-
Start date:
Apr 2015
-
End date:
Jul 2016
- Contact:
-
Funder:
Google
"The Internet doesn't forget", but people do. Internet has had strong impacts on memory and the processes of remembering and forgetting. In this project we use data collected from the web to quantitatively study how people remember and forget past events.
Overview
Memory and the way we remember, forget, and recall events, people, places, etc., at the individual level, have been a very sophisticated topic of theoretical research for a long time (Ebbinghaus-1885). However, the notion of collective memory as a socially generated common perception of an item, has been introduced and studied only recently (Halbwachs-1992); about the time that our societies started to become highly connected through new channels of communication. These studies however are all concerning offline settings. Whereas, the developments in digital technologies in recent years have influenced the way that we keep track of events both at individual and collective levels significantly. These technologies also have provided us with huge amounts of data, which are being used to study different aspects of our social behaviour. However, there have been only few large scale empirical studies on online remembering at the global level using these data. Work by Au Yeung and Jatowt (2011) analysed references to the past in large news collections, but this only considered the memory with a journalistic bias and limited to only mentions of specific dates.
This project will study remembering based on the information seeking patterns of large number of individuals on the web, by using Google search logs and temporal analysis on the search volumes constructed from Google Trends and Google Correlate. Although information seeking is not equivalent to memory, we argue that it is a reliable indicator of memory, or at least one needs to have a recollection of an item to want to perform a web search on it.
This project impacts a wide range of audiences and practices. Many questions and concerns about the way search engines work, or should work, can be tackled empirically by using the data that are produced on those platforms themselves. We will investigate whether, our memory and remembering pattern has a complex non-trivial and high pace dynamic, even if these new technologies theoretically make it impossible to forget at the individual level, as it has been claimed. The outcomes of the project can play an important role in informing and shaping the currently under-developed policies at the EU level and elsewhere. Additionally, our results could have applications in marketing, online opinion polling, broadcasting strategy, and forecasting and nowcasting of social collective behaviours.
References
Ebbinghaus, Hermann.Über das gedächtnis: untersuchungen zur experimentellen psychologie. Duncker & Humblot, 1885.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On collective memory. University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Au Yeung, Ching-man, and Adam Jatowt. “Studying how the past is remembered: towards computational history through large scale text mining.”Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management. ACM, 2011.
Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. Delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Support
This project is funded by Google.
Contact
Contact: Taha Yasseri (PI), Tel: +44 (0)1865 287229, Email: taha.yasseri@oii.ox.ac.uk
People
-
Dr Taha Yasseri
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Principal Investigator
-
Dr Ruth Olimpia García Gavilanes
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
-
Dr Milena Tsvetkova
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
News
-
Public interest in plane crashes only predicted ‘if death toll is 50 or higher’
14 October 2016
English Wikipedia continues to be shaped by things that matter to Westerners, with little reference to the rest of the world outside of North America and Europe.
Press
-
Plane crashes: public only interested if toll 50 or higher, study finds
Date Published: 12 October 2016
Source: The Guardian
Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute examine Wikipedia articles about some 1,500 crashes around the world.
-
We care when an airplane crashes. And then we don’t
Date Published: 11 October 2016
Source: Science
OII researchers find that when a crash involves fewer than 50 deaths, Wikipedia readers tended to pay relatively little attention.
-
The Strange Way Aircraft Crashes Attract Human Attention on the Web
Date Published: 7 July 2016
Source: MIT Technology Review
What determines the level of coverage that news events receive on the Web? Traffic to Wikipedia pages about aircraft crashes varies in unexpected ways, say Ruth García-Gavilanes, Milena Tsvetkova, and Taha Yasseri.