Heather Ford
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Tamson Pietsch, Head of the Centre for Public History at UTS and I are leading a small pilot project at UTS to analyse Wikipedia’s scope and progress over the past twenty years in Australia together with collaborators, Wikimedia Australia <https://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/Wikimedia_Australia> (including Pru Mitchell and 99of9|Toby Hudson). We are looking for someone to help us to…
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BBC Click interviewed me for a segment on possible manipulation of Wikipedia by the Chinese state (below). Manipulation of Wikipedia by states is not new. What does seem to be new here, though, is the way in which strategies for intervening in Wikipedia (both through the election of administrators and at individual articles) are so…
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I’m excited to announce that I will be co-supervising up to four very generous and well-supported PhD scholarships at the University of New South Wales (Sydney) on the themes of “Living with Pervasive Media Technologies from Drones to Smart Homes” and “Data Justice: Technology, policy and community impact”. Please contact me directly if you have…
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I was recently quoted in an article for Science News about the relationship between academia and Wikipedia by Bethany Brookshire. I was asked to comment on a recent paper by MIT Sloan‘s Neil Thompson and Douglas Hanley who investigated the relationship between Wikipedia articles and scientific papers using examples from chemistry and econometrics. There are…
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[Reblogged from the Software Sustainability Institute blog] My research involves the study of the emerging relationships between data and society that is encapsulated by the fields of software studies, critical data studies and infrastructure studies, among others. These fields of research are primarily aimed at interpretive investigations into how software, algorithms and code have become embedded into…
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News this week that a panel I contributed to on political bots has been accepted for the annual International Communication Association (ICA) conference in San Diego with Amanda Clarke, Elizabeth Dubois, Jonas Kaiser and Cornelius Puschmann this May. Political bots are automated agents that are deployed on social media platforms like Twitter to perform a variety…
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[Reposted from The Conversation, 15 January 2016] As Wikipedia turns 15, volunteer editors worldwide will be celebrating with themed cakes and edit-a-thons aimed at filling holes in poorly covered topics. It’s remarkable that a user-editable encyclopedia project that allows anyone to edit has got this far, especially as the website is kept afloat through donations…
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Max Klein defines himself on his blog as a ‘Mathematician-Programmer, Wikimedia-Enthusiast, Burner-Yogi’ who believes in ‘liberty through wikis and logic’. I interviewed him a few weeks ago when he was in the UK for Wikimania 2014. He then wrote up some of his answers so that we could share with it others. Max is a long-time volunteer of…
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Mark Graham and I have just returned from Maynooth in Ireland where we participated in a really great workshop called Code and the City organised by Rob Kitchin and his team at the Programmable City project. We presented a draft paper entitled, ‘Semantic Cities: Coded Geopolitics and Rise of the Semantic Web’ where we trace…
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