social machines paradigm
DESCRIPTION
Keynote talk at the Web Science Summer School, Singapore, 8 December 2014. Today we see the rise of Social Machines, like Twitter, Wikipedia and Galaxy Zoo—where communities identify and solve their own problems, harnessing commitment, local knowledge and embedded skills, without having to rely on experts or governments. The Social Machines paradigm provides a lens onto the interacting sociotechnical systems of our hybrid digital-physical world, citizen-centric and at scale—emphasising empowerment and sociality in a world of pervasive technology adoption and automation. This talk will present the Social Machines paradigm as an approach to social media analytics and a rethinking of our scholarly practices and knowledge infrastructure.TRANSCRIPT
David De Roure
The Social Machines Paradigm
Overview
1. Shifts in scholarship
2. Social Machines
3. Knowledge Infrastructure
The Big Picture
More people
More
machin
es
Big Data
Big Compute
Conventional
Computation
“Big Social”
Social Networks
e-infrastructure
Online R&D
(Science
2.0)
Social
Machines
@dder
Edwards, P. N., et al. (2013) Knowledge Infrastructures: Intellectual Frameworks and
Research Challenges. Ann Arbor: Deep Blue. http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/97552
Christine B
org
man
theODI.org
F i r s t
http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/science-and-technology-committee/news/report-responsible-use-of-data/
New Social Processes
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/series/reading-the-riots
www.zooniverse.org
Scientists
Talk
Forum
Image
Classification
data reduction
Citizen Scientists
http://www.climateprediction.net/ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2455/abstract
Community Software
Supercomputer
Digital Music Collections
Student-sourced ground truth
Community Software
Linked Data Repositories
Supercomputer
23,000 hours of
recorded music
Music Information
Retrieval Community
SALAMI
Notifications and automatic re-runs
Machines are users too
Autonomic
Curation
Self-repair
New research?
“In it” not “On it”
In it not on it
1. Shifts in scholarship
2. Social Machines
3. Knowledge Infrastructure
Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social
constraint – the very processes from which society
arises. Computers can help if we use them to
create abstract social machines on the Web:
processes in which the people do the creative work
and the machine does the administration... The
stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new
social engines. The ability to create new forms of
social process would be given to the world at large,
and development would be rapid.
Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999 (pp. 172–175)
Social MachinesPrinciples of
Empowerment
1
2
SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
(EPSRC) under grant number EPJ017728/1 and comprises the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Edinburgh. See sociam.org
SOCIAM - Social Machines - will research into pioneering methods
of supporting purposeful human interaction on the World Wide Web,
of the kind exemplified by phenomena such as Wikipedia and Galaxy
Zoo. These collaborations are empowering, as communities identify
and solve their own problems, harnessing their commitment, local
knowledge and embedded skills, without having to rely on remote
experts or governments.http://sociam.org/
“Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking…
The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage…”
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/
Pip Willcox
Mark d’Invernohttp://goldsmiths.musiccircleproject.com/
PRAISE: Performance and pRactice Agents Inspiring Social Education
Digital networks have radically increased the speed and scope with which individuals
can effect social change, transforming the relationship between people and
institutions. But the impact to date of this transformation has been more disruptive
and ad hoc, as opposed to constructive and systematic. Existing tools and practices
for harnessing the potential of digital networks have failed to sustain a public sphere
where institutions and individuals can come together to understand, learn and act
constructively on societal problems. By building “social machines” that bring system
solutions to such critical global challenges as gender equality and literacy learning,
the Laboratory for Social Machines seeks to contribute to the creation of the next
generation of the public sphere.
http://socialmachines.media.mit.edu/
http://sociam.org/socm2015/
Trajectories... distinguished by purpose
Trajectories through Social Machines https://sites.google.com/site/bwebobs13/
Normal Science – computer science is a puzzle-
solving activity under our current paradigm, inspired
by great achievements (in the left quadrants).
Successful social machines, like Wikipedia, are the
anomaly. They do not yield to standard techniques
despite attempts to extend those techniques and fit
social machines in as machines. cf Newtonian
mechanics.
Kuhn cycle
We are in the period of crisis, where the failure of established
methods permits us to experiment with new methods to crack the
anomaly. We experiment with social machines as an underpinning
model.
If successful, social machines become the new paradigm and
scientific revolution has occurred. This is evidenced by the papers
and books that train the next generation.
1. Shifts in scholarship
2. Social Machines
3. Knowledge Infrastructure
Web as lens
Web as artefact
WebObservatories
http://www.w3.org/community/webobservatory/
A computationally-enabled sense-making network of expertise,
data, software, models and narratives
Iain Buchan
Towards interoperable observatories
Te
ch
nic
al a
nd
so
cia
l in
terf
ace
http://www.w3.org/community/webobservatory/
The Web
Observatory
Tiropanis, T., Hall, W., Shadbolt, N., De Roure, D., Contractor, N., and Hendler, J.
The web science observatory. IEEE Intelligent Systems 28, 2 (2013), 100–104.
The R Dimensions
Research Objects facilitate research that is
reproducible, repeatable, replicable, reusable,
referenceable, retrievable, reviewable, replayable,
re-interpretable, reprocessable, recomposable,
reconstructable, repurposable, reliable,
respectful, reputable, revealable, recoverable,
restorable, reparable, refreshable?”
@dder 14 April 2014
sci method
access
understand
new use
social
curation
Research Object
Principles
Scholarly
Machines
EcosystemDavid De Roure, JCDL 2013
Richard O’Bierne
STORYTELLING AS A STETHOSCOPE
FOR SOCIAL MACHINES
1. Sociality through storytelling potential
and realization
2. Sustainability through reactivity and
interactivity
3. Emergence through collaborative
authorship and mixed authority
Zooniverse is a highly storified Social Machine
Facebook doesn’t allow for improvisation
Wikipedia assignsauthority rights rigidly
http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/ora:8033Segolene Tarte, David De Roure and Pip Willcox, (2014). Working out the plot: the role of stories in social machines
social machines
social machines
Not just machines —try calling them socials
social machinessocial machines
1. Shifts in scholarship beyond the fourth paradigm
– Crowd + Machines, and our automated future
2. Social Machines
– Humans are empowered, creative, subversive, curious Ludere humanum est*
– A lens, a pattern, … and a new paradigm?
– You are designers of social machines
3. Knowledge Infrastructure
– Sensemaking network of Scholarly Social Machines
– Observatories, Social Objects, r* research
– Don’t forget it is fundamentally social
* Pip Willcox
rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org
The FORCE2015 Research Communication and
e-Scholarship Conference brings together researchers,
scholars, librarians, archivists, information scientists,
publishers, and research funders in a lively forum – to
broaden awareness of current efforts across disciplines,
but also to define the future through discussions,
challenge projects, demonstrations, and the seeding
of new partnerships and collaborations.
Pip
Will
co
x
Thanks to Christine Borgman, Iain Buchan, Mark d’Inverno,Chris Lintott, Richard O’Bierne, Kevin Page, Rob Simpson,Ségolène Tarte, Pip Willcox; FORCE11, SOCIAM; AndrewW. Mellon Foundation, EPSRC, ESRC, AHRC.
[email protected]/people/dder
@dder
http://www.slideshare.net/davidderoure/social-machines-paradigm
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk
www.force11.org
sociam.org
EPSRC EP/J017728/1
Abstract
Today we see the rise of Social Machines, like Twitter, Wikipedia and Galaxy Zoo—where communities identify and solve their own problems, harnessing commitment, local knowledge and embedded skills, without having to rely on experts or governments.
The Social Machines paradigm provides a lens onto the interacting sociotechnical systems of our hybrid digital-physical world, citizen-centric and at scale—emphasising empowerment and sociality in a world of pervasive technology adoption and automation.
This talk will present the Social Machines paradigm as an approach to social media analytics and a rethinking of our scholarly practices and knowledge infrastructure.