LINIS at Web Science conference in Bloomington.

What is Web science? Does the web “deserve” its own area of knowledge or is it just another academic fashion? The Web is the largest human information construct in history. The Web is transforming society. Web Science studies the vast information network of people, communities, organizations, applications, and policies that shape and are shaped by the Web. Computing, physical, and social sciences come together, complementing each other in understanding how the Web affects our interactions and behaviors.

The Seventh annual Web science conference was held at Indiana university, Bloomington, in June 2014, and was co-sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other businesses. This highly selective event included 30 presentations with acceptance rate of less than one third. The presentation that was awarded the status of the best paper analyzed 2.3 tweets devoted to the Gezi park protests in Turkey and, among other things, it found out that with time the discussion of the problem became more democratic and the ability to influence other users more equally distributed.

The paper by Sergey Koltcov (LINIS) also got quite notable feedback. It discussed the unresolved methodological problem of clustering of large text collections obtained online, in particular the issue of instability of topic modeling algorithm. During experiments at LINIS it was found out that different solutions produced by this algorithm are not just slightly different, but they differ dramatically so that no conclusions about topical composition of the collection can be drawn. It thus does not let scholars understand whether, for example, Gezi park has become a more or a less discussed issue in a given period of time compared to the previous time. LINIS is currently working on methods to stabilize topic modeling results.

Date

30 July 2014

About

Internet Studies Lab