Profile

Jonathan Bright is an Associate Professor, 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

  • Associate Professor, December 2020 – present
  • Senior Research Fellow, November 2017 – present
  • Research Fellow, 2013 – 2017

Students supervised at the OII

Current Students

Past students

Research

Current projects

Past projects

  • A Global Study of Holocaust mis- and disinformation online

    Participants: Dr Jonathan Bright

    This project conducts a systematic study of online Holocaust denial and misinformation, aiming to measure the scale of the problem, raise awareness of trends and narratives, and shed light on the platforms and areas hosting such content.

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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, 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

Conference papers

  • Camargo, C.Q., Bright, J., McNeill, G., Raman, S. and Hale, S.A. (2020) "Estimating Traffic Disruption Patterns with Volunteered Geographic Information", Scientific Reports. England. Springer Science and Business Media LLC. 10 (1) 252.
  • Vogl, T., Seidelin, C., Ganesh, B. and Bright, J. (2019) "Algorithmic Bureaucracy", Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research. dg.o 2019: 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research. ACM. 148-153.
  • Hale, S., McNeill, G. and Bright, J. (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). EuroVis Workshop on Reproducibility, Verification, and Validation in Visualization (EuroRV3), Barcelona, Spain. Eurographics Association.
  • Bright, J.M. and Voigt, C. (2016) "The Lightweight Smart City and Biases in Repurposed Big Data", Second International Conference on Human and Social Analytics. The Second International Conference on Human and Social Analytics. International Academy Research and Industry Association.

Journal articles

Reports

  • Gagliardone, I., Pohjonen, M., Beyene, Z., Zerai, A., Aynekulu, G., Bekalu, M., Bright, J., Moges, M.A., Seifu, M., Stremlau, N., Taflan, P., Gebrewolde, T.M. and Teferra, Z. (2016) "Mechachal: Online Debates and Elections in Ethiopia - From Hate Speech to Engagement in Social Media" In: Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy. Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy.
  • Bright, J., Margetts, H.Z., Wang, N. and Hale, S.A. (2015) Explaining Usage Patterns in Open Government Data: The Case of Data.Gov.UK.
  • Bright, J.M., Margetts, H., Hale, S. and Yasseri, T. (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

  • 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 Era Government and Politics

    This option course will approach the study of government and politics through the lens of data science.

  • Digital Era Government and Politics

    This option course will approach the study of government and politics through the lens of data 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.

Videos

News

Events

Blog

Press

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.