Oxford Internet Institute

Current projects

• NEXUS: Real Time Data Fusion and Network Analysis for Urban Systems

  Participants: Dr Scott A. Hale, Dr Jonathan Bright, Dr Graham McNeill

  Mining human mobility and migration patterns from social media and industry data sources as well as visualizing geo-temporal network data interactively with HTML5.

• Elections and the Internet

  Participants: Professor Helen Margetts, Dr Scott A. Hale, Dr Taha Yasseri, Dr Jonathan Bright

  This site collects elections research at the OII. We are interested in exploring the extent to which data from the social web can be used to predict interesting social and political phenomena, especially elections.

• Political Knowledge and the Web

  Participants: Dr Jonathan Bright

  Information is key for citizens to play their role in the democratic systems. Citizens need information to define their preferences and evaluate the activity of governments and parliaments.

• Urban Data 2 Decide

  Participants: Dr Stefano De Sabbata, Dr Jonathan Bright

  Urban decision makers are nowadays faced with both unprecedented challenges as well as new op-portunities as the environment around them grows ever more complex.

• VOX-Pol Network of Excellence

  Participants: Professor Ian Brown, Dr Jonathan Bright

  The VOX-Pol research project is designed to comprehensively research, analyse, debate, and critique issues surrounding violent online political extremism (VOPE).

• Open Data and Civic Engagement: Mechanisms for the Promotion of Political Participation

  Participants: Dr Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, Dr Ning Wang, Dr Jonathan Bright

  How effective are open data initiatives in encouraging civic engagement in policy-relevant domains?

Past projects

• Big data and election prediction: analysing online information seeking during the European Parliament elections

  Participants: Dr Taha Yasseri, Dr Jonathan Bright, Eve Ahearn

  This project investigates the extent to which the characteristics of different political systems (for example, the number of major political parties) affect patterns of online information seeking behaviour which take place during election time.

• Big Data: Demonstrating the Value of the UK Web Domain Dataset for Social Science Research

  Participants: Professor Helen Margetts, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, Dr Scott A. Hale, Tom Nicholls, Dr Taha Yasseri, Dr Jonathan Bright

  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.

• Digital Era Government and Politics

  Providing an in-depth understanding of the changing nature of digital-era governance and politics and the theoretical, practical and ethical questions surrounding the role of the Internet and related technologies in political life.

• Accessing Research Data from the Social Web

  This course teaches the essentials of programming in Python, the language of choice in the growing field of computational social science.

• Digital Social Research: Statistics Core

  This course introduces students to statistics for the social sciences, with an emphasis on application to research on the Internet and society.

• Simulating Society

  This course is about agent-based modelling, a fascinating technique for answering social science questions, based on computer simulation of real-world societies and real-world human events.

• Accessing Research Data from the Social Web: OII MSc Methods Option Course

  Recorded: 16 July 2015

  Duration: 00:02:46

  In the space of a few years data sourced from the "social web" (platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Google) has come to occupy an important place in social science research.

• Digital Era Government and Politics: OII MSc Option Course

  Recorded: 12 July 2015

  Duration: 00:03:19

  This option course for the OII MSc in "Social Science of the Internet" examines the impact of the Internet and related technologies on the core activities and institutions of government and politics

• Does Social Media Use Change the Type of News We Receive?

  Recorded: 8 November 2013

  Duration: 00:20:46

  Jonathan Bright explores the impact of social media on news consumption. He examines how social media users choose what to share, how this varies by platform, and what the implications may be for the type of news coverage that people receive.

• Social Media for Social Science Research (Doctoral Research Methods Workshop Series, Part 2)

  22 November 2013 - 22 November 2013, 09:30:00 - 16:00:00

  Social media platforms allow us to study social research questions in a new way. This event aims to make sure the new techniques required to do so are not outside the skill set of researchers.

• Using Twitter data to map local commuting patterns

  10 February 2016

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  One of the early areas of focus of the NEXUS project has been to look at the extent to which Twitter data can be [...]

• Social and Open Data Sources and Visualisation Methods for Urban Decision Making

  2 February 2016

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  One of the deliverables from the UrbanData2Decide project has just been published on the project website. It’s a report on social and open data [...]

• Smart cities and collaborative mapping tools

  1 February 2016

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  The UrbanData2Decide project has partly been about getting to know local government administrators and understanding more about the types of data related challenges they [...]

• The changing nature of big data sources as a barrier to smart city implementation

  27 January 2016

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  Twitter is going to be a major data source for the NEXUS project, as it is for almost every other project studying social media data. [...]

• Mapping human mobility with social media data

  12 January 2016

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  One of the key aims of the NEXUS project is to explore the extent to which human mobility patterns (e.g. commuting, tourism, migration) can be [...]

• How big data is breathing new life into the smart cities concept

  6 January 2016

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  “Big data” is a growing area of interest for public policy makers: for example, it was highlighted in UK Chancellor George Osborne’s recent budget [...]

• Crowdsourcing for public policy and government

  27 August 2015

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  Evening reception at the Ashmolean Museum for the IPP2014 conference: crowdsourcing for public policy. If elections were invented today, they would probably be referred [...]

• How big data is breathing new life into the smart cities concept

  23 July 2015

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  One day all our trees will be electric. Image from Smart City Exhibition 2014 by Forum PA (Flickr). “Big data” is a growing area [...]

• Digital era political parties post #GE2015

  19 May 2015

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  Along with consultants and advisors and large-scale data management platforms from Obama’s hugely successful digital campaigns, all the main political parties used an arsenal [...]

• Could social media forecast political movements?

  8 May 2015

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  GE2015 turned out to be a bad night for some. Beyond the obvious political parties, the reputation of polling firms took a big hit: [...]

• Where do people mention candidates on Twitter?

  8 May 2015

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  In previous posts we’ve looked at people mentioning local party candidates on Twitter. In that post we basically assumed that people mentioning local candidates [...]

• Which parties were most read on Wikipedia?

  8 May 2015

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  Taha and Stefano previously looked at the distribution of Wikipedia pages by candidate. These pages are much more patchy than Twitter handles: only in [...]

• What if mentions were votes?

  7 May 2015

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  The last post looked at mention activity for each British constituency. What would happen if we took these mentions to be votes? Does this [...]

• Which parties are having the most impact on Twitter?

  7 May 2015

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  The previous two posts have shown that the amount of effort parties are putting in on Twitter at the local level is pretty variable. [...]

• The (local) General Election on Twitter

  7 May 2015

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  The UK’s national election is decided on a constituency basis: 650 odd separate small elections, each returning one MP. Despite the obvious importance of [...]

• Scotland’s independence referendum on Wikipedia

  18 September 2014

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  My colleague Taha Yasseri and I are currently working on a Fell Fund project on social media data and election prediction, looking especially at data from [...]

• The life and death of political news: using online data to measure the impact of the audience agenda

  9 September 2014

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  The political agenda has always been shaped by what the news media decide to publish, and the question of how much influence the audience [...]

• Creating transnational political links with euandi and Facebook

  30 April 2014

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  CAPTION Just wanted to put up a quick plug for the euandi voting advice application [VAA] which has recently been launched by the European University Institute. I [...]

• When do people start getting interested in elections? The electoral information cycle

  8 April 2014

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  by Jonathan Bright and Taha Yasseri. When do people start getting interested in elections, and how does this differ in different countries? In this post we [...]

• Social predictions in Iran, Germany and the UK

  20 January 2014

  Authors: Jonathan Bright

  New short paper  to appear in Information Technology (guest editors Katrin Weller & Markus Strohmaier). Basic argument: we won’t get political predictions out of the social [...]

• Can Google predict who will win the election?

  16 October 2015 Maclean's

  
  

  In an article about predicting election results the major Canadian news magazine quotes a research study by Taha Yasseri and Jonathan Bright on whether electoral popularity can be predicted using socially generated big data.

• Ascertaining ‘what the readers want’

  8 September 2015 The Hindu

  
  

  A long article on digital journalism quotes research by Jonathan Bright and Tom Nicholls which found that the most read articles were the most likely to stay on the front page longer.

• It’s the smart way to travel

  31 August 2015 Oxford Mail

  
  

  Jonathan Bright told the local press about plans for Oxford to use mobile phone data to learn about traffic patterns. This is part of an initiative to turn Oxford into a 'Smart City' using big data to improve the lives of its citizens.

• Google’s search algorithm could steal the Presidency

  6 August 2015 Wired

  
  

  The algorithms that rank search results could seriously affect a close-run presidential election by influencing the way that people vote. Jonathan Bright points out that it's not possible to have a completely neutral algorithm.

• Why do we argue online?

  24 July 2015 The Irish Times

  
  

  Jonathan Bright is quoted in an article in the Irish Times which looks at the proliferation of online arguments between strangers. He says that there was a 'false hope in the '90s that [the internet] would open a new style of democracy.'

• QR codes used on ballot paper for the first time

  15 May 2014 BBC Oxford

  
  

  For the first time in the UK a QR code has been incorporated in a political party’s official emblem on the ballot paper. Jonathan Bright says that if this becomes more commonplace the Electoral Commission would have questions.