Thank you SETUP for a great evening! SETUP also compiled all photos, videos and some tweets of the event in the Storify stream embedded below.

Slide 1:
Hi, I’m Anne and this is Esther and we are PhD’s at the University of Amsterdam with the Digital Methods Initiative. We will be showing the first results of a mapping project on the Dutch Blogosphere. It is a work in progress.

Slide 2:
Author on the Dutch blogosphere, Frank Schaap, distinguishes between two types of blogs: linklogs and lifelogs. Linklogs primarily post links to other websites (right), whereas Lifelogs primarily post details about their personal life and everyday experiences (left).

Slide 3:
The current Dutch blogosphere, however, seems to be characterized by the many references to social media platforms. Did the Dutch blogosphere transform from link- and lifelogs into platform-oriented blogs?

Slide 4:
Our aim is to map the changing linking practices of blogs in order to empirically analyze this shift. Following the definition of the blogosphere as the collection of all blogs and their interconnections we aim to map and characterize the Dutch blogosphere. So… which blogs?

Slide 5:
Well, good question! Starting points are very important! This collection of blogs is compiled from several expert sources, namely: lists from Frank Schaap, Merel Roze, Flabber, Frank Meeuwsen and Arie Altena.

Slide 6:
We used the Issue Crawler; a software tool that locates and visualizes networks on the web. It crawls the startingpoints, which means that it follows the hyperlinks from one page to the next, then analyzes and visualizes these connections.

Slide 7:
So what is the Dutch blogosphere? It is what the Dutch blogs link to. This means it also includes non-blogs. Moreover, these apparent strangers in our midst characterize the current Dutch blogosphere.

Slide 8:
First of all, there is a densely linked Dutch blogosphere. This snapshot from June 2010 shows the top 100 prominent blogs and related websites including news sites and social media platforms.

Slide 9:
When we zoom in we can see the links between the nodes and clusters made visible. What you see here is a literary cluster that includes professional writers like Ivo Victoria, Merel Roze, and Walter van den Berg.

Slide 10:
This second cluster is a marketing and technology cluster. It includes Bright, Frankwatching, and Dutch Cowboys. The latter is on the fringe of the networkcluster because, as you can see, it does not link back.

Slide 11:
In this detailed view of map we see the prominence of social media platforms in the Dutch blogosphere, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. These platforms are most prominent within the marketing & technology and news & opinion cluster.

Slide 12:
One of the most central nodes, the micro-blogging platform Twitter is also the largest node in the Dutch blogosphere. When we look at the statistics we see that Twitter almost receives 35 thousand links from the rest of the network.

Slide 13:
Analyzing the links from the current Dutch blogosphere, platforms take a central and prominent position within it. How would one do an analysis on the historical Dutch blogosphere? Was the early 2003 blogosphere indeed organized around lifelogs and linklogs?

Slide 14:
Well, the historical Dutch blogosphere is a work in progress. The first question is: Which starting points to use? We took all the blogs on the Loglijst, a blog indexing site that was started in 2001. The Loglijst scraped and indexed Dutch blogs.

Slide 15:
However, when we checked all the blogs listed in the Loglijst for their response code, or put differently, check to see if they are still online and alive, we notice that many popular blogs from 2003 are no longer online.

Slide 16:
Fortunately, many of the “dead” blogs live on in the Internet Archive which has archived millions of pages from 1996 onward. One can revisit blogs from the past through their WayBackMachine which is the interface to the archive.

Slide 17:
The Internet Archive allows one to search for the history of one specific website or blog and as such privileges single site histories. When entering a URL the output is a list of archived snapshots ordered by date. (asterixes indicate changes to the website)

Slide 18:
This is one of the earliest archived Dutch blogs from 1999. We are automatically going to look up all the blogs from the starting list with one of our tools. Then rip all the links within the blogs and create network visualizations like we have seen before.

Slide 19:
The Dutch blogosphere is an under studied object and we wish to contribute by mapping its history. This proposed study enables us to create collections from the Dutch blogosphere for every year between 1999 and 2009, and compare and analyze these pasts states of the Dutch blogosphere.

Slide 20:
Thank you for your attention, kthnxbai, see you on digitalmethods.net

Joris van Hoboken, PhD candidate at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, talked about what Google knows and what Google wants. Google is no longer just a search engine, it is now an extraordinary collection of services. What does it want with all these services? An image of a whiteboard used during one of Google’s brainstorms reveals a desire for Digital World Dominance which may be achieved by providing all the services needed. Google wants to be the most trusted personal service provider. It wants to be the matchmaker of information demand and supply.

What Google knows.

Google knows a lot but we don’t really know for sure what it really knows. As a methodology van Hoboken applies the famous concept of the known unknowns, made famous by United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.

Google knows your friends and family. Google knows your digital literacy level, it knows how you search and how advanced your search queries are. Google knows if you are paranoid, if you go to the Google Privacy center. Google knows when we are sick, e.g. Google Flu Trends. Google knows when we are voting, e.g. Google General Election 2010. Google knows what we are voting and who we should vote for.

Google knows your unknown knows.

(c) Peter Steiner, July 5th 1993 for an issue of The New Yorker.

Google knows you’re a dog.

The power of Google is the power to decide which of the known unknowns are real. A problematic issue that needs to be addressed is that Google doesn’t want to take responsibility for what it knows.

More pictures from the Graduation Day on Flickr.

Prof. Richard Rogers started with situating Digital Methods within the field of Internet Studies as one of the three strands that deals with the computational turn within Humanities. The first project on Facebook activism was presented by PhD candidate Lonneke van der Velden. The project addresses the claim of Facebook as a form of slactivism by looking at what types of activism Facebook enables. The second presentation by Catalina Iorga looks at the myth of data-driven citizen journalism by asking: “Do non-mainstream digital media (e.g. citizen blogs) directly reference Afghan War Diary individual document pages?

The second theme track contained two projects dealing with Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 analysis and multiple times online. PhD candidate Anne Helmond talked about how the social web has new means of recommending that do not rely on the traditional fundamental unit of analysis in Web 1.0, the link. To what extent do we have new web currencies such as the Like or the (re)Tweet and what type of content is being Liked? In Pace Online PhD candidate Esther Weltevrede addressed the multiplicity of time online by looking at how spheres handle time differently by asking: “How is the temporality of content handled by engines and platforms?” It further complicates the notion of multiplicity by looking at both the update cycles of content (freshness) and the update cycle of the engines (relevance).

PhD candidate Sabine Niederer introduced the final session on the web as a problem for content analysis and asks: “What type of content analysis can be done with the Web.” When the method follows the medium the question becomes: “How to let content speak for itself with no coding, or labeling the (sub) discourses?” The research project on ‘Controversy on Twitter,’ presented by Assistant Professor Thomas Poell, asks how controversy is organized on Twitter. The project focusses on the controversy of the Ground Zero Mosque and looked at (1) how much of the activity was organized through labels and hash tags, (2) which labels and hash tags were used when tweeting about the issue and which parties aligned with these labels and hash tags, (3) if hash tags organize different accounts of the controversy.

Finally, teacher and Digital Methods Initiative’s lead tool developer Erik Borra talked about repurposing Google’s related search for research. This new tool can provide: an overview of the organization of a content space, insights into query design, starting points, identification of programs and anti-programs and classification and organization.

Cross-posted from the Digital Methods Initiative blog.

The 2.0 denotes an ‘improved’ or progressional version of the web that builds upon and develops Web 1.0. [...] Implicitly rooted in this vision of the web is a sense of teleological progress, of purposeful and directed development, of continual and designed improvement. (Beer 2009: 986)

Instead of looking at Web 2.0 as the “next” version of the web, we can also look at the changes in the structure of the web, specifically looking at web native objects. In this view, Web 1.0 consists of the static page, whereas Web 2.0 consists of dynamic pages filled with the web native object of the status update or the post. This may be seen in the blog and specifically in RSS – denoting changes to a page-, which could be considered a main object of study in the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and in the social networking site with its profiles that display a page (The Wall) filled with posts. An important shift has taken place in the structure of the web: in Web 1.0 hyperlinks mainly link to static pages and objects and in Web 2.0 the hyperlink links to dynamic pages and objects. This shift affects the way we map and analyze the web.

In general terms, Web 2.0 is a concept that forms part of the lexicon of a range of emerging accounts that commentate on a large-scale shift toward a ‘participatory’ and ‘collaborative’ version of the web, where users are able to get involved and create content. (Beer 2009: 986)

This ‘participatory’ and ‘collaborative’ web has created new objects and new types of hyperlinks that characterize Web 2.0: the subscribe, the like, the share, the nr of retweets, the submit to Digg, the save to Delicious, the social network profile, the shortened url, etc. The question also becomes, are these new characteristics forming a new currency of the web? In Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web, Jill Walker describes links as the currency of the web and asks what its currency is. Even though there is a black market for links she notes that “The more common form of trade in this economy of links is barter exchange. Reciprocal linking and link exchange are common practice, and are loosely organised as favours or more systematically in web rings and blogrolling.” (Walker 2002)

Is the hyperlink still the currency of the web in Web 2.0?

If we want to map the current web, how can we use, or adjust, the IssueCrawler to deal with these new objects and new types of links? How do we map a dynamic web? Currently, the IssueCrawler collapses all social networking links from platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Current web mapping and analysis focuses on the interrelations between users on for example Twitter by isolating it. How can we map the current web by not looking at these platforms in isolation but as part of the so-called “ecosystem” they are part of?

The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The “velocity of information” is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. […] The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool. […] Internet culture is a culture of nowness. (Gelernter 2010)

The lifestream is characterized by both time (which we will deal with later) and cross-syndication. The interwoven social media platforms gathered into a central source. How can we analyze cross-platform syndication, which tools do we currently have at hand and which tools do we need to perform such an analysis?

The profile is a common feature of Web 2.0, and is the place where information is gathered about us, our activities, our choices, tastes and preferences and so on. (Beer 2009: 996)

One way into operationalizing Web 2.0’ifying the IssueCrawler is looking at the structure of different social networking sites and platforms. Profile structures may be checked by looking into username checkers. A second way is, instead of categorizing sites by their domain name (.edu, .us, .nl) is by type of platform. A third way is to move beyond the hyperlink as the prime object of mapping as proposed by for example Greg Elmer (2006).

How are networks formed in 2.0? One could argue that a network is formed through liking, sharing and saving in addition to linking. What are the web native objects and characteristics that form networks in the 2.0? What is the role of platforms in the formation of networks in 2.0? Considering the politics of platforms (Gillespie 2010), are some platforms more central than others? How open or closed are these platforms and how does this affect mapping?

The text above describes three meta-issues, which would translate into three projects:

1. Issuecrawler 2.0 > How to deal with the 2.0 in the network?
2. Types of 2.0 links/The link 2.0 > Is the hyperlink still the currency of the web in Web 2.0? How to compare recommendation objects? Hyperlink vs. the like or the share? What do they do to the quality of the web?
3. Cross-platform syndication > cross-spherical comparison of platforms? Content circulation analysis has become difficult in the social web
4. Platform dependency > Changing linking practices > Dutch Blogosphere. How and where to find issues in 2.0? How do you define what an actor is?