
Dr Scott A. Hale is an Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow, and Turing Fellow. He develops and applies computer science techniques to the social sciences focusing on improving equitable access to quality information.
Dr Scott A. Hale
Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow
Profile
Dr Scott A. Hale is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the OII, a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, and a Senior Member of St Antony’s College. He develops and applies techniques from computer science to research questions in the social sciences. His research seeks to see more equitable access to quality information and investigates the spread of information between speakers of different languages online, the roles of bilingual Internet users, collective action and mobilization, hate speech, and misinformation.
Scott graduated with degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Spanish from Eckerd College, FL, USA. During his time at Eckerd, he published computer science research in the area of image processing while working on a larger research project, Darwin, to uniquely identify dolphins from digital photographs. After graduating, he worked in Okinawa, Japan, at the Okinawa Prefectural Education Centre with public school teachers to develop English immersion curricula and with IT professionals to deliver continuing education training through the Internet to staff members and students on outlying islands. He came to the OII as a master’s candidate in October 2009 and completed his DPhil (PhD) at the department in 2015. His DPhil research concentrated on how the design of social media platforms affects the amount of information shared across language divides.
Selected Publications
Wang, Z., Hale, S.A., Ifeoluwa Adelani, D., Grabowicz, P., Hartman, T., Flöck, F., and Jurgens, D. (2019) Demographic Inference and Representative Population Estimates from Multilingual Social Media Data. In Proceedings of the Web Conference 2019, WWW 2019, ACM.
Open-access |Blog | Python package | Web demo
Hale, S. and Eleta, I. (2017) Foreign-language Reviews: Help or Hindrance?, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Margetts, H., John, P., Hale, S., and Yasseri, T. (2015) Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action. Princeton University Press.
Hale, S.A. (2014) Global Connectivity and Multilinguals in the Twitter Network. In Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI’14, ACM.
Hale, S.A. (2014) Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science (WebSci ’14). ACM.
Hale, S. A. (2012) Net Increase? Cross-lingual Linking in the Blogosphere. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication.
Research interests
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), bilingualism, applications of machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), social network analysis (SNA), experiments, visualization, complex systems, mobilization and collective action, human mobility
Positions held at the OII
- Associate Professor, December 2020 –
- Senior Research Fellow, September 2018 –
- Social Data Science MSc Programme Co-Director, January 2019 – December 2020
- Social Data Science Programme Director, February 2017 – December 2018
- Senior Data Scientist and Research Fellow, June 2016 – August 2018
- Data Scientist, January 2015 – May 2016
- DPhil Student, October 2010 – January 2015
- Research Assistant, May 2010 – December 2014
- MSc Student, October 2009 – August 2010
Students supervised at the OII
Current students
Past students
- Benjamin Gittelson (MSc Thesis: Linguistic and social niche size impacts word fate across word classes on Reddit)
- Mel Bumpas (MSc Thesis: Comparative Analysis of News Audience Structures on Twitter and Weibo)
- Sharon Chang (MSc Thesis: Public Transport For All: Towards a New Transport Usability Measure Applied To the London Underground)
- Lindsay Ferris (MSc Thesis: Self-presentation and Ambiguity: Queer Women’s use of a Mobile Location-based Dating App)
- Julian Gilson (MSc Thesis: Can Big Data Predict the Eurovision Song Contest? A Study in Methods for Forecasting in Data Asymmetric Environments)
- Katsushige Kitazawa (MSc Thesis: Social Media and Early Warning Systems for Natural Disasters)
- Zachary Levine (MSc Thesis: The October 2014 United States Treasury Bond Flash Crash and the Contributory Effect of Mini Flash Crashes)
- Cailean Osborne (MSc Thesis: Crowdsourced Histories of World War II: An Evaluation of Methodologies for Comparative History on Wikipedia)
- Zo Ahmed (MSc Thesis: Tackling Racial Bias in Automated Online Hate Detection: Towards Fair and Accurate Classification of Hateful Online Users Using Geometric Deep Learning)
- Austin Botelho (MSc Thesis: Deciphering Dog Whistles: Evaluating Automated Detection Algorithms for Multimodal Hate)
- Dragos Gorduza (MSc Thesis: Unequal effects of traffic: geo-locational study of traffic in Oxfordshire)
- Olivia Ong (MSc Thesis: Commuting disruptions and cyclist resiliency: A case study of London’s Santander Cycles)
- Hope Schroeder (MSc Thesis: The Role of Language in Political Discourse on WhatsApp During the 2019 Indian Election)
Research
Current projects
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Current Affairs 2.0: Agenda setting in the European Union
Participants: Dr Scott Hale, Fabian Flöck, Przemyslaw Grabowicz, David Jurgens, Chico Camargo
This project seeks to measure and explain what societal issues are given the highest priorities by media organizations, policy makers, and the general public in different nations and languages of the European Union.
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Alternative News Networks – Understanding the spread and influence of disinformation, propaganda, and divisive political news content in the UK online information ecosystem
Participants: Dr Jonathan Bright, Professor Philip Howard, Dr Scott Hale, Hannah Bailey, Mona Elswah, Megha Mishra, Dr Vidya Narayanan, Marcel Schliebs, Christian Schwieter, Katarina Rebello, Ali Arsalan Pasha Siddiqui, Karolina Werens, Alexandra Pavliuc, Anna George
This project seeks to understand the health of the UK online information ecosystem, including tracking the spread of divisive and misleading content.
Past projects
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Political Volatility
Participants: Professor Helen Margetts, Dr Scott Hale, Dr Chico Camargo, Dr Myrto Pantazi, Professor Peter John
This project seeks to quantify trends and changes in the volatility of public opinion before and after widespread use of social media, and to study how social information can drive public opinion.
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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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Wikipedia’s Networks and Geographies: Representation and Power in Peer-Produced Content
Participants: Dr Han-Teng Liao, Dr Bernie Hogan, Professor Mark Graham, Dr Scott A. Hale, Dr Heather Ford
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.
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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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Human Translation of User-Generated Content
Participants: Dr Scott A. Hale
Understanding what translation rating/voting systems work best for human, crowd-sourced translation and the optimal display of translated content.
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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.
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The Internet, Political Science and Public Policy: Re-examining Collective Action, Governance and Citizen-Government Interactions in the Digital Era
Participants: Professor Helen Margetts, Dr Scott A. Hale, Tom Nicholls, Dr Taha Yasseri
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.
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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.
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Government on the Web
Participants: Professor Helen Margetts, Dr Tobias Escher, Dr Scott A. Hale, Simon Bastow, Professor Patrick Dunleavy, Oliver Pearce, Jane Tinkler
Research dedicated to improving knowledge and understanding of e-government and the impact of web-based technologies on government.
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Using Twitter to Map and Measure Online Cultural Diffusion
Participants: Professor Mark Graham, Dr Scott A. Hale, Devin Gaffney, Dr Ning Wang
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.
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Interactive Visualizations for Teaching, Research, and Dissemination
Participants: Professor Helen Margetts, Professor Mark Graham, Dr Scott A. Hale, Dr Monica Bulger, Joshua Melville
"InteractiveVis" aims to support easy creation of interactive visualisations for geospatial and network data by researchers: it will survey existing solutions, build currently missing features, and smooth over incompatibilities between existing libraries.
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OXLab: Oxford eXperimental Laboratory
Participants: Professor Helen Margetts, Dr Tobias Escher, Dr Nir Vulkan, Dr Scott A. Hale, Ingrid Boxall, Professor Peter John, Lucy Bartlett
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).
Featured
- (2019) "Demographic Inference and Representative Population Estimates from Multilingual Social Media Data", WWW '19 The World Wide Web Conference. 2056-2067.
- (2017) "Foreign-language Reviews: Help or Hindrance?", Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '17: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM. 2017-May 4430-4442.
- (2015) Political Turbulence How Social Media Shape Collective Action. Princeton University Press.
- (2014) "Multilinguals and Wikipedia editing", Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Web Science Conference, WebSci 2014. the 2014 ACM conference, 23 – 26 June 2014. ACM Press. 99-108.
- (2014) "Global connectivity and multilingualsin the Twitter network", Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’14. CHI '14: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM. 833-842.
- (2013) "Petition growth and success rates on the UK No. 10 Downing Street website", Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, WebSci'13. the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, 2 – 4 May 2013. ACM Press. volume (10) 132-138. (Source info: Hale, S. A., Margetts, H., and Yasseri, T. (2013). Petition Growth and Success Rates on the UK No. 10 Downing Street Website. In Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, WebSci ’13.)
- (2012) "Net increase? Cross-lingual linking in the blogosphere", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 17 (2) 135-151.
Books
- (2015) Political Turbulence How Social Media Shape Collective Action. Princeton University Press.
Chapters
- (2019) "How Social Media Shapes Political Participation and the Democratic Landscape" In: Society and the Internet: How Networks of Information and Communication are Changing Our Lives (Second Edition) GRAHAM, M. and Dutton, W. (eds.) 2nd. Oxford University Press.
- (2018) "Misogyny, Twitter, and the rural voter" In: Atlas of the 2016 Elections Watrel, R.H., Weichelt, R., Davidson, F.M., Heppen, J., Fouberg, E.H., Archer, J.C., Morrill, R.L., Shelley, F.M. and Martis, K.C. (eds.). Rowman & Littlefield.
- (2017) "Live versus archive: Comparing a web archive to a population of web pages" In: The Web as History Brügger, N. and Schroeder, R. (eds.). London: UCL Press. 45-61.
- (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.
Conference papers
- (2020) "Estimating Traffic Disruption Patterns with Volunteered Geographic Information", Scientific Reports. England. Springer Science and Business Media LLC. 10 (1) 252.
- (2019) "Viz-Blocks: Building Visualizations and Documents in the Browser", EuroVis 2019 - Short Papers. EuroVis. Eurographics Association. 97-101.
- (2019) "Challenges and frontiers in abusive content detection", Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Abusive Language Online. Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Abusive Language Online, 1 January 1970. Association for Computational Linguistics. 80-93.
- (2018) "Online petitioning through data exploration and what we found there: A dataset of petitions from avaaz.org", 12th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2018. 474-480.
- (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.
- (2017) "Generating Tile Maps", Computer Graphics Forum. Eurographics Conference on Visualization (EuroVis), Barcelona, Spain, 12 – 16 June 2017. Wiley. 36 (3) 435-445.
- (2017) "Foreign-language Reviews: Help or Hindrance?", Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '17: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM. 2017-May 4430-4442.
- (2016) "User Reviews and Language: How Language Influences Ratings", Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’16 EA. CHI'16: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM. 07-12-May-2016 1208-1214.
- (2015) "Cross-language Wikipedia editing of Okinawa, Japan", Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’15. CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM. 2015-April 183-192. (In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2015. ACM)
- (2015) "Collaborative Visualizations for Wikipedia Critique and Activism", Proceedings of ICWSM. AAAI. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. WS-15-19 11-16. (Source info: In Proceedings of ICWSM. AAAI, Forthcoming)
- (2015) "How much is said in a microblog? A multilingual inquiry based on Weibo and Twitter", Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Web Science Conference, WebSci 2015. WebSci '15: ACM Web Science Conference. ACM. (9 pages, 4 figures WebSci 2015)
- (2014) "Multilinguals and Wikipedia editing", Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Web Science Conference, WebSci 2014. the 2014 ACM conference, 23 – 26 June 2014. ACM Press. 99-108.
- (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)
- (2014) "Global connectivity and multilingualsin the Twitter network", Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’14. CHI '14: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM. 833-842.
- (2014) "Okinawa in Japanese and English wikipedia", CHI '14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '14: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM. 927-932.
- (2013) "Petition growth and success rates on the UK No. 10 Downing Street website", Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, WebSci'13. the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, 2 – 4 May 2013. ACM Press. volume (10) 132-138. (Source info: Hale, S. A., Margetts, H., and Yasseri, T. (2013). Petition Growth and Success Rates on the UK No. 10 Downing Street Website. In Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, WebSci ’13.)
- (2012) "Impact of platform design on cross-language information exchange", Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. the 2012 ACM annual conference extended abstracts, 5 – 10 May 2012. ACM Press. 1363-1368.
- (2006) "Iterative 3-D Pose Correction and Content-Based Image Retrieval for Dorsal Fin Recognition", Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. 4141 LNCS 648-660.
Journal articles
- (2021) "Social media and early warning systems for natural disasters: A case study of Typhoon Etau in Japan", International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. 52 101926.
- (2020) "Does Campaigning on Social Media Make a Difference? Evidence from candidate use of Twitter during the 2015 and 2017 UK Elections", Communication Research. 47 (7) 988-1009.
- (2020) "Measuring relative opinion from location-based social media: A case study of the 2016 U.S. presidential election", PLOS ONE. 15 (5) e0233660.
- (2019) "Room to Glo: A Systematic Comparison of Semantic Change Detection Approaches with Word Embeddings", Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2019.. 66-76.
- (2019) "Diagnosing the performance of human mobility models at small spatial scales using volunteered geographical information", Royal Society Open Science. 6 (11) 191034.
- (2019) "Explaining Download Patterns in Open Government Data: Citizen participation or private enterprise?", International Journal of Electronic Governance. 11 (2) 217.
- (2019) "Demographic Inference and Representative Population Estimates from Multilingual Social Media Data", WWW '19 The World Wide Web Conference. 2056-2067.
- (2018) "TripAdvisor Reviews of London Museums: A New Approach to Understanding Visitors", Museum International. 70 (1-2) 154-165.
- (2018) Volatility in the Issue Attention Economy.
- (2018) "How digital design shapes political participation: A natural experiment with social information", PLoS ONE. 13 (4) e0196068.
- (2018) "Digital Traces of Distinction? Popular Orientation and User-Engagement with Status Hierarchies in TripAdvisor Reviews of Cultural Organizations", New Media and Society. 20 (11) 4218-4236.
- (2017) "The October 2014 United States Treasury bond flash crash and the contributory effect of mini flash crashes", PLOS ONE Hernandez Montoya, A.R. (eds.). 12 (11) e0186688.
- (2017) "Estimating local commuting patterns from geolocated Twitter data", EPJ Data Science 6. 6 (24).
- (2017) "Rapid rise and decay in petition signing", EPJ DATA SCIENCE. 6 (1) 20.
- (2016) "Understanding editing behaviors in multilingual Wikipedia", PLoS ONE. 11 (5) e0155305.
- (2014) "Investigating Political Participation and Social Information Using Big Data and a Natural Experiment", CoRR. abs/1408.3562.
- (2013) "Leadership without Leaders? Starters and Followers in Online Collective Action", Political Studies. 63 (2) 278-299.
- (2013) "Where in the World are You? Geolocation and Language Identification in Twitter", The Professional Geographer. 66 (4) 568-578.
- (2013) "Featured graphic. mapping the geoweb: A geography of Twitter", Environment and Planning A. 45 (1) 100-102.
- (2013) "Modeling the Rise in Internet-based Petitions.", CoRR. abs/1308.0239.
- (2012) "Featured graphic: Digital divide: The geography of internet access", Environment and Planning A. 44 (5) 1009-1010.
- (2012) Unsupervised Threshold for Automatic Extraction of Dolphin Dorsal Fin Outlines from Digital Photographs in DARWIN (Digital Analysis and Recognition of Whale Images on a Network).
- (2012) "Net increase? Cross-lingual linking in the blogosphere", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 17 (2) 135-151.
Reports
- (2015) Explaining Usage Patterns in Open Government Data: The Case of Data.Gov.UK.
- (2015) Multilingual Wikipedia: Editors of primary language contribute to more complex articles.
- (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.
- (2012) Social Influence and Collective Action: An Experiment Investigating the Effects of Visibility and Social Information Moderated by Personality.
- (2011) "Geographies of the World's Knowledge" In: Oxford Internet Institute. London: Oxford Internet Institute.
- (2011) First year report on scientific workshop, SESERV Deliverable D1.2, Socio-Economic Services for European Research Projects FP7-2010-ICT-258138-CSA.
- (2008) A New Approach to Unsupervised Thresholding for Automatic Extraction of Dolphin Dorsal Fin Outlines from Digital Photographs in DARWIN. The Eckerd Scholar 2008. Eckerd College.
Working papers
- (2021) Tweeting for the Cause: Network analysis of UK petition sharing.
Teaching
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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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Data Analytics at Scale
The course will teach computational complexity and how to profile and increase the computational efficiency of Python code. It will also cover parallel and distributed computing approaches, and discuss data storage and retrieval techniques.
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Foundations of Visualisation
Discussion of the two-way interaction between visualisation and the social sciences.
Videos
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Destroy the Internet Advertising Economy with this One Weird Trick
Recorded: 2 December 2020
Duration: 00:58:37
The OII welcomes Tim Hwang, discussing his new book ‘Subprime Attention Crisis’ with Dr Scott A. Hale, This session is a deep-dive conversation exploring how the modern online advertising economy really works.
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Countering the COVID-19 Misinfodemic with Text Similarity and Social Data Science
Recorded: 24 June 2020
Duration: 01:02:23
Dr Scott A. Hale discusses how text similarity algorithms are being used to help fact-checkers locate misinformation, cluster similar misinformation, and identify existing fact-checks on platforms with end-to-end encryption. Moderated by Dr Chico Camargo.
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Global Fact 7: Fakes, misinformation and fact-checking
Recorded: 24 June 2020
Duration: 01:02:28
In this session, part of International fact-checking network Global Fact 7 Virtual, panelists will present ongoing research on misinformation and fact-checking from around the world.
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Monitoring health misinformation: An early-detection methodology for fact-checkers
Recorded: 17 June 2020
Duration: 00:09:18
Monitoring the health conversation online. Detecting notable shifts through word embeddings and semantic change. Presentation by Jenna Sherman, Nat Gyenes, Ashkan Kazemi, and Scott Hale.
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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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Foreign-language Reviews: Help or Hindrance? (CHI2017)
Recorded: 2 February 2017
Duration: 00:05:14
Dr Scott A. Hale tests the impact of foreign-language reviews on the perceived helpfulness of all reviews using an experiment, and finds use of translation buttons clearly separated individuals with positive and negative attitudes.
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The ATI Fellow Short Talks: Dr Scott Hale
Recorded: 2 December 2016
Duration: 00:25:21
In the Alan Turin Institute's Fellow Talks, Dr Scott A. Hale talks about social data science and its application to bilingualism.
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Okinawa in Japanese and English Wikipedia
Recorded: 26 April 2016
Duration: 00:03:17
This is a video summary of a extended abstract and poster presented at the 2014 ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (Montreal, Canada).
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How Much Interaction Is There Between Wikipedia’s Language Editions?
Recorded: 15 January 2016
Duration: 00:15:01
Presentation on Scott Hale's Wikipedia research, on the occasion of Wikipedia's 15th Birthday.
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Modelling the Rise in Internet-based Petitions
Recorded: 8 November 2013
Duration: 00:17:39
The launch of online government petition platforms allows for the passive study of all petitions to government. Scott Hale gives a brief overview of OII findings related to three government petition platforms and the future directions being pursued.
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Quantitative Methods in Social Media Research: Data Visualization
Recorded: 26 September 2012
Duration: 00:10:55
Scott Hale discusses visualisation during a seminar on quantitative methods in social media research held at the OII on 26 September 2012. How can we visualise data collected by social media? How does visualisation relate to statistical analysis?
News
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New machine learning algorithm can predict age and gender from just your Twitter profile
16 May 2019
A new “demographic inference” tool developed by academics can make predictions based solely on the information in a person’s social media profile (i.e. screen name, biography, profile photo, and name)
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Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action awarded the Political Studies Association book prize
5 December 2017
Professor Helen Margetts, Professor Peter John, Dr Scott Hale, and Dr Taha Yasseri have won the W. J. M. Mackenzie Book Prize at the Political Studies Association (PSA)’s Annual Awards in Westminster on 5 December 2017.
Events
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OII’s Wednesday Webinar Week 8 ‘Destroy the Internet Advertising Economy With This One Weird Trick’
2 December 2020
The OII welcomes Visiting Policy Fellow Tim Hwang, to discuss his new book 'Subprime Attention Crisis' with Dr Scott A. Hale. Tim is a researcher and lawyer, working at the intersection of technology, public policy and economics.
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Countering the COVID-19 Misinfodemic with Text Similarity and Social Data Science
24 June 2020
Dr Scott A. Hale will discuss how text similarity algorithms are being used to help fact-checkers locate misinformation, cluster similar misinformation, and identify existing fact-checks in the context of tip lines on platforms with end-to-end encryption
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Book Launch: Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action
27 January 2016
Drawing on large-scale data generated from the Internet and real-world events, this book shows how mobilizations that succeed are unpredictable, unstable, and often unsustainable.
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Wikipedia 15th Birthday Editathon: The Social Internet
15 January 2016
On Friday 15 January 2016 Wikipedia will celebrate its fifteenth birthday and we are celebrating by having a Wikipedia editathon!
Blog
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Detecting East Asian Prejudice on Social Media
28 May 2020
Authors: Bertram Vidgen
Researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute have contributed to research led by The Alan Turing Institute’s Hate Speech: Measures & Counter-measures project to create ...
Read More Detecting East Asian Prejudice on Social Media -
Cutting congestion and minimising traffic disruption using online mapping data
6 March 2020
Authors: Chico Camargo
In his latest blog, OII postdoctoral researcher Dr Chico Q. Camargo explains why using data from online mapping tools can help policymakers and planners ...
Read More Cutting congestion and minimising traffic disruption using online mapping data -
Awarded Political Studies Association book prize
8 December 2017
Author: Scott A. Hale
Professor Helen Margetts, Professor Peter John, Dr Scott Hale, and Dr Taha Yasseri have won the W. J. M. Mackenzie Book Prize at the ...
Read More Awarded Political Studies Association book prize -
Twitter trials 280 characters, but its success in Japan is more than a character difference
1 October 2017
Author: Scott A. Hale
Twitter has rolled out a limited trial of 280 characters for some of its users. In announcing the trial, Twitter specifically noted that most ...
Read More Twitter trials 280 characters, but its success in Japan is more than a character difference -
Publication: Rapid rise and decay in petition signing
17 August 2017
Author: Scott A. Hale
Our journal article entitled, “Rapid rise and decay in petition signing” has been published in EPJ Data Science. Contemporary collective action, much of which ...
Read More Publication: Rapid rise and decay in petition signing -
How Social Media Turn Political Mobilization Upside Down
1 June 2017
Author: Scott A. Hale
Political Turbulence author Helen Margetts spoke at the “Society Through the Lens of the Digital” conference organised by The Volkswagen Foundation at the end ...
Read More How Social Media Turn Political Mobilization Upside Down -
Review in Political Studies Review
7 March 2017
Author: Scott A. Hale
Rhys Crilley reviewed Political Turbulence in “Political Studies Review” One of the major strengths of Political Turbulence includes the authors’ ability to make complex ...
Read More Review in Political Studies Review -
Social information and political participation on the internet
28 January 2017
Authors: Scott A. Hale
This paper tests whether the social information provided by the internet affects the decision to participate in politics. In a field experiment, subjects could ...
Read More Social information and political participation on the internet -
Leadership without Leaders? Starters and Followers in Online Collective Action
28 January 2017
Author: Scott A. Hale
The internet has been ascribed a prominent role in collective action, particularly with widespread use of social media. But most mobilisations fail. We investigate ...
Read More Leadership without Leaders? Starters and Followers in Online Collective Action -
The Motivating Role of Violence in Video Games
28 January 2017
Authors: Andrew Przybylski
Six studies, two survey based and four experimental, explored the relations between violent content and people’s motivation and enjoyment of video game play. Based ...
Read More The Motivating Role of Violence in Video Games -
Brexit, voting, and political turbulence
18 August 2016
Author: Scott A. Hale
We are still digesting the result of the UK referendum to leave the European Union, but it is clear many events were played out ...
Read More Brexit, voting, and political turbulence -
Updated plugin and future development
11 April 2016
Author: Scott A. Hale
Released in 2012, the sigma.js plugin for Gephi allows for the interactive display of network data in a web browser using open-source technologies, principally ...
Read More Updated plugin and future development -
Visualizing network data
11 April 2016
Author: Scott A. Hale
Released in 2012, the sigma.js plugin for Gephi allows for the interactive display of network data in a web browser using open-source technologies, principally ...
Read More Visualizing network data -
Multilingualism research featured in The Guardian
28 May 2015
Author: Scott A. Hale
A recent article in the Guardian newspaper by Holly Yong surveys much research about online language divides, including my work on multilingualism and cross-language ...
Read More Multilingualism research featured in The Guardian -
Design for multilinguals: Seemingly simple yet often missed
27 April 2014
Author: Scott A. Hale
As I prepare my slides for CHI 2014, I’m struck by one implication I give for the research I will present on language and ...
Read More Design for multilinguals: Seemingly simple yet often missed -
Interactive map of Twitter mentions in geotagged tweets
12 January 2013
Author: Scott A. Hale
I recently had the pleasure of building my first interactive map visualization using Leaflet with Joshua R. Melville and the Floatingsheep team, who have ...
Read More Interactive map of Twitter mentions in geotagged tweets -
Build your own interactive network
15 November 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
Similar to the map builder, there is a web-based version of the network builder under development. The web based version is useful as it ...
Read More Build your own interactive network -
Build your own interactive map
11 November 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
After initial testing in our closed beta period, the InteractiveVis team is very happy to open the Interactive Map Builder to everyone. All you ...
Read More Build your own interactive map -
Interactive Maps
5 November 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
Update: 6 November 2012 – US map featured in the Guardian. I’ve not blogged for a while on this site, because I’ve been doing ...
Read More Interactive Maps -
US election zoom-in
5 November 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
Update: 6 November 2012 – Featured in the Guardian. Interactive world maps are great, but the excitement over the US Presidential Election left us ...
Read More US election zoom-in -
Network visualization lunchtime talk
29 October 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
Scott Hale, of the InteractiveVis project team, will lead an introductory talk on network visualization next Wednesday, 7 November at Oxford’s IT Services. All ...
Read More Network visualization lunchtime talk -
Preparing data to create your own interactive map
24 October 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
Behind every visualization is data. After some extensive internal testing we are preparing to release a wizard to create map visualizations next week. This ...
Read More Preparing data to create your own interactive map -
Interactive Map of Central Government Online
23 October 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
Big Data Citizen-Government Interactions Digital Era Governance We have collected and visualized a pilot crawl of UK Central Government websites in late 2011, showing ...
Read More Interactive Map of Central Government Online -
Updated with IE-compatibility, conference appearance, wizard coming soon
29 September 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
Internet Explorer Compatibility The Interactive Visualizations are standards compliant, but not all browsers are. We are relying on the Sigma.js framework to display network ...
Read More Updated with IE-compatibility, conference appearance, wizard coming soon -
Language Bubbles
3 September 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
Eli Pariser has raised awareness that personalization algorithms play in filtering and ranking results on the web. I think this work is very important, ...
Read More Language Bubbles -
Feedback Needed: Interactive map demo
23 August 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
skip to the demo… As with the network diagrams discussed earlier, geographic data can often benefit from the ability to be explored in an ...
Read More Feedback Needed: Interactive map demo -
Feedback Needed: Interactive network diagram demos
8 August 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
This post lays out some of the importance of interactivity for network diagrams and we think is well worth a read (or at least ...
Read More Feedback Needed: Interactive network diagram demos -
Existing tools and OII InteractiveVis approach
8 August 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
From the beginning of this project, we have been keen to build upon the best of the existing tools and not “reinvent the wheel.” ...
Read More Existing tools and OII InteractiveVis approach -
Beyond Books slide presentation
31 July 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
The OII InteractiveVis team has been busy at work and anticipates an exciting release of two demo visualizations extremely soon. In the meantime, there ...
Read More Beyond Books slide presentation -
Recent contacts working on cross-language problems
13 July 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
I’ve recently been able to meet some spectacular individuals who are working on various aspects of cross-language communication. This blog post won’t to justice ...
Read More Recent contacts working on cross-language problems -
Underway
7 June 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
We’re very excited to be starting this project and getting underway. Initial project meetings have mapped out our timeline and initial goals and now ...
Read More Underway -
Welcome, InteractiveVis project vision
16 May 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
The InteractiveVis project, funded by JISC from May to September 2012, aims to allow easy creation of interactive visualisations for geospatial and network data ...
Read More Welcome, InteractiveVis project vision -
Prof Helen Margetts serves on UK Digital Advisory Board
26 April 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
OII Director Helen Margetts is one of twelve expert members of the new Digital Advisory Board in the UK. Chaired by UK Digital Champion ...
Read More Prof Helen Margetts serves on UK Digital Advisory Board -
Need your vote (if .ac.uk email)! — Interactive visualization development
23 March 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
Update: 25 June 2012 The project has been choosen by JISC to receive funding. Further information on the project and status updates will be ...
Read More Need your vote (if .ac.uk email)! — Interactive visualization development -
Two new publications, new research project, looking to hire
26 February 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
A lot has happened since my last post, and the selected publications page has been updated to reflect this. I am very pleased to ...
Read More Two new publications, new research project, looking to hire -
Join our team: Big Data Research Officer needed
18 February 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
We are excited to announce an open position for a Big Data Research Officer, who will contribute to three exciting Big Data projects at ...
Read More Join our team: Big Data Research Officer needed -
Government and IT report released
26 January 2012
Author: Scott A. Hale
Digital Era Governance The Government on the Web team is pleased to announce the publication of Government and IT—”a recipe for rip-offs”: Time for ...
Read More Government and IT report released -
Prof Helen Margetts’ remarks at London Cyberspace Conference
14 November 2011
Author: Scott A. Hale
Helen Margetts spoke at the London Conference on Cyberspace, organized by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1-2 November. Although much of the conference was ...
Read More Prof Helen Margetts’ remarks at London Cyberspace Conference -
Collection of Graphics on Language and the Internet
4 November 2011
Author: Scott A. Hale
Update (Nov. 2014): I’ve recently published two papers examining users who contribute content in multiple languages online. Please see Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing and ...
Read More Collection of Graphics on Language and the Internet -
Wikipedia coverage by langauge
17 October 2011
Author: Scott A. Hale
Update (November 2014): I’ve recently published a related paper examining how many users edit multiple language editions of Wikipedia and how these multilingual users ...
Read More Wikipedia coverage by langauge -
Visualizing English, Spanish, Japanese in the blogosphere
14 April 2011
Author: Scott A. Hale
Update (Feb. 2012): The paper is now published and freely available from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2011.01568.x/full. Update (Dec. 2011): The full paper ...
Read More Visualizing English, Spanish, Japanese in the blogosphere -
New research project: The Internet, Public Policy and Political Science
1 April 2011
Author: Scott A. Hale
Digital Era Governance Collective Action Citizen-Government Interactions We will begin a new three-year research programme on The Internet, Public Policy and Political Science: Collective ...
Read More New research project: The Internet, Public Policy and Political Science -
Translating Twitter
29 March 2011
Author: Scott A. Hale
I had the great opportunity to meet George Weyman, a project director at meedan, yesterday at an OII event. meedan has been doing great ...
Read More Translating Twitter -
The net effect: Is the internet really vital to contemporary protest?
10 March 2011
Author: Scott A. Hale
Professor Helen Margetts was recently featured on the The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) website writing about the importance of the Internet to ...
Read More The net effect: Is the internet really vital to contemporary protest? -
Video: Professor Margetts acts as an expert witness to the House of Commons Public Administration Committee
10 March 2011
Author: Scott A. Hale
Update: 11 March 2011The Guardian has reported on the committee meeting on its website. On Tuesday, 8th March, Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Institute) acted ...
Read More Video: Professor Margetts acts as an expert witness to the House of Commons Public Administration Committee -
Content Providers and Neutrality
20 November 2010
Author: Scott A. Hale
I don’t seem to be writing too timely, but I hope these posts nevertheless remain interesting. Last week the course I TA for was ...
Read More Content Providers and Neutrality -
Multilingual sharing in video
5 November 2010
Author: Scott A. Hale
I’ve thought a lot about translation and multilingual sharing online in text environments (blogs, Wikipedia, social networking sites), but I’m reminded how quickly platforms ...
Read More Multilingual sharing in video -
Purposesfully Restricted and Network Visualizations
24 September 2010
Author: Scott A. Hale
A few interesting links to share: Religious Search Engines Yield Tailored Results Visual Complexity – great transportation network visualizations The Intelligence Of Crowds In ...
Read More Purposesfully Restricted and Network Visualizations -
Japan/China crosslinks on- and off-line
24 September 2010
Author: Scott A. Hale
Just over a month ago, I wrote about the difficulty international platforms such as Google maps have in naming disputed geographic features. Recent incident ...
Read More Japan/China crosslinks on- and off-line -
How geographically or linguistically diverse is your online social network?
17 August 2010
Author: Scott A. Hale
Three recent news stories highlight the international nature of many social media platforms: Pingdom Documents Top Countries On Facebook How Black People Use TwitterThe ...
Read More How geographically or linguistically diverse is your online social network? -
Naming Places/Features on Google Maps
12 August 2010
Author: Scott A. Hale
Google Maps must engage in a cross-cultural (and often cross-lingual) act to publish its maps. Each place or feature name can be given in ...
Read More Naming Places/Features on Google Maps -
Homophily and the Internet
5 August 2010
Author: Scott A. Hale
I recently had the opportunity to meet Ethan Zuckerman while he was on a visit to Oxford for TED where he gave a talk ...
Read More Homophily and the Internet
Press
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Human or Machine? Social Science or Computer Science? Yes, we need them all
30 November 2020 The Commons
Today nearly half of the world’s population is online, and while we know we need to increase access to the Internet, access alone is not enough.
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22 researchers take ‘the stage’ and share their findings at Global Fact 7
24 June 2020 Poynter
On day 3 of Global Fact 7, fact checkers explored some of the thorniest issues faced in battling misinformation in Asia and the Balkans. Then nearly two-dozen academics and researchers shared their latest findings on a broad range of topics.
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A Third Rely on Translation to Make E-commerce Decisions
3 February 2017 Slator
Dr Scott A. Hale's research into how online consumers react to foreign-language reviews reveals nearly one-third rely on machine translation to make their choice.
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Why Translating Chinese User Reviews May Disappoint Danish Tourists
11 May 2016 Slator
Covering a study by Scott Hale on how language affects ratings on TripAdvisor.co.uk. Speakers of different languages and have an impact on ratings, with some language pairs showing more similar star ratings than vastly disparate ones.
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How are social media changing democracy?
28 March 2016 The Economist
The Economist explains the role of social media in political campaigning and draws heavily on the work of Helen Margetts and others in recently published 'Political Turbulence'
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A new kind of weather
26 March 2016 The Economist
Examining collective action and the role of social media, the Economist draws on the work of Helen Margetts and colleagues in recently published 'Political Turbulence'
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The Social revolution
26 February 2016 Science
Review of ‘Political Turbulence’ by Helen Margetts, Peter John, Taha Yasseri and Scott Hale. It ‘contributes an important series of creatively and rigorously researched insights into the social mechanics of Internet-based collective action’
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Unless you speak English, the internet doesn’t care about you.
18 February 2016 Fusion
English is the dominant internet language which causes difficulties for the non-Anglophone world. Mark Graham and Scott Hale are quoted.
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Review: ‘Political Turbulence: how social media shape collective action’
17 February 2016 openDemocracy UK
Stuart Weir extensively reviews recently published ' Political Turbulence' which he describes as revelatory. He also highlights the multi-disciplinary nature of OII research.
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Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action, by Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri
21 January 2016 Times Higher Education
In his review of recently published 'Political Turbulence', by Helen Margetts and colleagues, Ivor Gabor says that organising and agitating online can be a powerful mover of change.
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The Digital Language Divide
29 May 2015 The Guardian
A Digital Guardian article which explores in depth the effects of language on internet use draws heavily on work done by OII researchers.
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How the World Wide Web Became the Internet’s Killer App
11 March 2014 Motherboard Magazine
On the Web's 25th anniversary, Scott Hale contributes to an article outlining the history of (and differences between) the Internet and the Web.
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Wikipedia’s Secret Multilingual Workforce
13 December 2013 MIT Technology Review
Wikipedia's various language editions often carry entirely different content. Scott Hale has identified a small band of multilingual editors who are working to change that.
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First day ‘is crucial for success of e-petitions’
4 September 2013 BBC News, Politics
Nearly all e-petitions are doomed to become 'digital dust' say Helen Margetts and colleagues whose work on 'Big Data and Collective Action' is featured in an in-depth article on BBC News online.
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E-petitions doomed from the outset
4 April 2013 The Frontline
The specialist technology site reports on work by a team led by Scott Hale, examining petitions created on the 10 Downing Street site over two years. E-petitions are more a popularity contest that a way for Britons to get their voice heard, it says.
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Tweets decide SAFC v Toon fans’ debate
12 January 2013 Jarrow and Hebburn Gazette
Regional newspaper, the Jarrow and Hebburn Gazette highlights the references to the football clubs of the North East in the Premier League Twitter map created by the OII team.
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Chasing data shadows: Twitter map of football fans
11 January 2013 University of Oxford
A team from the OII has created an interactive Twitter map to find out where conversations about premier league football clubs originate. It shows that there are fewer Manchester United fans in London and the south-east than is popularly assumed.
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Oxford Internet Institute maps Premier League Twitter conversations in UK
11 January 2013 Anchorfan
Social Sport News site reports on the interactive map produced by Mark Graham and the OII team which maps twitter conversations about Premier League football clubs.
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Twitter map finally reveals exactly where Manchester United fans live
11 January 2013 Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph highlights the ‘fascinating’ map plotting Twitter conversations about Premier League Football clubs created by a team at the OII.
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Now a Twitter map of football fans
11 January 2013 India Blooms
India based web-site reports the work of the OII team on the interactive Premier League Twitter map.
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Most Man U fans do not come from the south, study shows
11 January 2013 ITV
ITV reports the work of the OII team on the interactive Premier League Twitter map.
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Which Premier League teams are the most popular in search area? A Twitter interactive map
11 January 2013 The Guardian
The interactive map of geotagged Tweets mentioning Premier League teams or associated hashtags created by the team at the OII features on the Data Store Show and Tell page of the Guardian.
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Confirmed: The Internet Does Not Solve Global Inequality
26 March 2012 The Atlantic
The message of the OII's interactive iBook "Geographies of the World's Knowledge" confirms that the Anglophone world dominates academic and user-generating publishing and rich countries dominate the production of user content.