Research

The Oxford Internet Institute is a research department of the University of Oxford, focusing on the social implications of the Internet and other advanced ICTs. Our multidisciplinary research faculty include political scientists, sociologists, lawyers, and economists who are engaged in a variety of research projects covering the themes of: Everyday Life, Governance and Democracy, Network Economy, Science and Learning and Shaping the Internet. One of our key missions is to stimulate and inform debate about the Internet, and to shape policy and practice around its (re)invention and use.

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Research news

Demonstrating the Value of the UK Web Domain Dataset for Social Science Research

Demonstrating the Value of the UK Web Domain Dataset for Social Science Research

The potential of web archives for link analysis research has been well documented, but this potential has yet to be realised and demonstrated in good research. The OII project "Big Data: Demonstrating the Value of the UK Web Domain Dataset for Social Science Research" aims to increase visibility, accessibility, and ease-of-use of the JISC UK Web Domain Dataset, a 30 terabyte web archive of the .uk country-code top level domain (ccTLD) collected from 1996 to 2010. The project will extract link graphs from the data, assess the feasibility and impact of using the .uk ccTLD as a boundary for UK web presence, and conduct and disseminate high-quality social science research examples using the collection. It will also trial tools and procedures to make the data more easily accessible including tools for remote access and assessing the feasibility of developing code to allow the easy import of link data from the collection into NodeXL or other network data analysis software packages to allow for easy access, visualisation, and analysis of subsets of the corpus. The researchers are Professor Helen Margetts (PI), Dr Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon (Co-I), Dr Eric T. Meyer (Co-I), Scott A. Hale, and Tom Nicholls. The project is supported by JISC.

  • Recruit: Research Assistant

    We are looking for a Part-time Research Assistant (Grade 6) to carry out research into the geography and social structure of Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa through large-scale data analysis. Closing: midday, 1 June 2012.

  • New Cybersecurity Centre

    Ian Brown (OII) is an Associate Director of Oxford's new Cyber Security Centre, established to bring together experts from a number of disciplines in Oxford and the wider world to address the cyber security challenges of the 21st century.

  • New Project: Online Activism

    A new OII project on Leaders and Followers in Online Activism is looking at how political and policy-oriented mobilizations (such as e-petitions or organized protests) start, and how they are sustained.

  • Child Protection / Online Risk

    A new OII project on child protection is undertaking a critical synthesis of the academic literature and the social and medical science evidence to date of the risks and opportunities of online activity for children and young people.

  • Open Education Week

    As part of Open Education Week we will be discussing our new project on Open Education Resources in HE institutions (Latin America and Europe): join the OportUnidad open webinar to find out more (6 March 2012: 16.00-17.00 GMT).

  • Internet Use in Britain

    Grant Blank looks at OxIS survey data on use and attitudes to the Internet in Britain to explore the "Next Generation Users": the 44% of British people who now access the Internet through multiple devices. (It isn't just young people.)

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Last updated on: 27 March 2012