web science and the two (hundred) cultures: representation of disciplines publishing in web science
DESCRIPTION
This talk summarises the content of my WebSci'13 publication on disciplinary representation in Web Science. The abstract of the paper is: Web Science is an interdisciplinary field. Motivated by the unforeseen scale and impact of the web, it addresses web related research questions in a holistic manner, incorporating epistemologies from a broad set of disciplines. There has been ongoing discussion about which disciplines are more or less present in the community, and about defining Web Science itself: there is, however, a dearth of empirical work in this area. This paper presents an analysis of the presence of different disciplines in Web Science. We applied Natural Language Processing and topic extraction to a corpus of Web Science material, analysing it with graphing and visualisation tools, MatLab and an expert survey. We discovered four communities within Web Science, and trends in the conference series over time (a strong impact from collocation) and format (posters covering a broader range of topics than papers). The expert survey linked highly ranked terms with disciplines, yielding strong links with Communication, Computer Science, Psychology, and Sociology. Controversially, experts described highly ranked topics and suggested disciplines (extracted from WebSci CFPs) as not reflecting the nature of Web Science.TRANSCRIPT
Web Science and the Two (Hundred) Cultures
Friday 3rd May, 2013
Clare J. Hooper1, Georgeta Bordea2, Paul Buitelaar2
1) IT Innovation, University of Southampton
2) DERI, National University of Ireland
Representation of Disciplines Publishing in Web Science
Web Science 2013
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
• WebSci is interdisciplinary
• It’s addressed key questions for years
• We can still struggle to describe it
The question
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
• How we do WebSci is important
• Quality • Credibility
• Data insight
Why worry about it?
dtc.webscience.ecs.soton.ac.uk/about-webscience-main-site/
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
1. Collate data corpus
2. NLP to extract topics
3. Analysis: graphing, visualisation
4. Analysis of communities
5. Analysis of WebSci conference series
6. Expert survey
Method
saffron.deri.ie
1) Web Science Communities
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
Web Science Communities
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
• 4 ‘real’ communities• 3 communities
subsumed within others
• Web page, semantic web technology, social media
• 2 incongruent communities
• future research, social science
Web Science Communities
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
Key Communities
Information retrieval
Semantic Web
Social networking
Personalised learning
2) Web Science Conference Series
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
Conference series (time)
avail
able
onlin
e
infor
mat
ion e
xcha
nge
infor
mat
ion re
triev
al
infor
mat
ion s
harin
g
mac
hine
learn
ing
natu
ral la
ngua
ge
RDF gra
ph
real
time
real
world
sem
antic
web
shar
e inf
orm
ation
socia
l med
ia
SPARQL qu
ery
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
2009
2010
2011
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
Conference series (time)
avail
able
onlin
e
infor
mat
ion e
xcha
nge
infor
mat
ion re
triev
al
infor
mat
ion s
harin
g
mac
hine
learn
ing
natu
ral la
ngua
ge
RDF gra
ph
real
time
real
world
sem
antic
web
shar
e inf
orm
ation
socia
l med
ia
SPARQL qu
ery
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
2009
2010
2011
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
Conference series (time)
avail
able
onlin
e
infor
mat
ion e
xcha
nge
infor
mat
ion re
triev
al
infor
mat
ion s
harin
g
mac
hine
learn
ing
natu
ral la
ngua
ge
RDF gra
ph
real
time
real
world
sem
antic
web
shar
e inf
orm
ation
socia
l med
ia
SPARQL qu
ery
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
2009
2010
2011
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
Conference series (time)
avail
able
onlin
e
infor
mat
ion e
xcha
nge
infor
mat
ion re
triev
al
infor
mat
ion s
harin
g
mac
hine
learn
ing
natu
ral la
ngua
ge
RDF gra
ph
real
time
real
world
sem
antic
web
shar
e inf
orm
ation
socia
l med
ia
SPARQL qu
ery
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
2009
2010
2011
3) Expert Survey
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
• Top extracted terms
• Suggested discipline list (past WebSci CFPs)
• 13 respondents
TermNumber of disciplines
Disciplines named by at least 3 experts
social interaction 12 Sociology; Psychology
social media 12 Communication; CompSci; NetSci; Sociology
learning network 11 CompSci; Pedagogy
mobile device 11 Any/all; CompSci; (Industrial) design
social networking 11 Communication; CompSci; Sociology
social networking site 11 Communication; CompSci
personal learning environment 10 CompSci; Education
web community 10 CompSci; Psychology; Sociology
internet user 9 CompSci; Psychology; Sociology
social science 9 Sociology
search engine 8 CompSci
web application 8 CompSci
web page 8 Any/all; CompSci
semantic web 7 CompSci
user interface 7 CompSci; Design
uniform resource identifier 4 CompSci
web science research 4 Any/all; CompSci; Web Science
information retrieval 2 CompSci
linked data principle 1 CompSci
TermNumber of disciplines
Disciplines named by at least 3 experts
social interaction 12 Sociology; Psychology
social media 12 Communication; CompSci; NetSci; Sociology
learning network 11 CompSci; Pedagogy
mobile device 11 Any/all; CompSci; (Industrial) design
social networking 11 Communication; CompSci; Sociology
social networking site 11 Communication; CompSci
personal learning environment 10 CompSci; Education
web community 10 CompSci; Psychology; Sociology
internet user 9 CompSci; Psychology; Sociology
social science 9 Sociology
search engine 8 CompSci
web application 8 CompSci
web page 8 Any/all; CompSci
semantic web 7 CompSci
user interface 7 CompSci; Design
uniform resource identifier 4 CompSci
web science research 4 Any/all; CompSci; Web Science
information retrieval 2 CompSci
linked data principle 1 CompSci
TermNumber of disciplines
Disciplines named by at least 3 experts
social interaction 12 Sociology; Psychology
social media 12 Communication; CompSci; NetSci; Sociology
learning network 11 CompSci; Pedagogy
mobile device 11 Any/all; CompSci; (Industrial) design
social networking 11 Communication; CompSci; Sociology
social networking site 11 Communication; CompSci
personal learning environment 10 CompSci; Education
web community 10 CompSci; Psychology; Sociology
internet user 9 CompSci; Psychology; Sociology
social science 9 Sociology
search engine 8 CompSci
web application 8 CompSci
web page 8 Any/all; CompSci
semantic web 7 CompSci
user interface 7 CompSci; Design
uniform resource identifier 4 CompSci
web science research 4 Any/all; CompSci; Web Science
information retrieval 2 CompSci
linked data principle 1 CompSci
TermNumber of disciplines
Disciplines named by at least 3 experts
social interaction 12 Sociology; Psychology
social media 12 Communication; CompSci; NetSci; Sociology
learning network 11 CompSci; Pedagogy
mobile device 11 Any/all; CompSci; (Industrial) design
social networking 11 Communication; CompSci; Sociology
social networking site 11 Communication; CompSci
personal learning environment 10 CompSci; Education
web community 10 CompSci; Psychology; Sociology
internet user 9 CompSci; Psychology; Sociology
social science 9 Sociology
search engine 8 CompSci
web application 8 CompSci
web page 8 Any/all; CompSci
semantic web 7 CompSci
user interface 7 CompSci; Design
uniform resource identifier 4 CompSci
web science research 4 Any/all; CompSci; Web Science
information retrieval 2 CompSci
linked data principle 1 CompSci
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
Controversy
“There are some startling absence, e.g. business studies, art, culture […] and education.”
“You need to add all the [humanities]
disciplines if you’re going to add
philosophy […] And what about art, design, media
studies, gender studies?”
“The [term] list seems to be very much slanted towards technology and away from anything like law, economics, sociology.”
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
Larger debate
• Can terms represent disciplines?• Mapping• Meaning
• Term extraction loss of context• argumentation, methods, author background
• How to get it back?• Related terms/term clusters• Definitions• Show full paragraphs
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
Data and results: clarehooper.net/WebSciCorpus/
Summing up
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
• 4 communities• Colocation works!• Term/discipline links vary
• Discipline presence varies• Disparity: terms / CFPs
and expert expectations
Summing up
© University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre 2013
• It ain’t over • The expert survey was
invaluable but small: we want more data!
• Please take 3 minutes to fill in a survey
• Or visit isurvey.soton.ac.uk/7480
Come participate!