A Brief Trip Report from WebSci 2018
The early part of last week I attended the Web Science 2018 conference. It was hosted here in Amsterdam which was nice for me. It was nice to be at a conference where I could go home in the evening.
Web Science is an interesting research area in that it treats the Web itself as an object of study. It’s a highly interdisciplinary area that combines primarily social science with computer science. I always envision it as a loop with studies of what’s actually going on the Web leading to new interventions on the Web which we then need to study.
There were what I guess a hundred or so people there … it’s a small but fun community. I won’t give a complete rundown of the conference. You can find summaries of each day done by Cat Morgan (Workshop Day, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3) but instead give an assortment of things that stuck out for me:
- The conference also hosted Tim Berners-Lee ACM Turing lecture, which is an obviously big deal. This was opened up to the public. There were ~900 people there. It was an excellent talk giving a history of the web and thoughts about its current status. Video will be available soon.
- Interesting work on how people evaluate the credibility of online news in search engine result pages.
- {poem}.py
- Nice reproducibility pack from Laura Hollink & co at CWI on gender differences on wikipedia.
- My favorite talk by far “Not Every Remix is an Innovation” – looking at tracking remixing in an online 3D printing sharing community. Amazing insights into process.
- Future of Semantics on the Web – nice overview and some good next steps but I wanted something bolder.
- Why web archives are so important for research.
- Super-turkers – can you make a living crowd sourcing?
- Novelty detection in design: learned about dribbble.com
And some tweets:
Think Links 