| Website | https://joshbraun.umasscreate.net |
| University Profile | https://www.umass.edu/journalism/facultyStaff/bio/braun |
| Distribution Matters | https://mitpress.mit.edu/search-result-list/?series=distribution-matters |
| Pronouns | he/him |
#commodon A Partial List of Researchers on Mastodon in Communication, Media Studies, and Adjacent Fields Maintainer’s Note: This list is opt-in. To request that your account be added, contact one of the maintainers (Josh Braun or Bethany Klein) or suggest a change directly to the Google Doc from...
Interesting thought by @riskybusiness on his latest podcast: what would happen if someone like Google set up their own Mastodon instance, and it became like the Gmail of Mastodon.
I recognize that a lot of people who have been around would have concerns, but... it's the kind of thing that could happen.
Thank you! After 50 days, @TheConversationUS has 11x more followers on #mastodon than we accumulated on TikTok in 18 months.
Could you help us match our Twitter numbers by telling your friends about us?
(We're a nonprofit #news source sharing the knowledge of academic experts with the public on a wide range of topics. We’re part of a global network that includes @TheConversationUK @theconversationau @TheConversationAfrica @theconversationes & @TheConversationClimate)
I'm an associate professor at UMass Amherst, where I teach about #journalism and #mediaindustries. My research focuses on media distribution and, occasionally, dysfunction in the adtech industry.
I also co-edit a book series on the civic impacts of media distribution for The MIT Press, so feel free to hit me up if you're working on a relevant project.
#introduction #commodon #mediastudies #sciencejournalism #linux #emacs #zettlekasten
As new members arrive -- particularly my colleagues in the academic community -- may I remind you that the fediverse does not look kindly upon data scraping without getting the consent of instance admins and members.
I wrote a critique of a recent (very, very sloppy) study that not only scraped without consent -- it also ran people's posts through Google:
https://fossacademic.tech/2022/10/18/notesOnNobreEtAl.html
As the AOIR ethics guides note: expectations of privacy are heavily contextual.
There’s a new paper out about Mastodon! But unfortunately, it’s a deeply problematic one. Nobre et al’s “More of the Same? A Study of Images Shared on Mastodon’s Federated Timeline” is a paper that is now published in proceedings from International Conference on Social Informatics. (Unfortunately, it’s not open access.) Because I’m currently researching the fediverse and blogging about that process, I thought I’d write up notes on this paper. Why this paper? Frankly, because I’m pretty certain it violates the community norms, as well as terms of service, of many Mastodon instances. It instantly reminded me of the controversial paper from Zignani et al, “Mastodon Content Warnings: Inappropriate Contents on a Microblogging Platform”, which resulted in a scathing open letter and the retraction of a dataset from the Harvard Dataverse. Nobre et al’s “More of the Same” is a study of image-sharing. The authors claim that it is about image-sharing on Mastodon, but really their focus is on images they culled from Mastodon.social’s federated timeline. They pulled 4M posts from 103K active users, of which 1M had images. Since they pulled posts from Mastodon.social’s federated timeline, they saw posts from 4K separate instances. The authors state that a “relevant number” of the images they found are “explicit.” They categorize the images as such after running them through Google’s Vision AI Safe Search system. They also run the images they find through Google’s image search to trace where the images came from and how they are shared on Mastodon. Ultimately, the authors don’t really make an argument, other than stating in passing that Mastodon needs better moderation, since people share explicit images. In some ways, “More of the Same” lives up to its title: it’s more of the same poor scholarship that can be seen in Zignani et al (in fact, Nobre et al cite that controversial paper). Here are my critiques:
It occurs to me that I haven't done a proper #introduction on this new instance! My formal job title is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University, but alongside that I also direct #MeshResearch, a lab focused on building open-source interoperable tools for new forms of scholarly communication. I'm also director of #HumanitiesCommons, a scholarly network serving something like 50,000 users across the humanities and around the world.* And of course I'm one of your friendly neighborhood hcommons.social admins.
My #research interests circulate around the future of #scholarlyCommunication, as one component of thinking about how #universities might become more #open, more #generous spaces for cultural and intellectual work. Of late, that interest has led me to thinking a lot about #leadership and #governance, and particularly ways that they can be more #collective and #collaborative.
Me: Alexa, what's the price of a Costco membership?
Alexa: [quotes the current price of a share of Costco stock]
Me: Not what I asked for. But an apt commentary on which questions matter in a financialized economy.
Chanders
johnnyunger
Robert W. Gehl
Mike Masnick ✅
The Conversation U.S.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jess Calarco