Oxford Internet Institute

Digital Knowledge and Culture

New technologies have enabled innovations in the ways in which we create knowledge, access information, and engage with our heritage. These changes also affect the public, which is not just leaving digital traces, but increasingly playing a part in contributing to knowledge production. The OII is charting the ongoing digital transformations of the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities, and their implications.

This research cluster brings together researchers whose work is aimed at understanding the impacts of digital technologies on scholarly and public engagement with knowledge, arts, culture and heritage. Our work has involved physicists, marine biologists, historians, theatre companies, film makers, scholarly archives, major libraries, museums, universities, crowdsourcing projects and the BBC in research projects at the forefront of understanding this shifting landscape.

People: Kathryn Eccles, Isis Hjorth, Bernie Hogan, Eric Meyer, Ralph Schroeder, Matt Willis

Research

Digital tools and techniques now underpin most of our scholarly activities. Physicists and philosophers, biologists and biographers, doctors and demographers all increasingly rely on digital tools and data to do their work, to open up new lines in enquiry, and to advance their knowledge of the world. The Internet also opens up this knowledge much more widely to the general public, who are increasingly not just research subjects and creators of the traces left in big data, but also can actively play a part in interpreting and creating new knowledge.

Our cultural landscape has been similarly transformed by increased access to and enhanced understanding of the digital environment. Visits to museums and cultural spaces can begin long before we step through the door, and we can access deep, rich contextual resources to enhance our engagement with the arts and heritage environments.

Our work extends across Oxford and beyond, including close ties to: Digital Humanities at Oxford; The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH); OeRC; HeLEX; Wolfson Digital Cluster; Digital Humanities Summer School.

Selected Publications

The below are a few publications in this area: for complete lists of outputs, please refer to individual faculty biographies.

• Meyer, E.T., Schroeder, R. and Cowls, J. (2016)  “The net as a knowledge machine: How the Internet became embedded in research“, New Media & Society.
• Cowls, J. and Schroeder, R. (2015)  “Causation, Correlation, and Big Data in Social Science Research“, Policy and Internet. 7 (4) 447-472.
• Meyer, E.T. (2015)  “The expert and the machine“, Convergence. 21 (3) 306-313.
• Schroeder, R. and Taylor, L. (2015)  “Big data and Wikipedia research: social science knowledge across disciplinary divides“, Information Communication and Society. 18 (9) 1039-1056.
• Dougherty, M. and Meyer, E.T. (2014)  “Community, tools, and practices in web archiving: The state-of-the-art in relation to social science and humanities research needs“, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 65 (11) 2195-2209.
• Barjak, F., Eccles, K., Meyer, E.T., Schroeder, R. and Robinson, S. (2013)  “The Emerging Governance of E-Infrastructure“, JOURNAL OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION. 18(2) 1-24.

Teaching

The MSc optional paper in Digital Ethnography is designed to provide students with the knowledge and skills to carry out qualitative data analysis of a variety of kinds of data (e.g. text, photos, videos) collected from both online and offline settings. Past student projects in the ethnography course have included studies of communities that share YouTube videos on a particular topic, fandom and specific fan communities, communities that deviate from standard norms, online support groups, and a range of other groups online that merit deep investigation to better understand online norms, cultures, and identities.

The MSc optional methods paper in Metrics, Measurement, and Online Visibility is designed to give students experience analysing data both from traditional sources (Web of Knowledge, Scopus, etc.) and from alternative sources (Google, social media, Wikipedia, etc.). Students on the metrics course have used these techniques to understand the growth of an area of academic interest such as ‘internet studies’, to measure the uses and impacts of a particular website or set of websites, and to track the influence of individuals online.

The MSc optional methods paper in Digital Interviewing is designed to encourage students to develop a critical stance to their own research practice and the work of others. Alongside conceptual and theoretical discussions in class, students will be obtaining hand­s-on practice gathering qualitative data, particularly using digitally-mediated methods.