Interview with Matthew McGregor of Blue State Digital on the topics covered in his seminar "Digital strategy, social media and elections".

Interview with Beth Noveck on receiving an internet and society award at the OII Internet Awards 2014. Beth Noveck discusses the work of NYU's Governance Lab (which she directs), and the role of data in opening up government. She starts by discussing the origins of her interest in open government, democratisation, and political culture. She then discusses how opening up government data can translate into positive outcomes -- in terms of delivery of services, greater transparency, and strategies for collaborative goverment-citizen solutions -- and also how easy/difficult it is in practice to open and promote cultural change in government. She discusses how our notion of citizenship needs to change: we need a more active conception of citizenship, with citizens regarded as cocreators and participants, rather than simply monitors of government. Working in both the academic and policy worlds, Beth closes by emphasising the importance of being academically rigorous and evidence-based, while also engaging with the real world; that is, having an impact on policy and the running of institutions, and doing academic work quickly and well, with "real-world urgency". We should consider not just what we 'can' do with new media to promote a stronger democratic culture, but also what we 'should' be doing.

Interview with Laura Bates on receiving an internet and society award at the OII Internet Awards 2014. Laura Bates discusses the origins of the Everyday Sexism project, its intended audience, and the early difficulties she faced when talking about the problem of the normalisation of sexism and getting people to acknowledge its existence. She discusses the irony that the Internet can be used both as a medium to enable people to join together to promote positive social change, but also to intimidate women (eg through trolling). She discusses what we can do to control trolling and sexual harassment, such as social media companies putting the safety of the user at the centre of their policies; government making sure that people are prosecuted for illegal behaviours such as making death threats (even when it 'only' takes place online); what we can do individually to speak out against unacceptable behaviour; and the important role of education in schools at a young age to combat the normalisation of sexism and violence against women. She finishes by discussing the future of the everyday sexism project; whether the tide is turning (she notes a massive increase in men writing in to say they didn't realise the scale of the problem, and women writing to say they didn't realise they could speak out..), or whether there will be as great a need for the project in ten years' time as now.

Interview with Dame Stephanie Shirley on receiving a lifetime achievement award at the OII Internet Awards 2014. Dame Stephanie Shirley, the OII's founding donor, discusses her early career as founder and Chief Executive of software company, Xansa plc. She discusses organisational and early feminist culture, the role of women in IT / STEM (and how to encourage greater involvement), and entrepreneurship and social consciousness, particularly in relation to her important role as a philanthropist. She closes with thoughts on the future of the Oxford Internet Institute.

Interview with Barry Wellman on receiving a lifetime achievement award at the OII Internet Awards 2014. Barry Wellman discusses his early work on urban sociology and social networks in the city, and describes how this fascination with the evolution of community relationships shaped his scholarship. He offers insights into the concept of 'networked individualism' as it plays out across different spheres of our lives, particularly in networked work, and sets a research agenda for the next stage of his remarkable career.

The value of not knowing something illuminates some basic assumptions about knowledge and allows us to ask a series of interesting questions about how the information society will develop.  Our relationship with knowledge is an uneasy one. As we progress the cost of acquiring knowledge seems to be sinking, and the choice of what knowledge to pursue becomes more pronounced. We can imagine a world in which we could find out a whole range of things, at a moderate cost, but will choose not to because we believe that it would be wrong to attempt to know those things. That would be consistent with how knowledge has been viewed over the centuries, and would require us to develop a sense of when it is morally defensible to choose ignorance over knowledge. The value of not knowing something illuminates some basic assumptions about knowledge and allows us to ask a series of interesting questions about how the information society will develop. This talk will examine a number of ways in which this tension can play out.

Tim Wu will discuss the science of attention, the history of the attention industries, and some of the harms caused by overharvesting. He will also propose a model of attention sovereignty of importance for the future. Rich or poor, man, woman or child, each of us has 168 hours per week: it is how we use that time that differentiates us. Yet we seem to live in an era where the daily demands made on our time and attention are greater than ever before. This is due both to advances in information technologies, and also the rise of Internet business models that depend on the sale of human attention. In this talk, Tim Wu will discuss the science of attention, the history of the attention industries, and some of the harms caused by overharvesting. He will also propose a model of attention sovereignty of importance for the future.

This talk aims to provide a philosophical framework through which the current emphasis on data-intensive biology can be studied and understood. Over the last two decades, online databases, digital visualization tools and automated data analysis have become key tools to cope with the increasing scale and diversity of scientifically relevant information that is being accumulated (the so-called ‘big data’). Within the biological and biomedical sciences, digital access to data has revolutionized research methods and ways of doing science, thus also challenging how life is researched and understood. Prominent scientists have characterized this shift as leading to a new, ‘data-intensive’ paradigm for research, encompassing innovative ways to produce, store, disseminate and interpret data. This talk aims to provide a philosophical framework through which the current emphasis on data-intensive biology, and more generally the role played by data in scientific inquiry, can be studied and understood. To achieve this, I focus on what I call data journeys: the ways in which scientific data are disseminated across a multiplicity of contexts in order to function as evidence for knowledge claims. As I will show, the more widely data are disseminated and re-used, the more significant their epistemic role is deemed to be. To be transformed into knowledge, scientific data need to be ordered, labelled and packaged to make them portable – that is, capable of being picked up and transported across different sites. In this talk, I focus on the role of online databases as key sites for data packaging, whose structure and functioning strongly affects how existing data about organisms are transformed into new claims about the biological world. Building on a close study of the material conditions under which data travel, I then put forward three main arguments: (1) portability is a defining characteristic of data as a component of scientific inquiry, which crucially depends on the specific domains through which data are made to move; (2) what counts as data in the first place depends on the procedures and contexts through which researchers attribute evidential value to objects and processes; and (3) the fruitfulness of data-intensive science can thus be understood as resulting from the skilful use of information technologies to articulate and multiply the contexts in which different types of data can be organised and interpreted.

Tim Unwin focuses on current work at the CTO, where his own personal contributions focus especially on the use of ICTs by people with disabilities. Many of those engaged in using information and communication technologies for development in the early 2000s saw them as being an opportunity through which profoundly different social, economic and political structures could be created, that would in some way generate a fairer, more equitable global system. Recent rapid expansion in the use of mobile technologies and social media has convinced a newer generation of researchers and practitioners that this project is still on track. In this seminar, Tim Unwin will draw on his experiences at the boundaries between theory and practice, to explore whether such optimism is indeed justified. Themes that he will (probably) address include notions of empowerment, poverty, political violence, and challenges of implementing effective ‘development’ interventions. The seminar will draw particularly on some of his current work at the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, where his own personal contributions focus especially on the use of ICTs by people with disabilities as well as on skills development and entrepreneurship, but he will also take a longer term perspective that builds (almost invisibly) on his early work as a medieval historical geographer.

Jon Agar will introduce the concept of working worlds, illustrate how they can be used to think about past and present science, and identify some problems and issues. In a recent historical survey of science in the twentieth century, I devised a concept 'working worlds' which I think helps understand science's relationship with its broader context. Working worlds are arenas of human action that generate problems. The intuition was that science does not operate in a featureless, level environment; rather it responds to an uneven, given landscape of which working worlds are the major features. Our lives, but especially our sciences, have been organised by our orientation towards working worlds. In this seminar I will introduce the concept of working worlds, illustrate how they can be used to think about past and present science, and identify some problems and issues.