# Notebook from Seva1000/seva1000.github.io
Path: markdown_generator/talks.ipynb

# Talks markdown generator
Takes a TSV of talks with metadata and converts them for use with academicpages.github.io.

TODO: Make this work with BibTex or other databases of talks, rather than Stuart's TSV format.
_____no_output_____

!pip install getorg --upgrade
import pandas as pd
import osRequirement already up-to-date: getorg in /srv/paws/lib/python3.4/site-packages
Requirement already up-to-date: geopy in /srv/paws/lib/python3.4/site-packages (from getorg)
Requirement already up-to-date: retrying in /srv/paws/lib/python3.4/site-packages (from getorg)
Requirement already up-to-date: pygithub in /srv/paws/lib/python3.4/site-packages (from getorg)
Requirement already up-to-date: six>=1.7.0 in /srv/paws/lib/python3.4/site-packages (from retrying->getorg)
Requirement already up-to-date: python-jose in /srv/paws/lib/python3.4/site-packages (from pygithub->getorg)
Requirement already up-to-date: pycrypto<2.7.0,>=2.6.0 in /srv/paws/lib/python3.4/site-packages (from python-jose->pygithub->getorg)
Requirement already up-to-date: ecdsa<1.0 in /srv/paws/lib/python3.4/site-packages (from python-jose->pygithub->getorg)
Requirement already up-to-date: future<1.0 in /srv/paws/lib/python3.4/site-packages (from python-jose->pygithub->getorg)
talks = pd.read_csv("talks.tsv", sep="\t", header=0)
talks_____no_output_____html_escape_table = {
    "&": "&",
    '"': """,
    "'": "'",
    ">": ">",
    "<": "<",
    }

def html_escape(text):
    if type(text) is str:
        return "".join(html_escape_table.get(c,c) for c in text)
    else:
        return "False"_____no_output_____!mkdir _talks_____no_output_____loc_dict = {}
count = 0
base_url = "staeiou.github.io"

for row, item in talks.iterrows():
    md_filename = str(item.date) + "-" + item.slug + ".md"
    html_filename = str(item.date) + "-" + item.slug
    year = item.date[:4]
    count += 1

    md = "---\ntitle: \""   + item.title + '"\n'
    md += "collection: talks" + "\n"
    if item.talk_type is not None:
        md += 'type: "' + item.talk_type + '"\n'

    md += "permalink: /talks/" + html_filename + "\n"

    if item.venue is not None:
        md += 'venue: "' + item.venue + '"\n'

    if item.date is not None:
        md += "date: " + str(item.date) + "\n"

    if item.geoloc is not None:
        md += 'location: "' + str(item.geoloc) + '"\n'

    if len(str(item.summary))>10:
        md += 'excerpt: "'
        md += html_escape(item.summary) + '"\n'
    elif len(str(item.description))>10:
        if len(str(item.description))>200:
            md += 'excerpt: "'
            md += html_escape(item.description[:200])
            md += '..."\n'
        else:
            md += 'excerpt: "'
            md += html_escape(item.description) + '"\n'

    md += "---\n"

    if isinstance(item.url, str):
        md += "\nLink to more information\n"

    if len(str(item.description))>10:
        md += "\n" + html_escape(item.description) + "\n"
    md_filename = os.path.basename(md_filename)
    print(md)

    with open("_talks/" + md_filename, 'w') as f:
        f.write(md)---
title: "A Communicative Ethnography of Argumentative Strategies in a Wikipedian Content Dispute"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2008-03-01-tamu-communicative-ethnography
venue: "Exploring New Media Worlds"
date: 2008-03-01
location: "College Station, TX"
---

---
title: "Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2008-07-19-wikimania-academics-wikipedia
venue: "Annual Wikimedia Conference (Wikimania)"
date: 2008-07-19
location: "Alexandria, Egypt"
---

---
title: "Working With/in Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2009-03-28-aaas-wikipedia-infrastructures
venue: "Annual Conference on Science and Technology in Society"
date: 2009-03-28
location: "Wasthington, Dc"
---

---
title: "Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2009-04-25-mit6-media-use-wikipedia
venue: "Media in Transition 6"
date: 2009-04-25
location: "Cambridge, MA"
---

---
title: "Algorithmic Governance: The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2009-07-26-wikiconf-nyc-algorithmc-governance
venue: "First Annual Wikiconference NYC"
date: 2009-07-26
location: "New York, NY"
---

---
title: "Trace Ethnography: An ANT Method for the Study of Sociotechnical Networks"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2009-09-25-nyu-trace-ethnography
venue: " the Second Annual Media Sociology Forum"
date: 2009-09-25
location: "New York, NY"
---

---
title: "The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools"
collection: talks
type: "Conference proceedings talk"
permalink: /talks/2009-10-27-wikisym-social-roles-bots
venue: "International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration"
date: 2009-10-27
location: "Orlando, Florida"
excerpt: "A short paper showing the recent explosive growth of automated editors (or bots) in Wikipedia, which have taken on many new tasks in administrative spaces."
---

Link to more information

A short paper showing the recent explosive growth of automated editors (or bots) in Wikipedia, which have taken on many new tasks in administrative spaces.

---
title: "Where Are the Missing Wikipedians? The Sociology of a Bot"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2009-10-28-4s-missing-wikipedians
venue: "Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S)"
date: 2009-10-28
location: "Arlington, Virginia"
---

---
title: "The Wisdom of Bots: A Critique of ‘Self-Organization’ in Wikipedia"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2010-01-10-cpov-wisdom-of-bots
venue: "Critical Point of View: Wikipedia and the Politics of Open Knowledge"
date: 2010-01-10
location: "Bangalore, India"
---

---
title: "The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal"
collection: talks
type: "Conference proceedings talk"
permalink: /talks/2010-02-25-cscw-banning-vandal
venue: "Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work"
date: 2010-02-25
location: "Savannah, Georgia"
excerpt: "This paper traces out a heterogeneous network of humans and non-humans involved in the identification and banning of a single vandal in Wikipedia."
---

Link to more information

This paper traces out a heterogeneous network of humans and non-humans involved in the identification and banning of a single vandal in Wikipedia.

---
title: "Bot Politics: How is Automation Changing the Wikipedian Society?  Critical Point of View II"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2010-03-26-cpov-bot-politics
venue: "Critical Point of View: Wikipedia and the Politics of Open Knowledge"
date: 2010-03-26
location: "Amsterdam, the Netherlands"
---

---
title: "Academic Researchers in Wikimedia Communities: Ethics, Methods, and Policies"
collection: talks
type: "Panelist"
permalink: /talks/2010-07-10-wikimania-academic-researchers
venue: "Wikimania 2010"
date: 2010-07-10
location: "Gdansk, Poland"
excerpt: "A panel intended to foster a dialog between academic researchers who study Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia community."
---

Link to more information

In the past few years, there has been an explosion of academic researchers who are turning their attention towards Wikimedia projects. Hundreds of scholars representing virtually every discipline in the humanities, the social sciences, and the computational sciences have entered various Wikimedia communities to answer a broad range of questions using an equally diverse set of methods. As both researchers and editors have learned, actively studying wiki communities raises a number of problems and concerns, from the practical and logistical to the ethical and legal. Despite years of informal dialog and negotiation between individual researchers and editors, multiple WikiProjects dedicated to wiki research, and an ongoing attempt to craft a formal research policy, many issues are still unresolved.\n\nThe purpose of this panel is to foster a dialog between wiki researchers and the Wikimedia community on many of these issues, which include: Are talk pages, listservs, and IRC channels public spaces, and should researchers have to identify themselves when they enter? What kinds of privacy issues exist with reporting an editor’s actions in an academic article? Under what conditions should social scientists be allowed to send unsolicited requests to random samples of users, a process which has been sometimes been considered spam and resulted in the banning of researchers’ accounts? Are controversial 'breaching experiments' (such as vandalism response tests) of value, and is there a way they can be performed in a satisfactory manner? Should there be a group or committee that would review and approve certain kinds of academic research activities, similar to the Bot Approval Group? These are some of the many questions that will be asked, and audience members will be encouraged to participate in this discussion.

---
title: "Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices"
collection: talks
type: "Conference proceedings talk"
permalink: /talks/2011-01-03-hicss-trace-ethnography
venue: "Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences"
date: 2011-01-03
location: "Lihue, Hawaii"
excerpt: "We detail the methodology of ‘trace ethnography’, which combines the richness of participant-observation with the wealth of data in logs so as to reconstruct patterns and practices of users in distributed sociotechnical systems"
---

Link to more information

We detail the methodology of ‘trace ethnography’, which combines the richness of participant-observation with the wealth of data in logs so as to reconstruct patterns and practices of users in distributed sociotechnical systems

---
title: "Machine-Generated Content: Bots and the Governance of Wikipedia"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2011-03-04-dml-bots-governance
venue: "Digital Media and Learning (DML)"
date: 2011-03-04
location: "Long Beach, CA"
---

---
title: "Participation in Wikipedia’s Article Deletion Processes (with Heather Ford)"
collection: talks
type: "Conference proceedings talk"
permalink: /talks/2011-10-05-wikisym-article-deletion
venue: "International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration"
date: 2011-10-05
location: "Mountain View, CA"
excerpt: "This paper investigates Wikipedia's article deletion processes, finding that it is heavily populated by specialists."
---

Link to more information

We find that Wikipedia’s deletion process is heavily frequented by a relatively small number of longstanding users. The vast majority of such deleted articles are not spam, vandalism, or “patent nonsense,” but rather articles which could be considered encyclopedic, but do not fit the project‟s standards.

---
title: "’The Internet is Here’: The Virtuality of ‘On-line Communities in Physical Spaces"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2011-11-02-4s-internet-is-here
venue: "Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S)"
date: 2011-11-02
location: "Cleveland, OH"
---

---
title: "User-Generated Platforms in Wikipedian Governance"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2011-11-03-4s-wikipedian-governance
venue: "Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S)"
date: 2011-11-03
location: "Cleveland, OH"
---

---
title: "Improving Wikipedia’s Notifications to Rejected Contributors"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2012-03-31-gcoe-wikipedia-notifications
venue: "GCOE International Symposium on Informatics Education"
date: 2012-03-31
location: "Kyoto, Japan"
---

---
title: "Black-boxing the user: internet protocol over xylophone players (IPoXP)"
collection: talks
type: "Conference proceedings talk"
permalink: /talks/2012-05-02-altchi-ipoxp
venue: "Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI)"
date: 2012-05-02
location: "Austin, Texas"
excerpt: "We introduce IP over Xylophone Players (IPoXP), a novel Internet protocol between two computers using xylophone-based Arduino interfaces"
---

Link to more information

We introduce IP over Xylophone Players (IPoXP), a novel Internet protocol between two computers using xylophone-based Arduino interfaces. In our implementation, human operators are situated within the lowest layer of the network, transmitting data between computers by striking designated keys. We discuss how IPoXP inverts the traditional mode of human-computer interaction, with a computer using the human as an interface to communicate with another computer.

---
title: "Hunting for Fail Whales: Lessons from Deviance and Failure in Social Computing"
collection: talks
type: "Panelist"
permalink: /talks/2012-05-07-chi-fail-whales
venue: "Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI)"
date: 2012-05-07
location: "Austin, Texas"
---

---
title: "Defense Mechanism or Socialization Tactic? Improving Wikipedia’s Notifications to Rejected Contributors"
collection: talks
type: "Conference proceedings talk"
permalink: /talks/2012-06-05-icwsm-socialization-wikipedia
venue: "International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM)"
date: 2012-06-05
location: "Dublin, Ireland"
excerpt: "A descriptive study of Wikipedia's highly-automated socialization processes and an A/B test to improve templated messages to newcomers."
---

Link to more information

In this paper, we first illustrate and describe the various defense mechanisms at work in Wikipedia, which we hypothesize are inhibiting newcomer retention. Next, we present results from an experiment aimed at increasing both the quantity and quality of editors by altering various elements of these defense mechanisms, specifically pre-scripted warnings and notifications that are sent to new editors upon reverting or rejecting contributions. Using regression models of new user activity, we show which tactics work best for different populations of users based on their motivations when joining Wikipedia.

---
title: "Trace literacy: a framework for holistically conceptualizing newcomer socialization in socio-technical systems"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2012-10-12-infosocial-trace-literacy
venue: "Infosocial"
date: 2012-10-12
location: "Evanston, IL"
---

---
title: "Time to Degree: Examining the Experiences of Graduate Students in the Long-Term Ecological Research Network"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2012-10-17-4s-time-to-degree
venue: "Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S)"
date: 2012-10-17
location: "Copenhagen, Denmark"
---

---
title: "What Aren’t We Measuring?  Methods for Quantifying Wiki-Work."
collection: talks
type: "Panelist"
permalink: /talks/2012-10-29-wikisym-methods
venue: "International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym 2012)"
date: 2012-10-29
location: "Linz, Austria"
---

---
title: "Actor-Network Theory"
collection: talks
type: "Guest lecture"
permalink: /talks/2013-02-07-203-actor-network-theory
venue: "Social Aspects of Information Systems course"
date: 2013-02-07
location: "Berkeley, CA"
excerpt: "An introduction to Actor Network Theory for students in the Masters of Information Management and Systems (MIMS) course"
---

---
title: "Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia (with Aaron Halfaker)"
collection: talks
type: "Conference proceedings talk"
permalink: /talks/2013-02-23-cscw-edit-sessions
venue: "Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work"
date: 2013-02-23
location: "San Antonio, TX"
excerpt: "This paper establishes a quantitative metric for measuring editor activity through temporal edit sessions."
---

Link to more information

Many quantitative, log-based studies of participation and contribution in CSCW and CMC systems measure the activity of users in terms of output, based on metrics like posts to forums, edits to Wikipedia articles, or commits to code repositories. In this paper, we estimate the amount of time users have spent contributing. Through an analysis of Wikipedia log data, we identify a pattern of punctuated bursts in editors’ activity that we refer to as edit sessions. Based on these edit sessions, we build a metric that approximates the labor hours of editors in the encyclopedia. Using this metric, we first compare labor-based analyses with output-based analyses, finding that the activity of many editors can appear quite differently based on the kind of metric used.

---
title: "Community, Impact, and Credit: Where Do I Submit My Papers?"
collection: talks
type: "Panelist"
permalink: /talks/2013-02-26-cscw-community-impact
venue: "ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)"
date: 2013-02-26
location: "San Antonio, TX"
---

---
title: "Values Where? Interrogating Client-Side Scripting as a Design Process"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2013-03-01-ttw-values-where
venue: "Theorizing the Web"
date: 2013-03-01
location: "New York, NY"
---

---
title: "When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes? (with Aaron Halfaker)"
collection: talks
type: "Conference proceedings talk"
permalink: /talks/2013-08-03-wikisym-levee-breaks-bots
venue: "International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym 2012)"
date: 2013-08-03
location: "Hong Kong"
excerpt: "This paper examines what happened when one of Wikipedia's counter-vandalism bots unexpectedly went offline."
---

Link to more information

In the first half of 2011, ClueBot NG – one of the most prolific counter-vandalism bots in the English-language Wikipedia – went down for four distinct periods, each period of downtime lasting from days to weeks. In this paper, we use these periods of breakdown as naturalistic experiments to study Wikipedia’s heterogeneous quality control network. Our analysis showed that the overall time-to-revert edits was almost doubled when this software agent was down. Yet while a significantly fewer proportion of edits made during the bot’s downtime were reverted, we found that those edits were later eventually reverted. This suggests that other agents in Wikipedia took over this quality control work, but performed it at a far slower rate.

---
title: "Hadoop as Grounded Theory: Is an STS Approach to Big Data Possible?  the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science 4S"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2013-10-09-ica-hadoop-grounded-theory
venue: "Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S)"
date: 2013-10-09
location: "San Diego, CA"
---

---
title: "Design by Bot: Power and Resistance in the Development of Automated Software Agents"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2013-10-23-aoir-design-by-bot
venue: "Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)"
date: 2013-10-23
location: "Denver, CO"
---

---
title: "Size Matters: How Big Data Changes Everything"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2013-11-25-bkk-data
venue: "Bangkok Scientifique"
date: 2013-11-25
location: "Bangkok, Thailand"
excerpt: "A talk introducing various concepts around large-scale data analysis to a general audience, including spam detection and governmental survellance."
---

Link to more information

In the wake of all the rigmarole going on with the Snowden leaks and details of the NSA intelligence gathering apparatus, it's suddenly very clear to the average person just how much data is out there, and how difficult it must be to recognize, organize and filter it for a usable purpose. Even if we try to minimize our digital footprint, each of us nonetheless generates an incredible amount of data that represents US in the digital realm. To talk us through what systems are used to parse such vast quantities of data into a usable format, we are happy to welcome Stuart Geiger to this month's BkkSci. Stuart's current research is on the intersection of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) that is often branded as "Big Data." These systems collect massive, diverse, and complex data sets, and then use this data to teach computers how to identify patterns and make decisions. Stuart will talk about his work both in building these automated agents to support the production of knowledge, and in studying how these systems are changing how scientists, governments, businesses, and ordinary people like you and me come know the world.

---
title: "Robotic Ethics and Opportunities"
collection: talks
type: "Panelist"
permalink: /talks/2014-04-04-robots-new-media
venue: "Robots and New Media"
date: 2014-04-04
location: "Berkeley, CA"
excerpt: "A panel discussing the ethical and political issues that are raised with autonomous robots and software bots."
---

Link to more information

---
title: "Governing the Commons"
collection: talks
type: "Guest lecture"
permalink: /talks/2014-04-10-hofi-governing-commons
venue: "History of Information"
date: 2014-04-10
location: "Berkeley, CA"
excerpt: "A lecture on the history of Wikipedia, in the broader context of the history of reference works."
---

---
title: "Successor Systems: Enacting Ideological Critique Through the Development of Software"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2014-04-25-ttw-successor-systems
venue: "Theorizing the Web"
date: 2014-04-25
location: "Brooklyn, New York"
---

Link to more information

---
title: "Successor Systems: The Role of Reflexive Algorithms in Enacting Ideological Critique"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2014-05-16-algolife-successor-systems
venue: "The Contours of Algorithmic Life"
date: 2014-05-16
location: "Davis, CA"
---

---
title: "Data-Driven Data Research Using Data and Databases: A Practical Critique of Methods and Approaches in “Big Data” Studies"
collection: talks
type: "Panelist"
permalink: /talks/2014-05-23-ica-data-driven-data
venue: "Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (ICA)"
date: 2014-05-23
location: "Seattle, WA"
excerpt: "This panel focuses on the challenges faced by researchers conducting mixed-method research into online platforms, particularly where large amounts of data are widely available."
---

In the past two years, the buzzword "big data" has provoked critiques by a number of social scientists (eg., boyd & Crawford 2011; Bruns & Burgess 2012; Burrell 2012; Baym 2013) on the theories, methodologies, and analysis of large data sources. This panel follows up from last year’s ICA 2013 panel, “Downsizing Data: Analyzing Social Digital Traces,” and draws from the experiential grounded approach of Hargittai’s (2009) “Research Confidential” to bring to light practical critiques of the application of digital data research methods in the  study of social media platforms. Namely, the panelists will explore how social scientists can shift away from the rhetoric surrounding “big data” and robustly analyze the use of large-scale, computationally-driven, mixed-methods approaches in digital data research. Again, this panel will not discredit large-scale data approaches; instead, we aim to provide context to researchers who wish to employ them in combination with established methods in the field. The panel brings together five scholars to speak about their successes and failures working  on projects that employ large-scale digital data methods and tools, regardless of the size of the data, in addition to their iterative approaches dealing with the practicalities of data collection, sampling, theory, analysis, and especially results. Notably, these projects are not purely quantitative, analytical studies employing large datasets: all participants use largescale data and computational approaches within the context of empirical mixed-methods or even (traditionally) qualitative, interpretive studies. The panelists will also discuss the critical  approaches to “big data” that inhabit each project. These projects are all exemplars of an emerging mode of scholarship, and collectively they aim to generate a productive and concrete discussion about methodology and epistemology. After a framed introduction by the  moderator, participants will spend 10 minutes each to speak in detail about the methodologies of their projects, after which the latter half of the panel will open to discussion with the audience. This panel also will be paired with a Blue Sky Workshop, provocatively entitled “‘Big Data is Bullshit’: Scoping the Next 5 Years of Digital Data Research.” We aim to use the panel as an expert-driven, experiential methods presentation as well as a launchpad for topics and debates that can be further explored in the workshop session (which will occur at some point following the panel).

---
title: "Big Data is Bullshit': Scoping the Next 5 Years of Digital Data Research"
collection: talks
type: "Panelist"
permalink: /talks/2014-05-24-ica-big-data-bullshit
venue: "Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (ICA)"
date: 2014-05-24
location: "Seattle, WA"
---

---
title: "Successor Systems: The Role of Reflexive Algorithms in Enacting Ideological Critique"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2014-08-23-4s-successor-systems
venue: "Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S)"
date: 2014-08-23
location: "Buenos Aires, Argentina"
---

---
title: "Successor Systems: The Role of Reflexive Algorithms in Enacting Ideological Critique"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2014-10-21-aoir-successor-systems
venue: "Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)"
date: 2014-10-21
location: "Daegu, South Korea"
---

---
title: "Defining, Designing, and Evaluating Civic Values in Human Computation and Collective Action Systems (with Nathan Matias)"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2014-11-02-hcomp-values-in-crowdsourcing
venue: "Human Computation Conference (HCOMP), Citizen-X Workshop"
date: 2014-11-02
location: "Pittsburgh, PA"
excerpt: "We review various crowdsourcing and collective action systems, identifying particular sets of civic values and assumptions."
---

Link to more information

Collective action is often described in terms of the relationships, learning, principled processes, and community capacities it fosters. Despite this, human computation and collective action systems are often designed and evaluated with system outputs in mind: the quality of answers, the number of votes, the accuracy of content created. In this proposal, we review literature on the design values of “citizen-x” systems, put forward a series of models for describing the civic values in “citizen-x”, and classify systems by those models.

---
title: "Supporting Change from Outside Systems with Design and Data"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2014-12-09-berkman-successor-systems
venue: "Berkman Center for Internet and Society"
date: 2014-12-09
location: "Cambridge, MA"
---

---
title: "Situated knowledges and successor systems: developing CSCW systems to enact ideological critiques"
collection: talks
type: "Workshop presentation"
permalink: /talks/2015-03-15-cscw-feminism-workshop
venue: "CSCW Workshop on Feminism and Feminist Approaches in Social Computing"
date: 2015-03-15
location: "Vancouver, BC"
---

---
title: "Does Facebook Have Civil Servants? On Governmentality and Computational Social Science"
collection: talks
type: "Workshop presentation"
permalink: /talks/2015-03-15-cscw-ethics-workshop
venue: "CSCW Workshop on Ethics for Studying Sociotechnical Systems in a Big Data World"
date: 2015-03-15
location: "Vancouver, BC"
---

---
title: "Trace Ethnography Workshop"
collection: talks
type: "Workshop presentation"
permalink: /talks/2015-03-24-iconf-trace-ethno
venue: "ISchools Conference"
date: 2015-03-24
location: "Newport Beach, CA"
---

Link to more information

---
title: "Moderating Online Conversation Spaces"
collection: talks
type: "Guest lecture"
permalink: /talks/2015-04-07-203-moderating-online-spaces
venue: "Social Aspects of Information Systems course"
date: 2015-04-07
location: "Berkeley, CA"
excerpt: "An overview of how various online platforms moderate content, discussing issues that link up to the theories discussed in the Social Aspects of Information Systems class."
---

---
title: "Peer Production and Wikipedia"
collection: talks
type: "Guest lecture"
permalink: /talks/2015-04-09-203-wikipedia
venue: "Social Aspects of Information Systems course"
date: 2015-04-09
location: "Berkeley, CA"
excerpt: "An overview of Wikipedia and other peer production platforms, discussing issues that link up to the theories discussed in the Social Aspects of Information Systems class."
---

---
title: "But it Wouldn’t Be an Encyclopedia; It Would Be a Wiki: Wikipedia and the Repurposing of WikiWikiWeb"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2015-05-25-ica-wiki-history
venue: "Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (ICA)"
date: 2015-05-25
location: "San Juan, Puerto Rico"
excerpt: "In this talk, I examine the early history of “anyone can edit” wiki software -- originally developed in 1995, six years before Wikipedia’s origin -- focusing on the ways in which this technological infrastructure has been repurposed across communities, domains, and scales."
---

In this talk, I examine the early history of “anyone can edit” wiki software -- originally developed in 1995, six years before Wikipedia’s origin -- focusing on the ways in which this technological infrastructure has been repurposed across communities, domains, and scales. While today, the idea of a wiki is associated with large-scale, massively-distributed encyclopedic knowledge production, this was not always the case. As I show, many of the assumptions and practices in pre-Wikipedia wiki communities contradicted the idea of a universal repository to document the sum total of human knowledge. In fact, the title of this presentation comes from a conversation between Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales and Ward Cunningham, the creator of the first wiki, who advised Wales that the goals of creating a general-purpose encyclopedia and a wiki might be inherently contradictory. As Wales, Sanger, and other early Wikipedians used Cunningham’s wiki software to produce a collective encyclopedia, they found themselves constantly modifying the wiki platform, incorporating features and affordances that supported the kind of encyclopedic knowledge production they found themselves engaged in. Many of these novel features -- such as a persistent history of edits to articles, separate discussion pages for individual articles, and citations/references -- are now taken for granted aspects of what it means for a wiki to be a wiki. Yet at the time, their existence was far more controversial and precarious. Using archival and software studies methods, I illustrate several ways in which wiki software was adapted for the specific purposes and practices of Wikipedians, departing substantially from the pre-Wikipedia understandings of what wiki-based collaboration is and ought to be. Beyond Wikipedia, this case shows how technological infrastructures intersect with particular configurations of communities, epistemologies, and ideologies. Focusing on how one particular infrastructure was re-used and repurposed for a rather different set of values gives us a useful case for problematizing technologically determinist narratives around media technology and society.

---
title: "Bot-Based Collective Blocklists in Twitter: The Counterpublic Moderation of a Privately-Owned Networked Public Space"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2015-10-23-aoir-blockbots
venue: "Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)"
date: 2015-10-23
location: "Phoenix, AZ"
excerpt: "This presentation introduces bot-based collective blocklists (or blockbots) in Twitter, which have been created to help various groups better moderate their own experiences on the site."
---

---
title: "Crowdsourcing: Theoretical Considerations"
collection: talks
type: "Panelist"
permalink: /talks/2015-11-06-crowdsourcing-academy
venue: "Crowdsourcing and the Academy Symposium"
date: 2015-11-06
location: "Berkeley, CA"
excerpt: "A panel discussing how academics use crowdsourcing in research."
---

Link to more information

---
title: "The Bot Multiple: Unpacking the Materialities of Automated Software Agents"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2015-11-12-4s-bot-multiple
venue: "Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S)"
date: 2015-11-12
location: "Denver, CO"
excerpt: "I examine the roles that automated software agents (or bots) play in the governance and moderation of Wikipedia, Twitter, and reddit – three online platforms that differently uphold a related set of commitments to ‘open’ and ‘public’ online participation."
---

This paper examines the roles that automated software agents (or bots) play in the governance and moderation of Wikipedia, Twitter, and reddit – three online platforms that differently uphold a related set of commitments to ‘open’ and ‘public’ online participation. While bots are often discussed as malicious or fake agents (e.g. ‘socialbots’), the bots I discuss in these three platforms are more or less legitimate social actors, delegated substantial authority in autonomously enforcing norms and policies. These bots extend and modify the functionality of sites like Wikipedia, Twitter, and reddit, and are generally developed and deployed by volunteers on their own time – continuously operated on computers that are independent from the servers hosting the site. These governance bots involve alternative relations of power and code, requiring that we go beyond studying software code in order to unpack the sociomaterial configurations at work in such digitally-architected spaces. Instead of taking for granted the pre-existing stability of these sites as unified platforms, bots require that we examine the concrete, historically contingent material conditions under which this code is run. Reporting from a multi-sited ethnography of infrastructure, I demonstrate several ways in which bot development comes on the scene in relation to broader assemblages of server farms, platform code, federated databases, code repositories, issue trackers, application programming interfaces, terms of service, mailing lists, counterpublic groups, and a variety of other entities. I argue that bots give us a compelling set of cases for exploring the multiple materialities at work in highly-distributed online spaces.

---
title: "Why bots are my favorite contribution to Wikipedia"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2016-01-16-wiki15-bots
venue: "Wikipedia 15th Anniversary Birthday Bash"
date: 2016-01-16
location: "San Francisco, CA"
excerpt: "A short talk to open up an event celebrating the 15th anniversary of Wikipedia. The prompt we were given was "Why [x] is my favorite contribution to Wikipedia.""
---

A short talk to open up an event celebrating the 15th anniversary of Wikipedia. The prompt we were given was "Why [x] is my favorite contribution to Wikipedia." Here is a photo of me handing off the mic: <br><img src="http://funcrunch.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/funcrunch-20160116-0757.jpg>

---
title: "Scraping Wikipedia Data"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2016-02-17-thw-scraping-wikipedia
venue: "The Hacker Within, BIDS"
date: 2016-02-17
location: "Berkeley, CA"
excerpt: "A tutorial (with Jupyter notebooks) about how to use APIs to query structured data from Wikipedia articles and the Wikidata project."
---

Link to more information

A tutorial (with Jupyter notebooks) about how to use APIs to query structured data from Wikipedia articles and the Wikidata project.

---
title: "“What the hack?” Hacking culture and discourse in data science pedagogy (with Brittany Fiore-Gartland)"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2016-04-15-ttw-what-the-hack
venue: "Theorizing the Web"
date: 2016-04-15
location: "Astoria, New York"
---

Link to more information

---
title: "Moderating harassment in Twitter with blockbots: a counterpublic and algorithmic strategy"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2016-04-16-ttw-blockbots
venue: "Theorizing the Web"
date: 2016-04-16
location: "Astoria, New York"
---

Link to more information

---
title: "Algorithms as agents of gatekeeping, governance, and articulation work in Wikipedia"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2016-06-08-ica-algorithms-gatekeeping
venue: "Algorithms, Automation, and Politics workshop"
date: 2016-06-08
location: "Fukuoka, Japan"
excerpt: "I discuss how algorithmic systems are deployed to enforce particular behavioral and epistemological standards in Wikipedia, which can become a site for collective sensemaking among veteran Wikipedians."
---

This talk is based on a multi-year ethnographic study of algorithmic software agents in Wikipedia, where bots and automated tools have fundamentally transformed the nature of the notoriously decentralized, ‘anyone can edit’ encyclopedia project. I studied how the development and operation of automated software agents intersected with the development of organizational structures and epistemic norms. My ethnography of infrastructure (Star, 1999) involved participant-observation in various spaces of Wikipedia. I discuss how algorithmic systems are deployed to enforce particular behavioral and epistemological standards in Wikipedia, which can become a site for collective sensemaking among veteran Wikipedians.

---
title: "Successor Systems: Lessons for Big Data From Feminist Epistemology and Activism"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2016-06-09-ica-successor-systems
venue: "Big Data: Critiques and Alternatives workshop"
date: 2016-06-09
location: "Fukuoka, Japan"
excerpt: "I discuss four data-intensive activist projects as "successor systems," discussing the political and epistemological implications of using data to advance activist projects."
---

The concept of successor systems extends Harding (1987) and Haraway’s (1988) call for feminist “successor sciences” -- ways of knowing that critically blend objectivity with situatedness -- to the field of “Big Data.” I argue that successor systems involve a different form of data-intensive knowledge production, in which counterpublic collectives (Fraser, 1990) reflectively deploy algorithmic routines to build “a better account of the world” (Haraway, 579). I discuss four data-intensive activist projects as successor systems, discussing political and epistemological implications of such tactics. These successor systems have much to teach scholars and practitioners of “Big Data,” giving concrete and theoretical alternatives to the more dominant practices in academia and industry.

---
title: "Drowning in Data: Industry and Academic Approaches to Mixed Methods in “Holistic” Big Data Studies"
collection: talks
type: "Panelist"
permalink: /talks/2016-06-11-ica-drowning-in-data
venue: "Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (ICA)"
date: 2016-06-11
location: "Fukuoka, Japan"
excerpt: "This panel extends discusses the potentials and complications of mixed-methods research in big data studies, specifically in cases when population-level data is available."
---

In the past five years, as “big data” research increasingly has been adopted and adapted in the social sciences, the question of multimodal analysis pays a larger role in approaches and perspectives of research methodology. The buzzword "big data" has provoked critiques by a number of social scientists (eg., boyd & Crawford 2011; Bruns & Burgess 2012; Burrell 2012; Baym 2013; Lazer, et al. 2014; Tufekci 2014) on the theories, methodologies, and analysis of large data sources, and yet a growing number of scholars are experimenting with new ways to think about applying traditional and established methods to a newer domain and scale of data. Past panels (e.g., ICA 2013’s “Downsizing Data: Analyzing Social Digital Traces” and ICA 2014’s “Data-Driven Data Research Using Data and Databases: A Practical Critique of Methods and Approaches in ‘Big Data’ Studies”) have examined the practice of large-scale data analysis in social media research. This panel extends those discussions to look at the complications of mixed-methods research in big data studies, specifically in cases when “holistic,” population-level data is available.

---
title: "Administrative Support Bots in Wikipedia: How Automation Can Transform the Affordances of Platforms and the Governance of Communities"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2016-06-14-ica-communicating-with-machines
venue: "Communicating with Machines workshop"
date: 2016-06-14
location: "Fukuoka, Japan"
excerpt: "I discuss cases from a multi-year ethnographic study of automated software agents in Wikipedia, where ‘bots’ have fundamentally transformed the nature of the ‘anyone can edit’ encyclopedia project."
---

I discuss cases from a multi-year ethnographic study of automated software agents in Wikipedia, where ‘bots’ have fundamentally transformed the nature of the ‘anyone can edit’ encyclopedia project. Bots and bot developers have long been a core part of the Wikipedian community, and I studied how the development and operation of automated software agents intersected with the development of organizational and epistemic norms. My ethnographic project involved participant-observation in various spaces of Wikipedia: both routine editorial activity in Wikipedia (which is assisted through bots) and specific work in bot development, including proposing, developing, and operating a bot of my own. I also conducted extensive historical analysis of the history of Wikipedia, including case studies of bots throughout Wikipedia’s 15 year history.

---
title: "Governing Open Source Projects at Scale: Lessons from Wikipedia's Growing Pains"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2016-07-16-scipy-governing-scale
venue: "SciPy"
date: 2016-07-16
location: "Austin, Texas"
excerpt: "Many open source, volunteer-driven projects begin with a small, tight-knit group of collaborators, but then rapidly expand far faster than anyone expects or plans for. I discuss cases of governance growing pains in Wikipedia, which have many lessons for running open source software projects."
---

Many open source, volunteer-driven projects begin with a small, tight-knit group of collaborators, but then rapidly expand far faster than anyone expects or plans for. I discuss cases of governance growing pains in Wikipedia, which have many lessons for running open source software projects.

---
title: "Community Sustainability in Wikipedia: A Review of Research and Initiatives"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2016-08-13-pydata-community-sustainability
venue: "PyData SF"
date: 2016-08-13
location: "San Francisco, CA"
excerpt: "Wikipedia relies on one of the world’s largest open collaboration communities. Since 2001, the community has grown substantially and faced many challenges. This presentation reviews research and initiatives around community sustainability in Wikipedia that are relevant for many open source projects, including issues of newcomer retention, governance, automated moderation, and marginalized groups."
---

Wikipedia relies on one of the world’s largest open collaboration communities. Since 2001, the community has grown substantially and faced many challenges. This presentation reviews research and initiatives around community sustainability in Wikipedia that are relevant for many open source projects, including issues of newcomer retention, governance, automated moderation, and marginalized groups.

---
title: "“The Wisdom of Bots:” An ethnographic study of the delegation of governance work to information infrastructures in Wikipedia"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2016-09-02-4s-wisdom-of-bots
venue: "Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S)"
date: 2016-09-02
location: "Barcelona, Spain"
excerpt: "Wikipedians rely on software agents to govern the ‘anyone can edit’ encyclopedia project, in the absence of more formal and traditional organizational structures. Lessons from Wikipedia’s bots speak to debates about how algorithms are being delegated governance work in sites of cultural production."
---

Link to more information

I present findings from a multi-year ethnographic study of automated software agents in Wikipedia. "Bots" and bot developers are a core part of the volunteer community that curates one of the world's largest and most popular information resources. The Wikipedian community relies on hundreds of independently run bots to monitor and regulate almost all aspects of the site. Bots are delegated a wide variety of organizational and administrative work, including: patrolling for spam, 'vandalism', and 'edit wars'; standardizing grammar, layout, citations, and units; updating articles using public datasets; and identifying more complicated work and distributing those tasks to humans. In my infrastructural inversion (Bowker & Star 1999), I argue Wikipedia can only appear to be governed by an economistic "wisdom of crowds" if the work delegated to bots remains invisible. These bots have long been a core way in which Wikipedians govern the 'anyone can edit' project in the absence of more formal organizational structures. Wikipedians also work out fundamental disagreements about what the encyclopedia and the community ought to look like by, in part, debating about how bots ought to be delegated governance work. For example, one of the more consistently raised (and rejected) proposals on the English Wikipedia is a bot that would make all articles conform to a single national variety of English. Lessons from Wikipedia's bots speak to many debates about how algorithmic agents are being incorporated into sites of cultural production, drawing our focus to the governance work that is delegated to automated information infrastructures.

!ls _talks2008-03-01-tamu-communicative-ethnography.md
2008-07-19-wikimania-academics-wikipedia.md
2009-03-28-aaas-wikipedia-infrastructures.md
2009-04-25-mit6-media-use-wikipedia.md
2009-07-26-wikiconf-nyc-algorithmc-governance.md
2009-09-25-nyu-trace-ethnography.md
2009-10-27-wikisym-social-roles-bots.md
2009-10-28-4s-missing-wikipedians.md
2010-01-10-cpov-wisdom-of-bots.md
2010-02-25-cscw-banning-vandal.md
2010-03-26-cpov-bot-politics.md
2010-07-10-wikimania-academic-researchers.md
2011-01-03-hicss-trace-ethnography.md
2011-03-04-dml-bots-governance.md
2011-10-05-wikisym-article-deletion.md
2011-11-02-4s-internet-is-here.md
2011-11-03-4s-wikipedian-governance.md
2012-03-31-gcoe-wikipedia-notifications.md
2012-05-02-altchi-ipoxp.md
2012-05-07-chi-fail-whales.md
2012-06-05-icwsm-socialization-wikipedia.md
2012-10-12-infosocial-trace-literacy.md
2012-10-17-4s-time-to-degree.md
2012-10-29-wikisym-methods.md
2013-02-07-203-actor-network-theory.md
2013-02-23-cscw-edit-sessions.md
2013-02-26-cscw-community-impact.md
2013-03-01-ttw-values-where.md
2013-08-03-wikisym-levee-breaks-bots.md
2013-10-09-ica-hadoop-grounded-theory.md
2013-10-23-aoir-design-by-bot.md
2013-11-25-bkk-data.md
2014-04-04-robots-new-media.md
2014-04-10-hofi-governing-commons.md
2014-04-25-ttw-successor-systems.md
2014-05-16-algolife-successor-systems.md
2014-05-23-ica-data-driven-data.md
2014-05-24-ica-big-data-bullshit.md
2014-08-23-4s-successor-systems.md
2014-10-21-aoir-successor-systems.md
2014-11-02-hcomp-values-in-crowdsourcing.md
2014-12-09-berkman-successor-systems.md
2015-03-15-cscw-ethics-workshop.md
2015-03-15-cscw-feminism-workshop.md
2015-03-24-iconf-trace-ethno.md
2015-04-07-203-moderating-online-spaces.md
2015-04-09-203-wikipedia.md
2015-05-25-ica-wiki-history.md
2015-10-23-aoir-blockbots.md
2015-11-06-crowdsourcing-academy.md
2015-11-12-4s-bot-multiple.md
2016-01-16-wiki15-bots.md
2016-02-17-thw-scraping-wikipedia.md
2016-04-15-ttw-what-the-hack.md
2016-04-16-ttw-blockbots.md
2016-06-08-ica-algorithms-gatekeeping.md
2016-06-09-ica-successor-systems.md
2016-06-11-ica-drowning-in-data.md
2016-06-14-ica-communicating-with-machines.md
2016-07-16-scipy-governing-scale.md
2016-08-13-pydata-community-sustainability.md
2016-09-02-4s-wisdom-of-bots.md
!head _talks/2008-03-01-tamu-communicative-ethnography.md---
title: "A Communicative Ethnography of Argumentative Strategies in a Wikipedian Content Dispute"
collection: talks
type: "Talk"
permalink: /talks/2008-03-01-tamu-communicative-ethnography
venue: "Exploring New Media Worlds"
date: 2008-03-01
location: "College Station, TX"
---