OII Editor's Blog

Yana Breindl attended the 2009 Summer Doctoral Programme in Brisbane. She is currently a Wiener-Anspach Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at the OII, working on digital rights campaigning in Europe. Having already spoken about the SDP with Yana, we caught up with her for another chat…

Ed: You are now a visitor at the OII! What’s it like being in Oxford (after Australia)?

YB: It’s impressive! Oxford is a researcher’s paradise: centuries of academic history, more traditions than you’d ever be able to understand in a year, beautiful libraries all over the place, fascinating seminars on any topic you could imagine and, of course, many amazing scholars and brilliant students that are the heart of Oxford’s academic life. During my PhD, I’ve gotten used to traveling around the world to attend conferences (and summer schools) to meet other internet researchers. Here, visitors from all over the world come and participate in the vibrant academic life. Two weeks ago, Jimmy Wales was here to speak about free speech with Timothy Garton Ash (just a day after the Wikipedia blackout). Sometimes, it’s intimidating actually.

Ed: Are you still in touch with anyone from your SDP year?

YB: Absolutely! We’re not writing everyday but I regularly meet other SDP09ers (often the same 5-7 people actually) at academic conferences, or when visiting each other’s cities and universities. It’s great to have a network of people all over the world with whom you can remember good old koala times. With each new encounter, we have more memories to share and look forward to meeting again in the future. And then, there’s always facebook that allows us to see what’s going on in each others lives and keep in touch, even if it’s just from time to time. When one of us finishes his/her PhD, gets a baby or finds a new position, we’re all there to comment on his/her wall! Since 2009, I’ve met many SDP alumni from other years as well. Three of us are at OII at the moment in fact!

Ed: What was the most useful thing you were told (by faculty or students)?

YB: The most useful thing? That’s a tough one. There’s certainly Nancy Baym’s “perfection is the enemy of done” that I pasted above my desk when writing up the dissertation. Or Bernie Hogan’s advice: “you don’t need to do network analysis, you just need to understand enough network theory to justify why you’re not doing it!”. The career discussion with past SDP alumni was very helpful as well to think about life after the PhD and possible trajectories. More generally, the experience of sharing a common passion for internet research but also our doubts and fears with students and faculty was a rewarding experience. You realise that all academics are humans in the end.

Ed: And what memory will really stick with you, do you think?

YB: There are many memories: the classroom at QUT covered with colourful drawings where we spend most of our days, our attempts at making Jean LOL  in class through the etherpad backchannel, the engaging discussions with students and faculty working on a great variety of subjects (“eye-opening” as Nikki put it), our pot luck dinners in Andres and Jin’s flat (they had the best view!) and of course the video we made with Tim and Neal, that was great fun!

Ed: Any advice for students who are thinking about applying?

YB: Be honest about your research. Don’t try to fit it into a potential SDP theme (ours was “creativity”). Think about the strengths of your PhD: what’s the gap in the literature that you want to fill and how are you going to achieve this? Remember that your readers might not be familiar with your theoretical background so be clear and concise in addressing the literature. Don’t forget to justify your methods and what you expect to find. If some things are still unclear about your research, that’s normal. If they weren’t, you would not need to go to a doctoral school. Don’t be shy in articulating your expectations from SDP. You won’t find all the answers there but lots of useful hints and advice that will help you keep going. Many SDPers don’t have a home institution focusing on internet research; this is a good reason to apply.

Every summer we invite a talented group of doctoral students from around the world to the OII for an exciting, challenging, open and intense fortnight of study with leading academics in the field: it’s the OII’s Summer Doctoral Programme!

This year will see the tenth programme in the series, so we caught up with the SDP Director Dr Victoria Nash to ask her about “Ten Years of the SDP”:

Ed: The OII’s Summer Doctoral Programme started in 2003. What were your initial expectations: did you imagine it would be going strong ten years later?

VN: We had no idea that the SDP would be such a long-lasting success! We started the Programme as a teaching experiment to see what level of demand there would be for graduate degree programmes in this area, should the OII want to provide University courses at a later date. So there was an expectation that we might stop SDP once we had our own degree programmes in place, but by that point, the course had gained so much momentum in its own right, and seemed to make such a difference to participants, that we didn’t even consider stopping it.

Ed: What do you think has changed over the ten years?

VN: We’re certainly much more organised! And I suppose that the Internet itself has moved on so much that many of the topics students are researching would have been unimaginable back in 2003, but otherwise we haven’t changed that much. We do try and improve our offering each year in response to student feedback, but in practice that has meant fine-tuning the agenda and format rather than radical change.

Ed: SDP has enjoyed support from many longstanding partners: how did they get involved?

VN: We’re very lucky at OII to have some really loyal and trusted academic partners whom we’ve worked with on multiple projects. With SDP we’ve really benefited from the support provided by colleagues at the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT, the Annenberg School at USC and the Berkman Center at Harvard, for example. In each case that collaboration started with a single personal connection, but in each case the institutional bond has strengthened simply because SDP’s success is so obvious, and our partners recognise the benefits to their students and the discipline more broadly.

Ed: What does the programme gain from being held at the OII?

VN: The ‘Oxford experience’ is of course unique. To someone who’s never studied or visited here it can be a really magical experience to spend a couple of weeks amongst the ‘dreaming spires‘, with time spent sitting on college lawns and going punting. But on the academic front, there’s also great benefit in that we can involve many more of the OII’s own faculty, and in return that infuses our own research and study agenda.

Ed: Why should students from single disciplines attend this strongly multidisciplinary programme?

VN: One of the key challenges in undertaking research related to the Internet is that it is often quite difficult to answer a particular research question using tools, concepts and methods from a single discipline. And even if you do have a fantastic disciplinary project, it can be really valuable to get an alternative perspective, to share your views and ideas with others who may have a similar interest but from a very different background. We also know that many students studying the Internet within a single-discipline department may just not have much contact with other researchers studying this topic. So it can be very exciting to be exposed to 25 or 30 other students with similar research interests.

Ed: What do you think the SDP students bring to the OII?

VN: They bring so much! Now that we have our own degree programmes we realise how true it is that the future of Internet research lies in the hand of current doctoral students. Very often they are undertaking some of the most cutting-edge research, asking some of the most exciting questions. With the SDP we get insights into how other departments around the world are approaching and studying the Internet, and of course in many cases, students end up forging long-lasting links with the OII, so it has certainly expanded our network of connections substantially.

Ed: The SDP has been taken abroad three times: how were these different to the usual Oxford programmes?

VN: It’s really exciting to take SDP abroad. From an organisational point of view it makes things a little more unpredictable, but it delivers great benefits. First of all you are able to involve a more diverse group of students who may not be able to travel all the way to the UK, and secondly you have a whole new faculty body to draw on in delivering the teaching. We usually find it makes sense to have a slightly different academic focus that can draw on the strengths and expertise of the hosting department, and that is valuable for the OII staff attending too. But other than that, the SDP is the same wherever we hold it – a bunch of great students doing great research having a fun time with some world-leading academics. You can’t really go wrong with that! [see SDP2005 Beijing; SDP2007: Boston; SDP2009: Brisbane - Ed]

Ed: Having been held so far in China, the US and Australia: where would you like to take it in the future?

VN: We would have gone abroad this year but as it’s the 10th SDP, we are staying in Oxford to hold a reunion conference for past SDP alumni to run in parallel with the programme. But we want to go away in 2013 and have had many great suggestions. Right now I’m excited by the possibility of going to India or possibly Hong Kong, but it’s not too late for other good suggestions!

Ed: And lastly: How do you think the programme (or students) might change in the future?

VN: We’re always on the lookout for new ideas, and it’s not unthinkable that in the future we might take a narrower topic or disciplinary focus, or even run similar events for new post-docs. But I do think what we have works really well, so at the moment, we’re going to stick to what we do best!

The ninth OII Summer Doctoral Programme will kick off next week, with 29 talented doctoral students arriving at the OII from top universities all over the world. As usual it’ll be a packed fortnight of seminars, presentations, tutorials and social events, designed to provide the students with valuable (and practical) input into their thesis research, and introduce them to an international peer group of excellent young Internet researchers.

The seminar topics planned for this year include political engagement, public opinion formation, news and social media, privacy and data protection, industrial organisation, the Internet of Things and ethical consumption, Internet countercultures, Facebook and identity, citizens and government, and a reflection on what we mean today by ‘Internet Studies’. Three sessions will address research methods and tools, covering Internet ethnographies, social media data, and research ethics. Time will be set aside for students to present their thesis work to the group, and to meet with course tutors individually. Tutors will include OII teaching faculty, and visiting tutors including Jonathan Zittrain, Marc Smith, Lisa Nakamura, and Stephen Coleman.

Due to their past popularity, we will be organising sessions that address some of the more practical (but rarely taught) aspects of working, and getting ahead, in academia: Monica Bulger will share advice on academic presentation skills, and Jeremy Hunsinger will talk about starting out in ‘Jobs, Books and Journals’. We are excited that Jonathan Zittrain will once again be able to help contextualise the many academic and practical inputs and discussions in a ‘big picture’ conversation with students.

It isn’t all lectures and research seminars though: the entertainment will include various dinners, a picnic and punting, a theatre outing, an Oxford ghost tour, and the ever-popular ‘BBQ at Bill’s House’. We are delighted that Dame Stephanie Shirley – key OII supporter, software entrepreneur and philanthropist – will be hosting an afternoon tea for the students: a great opportunity to hear the stories behind the OII’s founding ten years ago, and her long professional interest in the social impacts of technology. It promises to be a very interesting discussion – but then the SDP has always been a great environment in which to learn and share, with lots of different people, viewpoints, backgrounds, and experiences, all crammed into a single amazing fortnight.

In short: we look forward to welcoming the SDP2011 participants to Oxford and the OII next week!

We have recently gone live with a second webcam, commanding sweeping(ish) views of the northern end of St Giles. Our webcam fans noticed almost immediately:

“I have died and gone to heaven! Not one, but two of your wonderful cams are now available for me when my longing to see Oxford becomes overwhelming. You have the best webcams anywhere. A webcam is streaming video, NOT something that updates every 5 minutes (that is a slide show). Am really looking forward to seeing more of the St. Giles fair this September. Many, many thanks from Northampton, MA, USA for your wonderful and impressive efforts.”

“I think that the addition of a 2nd web cam is an excellent idea. I often check this web cam site so that I can see the actual weather in Oxford. My daughter goes to school there and it is always a pleasure to see what she is experiencing. The addition of the 2nd camera just allows me to see more of St Giles Street, which I have walked upon several times, in my various trips to Oxford.” (Ontario, Canada)

Thanks to everyone for the feedback! Comments / queries should be sent to: webhelp@oii.ox.ac.uk

Our two-day conference is just about to come to an end with an evening reception at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum (you can have a live view through OII’s very own webcam…). Its aim was to try to make an assessment of the Internet’s impact on politics and policy. The presentations approached this challenge from a number of different angles and we would like to encourage everyone to browse the archive of papers on the conference website to get a comprehensive overview about much of the cutting-edge research that is currently taking place in many different parts of the world.

The submissions to this conference allowed setting up very topical panels in which the different papers fitted together rather well. Helen Margetts, the convenor, highlighted in her summary just how much discussion and informed exchange has been going on within these panels. But a conference is more than the collection of papers delivered. It is just as much about the social gathering of people who share similar interests and the conference schedule tried to accommodate for this by offering many coffee breaks to encourage more informal exchange. It is a testimony to the success of this strategy that the majority of people have very much welcomed the idea to have a similar conference in two years time, details of which are yet to be confirmed.

Great thanks to everybody who helped to make this conference happen, in particular OII’s dedicated support staff such as journal editor David Sutcliffe and events manager Tim Davies.

Our two-day conference is coming to a close with a keynote by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger who is soon to be joining the faculty of the Oxford Internet Institute as Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation.

Viktor talked about the theme of his recent book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” (a webcast of this keynote will be available soon on the OII website but you can also listen to a previous talk here). It touches on many of the recent debates about information that has been published on the web in some context and which might suddenly come back to us in a completely different context, e.g. when applying for a job and being confronted with some drunken picture of us obtained from Facebook.

Viktor puts that into a broad perspective, contrasting the two themes of “forgetting” and “remembering”. He convincingly argues how for most of human history, forgetting has been the default. This state of affairs has experienced quite a dramatic change with the advances of the computer technology, data storage and information retrieval technologies available on a global information infrastructure.  Now remembering is the default as most of the information stored digitally is available forever and in multiple places.

What he sees at stake is power because of the permanent threat of our activities are being watched by others – not necessarily now but possibly even in the future – can result in altering our behaviour today. What is more, he says that without forgetting it is hard for us to forgive as we deny us and others the possibility to change.

No matter to what degree you are prepared to follow the argument, the most intriguing question is how the current state of remembering could be changed to forgetting. Viktor discusses a number of ideas that pose no real solution:

1. privacy rights – don’t go very far in changing actual behaviour
2. information ecology – the idea to store only as much as necessary
3. digital abstinence – just not using these digital tools but this is not very practical
4. full contextualization – store as much information as possible in order to provide necessary context for evaluating the informations from the past
5. cognitive adjustments – humans have to change in order to learn how to discard the information but this is very difficult
6. privacy digital rights management – requires the need to create a global infrastructure that would create more threats than solutions

Instead Viktor wants to establish mechanisms that ease forgetting, primarily by making it a little bit more difficult to remember. Ideas include

• expiration date for information, less in order to technically force deletion but to socially force thinking about forgetting
• making older information a bit more difficult to retrieve

Whatever the actual tool, the default should be forgetting and to prompt its users to reflect and choose about just how long a certain piece of information should be valid.

Nice closing statement: “Let us remember to forget!”

The first day of the conference found an end in style with a well-received reception at Oxford’s fine Divinity Schools.

Day Two of the conference kicked off with panels on “Mobilisation and Agenda Setting”, “Virtual Goods” and “Comparative Campaigning”.  ICTlogy has been busy summarising some of the panels at the conference including this morning one’s with some interesting contributions on comparative campaigning.

The second round of panels included a number of scientific approaches to the role of the Internet for the recent UK election:

Gibson, Cantijoch and Ward in their analysis of the UK Elections drew attention to the fact that the 2010 UK General Election was dominated not by the Internet but by a very traditional media instead, namely the TV debates of party leaders. Importantly, they suggest to treat eParticipation as a multi-dimensional concept, ie. distinguish different forms of eParticipation with differing degrees of involvement, in fact in much the same way as we have come to treat traditional forms of participation.

Anstead and Jensen aimed to trace distinctions in election campaigning between the national and the local level. They have found evidence that online campaigns are both decentralized (little mention of national campaigns) and localised (emphasizing horizontal links with the community).

Lilleker and Jackson looked at how much party websites did encourage participation. They found that first and foremost, parties are about promoting their personnel and are rather cautious in engaging in any interactive communication. Most efforts were aimed at the campaign and not about getting input into policy. Even though there were more Web 2.0 features in use than in previous years, participation was low.

Sudulich and Wall were interested in the uptake of online campaigning (campaign website, Facebook profile) by election candidates. They take into account a range of factors including bookmakers odds for candidates but found little explanatory effects overall.

This panel was one of three in the first round of panels and has been focusing on ePetitions. Two contributions from Germany and two contributions from the UK brought a useful comparative perspective to the debate. ePetitions are an interesting research object because not only is petitioning a rather popular political participation activity offline but also online. It is also one of the few eParticipation activities quite a number of governments have been implemented by now, namely the UK, Germany and Scotland.

Andreas Jungherr was providing a largely quantitative analysis of co-signature dynamics on the ePetitions website of the German Bundestag, providing some background on how many petitions attract a lot of signatures (only a few) and how many petitions a user signs (usually only one).

This provided a background for the summary of a comprehensive study on ePetitioning in the German parliament by Ralf Linder. He offered a somewhat downbeat assessment in that the online system has failed to engage traditionally underrepresented groups of society to petitioning even though it has had impacted on the public debate.

Giovanni Navarria was much harsher in his criticism of ePetitioning on the Downing Street site based on his analysis of the petition against the road tax. He concluded that the government was actually wrong in putting such a service onto its website as it had created unrealistic expectations a representative government could not meet.

In contrast Panagiotis Panagiotopoulos in his evaluation of local ePetitioning in the Royal Borough of Kingston made a case for petitions on the local level to have the potential to really enhance local government democracy. This is a finding that is particularly important in the light of the UK government mandating online petitioning for all local authorities in the UK.

Arthur Lupia has just been delivering the opening keynote on our very own conference “Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: An Impact Assessment” here in Oxford. He started by turning on the audience:

• What is our impact on the Internet?
• Have we been as effective as we could have been in changing people’s beliefs and behaviours?

However, this wasn’t about benchmarking success of researchers into Internet and Politics but about the question why many well-intentioned projects – be it making people participate in politics, be getting across the relevance of your ground-breaking research or whatever – ultimately fail.

Arthur Lupia’s main argument that many of these well-meant enterprises do not take into account sufficiently how people are. How they are is – according to Lupia – mainly defined by three broad influences:

1. biology
2. social behaviour (e.g. how we learn etc)
3. political contexts

So in order to successfully persuade others (in any benign meaning of course) he posits three necessary conditions (implying that they might not be sufficient):

1. attention: as people have a limited capacity to pay attention, your message will only get through if they feel its urgency and relevance for them
2. elaboration: relate your message to the audience. People will only listen if it is unique and highly relevant to them. Ways to achieve this is by making it local, concrete and immediate but also by making the desired change possible, making clear that the desired effect is within reach
3. credibility:  Finally, credibility is key but this is not an absolute value but it is domain-specific. Credibility is bestowed on someone by the audience and depends on whether the audience believes (not matter if correctly) that you are knowledgeable and share their interests

See the summary by ICTlogy about the talk and the Q&A session. To follow the conference on Twitter on all over the Internet, look for the IPP2010 tag.

A few months ago we unveiled (after some poking around with servers and cameras) the Revamped Oxford Webcam.

Our webcam has had a rather bumpy ride since it first went live in 2006, ie it had the annoying / endearing habit of crashing if more than a few people accessed it at once, so it seemed to spend most of its life, well, dead.

So we spent a lot of time sending emails like ‘er webcam’s dead?’ to IT, who would then poke it back to life. We’ve received lots of really nice emails about the webcam over the years, many of them hinting wistfully at the up-time issues:

I confess I’m an addict to your great webcam that looks out onto the Taylorian.  I’m suffering from withdrawl!  When will the webcam be back up and running, and is there any chance of increasing its server load? (February 2008)

Can you please tell me when you expect your webcam to be operating again?  I miss being able to view a street in Oxford! (October 2008)

Some time ago I accessed your excellent webcam (which looks across at the Taylorian building), but now find I can’t access it. Is there a fault? (May 2009)

Lost the webcam again today (November 2007)

I have been unable to access your webcam for about a week now. (November 2007)

will it return? (November 2010)

some offering helpful suggestions:

Your camera is not level, it is at a slope angle (March 2007)