Projects
Our wide variety of research projects cover the themes of: Everyday Life, Governance and Democracy, Network Economy, Science and Learning and Shaping the Internet.
Current projects
Big Data: Demonstrating the Value of the UK Web Domain Dataset for Social Science Research
Participants: Professor Helen Margetts, Dr Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, Scott A. Hale, Dr Eric T. Meyer, Tom Nicholls
This project aims to enhance JISC's UK Web Domain archive, a 30 TB archive of the .uk country-code top level domain collected from 1996 to 2010. It will extract link graphs from the data and disseminate social science research using the collection.
Participants: Dr Monica Bulger, Dr Victoria Nash, Dr Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova
Work and activities by OII faculty and associates on issues surrounding online child safety and protection.
Development and Broadband Internet Access in East Africa
Participants: Dr Felix Akorli, Claude Bizimana, Dr Mark Graham, Charles Katua, Laura Elizabeth Mann, Professor Tim Waema
By using surveys, interviews and in-depth observations, this project examines the expectations and stated potentials of broadband Internet in East Africa and compares those expectations to on-the-ground effects that broadband connectivity is having.
EINS: Network of Excellence in Internet Science
Participants: Dr Ian Brown, Dr Monica Bulger, Dr Cristobal Cobo
EINS aims to strengthen scientific and technological excellence by developing an integrated and interdisciplinary scientific understanding of Internet networks and their co-evolution with society.
FRESNEL: Federated Secure Sensor Network Laboratory
Participants: Dr Ian Brown, Piers O'Hanlon, Dr Joss Wright
FRESNEL aims to build a large scale federated sensor network framework with multiple applications sharing the same resources, where reliable intra-application communication is guaranteed, as well as a scalable and distributed management infrastructure.
Future Home Networks and Services
Participants: Dr Ian Brown, Abdullahi Arabo, Dr Andrew Martin, Dr Joss Wright
This project is addressing home network and service security by researching and developing security frameworks for sharing between networks and devices, protocols to connect devices with cloud services, and security analysis of remote management systems.
Participants: Simon Bastow, Professor Patrick Dunleavy, Tobias Escher, Professor Helen Margetts, Oliver Pearce, Jane Tinkler
Research dedicated to improving knowledge and understanding of e-government and the impact of web-based technologies on government.
IMSK: Integrated Mobile Security Kit
Participants: Dr Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright
IMSK integrates information from legacy and novel sensor technologies into common operational picture where information is fused into intelligence, in a mobile system suitable for rapid deployment at venues which temporarily need enhanced security.
Participants: Dr Ian Brown, Professor William H. Dutton, Desiree Miloshevic, Professor Jonathan Zittrain
A programme of seminars, forums and conferences informing our research on Internet governance.
KNETWORKS: Dissemination and Networks of Knowledge in the Atlantic Area
Participants: Dr Cristobal Cobo, Professor William H. Dutton, Dr Eric T. Meyer
KNETWORKS aims to create a strong knowledge sharing and dissemination network in the Atlantic area to promote the exchange of good practices and implementation strategies for building and exploiting a 21st century knowledge and information society.
Lapsed Use of the Internet Amongst Young People in the UK: Digital Choice or Digital Exclusion?
Participants: Dr Rebecca Eynon, Dr Anne Geniets
Around 10% of 17-19 year olds in Britain are lapsed Internet users: why have they stopped using the Internet given its prevalence and value in the lives of the majority of young people? This project aims to inform the UK's digital inclusion strategy.
Leaders and Followers in Online Activism
Participants: Professor Helen Margetts, Dr Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, Dr Ning Wang
Where do political and policy-oriented mobilizations (such as e-petitions or organized protests) start and how are they sustained? What affects the propensity of people to join a mobilization, and hence, the mobilization's success?
Me, My Spouse and the Internet: Meeting, Dating and Marriage in the Digital Age
Participants: Dr Grant Blank, Professor William H. Dutton, Dr Bernie Hogan, Dr Nai Li, Dr Monica Whitty
The project uses survey data from Australian and UK couples to look at the significance and impact of the Internet on intimate relationships, including how people use ICTs to meet each other and maintain relationships, and how ICTs affect their behaviour.
OeSS: The Oxford e-Social Science Project
Participants: Dr Annamaria Carusi, Professor Paul Allan David, Dr Matthijs den Besten, Professor William H. Dutton, Dr Kathryn Eccles, Dr Marina Jirotka, Dr Eric T. Meyer, Professor Christopher Millard, Professor Michael Parker, Dr Justine Pila, Professor Tina Piper, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Michael Spence, Professor David Vaver
The Oxford e-Social Science project aims to understand how e-Research projects negotiate various social, ethical, legal and organizational forces and constraints, in order to help researchers avoid these problems when building scientific collaborations.
Participants: Dr Cristobal Cobo, Daniel Villar Onrubia
OportUnidad is an action-research project co-funded by the European Commission under the EuropeAid ALFA III programme with the aim of promoting the adoption of Open Educational Practices in Latin America.
Participants: Dr Grant Blank, Professor William H. Dutton, Professor Helen Margetts, Bianca Reisdorf
Research on access, use and attitudes to the Internet in Britain based on biennial surveys covering (for example) digital and social inclusion and exclusion, social networking, safety and privacy concerns, Internet regulation, and behaviour.
OXLab: Oxford eXperimental Laboratory
Participants: Professor Peter John, Professor Helen Margetts, Dr Nir Vulkan, Lucy Bartlett, Ingrid Boxall, Tobias Escher, Scott A. Hale
Oxford eXperimental Laboratory is undertaking laboratory-based experiments (eg information-seeking tasks) on networked computers in two disciplines: Economics (interactive decision making) and Political Science (evaluating government information online).
SECT: Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition
Participants: Michael Popham, Dr Eric T. Meyer, Judith Siefring
SECT will carry out an investigation into the sustainability of the EEBO-TCP corpus and aims to develop strategies to secure a sustainable future for the collection.
SESERV Consortium: Socio-Economic Services for European Research Projects
Participants: Dr Cristobal Cobo, Dr Eric T. Meyer, Dr Anne-Marie Oostveen
The SESERV consortium aims to maximize research impact by raising awareness of socio-economic trends in the areas of incentives, accounting, Digital Europe, and risk management, and by addressing possible policy priorities within the research community.
Participants: Maja Andjelkovic, Professor William H. Dutton, Jessica Richman
The Fifth Estate is a research project designed to examine critically the Internet's role in enabling new forms of democratic accountability and voice, comparable to the press of an earlier era.
Participants: Professor Soumitra Dutta, Professor William H. Dutton, Ginette Law
This research aims to identify patterns and trends in individual attitudes and behaviours related to online trust, privacy, security and freedom.
Participants: Professor Helen Margetts, Scott A. Hale, Tom Nicholls
This research programme aims to assess where political science understanding, knowledge and theory should be re-examined and developed in light of widespread use of the Internet, and to develop methodologies to study online behaviour.
The Learning Companion: an embodied conversational agent for learning
Participants: Dr Chris Davies, Dr Rebecca Eynon, Professor Yorick Wilks
The Learning Companion project aims to evaluate the feasibility of a computer-based digital tool to help adults whose engagement with learning is tentative or hard to sustain make productive use of the Internet for achieving their own learning projects.
ULab: European Laboratory for Modelling the Technical Research University of Tomorrow
Participants: Dr Monica Bulger, Professor William H. Dutton, Dr Rebecca Eynon
ULab will work as a University Laboratory, systematically reviewing, evaluating and experimenting with current practice in research, valorization, entrepreneurship and outreach activities in each of the five partner universities.
Using Twitter to Map and Measure Online Cultural Diffusion
Participants: Dr Mark Graham, Devin Gaffney, Scott A. Hale
This project is using Twitter data to comprehensively uncover where Internet content is being created; whether the amount of content created in different places is changing over time; and how content moves across time and space in the Social Web.
Participants: Dr Mark Graham, Dr Bernie Hogan, Dr Ilhem Allagui, Richard Farmbrough, Dr Ali Frihida
Using Wikipedia to explore the participation gap between those who have their say, and those whose voices are pushed to the side, in representations of the Arab world online.
Wikichains: Encouraging Transparency in Commodity Chains
Participants: Dr Mark Graham, Dr Steve New
Wikichains is a website that aims to encourage ethical consumption and transparency in commodity chains, by encouraging Internet users from around the world to upload text, images, sounds, and videos of any node on any commodity chain.
Wikipedia's Networks and Geographies: Representation and Power in Peer-Produced Content
Participants: Dr Mark Graham, Scott A. Hale, Dr Bernie Hogan, Han-Teng Liao
This project brings together OII research fellows and doctoral students to shed light on the incorporation of new users and information into the Wikipedia community.
Participants: Dr Grant Blank, Professor William H. Dutton
The World Internet Project (WIP) carries out panel surveys in over twenty countries to help understand how individuals adopt and use the Internet and other technologies, as well as the resulting social, economic, political and everyday-life implications.
Past projects
Breaking Barriers to e-Government
Participants: Professor William H. Dutton, Dr Rebecca Eynon, Professor Helen Margetts
Investigating the legal, organisational, technological and other barriers to expanding effective eGovernment services using the Internet and to define possible solutions at a European level to overcome such obstacles.
Broadband Internet in Oxfordshire schools
Participants: Peter Birmingham, Chris Davies, Richard Pring
Studying innovations in learning and education tied to the implementation of broadband infrastructures in Oxfordshire schools, leading to broader questions about the factors shaping e-innovation at all levels of education and learning.
Campaigning in cyberspace: 2005 general election online
Participants: Dr Steve Ward
Research on the role and use of new ICTs in the 2005 UK election campaign, drawing on data from both a top-down party perspective and bottom-up voter perspective using qualitative and quantitative methods.
Civil society participation in the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS)
Participants: Professor Stephen Coleman, Professor William H. Dutton, Dr Sonia Liff, Dr Victoria Nash
Achieving a deeper understanding of the nature, extent and potential of civil society groups' participation in the 2003 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and ICT policy making by establishing a cross-sector academic / practitioner dialogue.
Clinical and psychological characteristics of Internet gamblers: web-based survey
Participants: Professor William H. Dutton, John Geddes, Guy Goodwin, Joanne Lloyd, Dr Victoria Nash, Professor Robert D. Rogers
Expanding our understanding of online gambling by undertaking a web-based survey of users of Internet gambling sites, covering areas such as demographic and occupational characteristics, psychological characteristics, and attitudes to risk.
Companions: Intelligent, Persistent, Personalised Multimodal Interfaces to the Internet
Participants: Professor Yorick Wilks
This project developed a virtual conversational 'Companion': an agent that stays with the user for long periods of time, develops a relationship and 'knows' its owner's preferences and wishes, communicating primarily by using and understanding speech.
Cyber-humour: the end of humour as we know it?
Participants: Dr Limor Shifman
Combining quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the implications of the Internet on humorous communication (eg political, technology and gender based humour) starting from the senders of humorous messages and ending in receiving procedures.
Cybertrust: The tension between privacy and security in an e-society
Participants: Professor William H. Dutton
Perceptions of trust in online activities are significant factors influencing the kinds and extents of Internet use and interactions: this work draws on Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS) data to explore and refine key social determinants of cybertrust.
Digital Choices and the Reconfiguring of Access
Participants: Professor William H. Dutton
Research on how the use of the Internet in different, overlapping and interacting arenas is shaped by everyday and strategic choices about the design and use of the technology.
Digital Impacts: A Synthesis Report and Workshop
Participants: Dr Kathryn Eccles, Dr Eric T. Meyer
This project was designed to synthesize the evidence about the impact that digital resources are having on various audiences, and how resource providers have stepped up efforts to embed resources into the practices of communities.
Digitised Resources: A Usage and Impact Study
Participants: Dr Eric T. Meyer, Professor William H. Dutton, Dr Kathryn Eccles, Christine Madsen, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Professor Mike Thelwall
This project combined quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure the impact of online scholarly resources and to develop a best practices toolkit that allows assessment of the impact of digitisation projects by researchers and funding bodies.
Participants: Dr Ian Brown, Mona Hess, Sally McDonald, Francesca Millar, Yean-Hoon Ong, Stuart Robson, Dr Graeme Were
e-Curator explores the use of 3D colour scanning and e-Science technologies to capture and share very large 3D colour scans and detailed datasets about museum artefacts in a secure computing environment, to assist curators and conservators.
Participants: Professor Paul Allan David
Articulating and coordinating policy guidelines for international organisations, national governments and private foundations on open access publication and sharing of publicly funded scientific and technical data and information.
EICN working group on child protection and mobile phones
Participants: Professor William H. Dutton, Dr Victoria Nash
An OII-led working group to gather information and develop policy recommendations about the practices of mobile network operators in Europe in relation to child protection in the era of third-generation (3G) multimedia mobile phones.
Embedding e-science applications: designing and managing for usability
Participants: Grace de la Flor, Dr Marina Jirotka, Sharon Lloyd, Mustafizur Rahman, Dr Monica Schraefel, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dimitrina Spencer, Professor Anne Trefethen, Andrew Warr
The 'embedding e-science applications' project addressed the difficulty of managing requirements for usability in e-science projects, and developing collaborative approaches to system development that allow for communication of these requirements.
Participants: Dr Kathryn Eccles, Dr Eric T. Meyer, Professor Ralph Schroeder
Aiming to better understand the organizational, collaborative and technological developments in e-Infrastructures which are effective in supporting virtual research organizations in different fields.
eTRUST: e-democracy technologies and the problem of public trust
Participants: Dr Anne-Marie Oostveen
Does e-democracy increase trust in government, and, if so, under what conditions? This work is based on case studies (involving observation / interviewing) of local and national e-democracy initiatives selected from England and the Netherlands.
Participants: Dr Ian Brown, Ashima Chopra, Dorothea Kleine, Apurba Kundu, Ann Light, Christian Wallenta
The aim of the Fair Tracing project was to support Ethical Trade by implementing IT Tracking and Tracing Technologies in supply chains to provide consumers and producers with enhanced information.
FLOSSWorld: Free / Libre / Open Source Software
Participants: Professor Paul Allan David
FLOSSWorld is designed to increase knowledge about Free / Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) development and application, in order to support further collaboration between the EU and developing countries, and to contribute to informed public policy.
Participants: Professor Stephen Coleman
Evaluating the successes and failures of local authorities in facilitating ground-up, citizen-led approaches to e-democracy, and considering how authorities have tried to harness the power of ICTs to create and stimulate new forms of 'civic space'.
Future Directions in Virtual Reality
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder
This project provided an overview of virtual environments in Sweden and beyond, including applications.
Humanities Information Practices
Participants: Dr Marina Jirotka, Dr Eric T. Meyer, Dr Claire Warwick, Dr Sally Wyatt, Smiljana Antonijevic, Dr Anne Beaulieu, Dr Monica Bulger, Dr Annamaria Carusi, Tim Davies, Grace de la Flor, Dr Kathryn Eccles, Christine Madsen, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Melissa Terras, Dr Tim Webmoor
Many humanities scholars are enthusiastic users of digital resources, however there is a potential mismatch between what (and how) resources are offered, and how scholars might use them. How should they be designed to ensure maximum use by scholars?
Information Exchange between Citizens and the Department of Work and Pensions
Participants: Professor Patrick Dunleavy, Tobias Escher, Professor Helen Margetts, Jane Tinkler
A value for money study for the National Audit Office (NAO) looking at information exchange between the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and its benefit customers.
Intercultural Communication in Virtual Environments
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder
A project to study culture and norms in different virtual environments, such as interactions between languages in text-based worlds.
Internet and productivity in public services: innovative pathways for e-government
Participants: Professor Alexandre Caldas, Professor Paul Allan David, Professor William H. Dutton, Orges Ormanidhi
Investigating indicators of productivity growth in public sector institutions across eight EU countries, including patterns and impacts of ICT use, organisational perspectives, and implications of the interaction of ICT usage and organisational processes.
Language, power and Internet communication
Participants: Professor Richard Rose
A study on transnational Internet communication in which one party has a bi-cultural understanding and uses English as a foreign language while the other (native English) party assumes (not entirely correctly) that there is a shared understanding.
Living in a Virtual World: Adaptation to the Long-term Uses of Virtual Reality
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder
A project examining the long-term uses of virtual environments via a combination of experimental and participant observation studies.
Participants: Agnes Bruszik, Dr Monica Bulger, Paolo Celot, Professor William H. Dutton, Emilie Normann, Kristian Pederson
This project aims to develop and validate indicators of adult media literacy levels, in response to the Audiovisual Media Services Directive requiring that the European Commission report levels of Media Literacy in all EU Member States by December 2011.
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder
Funding for fieldwork and report on virtual environments as a tool for social science education.
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder
An investigation of the uses of virtual environments, including for co-visualization in various domains.
Participants: Tim Berners-Lee, Professor William H. Dutton, Professor Wendy Hall, Professor Yorick Wilks, Professor Jonathan Zittrain
Establishing networks of researchers from different technical and social science research disciplines to begin to develop a Web Science research agenda through the exchange of PhD students and collaborative workshops.
New electronic document designs and systems
Participants: Dr Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson's 'Transliterary' system aims to produce software that can unify electronic documents by converting them into compatible formats that allow mutual linking and the re-use of content.
OpenNet Initiative: state-sponsored filtering of the Internet
Participants: Professor Jonathan Zittrain
The Open Net Initiative aims to investigate, expose and analyze Internet filtering and surveillance practices, uncovering the potential pitfalls and unintended consequences of these practices, and helping to inform better public policy and advocacy work.
Parliamentary representation in the age of the Internet: an Anglo-Australian comparison
Participants: Dr Steve Ward
Evaluating the use of the Internet by parliaments and representatives in the UK and Australia, contributing to current debates about the health of representative parliamentary democracy and the role of political representatives in the 21st century.
Participation in Internet-mediated interactions
Participants: Ingemar Cox, Steffen Huck, Professor Helen Margetts
This research applied a multidisciplinary approach to developing a methodology for evaluating the web structure and 'health' of e-government, and investigating design mechanisms for fundraising on the Internet (including determinants of giving behaviour).
PEACH: Presence Research in Action
Participants: Dr Eric T. Meyer, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Malte Ziewitz
Presence research focuses on understanding and controlling the cognitive experience of being somewhere, or someone: we are analysing social impact scenarios to raise and address potential ethical and policy issues relating to Presence technologies.
Performance of distributed problem-solving networks
Participants: Professor Paul Allan David, Professor William H. Dutton, Dr Robert Ackland, David A. Bray, Irene Cassarino, Karen Croxson, Professor Jean-Michel Dalle, Dr Matthijs den Besten, Tobias Escher, Dr Aldo Geuna, Max Loubser, Dr Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Felix Reed-Tsochas, Wolf Richter, Philipp Tuertscher
Addressing the uncertainties that surround the coordination and performance of 'Distributed Problem Solving Networks' (DPSN), as well as the areas in which these new Internet-based forms offer advantages over more familiar modes of problem-solving.
Personal identification and identity management in new modes of e-government
Participants: Professor Miriam Lips, Dr Joe Organ, Professor John Taylor
Gathering empirical data on a variety of digital means for constructing and managing the citizen's identity in e-Government service relationships, and exploring varying relationships between the citizen and government in different policy fields.
Physical Science Information Practices
Participants: Dr Marina Jirotka, Dr Eric T. Meyer, Dr Melissa Terras, Dr Will Venters, Dr Sally Wyatt, Dr Monica Bulger, Dr Monica Bulger, Dr Annamaria Carusi, Avgousta Kyriakidou, Lucy Power, Dr Andrea Scharnhorst, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Peter Williams
Exploring the information seeking, organizing, archiving and communicating capacities of physical sciences communities as a study case (and role model) for effective information processing regimes and behaviours in complex problem-solving tasks.
Privacy Value Networks (PVNets)
Participants: Dr Ian Brown, Dr Fehmi Ben Abdesslem, Dave Birch, Dr Sacha Brostoff, Fadhila Haeri Mazanderani, Dr Tristan Henderson, David Houghton, Dr Adam Joinson, Miguel Malheiros, Dr Anne-Marie Oostveen, Chrysanthi Papoutsi, Iain Parris, Professor Angela Sasse, Dr Asimina Vasalou
Privacy Value Networks (PVNets) is producing an empirical base for developing concepts of privacy across contexts and timeframes, addressing a current lack of clarity of what privacy is and what it means to stakeholders in different usage scenarios.
Participants: Professor Stephen Coleman
Investigated how young people gather and communicate civic information online, and setting a new agenda for debating the relationship between young people, the Internet and democracy, arguing they are moving to newer forms of participation.
Researcher Engagement with Web Archives
Participants: Dr Eric T. Meyer, Dr Sally Wyatt, Dr Meghan Dougherty, Christine Madsen, Dr Arthur Thomas, Dr Charles van den Heuval
This project explores how to bridge the gap between archivists and researchers, and how preserved web content archives might be used by researchers and others to ask meaningful new questions.
Scoping the institutional infrastructure of e-science
Participants: Professor Paul Allan David, Dr Michael Spence
A project examining how the social, institutional and legal settings of scientists are likely to facilitate or constrain the conduct of e-science, focusing on policy recommendations to facilitate greater collaboration between universities internationally.
Social Feedback and the Emergence of Norms in the Production of Online Public Goods
Participants: Dr Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon
Investigating instances of collective action that have solved an old dilemma: why should people contribute to collective goods (eg online collaborative platforms) when, by being public, they can be enjoyed without making a contribution to their provision?
Spam email: a qualitative study
Participants: Professor William H. Dutton, Dr Leslie Haddon
A qualitative study of how individuals view and manage unwanted email, particularly spam, based on semi-structured interviews of users.
Participants: Professor Jonathan Zittrain
A leading independent authority on trends in badware and its distribution, and a focal point for the development of collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware. The main focus is on research and public education.
Student Protests and Digital Media: The Campaign Against Tuition Fees
Participants: Dr Michael Biggs, Dr Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon
How are digital media changing the way in which people mobilize for a collective cause? Why do some individuals take part in protest, and others not? These issues are investigated through the UK student campaign against raised tuition fees.
SUBITO: Surveillance of Unattended Baggage and the Identification and Tracking of the Owner
Participants: Dr Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright
SUBITO is designed to research and further develop automated real time detection of abandoned luggage, fast identification of the individual responsible and his/her subsequent path and current location.
Participants: Professor Paul Allan David, Professor William H. Dutton, Professor Paul Jeffreys, Dr Marina Jirotka, Dr Eric T. Meyer, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Professor Anne Trefethen
The e-Horizons Institute researched the coming technological breakthroughs in e-science that will have cross-sector social and economic implications as they are taken up by business, government and other actors.
Participants: Dr Chris Davies, Dr Rebecca Eynon, Professor John Furlong, Melissa Highton, Dr Lars Malmberg
This project, initiated as part of Becta's major programme of research in support of the Government's Harnessing Technology strategy, looked at the learning opportunities afforded by young people's uses of new technologies in their everyday lives.
The Sociology of Virtual Reality
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder
This award provided funding for field visits in the United States and research assistant field work in virtual environment settings.
The World Wide Web of Science: emerging global sources of expertise
Participants: Professor William H. Dutton, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Professor Alexandre Caldas
The World Wide Web of Science project assesses whether, and to what extent, the Internet and the Web are transforming access to sources of scientific expertise, and whether these sources are becoming more concentrated or more diversified.
Participants: Dr Ian Brown, Dr Colin Blackman, Professor Jonathan Cave, Simon Forge, Dr Karmen Guevara, Lara Srivastava, Professor Motohiro Tsuchiya, Malte Ziewitz
The Internet Futures project will produce a single preferred vision of a 'Future Internet' for Europe by researching possible social, psychological, technological and economic options for its further development and their likely socio-economic impacts.
Using Web Archives: A Futures Perspective
Participants: Dr Eric T. Meyer, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Arthur Thomas
Web archives are the best hope for future researchers to understand the web of yesterday and today, but efforts to ensure that archives will be useful are lagging. This report asks what challenges web archives face, and suggests how to address them.
Virtual communities of practice: the open source software community
Participants: Professor Paul Allan David
Paul David directed a major international networked project on the 'free / libre / open source' approach to software development, virtual communities and the broader implications of 'the "open source" way of working'.
VOSON: Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks
Participants: Dr Robert Ackland, Professor Bruce Bimber, Markus Buchhorn, Dr Rachel Gibson, Dr Mathieu O'Neil, Dr Steve Ward
The first stage in the establishment of a 'Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks': a Grid-enabled research environment facilitating cutting-edge collaborative research into the existence and impact of online social and political networks.
Wireless technology for broadband Internet
Participants: Dr Christian Sandvig
A 2004 pilot study mapping the use of Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) for broadband Internet access in Oxfordshire, later contributing to a cross-national study of the evolution of wireless networks undertaken by the OII and the University of Illinois.
Participants: Dr Eric T. Meyer, Dr Robert Ackland, Professor William H. Dutton, Christine Madsen, Professor Ralph Schroeder
Establishing a framework for e-Humanities research using available open source tools and technologies and archived web content to create novel research interfaces to the first of many, scholarly, e-Humanities web collections.
Last updated on: 16 May 2012
