
Ralph Schroeder has interests in virtual environments, social aspects of e-Science, sociology of science and tech, and has written extensively about virtual reality technology. His current research is related to digital media and right-wing populism.
Professor Ralph Schroeder
Programme Director of the MSc in Social Science of the Internet
Profile
Ralph Schroeder was formerly Professor in the School of Technology Management and Economics at Chalmers University in Gothenburg (Sweden). He completed his PhD about Max Weber at the LSE in 1988. His publications include Rethinking Science, Technology and Social Change (Stanford University Press, 2007) and Being There Together: Social Interaction in Virtual Environments (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is also the author of ‘An Age of Limits: Social Theory for the 21st Century’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) and, with Eric T. Meyer, of ‘Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities’ (MIT Press 2015).
His most recent book is ‘Social Theory after the Internet‘ and he is also working on big data in the social sciences.
Areas of Interest for Doctoral Supervision
Big data, virtual environments, digital media, right-wing populism
Research interests
Virtual environments, big data, digital media, right-wing populism, sociology of science and technology
Positions held at the OII
- MSc Programme Director, July 2018 –
- Senior Research Fellow, January 2009 –
- MSc Programme Director, January 2009 – October 2016
- Director of Research, October 2009 – September 2012
- James Martin Research Fellow, September 2004 – December 2008
Students supervised at the OII
Current students
Past students
- Dr Tobias Escher
- Dr Han-Teng Liao
- Dr Lucy Power
- Dr Pu Yan
Research
Current projects
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What Do ‘the People’ Want? Analysing Online Populist Challenges to Europe
Participants: Dr Sebastian Stier , Prof Ralph Schroeder, Dr Caterina Froio
Digital media allow populist messages to gain circulation, bypassing mainstream channels. This project aims to understand how widespread and impactful such messages are among the general public.
Past projects
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SciShops: Enhancing the Responsible and Sustainable Expansion of the Science Shops Ecosystem in Europe
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder
This project aims to expand and build upon the Science Shop ecosystem that currently exists in Europe and beyond.
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Data for Policy
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Professor Eric T. Meyer
A study of big data and other innovative data-driven approaches for evidence-informed policy making.
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Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Josh Cowls
The Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities project works with data derived from the UK domain crawl from 1996 to 2013, in order to develop a framework for the study of web archive data and produce a major history of the UK web space.
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Big Data for Advancing Dementia Research
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Ulrike Deetjen
The aim of this study is to undertake an in-depth examination of the practices in data sharing to advance the science of dementia and other age-related neurodegenerative diseases.
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Accessing and Using Big Data to Advance Social Science Knowledge
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Linnet E. M. Taylor, Josh Cowls
The project will follow 'big data' from its public and private origins through open and closed pathways into the social sciences, and document and shape the ways they are being accessed and used to create new knowledge about the social world.
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Data-driven economic models: challenges and opportunities of big data
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Greg Taylor, Dr Monica Bulger
The aim of this study is to identify key challenges to the realisation of benefits from big data in the UK economy, along with pathways to overcoming these challenges.
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OeSS: The Oxford e-Social Science Project
Participants: Professor William H. Dutton, Professor Paul Allan David, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Marina Jirotka, Dr Annamaria Carusi, Dr Matthijs den Besten, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Kathryn Eccles, Professor Christopher Millard, Professor Michael Parker, Dr Justine Pila, Professor Tina Piper, 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.
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Physical Science Information Practices
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Marina Jirotka, Dr Annamaria Carusi, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Lucy Power, Dr Monica Bulger, Dr Andrea Scharnhorst, Dr Will Venters, Dr Monica Bulger, Dr Melissa Terras, Dr Sally Wyatt, Avgousta Kyriakidou, 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.
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Using Web Archives: A Futures Perspective
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Arthur Thomas, Professor Eric T. Meyer
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.
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Humanities Information Practices
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Marina Jirotka, Dr Annamaria Carusi, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Christine Madsen, Tim Davies, Dr Kathryn Eccles, Dr Monica Bulger, Grace de la Flor, Dr Tim Webmoor, Dr Claire Warwick, Dr Melissa Terras, Dr Sally Wyatt, Smiljana Antonijevic, Dr Anne Beaulieu
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?
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PEACH: Presence Research in Action
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Malte Ziewitz, Professor Eric T. Meyer
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.
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eResearch 2020
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Kathryn Eccles
Aiming to better understand the organizational, collaborative and technological developments in e-Infrastructures which are effective in supporting virtual research organizations in different fields.
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Digitised Resources: A Usage and Impact Study
Participants: Professor William H. Dutton, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Professor Mike Thelwall, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Christine Madsen, Dr Kathryn Eccles
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.
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The e-Horizons Institute
Participants: Professor William H. Dutton, Professor Paul Allan David, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Marina Jirotka, Professor Anne Trefethen, Professor Paul Jeffreys, Professor Eric T. Meyer
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.
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Embedding e-science applications: designing and managing for usability
Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Marina Jirotka, Professor Anne Trefethen, Grace de la Flor, Sharon Lloyd, Mustafizur Rahman, Dr Monica Schraefel, Dimitrina Spencer, 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.
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World Wide Web of Humanities
Participants: Professor William H. Dutton, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Robert Ackland, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Christine Madsen
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.
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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.
Books
- (2018) Social Theory after the Internet Media, Technology, and Globalization. UCL Press.
- (2016) Big Data and Communication ResearchOxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford University Press.
- (2016) Introduction. Cambridge University Press.
- (2016) Global Powers. Cambridge University Press.
- (2015) Knowledge Machines Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities. MIT Press.
- (2013) An Age of Limits. Palgrave Macmillan UK.
- (2010) Being There Together. Oxford University Press.
- (2006) An Anatomy of Power. Cambridge University Press.
Chapters
- (2019) "Big Data Goes to Hollywood: The Emergence of Big Data as a Tool in the American Film Industry" In: Second International Handbook of Internet Research Hunsinger, J., Allen, M.M. and Klastrup, L. (eds.). Dordrecht: Springer.
- (2019) "Weberian Social Theory: Rationalization in a Globalized World" In: Oxford Handbook of Max WeberOxford Handbook of Max Weber. Oxford University Press.
- (2018) "Theorizing the Uses of the Web" In: The Sage Handbook of Web History Brugger, N. and Milligan, I. (eds.). SAGE Publications. 86-98.
- (2017) "Analysing the UK web domain and exploring 15 years of UK universities on the web" In: The Web as History Brugger, N. and Schroeder, R. (eds.). London: UCL Press. 23-44.
- (2017) "Michael Mann" In: Key Sociological Thinkers Stones, R. (eds.). 318-335.
- (2016) "The Ethics of Learning and Technology Research" In: The SAGE Handbook of E-learning Research, 2e. SAGE.
- (2016) "Mann's globalizations and their limits" In: Global Powers. Cambridge University Press. 164-182.
- (2015) "Mann, Michael (1942–)" In: International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier. 490-495.
- (2015) "Collaboration in Immersive and Non-immersive Virtual Environments" In: Immersed in Media. Springer International Publishing. 263-282.
- (2010) "The changing disciplinary landscapes of research: The agenda-setting role of e-research" In: World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities. 272-275.
- (2010) "Will e-science be open science?: Open access versus "open viewing" for a web of science: The neurocommons example" In: World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities. 322-324.
- (2010) "Will e-science be open science?: The politics of open access" In: World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities. 317-321.
- (2010) "Will e-science be open science?" In: World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities. 299-316.
- (2010) "The changing disciplinary landscapes of research" In: World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities. 257-271.
- (2010) "Collaboration Among e-Research Projects in the UK: An Analysis Using Online Research Methods" In: e-Research Collaboration. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. 153-166.
- (2009) "Towards a sociology of e-research: Shaping practice and advancing knowledge" In: e-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice. 35-53.
- (2006) "Introduction: the IEMP model and its critics" In: An Anatomy of Power. Cambridge University Press. 1-16.
Conference papers
- (2018) "Political bots and the swedish general election", 2018 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, ISI 2018. 124-129.
- (2014) "Mapping the UK Webspace: Fifteen Years of British Universities on the Web", CoRR. the 2014 ACM conference, 23 – 26 June 2014. ACM Press. abs/1405.2856 62-70. (Source info: Proceedings of WebSci, 2014)
- (2012) "Mixing real and virtual conferencing: Lessons learned", Proceedings - IEEE Virtual Reality. 2012 IEEE Virtual Reality (VR), 4 – 8 March 2012. IEEE. 79-80.
- (2009) "The future of e-research infrastructures", Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science.
- (2009) "Mapping Global e-Research: Scientometrics and Webometrics", Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science. the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science, Cologne, Germany, 22 – 24 June 2009.
- (2008) "The World Wide Web of Research and Access to Knowledge", Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on e-Social Science. 4th International Conference on e-Social Science, Manchester, England, 18 – 20 June 2008.
- (2006) "How open is e-Science?", e-Science 2006 - Second IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing. 2006 Second IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (e-Science'06), 4 December 2006. IEEE. 33.
- (2005) "Immersiveness and symmetry in copresent scenarios", Proceedings - IEEE Virtual Reality. 171-178.
Journal articles
- (2021) "Disinformation and the Structural Transformations of the Public Arena: Addressing the Actual Challenges to Democracy", Social Media + Society. 7 (1) 205630512198892.
- (2021) "Is there a link between climate change scepticism and populism? An analysis of web tracking and survey data from Europe and the US", Information, Communication & Society. 1-40.
- (2020) "Variations in the Adoption and Use of Mobile Social Apps in Everyday Lives in Urban and Rural China", Mobile Media and Communication. 8 (3) 318-341.
- (2020) "The populist campaigns against European public service media: Hot air or existential threat?", International Communication Gazette. 174804852093986.
- (2020) "Even in Sweden?", Nordic Journal of Media Studies. 2 (1) 97-108.
- (2020) "Online disinformation in the run-up to the Indian 2019 election", INFORMATION COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY.
- (2020) "The Dangerous Myth of Populism as a Thin Ideology", Populism. 3 (1) 13-28.
- (2020) "Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to Online News: A Cross-Country Analysis Combining Web Tracking and Surveys", International Journal of Press/Politics. 25 (3) 426-446.
- (2020) "Political Power and the Globalizing Spread of Populist Politics", Journal of Political Power. 13 (1) 22-40.
- (2019) "Historicizing media, globalizing media research: infrastructures, publics, and everyday life", Journal of Global History. 14 (3) 437-453.
- (2019) "Digital Media and the Entrenchment of Right-wing Populist Agendas", Social Media and Society. 5 (4) 1-11.
- (2019) "Contemporary populist politics through the macroscopic lens of Randall Collins’s conflict theory", Thesis Eleven. 154 (1) 97-107.
- (2019) "Digital Media and the Surge of Political Outsiders: Explaining the Success of Political Challengers in the United States, Germany, and China", SOCIAL MEDIA + SOCIETY. 5 (3).
- (2019) "Big data and cumulation in the social sciences", Information Communication and Society. 23 (11) 1593-1607.
- (2018) "Big Data for Policymaking: Great Expectations, but with Limited Progress?", Policy and Internet. 10 (3) 347-367.
- (2018) "Towards a theory of digital media", Information Communication and Society. 21 (3) 323-339.
- (2016) "Big Data Business Models: Challenges and Opportunities", Cogent Social Sciences. 2 (1) 1166924.
- (2016) "Online Entertainment| The Globalization of On-Screen Sociability: Social Media and Tethered Togetherness", International Journal of Communication. 10 5626-5643.
- (2016) "Rethinking digital media and political change", Convergence: the journal of research into new media technologies.
- (2016) "The net as a knowledge machine: How the Internet became embedded in research", New Media and Society. 18 (7) 1159-1189.
- (2016) "The globalization of on-screen sociability: Social media and tethered togetherness", International Journal of Communication. 10 5626-5643.
- (2015) "Causation, Correlation, and Big Data in Social Science Research", Policy & Internet. 7 (4) 447-472.
- (2015) "Is bigger better? The emergence of big data as a tool for international development policy", GeoJournal. 80 (4) 503-518.
- (2015) "Gellner, science and globalization", Thesis Eleven. 128 (1) 10-25.
- (2015) "A weberian analysis of global digital divides", International Journal of Communication. 9 (1) 2819-2837.
- (2015) "Big data and Wikipedia research: social science knowledge across disciplinary divides", Information Communication and Society. 18 (9) 1039-1056.
- (2014) "Big Data and Positive Change in the Developing World", Policy & Internet. 6 (4) 418-444.
- (2014) "Durkheim and Weber on the social implications of new information and communication technologies", New Media & Society. 16 (5) 789-805.
- (2014) "Emerging practices and perspectives on Big Data analysis in economics: Bigger and better or more of the same?", Big Data & Society. 1 (2) 1-10.
- (2014) "Big Data and the brave new world of social media research", Big Data & Society. 1 (2) 1-11.
- (2014) "Does Google shape what we know?", Prometheus (United Kingdom). 32 (2) 145-160.
- (2014) "Erratum", New Media & Society. 16 (2) 359.
- (2014) "Re: Search", New Media and Society. 16 (2) 187-194.
- (2013) "Mixing real and virtual conferencing: Lessons learned", Virtual Reality. 17 (3) 193-204.
- (2013) "Re: Search", New Media and Society. 15 (8) 1366-1373.
- (2013) "Mixing real and virtual conferencing: lessons learned", Virtual Reality. 17 (3) 1-12.
- (2013) "The Emerging Governance of E-Infrastructure", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 18 (2) 1-24.
- (2012) Key Issues for Digital Research: A Social Science Perspective on Policy and Practice.
- (2012) "Cross-disciplinary lessons for the future internet", Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). 7281 LNCS 42-54.
- (2011) "Web Archives: The Future(s)", SSRN Electronic Journal.
- (2010) "The limits to transforming the environment and the limits to sociological knowledge", Sustainability. 2 (8) 2483-2498.
- (2010) "Mobile phones and the inexorable advance of multimodal connectedness", New Media and Society. 12 (1) 75-90.
- (2009) "Making it open and keeping it safe: e-enabled data-dharing in Sweden", Acta Sociologica. 52 (3) 213-226.
- (2009) "Untangling the web of e-Research: Towards a sociology of online knowledge", Journal of Informetrics. 3 (3) 246-260.
- (2009) "New techniques in online research: challenges for research ethics", Twenty-First Century Society. 4 (2) 187-199.
- (2009) "Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues in Presence Research and Applications", Peach FP6 Coordination Action. (33909).
- (2009) "Life science research and drug discovery at the turn of the 21st century: the experience of SwissBioGrid.", J Biomed Discov Collab. 4 5.
- (2009) "Sifting Through the Online Web of Knowledge", SSRN.
- (2009) "The world wide web of research and access to knowledge", Knowledge Management Research and Practice. 7 (3) 218-233.
- (2009) "Open science in escience: Contingency or policy?", Journal of Documentation. 65 (1) 6-32.
- (2008) "Gauging the Impact of e-Research in the Social Sciences", SSRN Electronic Journal.
- (2008) "Patterns of information search and access on the World Wide Web: Democratizing expertise or creating new hierarchies?", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 13 (4) 769-793.
- (2008) "E-Sciences as research technologies: Reconfiguring disciplines, globalizing knowledge", Social Science Information. 47 (2) 131-157.
- (2008) "Literary sleuths online: E-Research collaboration on the Pynchon Wiki", Information Communication and Society. 11 (2) 167-187.
- (2008) "Literary Sleuths Online: e-Research Collaboration on the Pynchon Wiki", Information, Communication & Society. 11 (2) 25-45.
- (2007) "An overview of ethical and social issues in shared virtual environments", Futures. 39 (6) 704-717.
- (2007) "Social science approaches to e-science: Framing an agenda", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 12 (2) 563-582.
- (2006) "The usability of collaborative virtual environments and methods for the analysis of interaction", Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. 15 (6) 655-667.
- (2006) "Being there together and the future of connected presence", Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. 15 (4) 438-454.
- (2006) "The effect of behavioral realism and form realism of real-time avatar faces on verbal disclosure, nonverbal disclosure, emotion recognition, and copresence in dyadic interaction", Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. 15 (4) 359-372.
- (2006) The World Wide Web of Science: Emerging Global Sources of Expertise.
- (2006) Summary of Findings from Interview Series and Qualitative Validation of Webmetric Analysis.
- (2005) "Successes and failures in co-present situations", Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. 14 (5) 563-579.
- (2005) The World Wide Web of Science: Reconfiguring Access to Information.
Reports
- (2015) "Big data for advancing dementia research: An evaluation of data sharing practices in research on age-related neurodegenerative diseases" In: OECD Digital Economy Papers. Paris: OECD Publishing.
- (2014) Data-driven business models: Challenges and opportunities of big data. Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.
- (2012) Final Report on Social Future Internet Coordination Activities. SESERV Deliverable D3.2, Socio-Economic Services for European Research Projects FP7-2010-ICT-258138-CSA..
- (2011) Web Archives: The Future(s). Report for the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC).
- (2010) The Role of e-Infrastructures in the Creation of Global Virtual Research Communities. Final Report for the eResearch2020 project.
- (2009) "Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues in Presence Research and Applications. EC Report for Peach FP6 Coordination Action" In: Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues in Presence Research and Applications. European Commission.
- (2009) "An emerging global brain: How the Internet is revolutionising scientific research" In: Britain in 2009. Economic and Social Research Council Annual Magazine. Economic and Social Research Council.
- (2006) The World Wide Web of Science: Emerging Global Sources of Expertise. Final Report for the project "The World Wide Web of Science: emerging global sources of expertise".
- (2006) "Webmetric analysis for climate change. Report for the project "The World Wide Web of Science: emerging global sources of expertise"." In: The World Wide Web of Science: emerging global sources of expertise. Oxford Internet Institute.
- (2006) "Illustrative Webmetric Graphs and maps of Web Networks. Report for the project "The World Wide Web of Science: emerging global sources of expertise"" In: The World Wide Web of Science: Emerging Global Sources of Expertise. Oxford Internet Institute.
- (2006) "Findings from interview series and qualitative validation of webmetric analysis. Report for the project "The World Wide Web of Science: emerging global sources of expertise"" In: The World Wide Web of Science: emerging global sources of expertise. Oxford Internet Institute.
- "Big Data and Positive Social Change in the Developing World" In: Big data and positive social change in the developing world: A white paper for practitioners and researchers. Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute.
Teaching
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Big Data in Society
This course critically examines the unprecedented opportunities and serious challenges inherent in big data approaches to advancing knowledge.
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Foundations of Social Data Science
This course will introduce to some of the fundamental questions that have been raised in this domain across the social sciences.
Videos
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Reflections on the tenth anniversary of the MSc Social Science of the Internet
Recorded: 16 September 2019
Duration: 04:51:00
OII academics Professor Victoria Nash, Professor Ralph Schroeder and Professor Greg Taylor share their reflections on the origins of the MSc programme and its successes.
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Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities
Recorded: 27 January 2016
Duration: 00:37:13
How have digital technologies changed research practices in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities?
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Big Data in Society: OII MSc Option Course
Recorded: 1 June 2015
Duration: 00:05:05
This option course for the OII MSc in "Social Science of the Internet" moves beyond the hype to critically examine the unprecedented opportunities and serious challenges inherent in big data approaches to advancing knowledge.
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A Definition of Big Data from The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) with Professor Ralph Schroeder
Recorded: 16 July 2014
Duration: 00:02:30
What is 'big data'? The OII's Ralph Schroeder discusses.
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Quantitative Methods in Social Media Research: Big Data
Recorded: 26 September 2012
Duration: 00:29:43
Ralph Schroeder discusses very large datasets during a seminar on quantitative methods in social media research held at the OII on 26 September 2012. What do we gain and lose with big data? How is big data changing the way we do research?
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Being There Together: Social Interaction in Virtual Environments
Recorded: 8 November 2010
Duration: 00:05:25
Ralph Schroeder discusses the main themes of his lecture in the OII's "Society and the Internet" lecture series, covering different types of shared virtual environments (eg virtual worlds like Second Life) and how people interact in them.
News
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Clear link between climate scepticism and support for right-wing populists, study finds
12 January 2021
A study by Oxford University, carried out in partnership with the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany, has found clear evidence of a link between people supporting right-wing political parties and climate change scepticism.
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Two James Martin Research Fellows for the e-Horizons Institute
4 April 2006
Drs Ralph Schroeder and Matthijs den Besten are the first James Martin Research Fellows to join the James Martin School e-Horizons Institute
Events
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From Archives to Servers: How the Internet has Transformed Historical Scholarship
28 April 2021
The OII is delighted to welcome Ian Milligan from the University of Waterloo, hosted by Professor Ralph Schroeder. Ian's research focuses on historians use of web archives, as well as the impact of digital sources on historical practices more generally.
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Researching Virtual Worlds and Virtual Environments (OxDEG)
25 November 2014
This talk will reflect on work about shared virtual worlds and virtual environments, including various methods to study them and how this field has developed.
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Big Data: Rewards and Risks for the Social Sciences
Thursday 21 - Friday 22 March 2013
This workshop is targeted at those who are working at the coal face of big data in the social sciences.
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Choosing the Next Experiment: Tradition, Innovation, and Efficiency in the Selection of Scientific Ideas (Innovation and Digital Scholarship Lecture Series)
21 March 2013
Summary to follow.
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Towards a Sociology of Data
11 January 2013
This workshop is intended for researchers interested in questions regarding social science data.
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Networks of Regional Innovation KNetworks Community Workshop
16 November 2012
This seminar will discuss how platforms of innovation can serve regions.
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Networks of Regional Innovation: The case of the Atlantic Region Policy Forum
15 November 2012
This forum will serve as a discussion on how online platforms can enable regional innovation.
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Digital Social Research: A Forum for Policy and Practice
13 March 2012
This one-day policy forum will bring together leading academics in the rapidly evolving field of Digital Social Research with key thought leaders from business, industry and government interested in the future of research policy and practice.
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Social Science and Digital Research: Interdisciplinary Insights
12 March 2012
Technical innovations are enabling scholars to reconfigure how they do their work across all phases of the research process, from discovery to dissemination. What are the implications of this for the foci, quality and significance of research?
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New Threads in the Global Web of Knowledge (Society and the Internet Lecture Series, Part 14)
21 February 2012
The Internet has fundamentally changed how research is done. This talk explores the impact these changes have on the role of academic knowledge in society, and on how the public engages with this knowledge.
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Being There Together: Social Interaction in Virtual Environments (Society and the Internet Lecture Series, Part 2)
18 October 2011
This lecture will give an overview of different types of shared virtual environments and how people interact in them. This includes virtual worlds like Second Life as well as immersive virtual reality environments.
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Undergraduate Lecture Series (M5): Being There Together: Social Interaction in Virtual Environments
8 November 2010
This lecture will give an overview of different types of shared virtual environments and how people interact in them. This includes virtual worlds like Second Life as well as immersive virtual reality environments.
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Book Launch: ‘World Wide Research’
22 September 2010
This event marks the publication of 'World Wide Research' by MIT Press, with a keynote on directions in digital social research and a panel discussion on the role of advanced Internet and Web technologies for research practices across disciplines
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Information and Web Science Doctoral Workshop
18 March 2009
A workshop aimed at doctoral students in the areas of information science, library science, web science, Internet studies, or related disciplines who are working on topics related to the Internet and other networked technologies.
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Departmental Open Day for Students
18 November 2008
Summary to come.
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OII-Nuffield Social Networks Seminar Series
Monday 13 October - Monday 01 December 2008
Summary to come.
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Digital Objects and the Management of Information
20 June 2006
Summary to come.
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The World Wide Web and Access to Knowledge Workshop
Thursday 09 - Friday 10 February 2006
Summary to come.
Blog
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Rethinking Digital Media and Political Change
23 August 2016
Author: Ralf Schroeder
Did Twitter lead to Donald Trump’s rise and success to date in the American campaign for the presidency? Image: Gage Skidmore (Flickr) What are ...
Read More Rethinking Digital Media and Political Change -
Facebook and the Brave New World of Social Research using Big Data
30 June 2014
Author: Ralf Schroeder
The recent study on emotional contagion in Facebook has caused much debate. OII Professor Ralph Schroeder argues that we need to be thinking about ...
Read More Facebook and the Brave New World of Social Research using Big Data
Press
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Europe’s Populists Fearful of Social Media Restrictions
14 January 2021 VOA News
Europe’s populist leaders are outraged by the decision of U.S. social-media giants to block U.S. President Donald Trump from posting on their sites.
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Link between climate scepticism and support for right-wing populists – study
13 January 2021 Phys Org
Clear evidence of a link between people supporting right-wing political parties and climate-change scepticism has been identified in a new study from the University of Oxford and the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.
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Inside the online disinformation war trying to tear Sweden apart
9 September 2018 Wired
As Sweden prepares to go to the polls, trolls are polluting the country's political debate, and the alt-right is happy.
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Regulating social media won’t curb the rise of right-wing populism
18 June 2018 The New Statesman
Right-wing populists around the world have used social media to gain power. They have bypassed traditional broadcast and print media to speak directly to their publics.
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Facebook scandal
30 June 2014 FM4 orf.at (Austria)
Ralph Schroeder comments on Facebook research which analysed users moods but was seen by some people to be covert. He says it is an important study which shows how words can manipulate emotions in the way that face to face contact does.
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#BBCtrending: ‘I’m not a lab rat!’… reaction to #FacebookExperiment
30 June 2014 BBC News Trending
Ralph Schroeder comments on Facebook research which analysed users' moods but was seen by some people to have been carried out covertly. He finds the Facebook test ‘troubling’.
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Who, What, Why: What is ‘ungoogleable’?
27 March 2013 BBC News Magazine
In an article about a dispute between the Language Council of Sweden and Google on the term 'ungoogleable' Ralph Schroeder points out that there are people such as activists in China who need to keep off search engine radar.
Integrity Statement
In the past five years, my research has been funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, the German Ministry of Education, the Swedish Defence Research Agency (for a study of bots in the Swedish election in 2018), the European Union under Horizon 2020, the Tencent Internet and Society Institute, the European Commission DG Connect, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Sloan Foundation.