JISC Digital Festival 2014 – Notes Day 1 (Cont…)

The other presentation I attended on day 1 of the festival was that given by Prof. David de Roure of the  University of Oxford.  He spoke on “Big Data for the Social Sciences“, which I hoped would be relevant to my own work on Learning Analytics.  This blog post is my notes from his talk.

How does technology get used in research?

-> What is this new “big data” and what does it tell us?

• Big data does not respect disciplinary boundaries
• Data has been around a long time
• There is a lot of “hype” around big data that has led to inflated expectations of it
• Can consider 2013 as the year we sort to define big data and 2014 the year we begun to use it effectively
• It is big data because of both the velocity and volume of the data being generated
• “Data deluge” is now a phenomenon across the disciplines
• In the past analysis moved from the universities to business, now it is from the business world to the universities.
• There is  huge unsatisfied demand for “data scientists”
• Mores Law vs The Big Social

• We use digital tools because it is the ecosystem – Research 2.0
• What is the relevance of Social Science to Big Data?
  • We need to think through the implications
• RCUK’s definition of “big data” is: big enough that we can’t deal with it as we did before
• Why do we want it?
  • To do things in new ways
  • To do new things
  • e.g. Twitter data – we can look at the evolution of social processes in real-time
• We need the expertise of those from classical Social Science
  • e.g. food vs consumption
  • can obtain new data from new sources (e.g. supermarket loyalty cards)
• We can use different data sets to correlate
• Real-time uses of big data, e.g. Twitter
  • spread of infectious diseases
  • riots
• Visualisation can lead to better analysis
• Underpinned by available infrastructure
• Wikipedia is an example of  a social medium
  • behaviorally it is socially constructed
  • different in different countries/languages

— end —

Social Software – the power is in the community

I am working on a proposal for a Social Software Approach to Accessibility.  I have come to the conclusion that the software is the easy bit.  The big challenge is to build up the community of users to exceed the critical mass needed to yield sufficient benefit to all members of the community.  Now social networks can be harnessed to build such a community; Facebook and Twitter are good at circulating the existence of another social network and advertising its benefits.  The challenge then becomes how to offer sufficient benefits at the new network begins to grow.

In the case of the planned Social Software Approach to Accessibility it depends on numerous users with diverse access needs to quickly report on how accessible a site or resource was for them.  This report is held against a profile of their access needs so that relevant reports can be made available to other users with similar profiles looking for such resources.  If the network only numbers 10s or 100s of users then the benefits of it are unlikely to accrue.  It is estimated that a critical mass of over a 1000 users will be needed.  So the challenge is a marketing one: how to build the network from zero to 1000+ members quickly before interest is lost.

Any ideas on seeding such a network would be most welcome.  If anyone wants to know further details of the proposed Social Software Approach to Accessibility please ask but I am only giving out minimal information at this stage until we have had the time to build a working prototype and start building a user community.

Twitter, blogging and the use of social tools

This is a reworking of a post in Cloudworks on a Twitter vs Blogging debate, see:
http://cloudworks.ac.uk/index.php/cloud/view/2266.html

The way I use Twitter and Blogs both in authoring and reading modes varies over time depending on what I am working on; the time I give to the online world; my mood; the status of my social connections (face to face and online) and probably many other factors. Twitter currently helps me discoverer blog posts of interest; but blogs help me reflect; they both have their roles.

Further, the whole point of social software is that is use evolves socially. The technologies have particular affordances that lend themselves better to different types of interaction but I “believe” (ironically as a I am by background a systems engineer) that it is the social development of this use that takes precedence over the technical factors in determining which tools become dominant in terms of usage.

We use the tools that enable us to keep in contact with our existing social networks or discover or construct new networks. Now different people use the same tools for different and multiple purposes. This can generate levels of “noise” that some find intolerable. In attempts to mange the noise levels they may filter posts, constrain their networks or shift to alternative tools.

I don’t think this situation will converge to the dominant use of a single tool or even small set of tools for long periods of time. Twitter will have a finite life time.

I find the desire of humans to communicate and our inventiveness in ways of doing it over the millennia fascinating. Web 2.0 is a tiny blip in that. How much better a society we construct though if we do effectively communicate.