Thoughts on Software, Power, and Digital Method
In April 2026, the Association of Internet Researchers organized an online roundtable on methods (if you are a member, you can watch it back here) with Annette N. Markham, Axel Bruns, and myself. This is the transcript of my opening statement. Thank you, and thank you to the organizers for putting this roundtable together. We’re
EDIT (24/08/2019): Netvizz is no longer publicly accessible and will very probably not come back in the future. EDIT (06/08/2019): This morning, I received notification that Netvizz will lose access to the “Page Public Content Access” permission on September 4, 2019. This means that most of the app will very probably stop working on that
Social media platforms have become really huge. They have very large numbers of users, who share very large numbers of messages, images, videos, and so forth. They have a whole lot of spare cash, either from advertising revenue or from IPOs. They have not only become an intrinsic part of interpersonal communication and of the
When it comes to digital methods, one of the basic conundrums one encounters is the ambivalence between platform and practice. To phrase it in basic terms: are outcomes genuine human practice or simply artifacts of the platform’s affordances? There are different ways to approach this problem conceptually and I would go as far as saying
When it comes to social media, YouTube is maybe the most understudied platform considering it’s enormous popularity in the context of popular culture, politics, and commerce. As part of a long term project on APIs from a software/platform studies perspective, but also in relation to the technical fieldwork required for data-driven empirical work, I have
EDIT (23/01/2015): Changed some text to make clear that you can still run Netvizz by grabbing the source code, registering a new app, and running it in developer mode. EDIT (25/01/2015): I have written a small install guide for the source code on github. I’m unfortunately unable to help with individual problems, if you’re unfamiliar
In 1961, Information Pioneer Mortimer Taube (famous for popularizing mechanized coordinate indexing) wrote a book called Computers and Common Sense. The Myth of Thinking Machines. (Columbia University Press). Here is a quote that reminded me a lot of Philip Agre’s Computation and Human Experience: About a year ago the author was privileged to sit one
It’s a hot day in Amsterdam and writing is going slow. After reading this post on reddit, I ditched the writing for some playtime. In the post, /u/duckvimes_ charts the moderator overlaps between between /r/holocaust and a bunch of racist subreddits. The case is super interesting and the visualization very well done, but I thought
After about two years of thinking and coding, my colleague Erik Borra and myself are happy to announce that the Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit (DMI-TCAT) is finally available for download. DMI-TCAT runs in a LAMP environment and allows for capturing data in a number of different ways via both the streaming
Facebook is a nasty thing to study. It is much more complicated – in terms of interface, architecture, features, etc. – than Twitter for example. It has a lot of users and different types of interaction spaces. It is rather easy to extract a lot of data from it, particularly for companies creating apps and