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Observing Southampton through the Web at ESRC Festival of Social Science

As part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, the Web Science Institute hosted the event ā€œObserving Southampton through the Webā€ at the University of Southampton Bolderwood Campus. The event started with an introduction from Susan Halford, Professor of Sociology and also a director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton. Continue reading →

Redecentralize the Web: Event Report

A few weeks ago I went to an unconference called ā€œredecentralize the webā€œ. It was a two day event but I decided to go for just the Saturday as I needed at least some weekend downtime. The venue was excellent. It was hosted at the ThoughtWorks office in SoHo, London. Working wifi, nearly enough coffee, very good food (in 2015 geeks eat kale). My main goal for the day was to talk about the work weā€™ve done around the autodiscoverable Organisation Profile Documents. Continue reading →

Welcome to new Digital Champions!

It was great to see so many old and new faces at the Digital Champions "start of year lunch" the other day: From last year we have Tim O'Riordan, Sarah Hewitt, Gareth Beeston, Bartosz Paszcza (all from Web Science), Alex Hovden (Physics) and Sylvian Patrick (Digital Marketing). Newbies signed up so far this term are Amanda Herron, Hourik Sarafian and Ashley Stout (Digital Marketing) and Nic Fair and Dola Majekodunmi (Web Science) and there are more to come... Continue reading →

Data Literacy Workshop at #WebSci15

This workshop was held as part of the Web Science 2015 Conference in Oxford, on a boiling June 30th. Invited speakers included Jonathan Gray, Director of Policy at the Open Knowledge Foundation, Katelyn Rogers from the School of Data and James Stewart from the Government Digital Services team. The panel was moderated by Sir Nigel Shadbolt, one of whose tweets about the workshop was retweeted 28 times! https://twitter. Continue reading →

MOOC Data Visualisation Hackthon

Exploring and presenting our research data in a readily understandable visual form is an important aspect of communicating our work. Last week at our inaugural MOOC Data Visualisation Hackthon, members of the Web Observatory team and the Web and Internet Science research group at the University of Southampton get togetherĀ to share and develop d3Ā skills, explore new datasets, and make meaningful visualisations. Continue reading →

The era of “big data analytics”

While it may sound like a buzzphrase, there's no denying that we are well and truly in the era of big data analytics. An ever-increasing portion of our daily lives, business and social relations are mediated by digital platforms and computational processes. The implications of these changes are both dramatic and subtle, and we are still only beginning to understand them. Continue reading →

Microsoft and British Council Deep Learning Event, Kuala Lumpur

I'm on my way to Kuala Lumpur to talk about MOOCs and Curriculum Innovation at an event organised by Microsoft and the British Council. UPDATE 13th May - Storifys of tweets from the #ASEANDeepLearning event have now been added below the slides. 1. For the panel discussion (Monday 11th May) http://www.slideshare.net/lisaharris/integrating-deep-learning-skills-into-the-curriculum 2. For the keynote (Tuesday 12th May) http://www.slideshare. Continue reading →

Open Data 4 Development Project

Web Science Researchers Mark Frank and Johanna Walker have completed their Open Data 4 Development project 'User Centered Methods for Measuring the Value of Open Data'. The project attempts to derive 'bottom-up' methods for understanding the most valuable attributes of Open Data by looking at challenges experienced by third sector organisations in the UK and India and establishing what characteristics Open Data needs in order to be useful. Continue reading →