.” The presenter, Jason Priem, emphasized that OpenAlex tries to be something people can build on, as opposed to Scopus, etc. The project subscribes …
What am I up to these days? I will be offline until ASA in mid-August, where I will be part of a session on “Social Media and the Internet” organized by Matt Rafalow. Speaking In other speaking news, I am taking part in the final conference of the V-Data project …
As discussed with Zinzy and Maarten , I wanted to have a way to publish things on this site that don’t amount to full-fledged posts. Figuring out how was my homework assignment. Taking inspiration from various indieweb folk, I think I found a setup that works for me. It required …
What’s on my plate and on my mind these days? Here’s a non-exhaustive list. Teaching First drafts of bachelor’s theses on the theme of digitalization and media are in. I’m learning a lot from reading them. I am wrapping up Ethics in Contemporary Ethnographic Research , which …
What’s on my plate and on my mind these days? Here’s a non-exhaustive list. Teaching Together with Ksenia Fedorova, I am teaching a course in Advanced Qualitative Methods in Leiden University’s urban studies program. The course seeks to “level up” on students’ training in qualitative, and especially …
HPC clusters are great. They provide lots of CPUs and vast pools of memory that make computationally intensive analyses possible. Without them, I wouldn’t have been able to do a bunch of the work I’ve done over the past few years. But they can also get in the …
A few years ago, Biella Coleman, an anthropologist studying hacker culture, observed that the events surrounding the Snowden leaks constitute a "critical event" in the development of hacker culture, in the sense that they were transformative and set things on a new, politically intensified course. There have been several previous critical events, including Operation Sundevil
What’s on my plate and on my mind these days? Here’s a non-exhaustive list. Teaching The theme for my fieldwork section starting this fall will be “There is a Kind of Love Called Maintenance,” a line lifted from the poem “Atlas” by U.A. Fanthorpe. It’s a …
What’s on my plate and on my mind these days? Here’s a non-exhaustive list. Teaching For the second time, I’m teaching Ethics in Contemporary Ethnographic Research in the first year of our bachelor’s program with a crack team of co-instructors. I am finishing up co-teaching two …
Screening Surveillance is a series of short films produced by sava saheli singh. During an event featuring singh hosted by the d12n Research Cluster , we watched two of the films, which speculate on a near future in which “smart cities” and fully integrated health data systems envelope daily routines. The …
So you’re a qualitative researcher who finally wants to take the plunge into digital methods. Maybe your current project has yielded a treasure trove of textual material that you’d like to make sense of with the help of text analysis techniques. Maybe you got curious about newer developments …
Doing ethnographic fieldwork in data-saturated environments is fraught with ethical concerns in all kinds of new and surprising ways that we’re only slowly getting a handle on. Because of that, not many resources exist yet to guide contemporary ethnographic researchers. My class at Leiden University, Ethics in Contemporary Ethnographic …
For obvious reasons, many qualitative researchers these days are seeking ways of pursuing live and remote research. As a result, interest in digital ethnography, an established but somewhat marginal approach to social research, is now greater than ever before. Both emerging researchers just getting started as researchers and established researchers …
The acquittal of the president in the Senate impeachment trial earlier this year led many observers to note the feat of “mental gymnastics” required by the Senators who voted to acquit. With the sole exception of Mitt Romney, Republican Senators managed to sit for days listening to the litany of offences committed by the president—only to walk away claiming that none of it rose to the level of the…
There are many reasons for wanting to host your own repositories. I won’t go into the arguments for or against, but simply present a way to get your own “forge” with code respositories, ticket system, wiki and forum up and running quickly and securely. There are a few assumptions …
For this year’s RC21 Conference in Antwerp , Justus Uitermark and I are convening a session on digital platforms. We welcome all contributions examining how digital platforms reshape urban landscapes, relations, and research. We increasingly know and navigate the city through digital platforms like Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, TripAdvisor, and …
This Saturday I was invited to give a talk at the very first ReproHack in the Netherlands, held at the university library in Leiden. Because it was my first time talking on the topic of open science, I wrote up some of my thoughts that have been brewing over the …
A frightening tale of imperfect data, a contrived metric, and undead scholarship. Read on, if you dare, and you'll find out what zombies haunt American sociology! 🧟♀️🧟♂️🎓 I couldn't resist the Halloween theme for a quick writeup of my recent foray into bibliometric research. I wanted to figure out whether I could identify "undead" sociological scholarship—work that, after being dead for a…
On Tuesday, March 26, I will give a talk in the Urban Studies program at Leiden University’s The Hague campus. The title of the talk is “Social Media and the City: A Computational and Ethnographic Investigation,” and it will provide glimpses of the research I conducted with Justus Uitermark …
Inspired by this toot and using this tutorial -- both by Allison Parrish , who gives the greatest talks on computer-generated poetry -- I trained a recurrent neural network and had it generate some paper titles based on entries in my bibliographic database (available from here ). Fun times!
There is an worrying amount of commentary in Germany these days that equates the actions of the far left with those of the far right. Simply put, many people seem to think that setting a car on fire to protest the G20 meeting is just as bad as setting a shelter for asylum seekers ablaze -- something neo-nazis in Germany have been doing at a frightening rate
ArXiv is a public repository where researchers make their new work available. It's a great resource when you are trying to find cutting-edge research undertaken by physicists, computer scientists, or biologists, among others. Since these are people who do a lot to advance fields like social network analysis and datamining, sociologists should not shy away from this work, despite the many…