Untangling the Web

Today we talk with Jen Golbeck, who is known for her work in computational social network analysis. Her models for computing trust between people in social networks were amongst the first in the field. Now, she’s a professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park.

In this episode, she discusses her path to web science, her work in trust-based recommender systems, and how we can use web data to understand people's behaviors. But Jen isn't just interested in people — she's also become somewhat of an expert on dogs on the internet. Or more accurately, social media networks centered around pets.

Click here for this episode's transcript, and click here for show notes.

In this episode, we talk with Dame Wendy Hall, who was involved with creating the very field of web science. Wendy was a Founding Director of the Web Science Research Initiative, is the Managing director of the Web Science Trust, and became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2009. She explains some of her contributions to the field, as well as offers a perspective of how web science is changing under geopolitical forces, the pandemic, and more. Going beyond all this, she also dives into many of the ethical questions and challenges that web science posits.

Click here for the transcript and here to access the show notes for this episode.

In this episode, we talk with Susan Halford, Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Futures at the University of Bristol in the UK. Susan has been at the forefront of championing a deeper engagement between social scientists and computer scientists in addressing questions confronting Web Science. She explains why this partnership is so important in advancing not only the future of the Web but also the future of society.