Untangling the Web artwork

Untangling the Web

34 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 6 ratings

Web Science is the interdisciplinary study of the World Wide Web, drawing on science, social science, law, and the humanities.

Today, Web Science is needed more than ever. As the Web evolves, it is clear that we need in-depth and sustained interdisciplinary research to describe, analyze, and intervene in its future.

Untangling the Web is a podcast of the Web Science Trust, a charity promoting the understanding of the Web, through education and research in the discipline of Web Science.

On this podcast, we bring thought leaders from around the world to explore how the Web is shaping society and how society in turn is shaping the Web. We hope to improve our understanding of the Web, promote the Web’s positive impact on society – and change the Web for the better. The podcast is hosted by the SONIC Research Group.

Social Sciences Science
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed

Episodes

Brewster Kahle on Rewinding and Archiving the Web

February 05, 2022 00:31 - 23 minutes - 32.3 MB

Our guest for this episode is Brewster Kahle, a digital librarian who has spent his career intent on providing universal access to all knowledge. Kahle created the Internet’s first publishing system, Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and two sites that help catalog the web by collecting data of books, web pages, music, television, and software: Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive. He also implemented the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web. In this episode, Brewst...

Howard Rheingold on Predicting Technology’s Future

January 21, 2022 17:56 - 23 minutes - 32.6 MB

Our guest for this episode is Howard Rheingold, a critic, writer, and teacher who specializes in the cultural, social, and political implications of modern communication media. Howard wrote about the earliest personal computers at Xerox PARC, and he was also one of the early users of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or The WELL, an influential early online community. In 1994, he was hired as the founding executive director of HotWired. He is the author of several books, including The Virtual ...

Safiya Noble on Algorithms of Oppression

January 07, 2022 17:50 - 24 minutes - 34.9 MB

Our guest for this episode is Safiya Noble, an associate professor of gender studies and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Safiya is the co-founder and faculty director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, an interdisciplinary research center focused on the intersection of human rights, social justice, democracy, and technology. She is also the author of the best-selling book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. Her ...

Vint Cerf on Launching the Internet on Earth – Then in Space

December 24, 2021 18:00 - 24 minutes - 34.5 MB

Our guest for this episode is Vint Cerf, who is considered to be one of the fathers of the internet. Vint is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and currently serves as Google’s vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist – we’ll talk in this episode about how that title came to be. Vint has served in executive positions at places like the Internet Society and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and serves in advisory capacities at NIST and NASA. In this conversation,...

David Lazer on Using the Web to Study the Web

December 10, 2021 18:00 - 21 minutes - 30.3 MB

Our guest for this episode is David Lazer, a Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. David is among the leading scholars in the world on misinformation, and he has also researched how we can use the web as a tool to improve our political system. He co-wrote the book Politics with the People: Building Directly Representative Democracy, which was published in 2018. In this episode, David talks about the potential for members of Congress ...

Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Operating System of Our Lives

November 26, 2021 18:58 - 20 minutes - 28.7 MB

Our guest for this episode is Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. Siva is a regular columnist for The Guardian as well as the author of Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford, 2018) and The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press, 2011), among other books. He focuses on how big tech companies – especially Google and Facebook – are permeating our lives. In this conv...

Children and the Digital Future with Sonia Livingstone

November 11, 2021 23:25 - 20 minutes - 28.3 MB

Our guest for this episode is Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Sonia’s research focuses on children and young people’s media literacy and rights in the digital environment. She recently co-authored (with Alicia Blum-Ross) the book Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives, published by Oxford U Press. In this episode, Sonia suggests we examine children’s media use in...

Deborah McGuinness on Using Web Science to Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy

October 29, 2021 23:42 - 22 minutes - 31.5 MB

Our guest for this episode is Deborah McGuinness, Professor of Computer, Cognitive, and Web Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Deborah specializes in creating ontology-enabled research infrastructure for work in interdisciplinary settings. In this episode, Deborah explains how we can use ontologies to create programs that help us make the best decisions, from pairing wine and food to choosing to start a new medication. She shares her excitement about the potential intersect...

The Role of Research with Sandra González-Bailón

October 16, 2021 03:00 - 21 minutes - 30 MB

In this episode, we chat with Sandra González-Bailón, who is on the faculty at the Annenberg School for Communication. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, data mining, computational tools and political communication. She is the author of Decoding the Social World, published by MIT Press in 2017, and was also the keynote speaker of the ACM Web Science Conference in 2019. During this conversation, Sandra discussed some of her research about people’s news exposure — and w...

Semantic Web Science with Nigel Shadbolt

October 01, 2021 19:24 - 24 minutes - 34.3 MB

In this special 25th episode of Untangling the Web, we talk with one of the founders of web science, Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt. He's Principal of Jesus college and professorial Research Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Oxford.  As information adviser to the United Kingdom government, he encouraged the release of many 1000s of public sector data sets. He was knighted in 2013 for services to science and engineering. During this episode, Nigel recounts some of those founding ...

Azeem Azhar on the Exponential Age

September 18, 2021 13:58 - 25 minutes - 35.1 MB

For this episode, we talk with Azeem Azhar, an entrepreneur, investor and author. Previously, he founded PeerIndex, a big data analytics firm acquired in 2015. And his first book, “The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society,” was just published this month. Azeem was an early user of the Web — he takes us back to those days and tells us about some of the first social media sites. Then, he describes what it was like when platforms like Face...

Reporting on the Web with Rory Cellan-Jones

September 03, 2021 19:29 - 26 minutes - 35.8 MB

In this episode, we talk with journalist Rory Cellan-Jones. He's reported for BBC for 40 years, and for much of that time primarily focused on business and technology stories. He has covered everything from smartphones to social media and more. He's just published a new book, which he spoke about at this year's ACM Web Science conference. For this episode, Rory talks about some of the biggest and best stories of his career at BBC and beyond.  He was there to see this generation's "model For...

Cultural Perspectives on the Web with Pablo Boczkowski

August 20, 2021 18:14 - 27 minutes - 37.4 MB

Our guest for this episode is Pablo Boczkowski, who is Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, as well as the founder and director of the Center for Latinx Digital Media. He’s also the cofounder and the co-director of the Center for the Study of Media and Society in Argentina, and has been a senior research fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, Germany. In this episode, Pablo discusses his ...

Dating on the Web with Taha Yasseri

August 06, 2021 19:15 - 25 minutes - 35.5 MB

For this episode, we talk with Taha Yasseri, an associate professor at the School of Sociology and a Geary Fellow at the Geary Institute for Public Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland. He has been a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and AI, and a Research Fellow at Wolfson College at the University of Oxford.  He is interested in the dynamics of social machines on the Web. During this episode, Taha tell...

Web Epistemology with Richard Rogers

July 23, 2021 16:53 - 22 minutes - 31 MB

In this episode, we talk with Richard Rogers, a professor and chair of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. An award-winning author, he also is Director of the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), known for the development of software tools for the study of online data. He's interested in web epistemology -- and more -- and was co-chair for one of the very first Web Science conferences. In this episode, Richard digs into "digital methods" and what that really means, as...

The Hype Machine with Sinan Aral

July 09, 2021 22:07 - 28 minutes - 39.8 MB

In this episode, we talk with Sinan Aral, an award-winning researcher, entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the David Austin professor of Management, Marketing IT and Data Science at MIT, where he also directs MIT's initiative on the Digital Economy. And in 2020, he published his first book: The Hype Machine. During this conversation, Sinan gives us a "tour" of the book. He talks about how -- and why -- social media is built to hype us up, as well as how making social platforms intero...

Web Archiving with Matt Weber

June 25, 2021 18:07 - 21 minutes - 30.2 MB

In this episode, we talk with Matt Weber, a faculty member in the Department of Communication at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. With more than a decade of experience researching information ecosystems, organizations and communities, Matt focuses on the use of large scale web data to study processes of change. In addition, Matt has been an active member of the web science community. He's the program co-chair for the ACM 2021 Web Science Conference, and deli...

Next Generation of Web Science with Emilio Ferrara

June 11, 2021 18:19 - 22 minutes - 31.3 MB

For this episode, we talk with Emilio Ferrara, an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He's also a Research Team Leader for AI at USC’s Information Sciences Institute and the Director of the Annenberg Networks Network, ANN for short. Earlier this year, Emilio became the Chair of the Web Science Trust Network of Laboratories (WSTNet for short). In this episode, Emilio discusses his vision for the next generation of Web Science, especially in light of h...

Exploring Identity on the Web with Aleks Krotoski

May 28, 2021 17:46 - 23 minutes - 21.5 MB

Our guest for this episode is Dr. Aleks Krotoski, an award-winning international broadcaster, author and academic. She studies and writes about technology and interactivity. Her book, “Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You,” based on her hit columns in the Guardian and Observer, was published in 2012. Since then, she’s continued to break ground in academia and journalism, and she’s currently a Visiting Fellow in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of ...

Mental Health and the Web with Munmun De Choudhury

May 15, 2021 02:47 - 26 minutes - 24.1 MB

Our guest for this episode is Munmun De Choudhury, a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she leads the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab.  Her research centers on using social media to better understand and improve mental health. She draws on an interdisciplinary approach, combining social computing, machine learning and natural language analysis with insights and theories from the social, behavioral and health sciences. In this episode, Munmun t...

Networks on the Web with Robert Ackland

April 30, 2021 18:02 - 21 minutes - 19.7 MB

Our guest for this episode is Robert Ackland, a professor from the School of Sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra. Rob studies networks on the Web, and he established the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks -- VOSON for short -- to provide tools for research on this topic. During this episode, Rob talks about his early work with hyperlinks, as well as how he evolved his research and VOSON tools as the web entered the social media era. He explains how ...

Web and the New Future of Work with Jaime Teevan

April 16, 2021 16:19 - 26 minutes - 24.7 MB

In this episode, we talk with Jaime Teevan, chief scientist for Microsoft’s Experiences and Devices. In this role, she's charged with creating the future of productivity. She also developed the first personalized search algorithm used by Bing and introduced microproductivity into Microsoft Office. This conversation centers around a report by Jaime Teevan and her colleagues at Microsoft, which is what they believe to be the world’s largest synthesis of findings related to how people’s work p...

Privacy and the Web with Danny Weitzner

April 02, 2021 15:09 - 29 minutes - 27.3 MB

For this episode, we talk with Danny Weitzner, a proud founding member of the Web Science Trust who will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming 2021 ACM Web Science virtual conference. He's a 3Com Founders Principal Research Scientist at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and also the founding director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative. His research interests include accountable systems, privacy, cybersecurity and online freedom of expression. During this...

Web Science Challenges in India with Ravindran Balaraman

March 19, 2021 17:59 - 23 minutes - 21.4 MB

Ravindran (Ravi) Balaraman is our guest for this episode (23 min. long). He is the Mindtree faculty fellow and a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. And he also heads the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at IIT Madras, which is the leading interdisciplinary AI research center in India and India’s first lab to join the Web Science Trust Network of laboratories from around the world. His r...

Digital Inequality in Web Use with Eszter Hargittai

March 05, 2021 16:21 - 28 minutes - 25.8 MB

Our guest for this episode is Eszter Hargittai, who is a professor and holds the chair of the Internet Use and Society in the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich,  where she also heads the Web Use project research group. She's also one of the most cited web science researchers in the world. Her research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media, especially how differences in people's web skills and digital literacy influence what th...

Identity and the Web with Deen Freelon

February 19, 2021 19:04 - 29 minutes - 26.8 MB

Our guest for this episode is Deen Freelon, an associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. His research ranges from political expression through digital media to data science to computational methods. He has also served as principal investigator on grants from the Knight Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the US Institute of Peace. Not only does Deen make intellectual contributions to the fields of web science, communicati...

Data and Privacy with Alex "Sandy" Pentland

February 05, 2021 15:41 - 25 minutes - 23.3 MB

In this episode, we talk with Alex “Sandy" Pentland, who is one of the most cited web scholars at the crossroads of web science, network science, and computational social science. He’s a professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, directs the MIT Connection Science Research Initiative, and heads MIT’s Human Dynamics Group, among other accomplishments. His work has pioneered organizational engineering, wearable computing, modern biometrics, and more. In this conversation, Sandy brings insig...

Work and the Web with Gina Neff

January 22, 2021 11:06 - 22 minutes - 20.3 MB

In this episode, we talk with Gina Neff, whose work focuses on...work! No, that's not a typo — she's actually a sociologist who studies how web-based technologies are shaping the changing nature of work. Gina is a professor of Technology & Society at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, and has published three well-acclaimed books. In this conversation, Gina tells us about the cross between web science and work. She brings us through the...

"#Hashtag Activism" and #WebScience with Brooke Foucault Welles

January 08, 2021 21:26 - 19 minutes - 17.8 MB

Our guest for this episode is Brooke Foucault Welles. She recently co-authored the award-winning book, #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice. Brooke studies how online communication networks enable and constrain behavior, with particular emphasis on how these networks both enhance and mitigate marginalization. During this conversation, Brooke talks about just exactly what "hashtag activism" means, especially in the context of web science, and about her research into specific...

The Bits and Bots of the Web with Fil Menczer

December 18, 2020 16:48 - 30 minutes - 27.8 MB

For this episode, we talk with Fil Menczer, whose work is awesome. No, seriously — he’s the director of OSoMe, which is pronounced “awesome” and stands for the Observatory on Social Media. Fil’s research spans web science, computational social science, network science, and data science. In this conversation, Fil gives insight into how information can spread on social media and be manipulated. He talks what astroturfing looks like and how bots can work. And he tells us the tools that the Obs...

From Social Networking to Social Petworking with Jen Golbeck

November 30, 2020 09:24 - 24 minutes - 22.2 MB

Today we talk with Jen Golbeck, who is known for her work in computational social network analysis. Her models for computing trust between people in social networks were amongst the first in the field. Now, she’s a professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park. In this episode, she discusses her path to web science, her work in trust-based recommender systems, and how we can use web data to understand people's behaviors. But Jen isn't just int...

Web Science — From the Beginning and Beyond with Dame Wendy Hall

November 11, 2020 00:27 - 26 minutes - 36.5 MB

In this episode, we talk with Dame Wendy Hall, who was involved with creating the very field of web science. Wendy was a Founding Director of the Web Science Research Initiative, is the Managing director of the Web Science Trust, and became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2009. She explains some of her contributions to the field, as well as offers a perspective of how web science is changing under geopolitical forces, the pandemic, and more. Going beyond all this, she also dives in...

Symphonic Social Science – and Web Science with Susan Halford

September 23, 2020 15:49 - 20 minutes - 15.2 MB

In this episode, we talk with Susan Halford, Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Futures at the University of Bristol in the UK. Susan has been at the forefront of championing a deeper engagement between social scientists and computer scientists in addressing questions confronting Web Science. She explains why this partnership is so important in advancing not only the future of the Web but also the future of society.

Web Science – Why Now More Than Ever? with Jim Hendler

September 23, 2020 15:42 - 27 minutes - 20 MB

In this episode, we talk with Jim Hendler, Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US. Since those early days in the mid-2000s, Web Science has witnessed remarkable growth and attracted global attention. Jim points to some of the most significant contributions Web Science has offered society and argues why Web Science is relevant now more than ever …