
Jonathan Bright is a political scientist specialising in computational and ‘big data’ approaches to the social sciences.
Dr Jonathan Bright
Senior Research Fellow
- jonathan.bright@oii.ox.ac.uk
- +44 (0)1865 287233
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Profile
Jonathan Bright is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute who specialises in computational approaches to the social and political sciences. He has two major research interests: exploring the ways in which new digital technologies are changing political participation; and investigating how new forms of data can enable local and national governments to make better decisions.
Areas of Interest for Doctoral Supervision
Big data, democracy, governance, government, journalism, open data, political participation, public management, public policy, security, social media, social networks, surveillance
Research interests
social media, news, political behaviour, computational social science, big data
Positions held at the OII
- Senior Research Fellow, November 2017 – present
- Research Fellow, 2013 – 2017
Students supervised at the OII
Current Students
Past students
Research
Current projects
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VOX-Pol Network of Excellence
Participants: Dr Jonathan Bright, Dr Bharath Ganesh
The VOX-Pol research project is designed to comprehensively research, analyse, debate, and critique issues surrounding violent online political extremism (VOPE).
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TRANSNET: Forecasting and understanding transport network resilience and anomalies
Participants: Dr Scott A. Hale, Dr Jonathan Bright, Dr Graham McNeill, Chico Camargo
This project seeks to utilise newly available data to help urban policy makers improve transport infrastructure to cope with growing and increasingly mobile populations.
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Elections and the Internet
Participants: Professor Helen Margetts, Dr Scott A. Hale, 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.
Past projects
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Data Science in Local Government
Participants: Dr Jonathan Bright, Dr Bharath Ganesh
Data science in local government uses novel techniques to make government more efficient in targeting resources. This project aims to explain the spread of data science methods in the local government context and to understand their impact.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Urban Data 2 Decide
Participants: Dr Stefano De Sabbata, Dr Jonathan Bright, Dr Bharath Ganesh
Urban decision makers are nowadays faced with both unprecedented challenges as well as new opportunities as the environment around them grows ever more complex.
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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.
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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.
Featured
- (2018) "OpenStreetMap data for alcohol research: reliability assessment and quality indicators", Health and Place. 50 130-136.
- (2018) "Explaining the emergence of political fragmentation on social media: the role of ideology and extremism", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 23 (1) 17-33.
- (2017) "Estimating local commuting patterns from geolocated Twitter data", EPJ Data Science 6. 6 (24).
- (2016) "Wikipedia traffic data and electoral prediction: towards theoretically informed models", EPJ Data Science. 5 (1).
- (2016) "The Social News Gap: How News Reading and News Sharing Diverge", Journal of Communication. 66 (3) 343-365.
- (2016) "Europe’s voting space and the problem of second-order elections: A transnational proposal", European Union Politics. 17 (1) 184-198.
- (2015) "The real component of virtual learning: motivations for face-to-face MOOC meetings in developing and industrialised countries", Information, Communication & Society. 18 (10) 1200-1216.
- (2015) Explaining Usage Patterns in Open Government Data: The Case of Data.Gov.UK.
- (2015) "Ministerial Importance and Survival in Government: Tough at the Top?", West European Politics. 38 (3) 441-464.
- (2014) "The Life and Death of Political News: Measuring the Impact of the Audience Agenda Using Online Data", Social Science Computer Review. 32 (2) 170-181.
- (2014) "Can electoral popularity be predicted using socially generated big data?", it - Information Technology. 56 (5) 246-253.
Conference papers
- (2019) "Algorithmic bureaucracy", ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. 148-153.
- (2017) Where’d it go? How geographic and force-directed layouts affect network task performance. EuroVis Workshop on Reproducibility, Verification, and Validation in Visualization (EuroRV3).
- (2016) The Lightweight Smart City and Biases in Repurposed Big Data. The Second International Conference on Human and Social Analytics.
Journal articles
- (2019) "Explaining Download Patterns in Open Government Data: Citizen participation or private enterprise?", International Journal of Electronic Governance. 11 (2) 217-234.
- (2019) "Power users in online democracy: their origins and impact", Information, Communication and Society. 1-16.
- (2019) "Studying Peace and Studying Conflict: Complementary or Competing Projects?", Journal of Global Security Studies.
- (2019) "Does Campaigning on Social Media Make a Difference? Evidence from candidate use of Twitter during the 2015 and 2017 UK Elections", Communication Research.
- (2018) "Understanding news story chains using information retrieval and network clustering techniques", Communication Methods and Measures. 13 (1) 43-59.
- (2018) "Geodemographic biases in crowdsourced knowledge websites: do neighbours fill in the blanks?", GeoJournal: an international journal on human geography and environmental sciences. 83 (3) 427-440.
- (2018) "OpenStreetMap data for alcohol research: reliability assessment and quality indicators", Health and Place. 50 130-136.
- (2018) "A Divided Discipline? Mapping Peace and Conflict Studies", International Studies Perspectives. 19 (2) 128-147.
- (2018) "Explaining the emergence of political fragmentation on social media: the role of ideology and extremism", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 23 (1) 17-33.
- (2017) "Public Policy in the Platform Society", Policy and Internet. 9 (4) 368-373.
- (2017) "Estimating local commuting patterns from geolocated Twitter data", EPJ Data Science 6. 6 (24).
- (2016) "Big Data and Public Policy: Can It Succeed Where E-Participation Has Failed?", Policy and Internet. 8 (3) 218-224.
- (2016) "Wikipedia traffic data and electoral prediction: towards theoretically informed models", EPJ Data Science. 5 (1).
- (2016) "The Social News Gap: How News Reading and News Sharing Diverge", Journal of Communication. 66 (3) 343-365.
- (2016) "Europe’s voting space and the problem of second-order elections: A transnational proposal", European Union Politics. 17 (1) 184-198.
- (2015) Mechachal: Online Debates and Elections in Ethiopia. Report Two: Discussing Politics and History in Social Media.
- (2015) "In Search of the Politics of Security", The British Journal of Politics and International Relations. 17 (4) 585-603.
- (2015) "The real component of virtual learning: motivations for face-to-face MOOC meetings in developing and industrialised countries", Information, Communication & Society. 18 (10) 1200-1216.
- (2015) Mechachal: Online Debates and Elections in Ethiopia. Report One: A Preliminary Assessment of Online Debates in Ethiopia.
- (2015) "Crowdsourcing for Public Policy and Government", Policy & Internet. 7 (3) 263-267.
- (2015) "Ministerial Importance and Survival in Government: Tough at the Top?", West European Politics. 38 (3) 441-464.
- (2014) "The Life and Death of Political News: Measuring the Impact of the Audience Agenda Using Online Data", Social Science Computer Review. 32 (2) 170-181.
- (2014) "Can electoral popularity be predicted using socially generated big data?", it - Information Technology. 56 (5) 246-253.
- (2013) "Mediating surveillance: the developing landscape of European Online Copyright Enforcement", Journal of Contemporary European Research. 9 (1) 120-137.
- (2012) "Securitisation, terror, and control: towards a theory of the breaking point", Review of International Studies. 38 (4) 861-879.
- (2011) "Building biometrics: knowledge construction in the democratic control of surveillance technology", Surveillance and Society. 9 (1/2) 233-247.
Reports
- (2016) Mechachal: Online Debates and Elections in Ethiopia - From Hate Speech to Engagement in Social Media.
- (2015) Explaining Usage Patterns in Open Government Data: The Case of Data.Gov.UK.
- (2014) "The use of social media for research and analysis: a feasibility study" In: Report of research carried out by the Oxford Internet Institute on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions. Department for Work and Pensions.
Teaching
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Digital Era Government and Politics
This option course will approach the study of government and politics through the lens of data science.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Digital Era Government and Politics
This option course will approach the study of government and politics through the lens of data science.
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Applied Analytical Statistics
Applied analytical statistics is a course focusing on the tools and techniques used by social scientists to understand, describe and analyse (quantitative) data.
Videos
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Transnet: Understanding traffic with open data and visualization
Recorded: 26 July 2018
Duration: 00:42:30
This presentation, hosted by the Alan Turing Institute focuses on using crowd-sourced data, such as OpenStreetMap and Waze, to improve traffic models and better understand the factors contributing to traffic jams and other traffic issues.
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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.
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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
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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.
Events
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Social Media for Social Science Research (Doctoral Research Methods Workshop Series, Part 2)
22 November 2013
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.
Blog
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Understanding news story chains using information retrieval and network clustering techniques
31 January 2018
Author: Jonathan Bright
I have a new draft paper out with my colleague Tom Nicholls, entitled Understanding news story chains using information retrieval and network clustering techniques. ... Read More Understanding news story chains using information retrieval and network clustering techniques
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Does Campaigning on Social Media Make a Difference?
10 January 2018
Author: Jonathan Bright
I’ve got a new draft paper out with a host of colleagues here at the OII entitled Does Campaigning on Social Media Make a Difference? ... Read More Does Campaigning on Social Media Make a Difference?
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Survey: State of the Art of Data Science in Local Government
30 October 2017
Author: Jonathan Bright
The Data Science for Local Government project seeks to map and understand the use of both novel data analysis techniques and novel data sources ... Read More Survey: State of the Art of Data Science in Local Government
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Estimating local commuting patterns from geolocated Twitter data
25 October 2017
Author: Jonathan Bright
Over the last decade or so there has been an explosion of research interest in the area of measuring (and forecasting) of traffic and ... Read More Estimating local commuting patterns from geolocated Twitter data
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Predicting elections with Wikipedia data: new article in EPJ Data Science
26 August 2016
Author: Jonathan Bright
Taha Yasseri and I have a new article out in EPJ Data Science which looks at the subject of electoral prediction using page view ... Read More Predicting elections with Wikipedia data: new article in EPJ Data Science
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The Social News Gap: New article in Journal of Communication
1 July 2016
Author: Jonathan Bright
I have a new article out in the Journal of Communication which analyses which types of news get shared the most. Based on articles ... Read More The Social News Gap: New article in Journal of Communication
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Social and Open Data Sources and Visualisation Methods for Urban Decision Making
2 February 2016
Author: 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 ... Read More Social and Open Data Sources and Visualisation Methods for Urban Decision Making
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Smart cities and collaborative mapping tools
1 February 2016
Author: 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 ... Read More Smart cities and collaborative mapping tools
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The changing nature of big data sources as a barrier to smart city implementation
27 January 2016
Author: 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. ... Read More The changing nature of big data sources as a barrier to smart city implementation
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Mapping human mobility with social media data
12 January 2016
Author: 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 ... Read More Mapping human mobility with social media data
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Getting ggplot2 to work with igraph
7 December 2015
Author: Jonathan Bright
One common criticism of the otherwise excellent ggplot2 is that it doesn’t come with network visualisation capability. Network vis is so popular at the ... Read More Getting ggplot2 to work with igraph
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The History of Social News
16 September 2015
Author: Jonathan Bright
I am giving a presentation tomorrow at the IJPP conference here in Oxford. It’s being hosted by the Reuters Institute who are world leaders ... Read More The History of Social News
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The real component of virtual learning
28 July 2015
Author: Jonathan Bright
Monica Bulger, Cristobal Cobo and I have a new paper out in Information, Communication and Society where we investigate real world meetings organised by ... Read More The real component of virtual learning
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How big data is breathing new life into the smart cities concept
23 July 2015
Author: 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 ... Read More How big data is breathing new life into the smart cities concept
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Public Policy, Big Data and Smart Cities
10 July 2015
Author: Jonathan Bright
I have just got back from the International Conference on Public Policy in Milan, where I was attending a stream of internet and public ... Read More Public Policy, Big Data and Smart Cities
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New Paper in European Union Politics
30 June 2015
Author: Jonathan Bright
I have just published a paper in European Union Politics, together with Diego Garzia, Joseph Lacey and Alex Trechsel of the EUI. The paper ... Read More New Paper in European Union Politics
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Digital era political parties post #GE2015
19 May 2015
Author: 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 ... Read More Digital era political parties post #GE2015
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GE2015 on social media
12 May 2015
Author: Jonathan Bright
Last week we had a sort of social media hackathon in honour of the UK’s election, looking at the reaction generated on social media. ... Read More GE2015 on social media
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Could social media forecast political movements?
8 May 2015
Author: 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: ... Read More Could social media forecast political movements?
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Where do people mention candidates on Twitter?
8 May 2015
Author: 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 ... Read More Where do people mention candidates on Twitter?
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Which parties were most read on Wikipedia?
8 May 2015
Author: 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 ... Read More Which parties were most read on Wikipedia?
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What if mentions were votes?
7 May 2015
Author: 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 ... Read More What if mentions were votes?
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Which parties are having the most impact on Twitter?
7 May 2015
Author: 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. ... Read More Which parties are having the most impact on Twitter?
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The (local) General Election on Twitter
7 May 2015
Author: 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 ... Read More The (local) General Election on Twitter
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TICTEC 2015
10 April 2015
Author: Jonathan Bright
A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation at TICTEC, mySociety‘s inaugural research conference on the impact of civic technology. It was an ... Read More TICTEC 2015
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Information Seeking Behaviour and Election Predictions
9 February 2015
Author: Jonathan Bright
My colleague Taha Yasseri and I recently received a grant from the Fell Fund to extend our work on information seeking behaviour around election ... Read More Information Seeking Behaviour and Election Predictions
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Scotland’s independence referendum on Wikipedia
18 September 2014
Author: 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 ... Read More Scotland’s independence referendum on Wikipedia
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The life and death of political news: using online data to measure the impact of the audience agenda
9 September 2014
Author: 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 ... Read More The life and death of political news: using online data to measure the impact of the audience agenda
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Creating transnational political links with euandi and Facebook
30 April 2014
Author: 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 ... Read More Creating transnational political links with euandi and Facebook
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When do people start getting interested in elections? The electoral information cycle
8 April 2014
Author: 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 ... Read More When do people start getting interested in elections? The electoral information cycle
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Social predictions in Iran, Germany and the UK
20 January 2014
Author: 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 ... Read More Social predictions in Iran, Germany and the UK
Press
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UK government watchdog examining political use of data analytics
18 May 2017 New Scientist
Social media has had a large impact on the transparency of political campaigns, says Jonathan Bright of the Oxford Internet Institute.
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Europe Enters Election Season in the Post-Poll World
18 November 2016 Bloomberg
Taha Yasseri and Jonathan Bright's paper on predicting the outcomes of European Parliament elections using Wikipedia page traffic is quoted in a piece on Europe's upcoming election season.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
Integrity Statement
In the past five years my work has been financially supported by UK taxpayers, the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the John Fell Fund, the Luminate Group, Innovate UK, NERC, the Wiener-Anspach Foundation, ERA-NET Joint Programming Initiative (European Commission), the EC 7th Framework Programme, the Lloyds Register Foundation (Alan Turing Institute), the Department for Work and Pensions and Google. In that time I have also worked as a consultant for Facebook, DFID and the ICO, and given paid lectures on the Oxford Study Abroad programme and the FCO Indian Leadership Programme.