Digital humanities

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Example of a textual analysis program being used to study a novel, with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in Voyant Tools

Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the reflection on their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.

By producing and using new applications and techniques, DH makes new kinds of teaching and research possible, while at the same time studying and critiquing how these impact cultural heritage and digital culture. Thus, a distinctive feature of DH is its cultivation of a two-way relationship between the humanities and the digital: the field both employs technology in the pursuit of humanities research and subjects technology to humanistic questioning and interrogation, often simultaneously.

Definition

The definition of the digital humanities is being continually formulated by scholars and practitioners. Since the field is constantly growing and changing, specific definitions can quickly become outdated or unnecessarily limit future potential. The second volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016) acknowledges the difficulty in defining the field: "Along with the digital archives, quantitative analyses, and tool-building projects that once characterized the field, DH now encompasses a wide range of methods and practices: visualizations of large image sets, 3D modeling of historical artifacts, 'born digital' dissertations, hashtag activism and the analysis thereof, alternate reality games, mobile makerspaces, and more. In what has been called 'big tent' DH, it can at times be difficult to determine with any specificity what, precisely, digital humanities work entails."

Historically, the digital humanities developed out of humanities computing and has become associated with other fields, such as humanistic computing, social computing, and media studies. In concrete terms, the digital humanities embraces a variety of topics, from curating online collections of primary sources (primarily textual) to the data mining of large cultural data sets to topic modeling. Digital humanities incorporates both digitized (remediated) and born-digital materials and combines the methodologies from traditional humanities disciplines (such as history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies) and social sciences, with tools provided by computing (such as hypertext, hypermedia, data visualisation, information retrieval, data mining, statistics, text mining, digital mapping), and digital publishing. Related subfields of digital humanities have emerged like software studies, platform studies, and critical code studies. Fields that parallel the digital humanities include new media studies and information science as well as media theory of composition, game studies, particularly in areas related to digital humanities project design and production, and cultural analytics.

The Digital Humanities Stack (from Berry and Fagerjord, Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age)

Berry and Fagerjord have suggested that a way to reconceptualise digital humanities could be through a "digital humanities stack". They argue that "this type of diagram is common in computation and computer science to show how technologies are ‘stacked’ on top of each other in increasing levels of abstraction. Here, [they] use the method in a more illustrative and creative sense of showing the range of activities, practices, skills, technologies and structures that could be said to make up the digital humanities, with the aim of providing a high-level map." Indeed, the "diagram can be read as the bottom levels indicating some of the fundamental elements of the digital humanities stack, such as computational thinking and knowledge representation, and then other elements that later build on these. "

History

Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing, whose origins reach back to the 1930s and1940s in the pioneering work of English professor Josephine Miles and Jesuit scholar Roberto Busa and the women they employed. In collaboration with IBM, they created a computer-generated concordance to Thomas Aquinas' writings known as the Index Thomisticus. Other scholars began using mainframe computers to automate tasks like word-searching, sorting, and counting, which was much faster than processing information from texts with handwritten or typed index cards. In the decades which followed archaeologists, classicists, historians, literary scholars, and a broad array of humanities researchers in other disciplines applied emerging computational methods to transform humanities scholarship.

As Tara McPherson has pointed out, the digital humanities also inherit practices and perspectives developed through many artistic and theoretical engagements with electronic screen culture beginning the late 1960s and 1970s. These range from research developed by organizations such as SIGGRAPH to creations by artists such as Charles and Ray Eames and the members of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology). The Eames and E.A.T. explored nascent computer culture and intermediality in creative works that dovetailed technological innovation with art.

The first specialized journal in the digital humanities was Computers and the Humanities, which debuted in 1966. The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) were then founded in 1977 and 1978, respectively.

Soon, there was a need for a standardized protocol for tagging digital texts, and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was developed. The TEI project was launched in 1987 and published the first full version of the TEI Guidelines in May 1994. TEI helped shape the field of electronic textual scholarship and led to Extensible Markup Language (XML), which is a tag scheme for digital editing. Researchers also began experimenting with databases and hypertextual editing, which are structured around links and nodes, as opposed to the standard linear convention of print. In the nineties, major digital text and image archives emerged at centers of humanities computing in the U.S. (e.g. the Women Writers Project, the Rossetti Archive, and The William Blake Archive), which demonstrated the sophistication and robustness of text-encoding for literature. The advent of personal computing and the World Wide Web meant that Digital Humanities work could become less centered on text and more on design. The multimedia nature of the internet has allowed Digital Humanities work to incorporate audio, video, and other components in addition to text.

The terminological change from "humanities computing" to "digital humanities" has been attributed to John Unsworth, Susan Schreibman, and Ray Siemens who, as editors of the anthology A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004), tried to prevent the field from being viewed as "mere digitization." Consequently, the hybrid term has created an overlap between fields like rhetoric and composition, which use "the methods of contemporary humanities in studying digital objects," and digital humanities, which uses "digital technology in studying traditional humanities objects". The use of computational systems and the study of computational media within the arts and humanities more generally has been termed the 'computational turn'.

In 2006 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) launched the Digital Humanities Initiative (renamed Office of Digital Humanities in 2008), which made widespread adoption of the term "digital humanities" all but irreversible in the United States.

Digital humanities emerged from its former niche status and became "big news" at the 2009 MLA convention in Philadelphia, where digital humanists made "some of the liveliest and most visible contributions" and had their field hailed as "the first 'next big thing' in a long time."

Values and methods

Although digital humanities projects and initiatives are diverse, they often reflect common values and methods. These can help in understanding this hard-to-define field.

Values

• Critical & Theoretical
• Iterative & Experimental
• Collaborative & Distributed
• Multimodal & Performative
• Open & Accessible

Methods

• Enhanced Critical Curation
• Augmented Editions and Fluid Textuality
• Scale: The Law of Large Numbers
• Distant/Close, Macro/Micro, Surface/Depth
• Cultural Analytics, Aggregation, and Data-Mining
• Visualization and Data Design
• Locative Investigation and Thick Mapping
• The Animated Archive
• Distributed Knowledge Production and Performative Access
• Humanities Gaming
• Code, Software, and Platform Studies
• Database Documentaries
• Repurposable Content and Remix Culture
• Pervasive Infrastructure
• Ubiquitous Scholarship.

In keeping with the value of being open and accessible, many digital humanities projects and journals are open access and/or under Creative Commons licensing, showing the field's "commitment to open standards and open source." Open access is designed to enable anyone with an internet-enabled device and internet connection to view a website or read an article without having to pay, as well as share content with the appropriate permissions.

Digital humanities scholars use computational methods either to answer existing research questions or to challenge existing theoretical paradigms, generating new questions and pioneering new approaches. One goal is to systematically integrate computer technology into the activities of humanities scholars, as is done in contemporary empirical social sciences. Yet despite the significant trend in digital humanities towards networked and multimodal forms of knowledge, a substantial amount of digital humanities focuses on documents and text in ways that differentiate the field's work from digital research in media studies, information studies, communication studies, and sociology. Another goal of digital humanities is to create scholarship that transcends textual sources. This includes the integration of multimedia, metadata, and dynamic environments (see The Valley of the Shadow project at the University of Virginia, the Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular at University of Southern California, or Digital Pioneers projects at Harvard). A growing number of researchers in digital humanities are using computational methods for the analysis of large cultural data sets such as the Google Books corpus. Examples of such projects were highlighted by the Humanities High Performance Computing competition sponsored by the Office of Digital Humanities in 2008, and also by the Digging Into Data challenge organized in 2009 and 2011 by NEH in collaboration with NSF, and in partnership with JISC in the UK, and SSHRC in Canada. In addition to books, historical newspapers can also be analyzed with big data methods. The analysis of vast quantities of historical newspaper content has showed how periodic structures can be automatically discovered, and a similar analysis was performed on social media. As part of the big data revolution, Gender bias, readability, content similarity, reader preferences, and even mood have been analyzed based on text mining methods over millions of documents and historical documents written in literary Chinese.

Digital humanities is also involved in the creation of software, providing "environments and tools for producing, curating, and interacting with knowledge that is 'born digital' and lives in various digital contexts." In this context, the field is sometimes known as computational humanities.

Narrative network of US Elections 2012

Tools

Digital humanities scholars use a variety of digital tools for their research, which may take place in an environment as small as a mobile device or as large as a virtual reality lab. Environments for "creating, publishing and working with digital scholarship include everything from personal equipment to institutes and software to cyberspace." Some scholars use advanced programming languages and databases, while others use less complex tools, depending on their needs. DiRT (Digital Research Tools Directory) offers a registry of digital research tools for scholars. TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) is a gateway to text analysis and retrieval tools. An accessible, free example of an online textual analysis program is Voyant Tools, which only requires the user to copy and paste either a body of text or a URL and then click the 'reveal' button to run the program. There is also an online list of online or downloadable Digital Humanities tools that are largely free, aimed toward helping students and others who lack access to funding or institutional servers. Free, open source web publishing platforms like WordPress and Omeka are also popular tools.

Example of a visualization tool used to study poetry in a new way with Poemage

Projects

Digital humanities projects are more likely than traditional humanities work to involve a team or a lab, which may be composed of faculty, staff, graduate or undergraduate students, information technology specialists, and partners in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Credit and authorship are often given to multiple people to reflect this collaborative nature, which is different from the sole authorship model in the traditional humanities (and more like the natural sciences).

There are thousands of digital humanities projects, ranging from small-scale ones with limited or no funding to large-scale ones with multi-year financial support. Some are continually updated while others may not be due to loss of support or interest, though they may still remain online in either a beta version or a finished form. The following are a few examples of the variety of projects in the field:

Digital archives

The Women Writers Project (begun in 1988) is a long-term research project to make pre-Victorian women writers more accessible through an electronic collection of rare texts. The Walt Whitman Archive (begun in the 1990s) sought to create a hypertext and scholarly edition of Whitman’s works and now includes photographs, sounds, and the only comprehensive current bibliography of Whitman criticism. The Emily Dickinson Archive (begun in 2013) is a collection of high-resolution images of Dickinson’s poetry manuscripts as well as a searchable lexicon of over 9,000 words that appear in the poems. 

Example of network analysis as an archival tool at the League of Nations.

The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies), directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbilt University, preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. This Digital Archive currently holds 500,000 unique images, dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries, and documents the history of between 6 and 8 million individuals. They are the most extensive serial records for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World and also include valuable information on the indigenous, European, and Asian populations who lived alongside them. 

The involvement of librarians and archivists plays an important part in digital humanities projects because of the recent expansion of their role so that it now covers digital curation, which is critical in the preservation, promotion, and access to digital collections, as well as the application of scholarly orientation to digital humanities projects. A specific example involves the case of initiatives where archivists help scholars and academics build their projects through their experience in evaluating, implementing, and customizing metadata schemas for library collections.

The initiatives at the National Autonomous University of Mexico is another example of a digital humanities project. These include the digitization of 17th-century manuscripts, an electronic corpus of Mexican history from the 16th to 19th century, and the visualization of pre-Hispanic archaeological sites in 3-D.

Cultural analytics

"Cultural analytics" refers to the use of computational method for exploration and analysis of large visual collections and also contemporary digital media. The concept was developed in 2005 by Lev Manovich who then established the Cultural Analytics Lab in 2007 at Qualcomm Institute at California Institute for Telecommunication and Information (Calit2). The lab has been using methods from the field of computer science called Computer Vision many types of both historical and contemporary visual media—for example, all covers of Time magazine published between 1923 and 2009, 20,000 historical art photographs from the collection in Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, one million pages from Manga books, and 16 million images shared on Instagram in 17 global cities. Cultural analytics also includes using methods from media design and data visualization to create interactive visual interfaces for exploration of large visual collections e.g., Selfiecity and On Broadway. 

Cultural Analytics research is also addressing a number of theoretical questions. How can we "observe" giant cultural universes of both user-generated and professional media content created today, without reducing them to averages, outliers, or pre-existing categories? How can work with large cultural data help us question our stereotypes and assumptions about cultures? What new theoretical cultural concepts and models are required for studying global digital culture with its new mega-scale, speed, and connectivity? 

The term “cultural analytics” (or “culture analytics”) is now used by many other researchers, as exemplified by two academic symposiums, a four-month long research program at UCLA that brought together 120 leading researchers from university and industry labs, an academic peer-review Journal of Cultural Analytics: CA established in 2016, and academic job listings.

Textual mining, analysis, and visualization

WordHoard (begun in 2004) is a free application that enables scholarly but non-technical users to read and analyze, in new ways, deeply-tagged texts, including the canon of Early Greek epic, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Spenser. The Republic of Letters (begun in 2008) seeks to visualize the social network of Enlightenment writers through an interactive map and visualization tools. Network analysis and data visualization is also used for reflections on the field itself – researchers may produce network maps of social media interactions or infographics from data on digital humanities scholars and projects.

Network analysis: graph of Digital Humanities Twitter users

Analysis of macroscopic trends in cultural change

Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts. Researchers data mine large digital archives to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage. The term is an American neologism first described in a 2010 Science article called Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden.

A 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America compared the trajectory of n-grams over time in both digitised books from the 2010 Science article with those found in a large corpus of regional newspapers from the United Kingdom over the course of 150 years. The study further went on to use more advanced Natural language processing techniques to discover macroscopic trends in history and culture, including gender bias, geographical focus, technology, and politics, along with accurate dates for specific events.

Online publishing

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (begun in 1995) is a dynamic reference work of terms, concepts, and people from philosophy maintained by scholars in the field. MLA Commons offers an open peer-review site (where anyone can comment) for their ongoing curated collection of teaching artifacts in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments (2016). The Debates in the Digital Humanities platform contains volumes of the open-access book of the same title (2012 and 2016 editions) and allows readers to interact with material by marking sentences as interesting or adding terms to a crowdsourced index.

Criticism

Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold have identified a range of criticisms in the digital humanities field: "'a lack of attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality; a preference for research-driven projects over pedagogical ones; an absence of political commitment; an inadequate level of diversity among its practitioners; an inability to address texts under copyright; and an institutional concentration in well-funded research universities". Similarly Berry and Fagerjord have argued that a digital humanities should "focus on the need to think critically about the implications of computational imaginaries, and raise some questions in this regard. This is also to foreground the importance of the politics and norms that are embedded in digital technology, algorithms and software. We need to explore how to negotiate between close and distant readings of texts and how micro-analysis and macro-analysis can be usefully reconciled in humanist work." Alan Liu has argued, "while digital humanists develop tools, data, and metadata critically, therefore (e.g., debating the ‘ordered hierarchy of content objects’ principle; disputing whether computation is best used for truth finding or, as Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann put it, ‘deformance’; and so on) rarely do they extend their critique to the full register of society, economics, politics, or culture." Some of these concerns have given rise to the emergent subfield of Critical Digital Humanities (CDH):

Some key questions include: how do we make the invisible become visible in the study of software? How is knowledge transformed when mediated through code and software? What are the critical approaches to Big Data, visualization, digital methods, etc.? How does computation create new disciplinary boundaries and gate-keeping functions? What are the new hegemonic representations of the digital – ‘geons’, ‘pixels’, ‘waves’, visualization, visual rhetorics, etc.? How do media changes create epistemic changes, and how can we look behind the ‘screen essentialism’ of computational interfaces? Here we might also reflect on the way in which the practice of making- visible also entails the making-invisible – computation involves making choices about what is to be captured.

Negative publicity

Klein and Gold note that many appearances of the digital humanities in public media are often in a critical fashion. Armand Leroi, writing in The New York Times, discusses the contrast between the algorithmic analysis of themes in literary texts and the work of Harold Bloom, who qualitatively and phenomenologically analyzes the themes of literature over time. Leroi questions whether or not the digital humanities can provide a truly robust analysis of literature and social phenomenon or offer a novel alternative perspective on them. The literary theorist Stanley Fish claims that the digital humanities pursue a revolutionary agenda and thereby undermine the conventional standards of "pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power." However, digital humanities scholars note that "Digital Humanities is an extension of traditional knowledge skills and methods, not a replacement for them. Its distinctive contributions do not obliterate the insights of the past, but add and supplement the humanities' long-standing commitment to scholarly interpretation, informed research, structured argument, and dialogue within communities of practice".

Some have hailed the digital humanities as a solution to the apparent problems within the humanities, namely a decline in funding, a repeat of debates, and a fading set of theoretical claims and methodological arguments. Adam Kirsch, writing in the New Republic, calls this the "False Promise" of the digital humanities. While the rest of humanities and many social science departments are seeing a decline in funding or prestige, the digital humanities has been seeing increasing funding and prestige. Burdened with the problems of novelty, the digital humanities is discussed as either a revolutionary alternative to the humanities as it is usually conceived or as simply new wine in old bottles. Kirsch believes that digital humanities practitioners suffer from problems of being marketers rather than scholars, who attest to the grand capacity of their research more than actually performing new analysis and when they do so, only performing trivial parlor tricks of research. This form of criticism has been repeated by others, such as in Carl Staumshein, writing in Inside Higher Education, who calls it a "Digital Humanities Bubble". Later in the same publication, Straumshein alleges that the digital humanities is a 'Corporatist Restructuring' of the Humanities. Some see the alliance of the digital humanities with business to be a positive turn that causes the business world to pay more attention, thus bringing needed funding and attention to the humanities. If it were not burdened by the title of digital humanities, it could escape the allegations that it is elitist and unfairly funded.

Black box

There has also been critique of the use of digital humanities tools by scholars who do not fully understand what happens to the data they input and place too much trust in the "black box" of software that cannot be sufficiently examined for errors. Johanna Drucker, a professor at UCLA Department of Information Studies, has criticized the "epistemological fallacies" prevalent in popular visualization tools and technologies (such as Google's n-gram graph) used by digital humanities scholars and the general public, calling some network diagramming and topic modeling tools "just too crude for humanistic work." The lack of transparency in these programs obscures the subjective nature of the data and its processing, she argues, as these programs "generate standard diagrams based on conventional algorithms for screen display...mak[ing] it very difficult for the semantics of the data processing to be made evident."

Diversity

There has also been some recent controversy among practitioners of digital humanities around the role that race and/or identity politics plays. Tara McPherson attributes some of the lack of racial diversity in digital humanities to the modality of UNIX and computers themselves. An open thread on DHpoco.org recently garnered well over 100 comments on the issue of race in digital humanities, with scholars arguing about the amount that racial (and other) biases affect the tools and texts available for digital humanities research. McPherson posits that there needs to be an understanding and theorizing of the implications of digital technology and race, even when the subject for analysis appears not to be about race.

Amy E. Earhart criticizes what has become the new digital humanities "canon" in the shift from websites using simple HTML to the usage of the TEI and visuals in textual recovery projects. Works that has been previously lost or excluded were afforded a new home on the internet, but much of the same marginalizing practices found in traditional humanities also took place digitally. According to Earhart, there is a "need to examine the canon that we, as digital humanists, are constructing, a canon that skews toward traditional texts and excludes crucial work by women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community."

Issues of access

Practitioners in digital humanities are also failing to meet the needs of users with disabilities. George H. Williams argues that universal design is imperative for practitioners to increase usability because "many of the otherwise most valuable digital resources are useless for people who are—for example—deaf or hard of hearing, as well as for people who are blind, have low vision, or have difficulty distinguishing particular colors." In order to provide accessibility successfully, and productive universal design, it is important to understand why and how users with disabilities are using the digital resources while remembering that all users approach their informational needs differently.

Cultural criticism

Digital humanities have been criticized for not only ignoring traditional questions of lineage and history in the humanities, but lacking the fundamental cultural criticism that defines the humanities. However, it remains to be seen whether or not the humanities have to be tied to cultural criticism, per se, in order to be the humanities. The sciences might imagine the Digital Humanities as a welcome improvement over the non-quantitative methods of the humanities and social sciences.

Difficulty of evaluation

As the field matures, there has been a recognition that the standard model of academic peer-review of work may not be adequate for digital humanities projects, which often involve website components, databases, and other non-print objects. Evaluation of quality and impact thus require a combination of old and new methods of peer review. One response has been the creation of the DHCommons Journal. This accepts non-traditional submissions, especially mid-stage digital projects, and provides an innovative model of peer review more suited for the multimedia, transdisciplinary, and milestone-driven nature of Digital Humanities projects. Other professional humanities organizations, such as the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association, have developed guidelines for evaluating academic digital scholarship.

Lack of focus on pedagogy

The 2012 edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities recognized the fact that pedagogy was the “neglected ‘stepchild’ of DH” and included an entire section on teaching the digital humanities. Part of the reason is that grants in the humanities are geared more toward research with quantifiable results rather than teaching innovations, which are harder to measure. In recognition of a need for more scholarship on the area of teaching, Digital Humanities Pedagogy was published and offered case studies and strategies to address how to teach digital humanities methods in various disciplines.

Organizations

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is an umbrella organization that supports digital research and teaching as a consultative and advisory force for its constituent organizations. Its governance was approved in 2005 and it has overseen the annual Digital Humanities conference since 2006. The current members of ADHO are:

• Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH)
• Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH)
• Canadian Society for Digital Humanities / Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN)
• centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centers
• The European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH)
• Japanese Association for Digital Humanities (JADH)
• Humanistica, L'association francophone des humanités numériques/digitales (Humanistica)

ADHO funds a number of projects such as the Digital Humanities Quarterly journal and the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH) journal, supports the Text Encoding Initiative, and sponsors workshops and conferences, as well as funding small projects, awards, and bursaries.

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) is a free and open access virtual, interdisciplinary community focused on changing teaching and learning through the sharing of news, tools, methods, and pedagogy, including digital humanities scholarship. It is reputed to be the world's first and oldest academic social network.

Centers and institutes

• Department of Digital Humanities (King's College London, UK)
• Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (University of Glasgow, Scotland)
• Sussex Humanities Lab (University of Sussex, UK)
• Humlab, Umeå University (Sweden)
• Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) (University of Victoria, Canada)
• Forensic Computational Geometry Laboratory (FCGL)^[95] (IWR, Heidelberg University, Germany)
• Heidelberg Centre for Digital Humanities (Heidelberg University, Germany)
• The European Summer University in Digital Humanities (Leipzig University, Germany)
• Cultural Analytics Lab (The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA, and Qualcomm Institute, USA)
• Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA)
• Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (University of Virginia, USA)
• Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (University of Maryland, USA)
• Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (George Mason University, Virginia, USA)
• The Walter J. Ong, S.J. Center for Digital Humanities (Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA
• UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (University College London, UK)
• Center for Public History and Digital Humanities (Cleveland State University, USA)
• Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation (Washington State University, USA)
• Scholars' Lab (University of Virginia, USA)
• Centre for Digital Humanities Research (Australian National University, AU)
• Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG) (University of Helsinki, Finland)
• Laboratory for digital cultures and humanities of the University of Lausanne (LaDHUL) (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
• Centre for Information-Modeling, Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ZIM-ACDH) (University of Graz, Austria)
• mainzed, Mainz Centre for Digitality in the Humanities and Cultural Studies (Mainz, Germany)

Conferences

• Digital Humanities conference
• THATCamp
• Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) conference

Journals and publications

• Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ)
• DHCommons
• Digital Literary Studies
• Digital Medievalist
• Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH) (formerly Literary and Linguistic Computing)
• Digital Studies / Le champ numérique (DS/CN)
• Humanités numériques (Humanistica)
• Journal of Digital Archives and Digital Humanities
• Journal of Digital and Media Literacy
• Journal of Digital Humanities (JDH)
• Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy
• Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities (JJADH)
• Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative
• Kairos
• Southern Spaces
• Umanistica Digitale (AIUCD)

Tribe (Internet)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A social network diagram displaying tribes clustered by friendship ties among a set of Facebook users

The term tribe or digital tribe is used as a slang term for an unofficial community of people who share a common interest, and usually who are loosely affiliated with each other through social media or other Internet mechanisms. The term is related to "tribe", which traditionally refers to people closely associated in both geography and genealogy. Nowadays, it looks more like a virtual community or a personal network and it is often called global digital tribe. Most anthropologists agree that a tribe is a (small) society that practices its own customs and culture, and that these define the tribe. The tribes are divided into clans, with their own customs and cultural values that differentiate them from activities that occur in 'real life' contexts. People feel more inclined to share and defend their ideas on social networks than they would dare to say to someone face to face. For example, it would be ridiculous to 'poke' someone in real life.

History

The term "tribe" originated around the time of the Greek city-states and the early formation of the Roman Empire. The Latin term "tribus" has since been transformed to mean "A group of persons forming a community and claiming descent from a common ancestor" (Oxford English Dictionary, IX, 1933, p. 339, as cited in Fried, 1975, p. 7). As years passed by, the range of meanings have grown greater, for example, "Any of various systems of social organization comprising several local villages, bands, districts, lineages, or other groups and sharing a common ancestry, language, culture, and name" (Morris, 1980, p. 1369). Morris (1980) also notes that a tribe is a "group of persons with a common occupation, interest, or habit," and "a large family." Vestiges of ancient tribe communities were preserved in both large gatherings (like football matches) and in small ones (like church communities). Even though nowadays the range of groups referred to as tribal is truly enormous, it wasn't until the industrial society eroded the tribal gatherings of more primitive societies and redefined community. However, the existence of social media as we know it today is due to the post-industrial society that has seen the rapid growth of personal computers, mobile phones and the Internet. People now can collaborate, communicate, celebrate, commemorate, give their advice and share their ideas around these virtual clans that have once again redefined the social behaviour.

The first attempt of such social communities dates back to at least 2003, when tribe.net was launched.

tribe.net starting point

Tribe Networks is the driving force behind tribe.net, which is a website similar to other social networking sites. Users can create their own profiles and join networks, called 'tribes', based on common interests. Moreover, members can post job offers and event recommendations. Tribe serves 50 metropolitan markets, its largest being the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York City. The firm was found in July 2003 by Mark Pincus, Paul Martino and Valerie Syme, with the goal of connecting local people for what Pincus described as "an online cocktail party where people are getting leads through their friends. So people are there to have fun and connect and meet new people." Soon the site caught the attention of Knight Ridder, The Washington Post Company and blue chip venture firm Mayfield, which both totally invested around $6.3 million in venture capital. After three months of activity, Tribe brought together 48,000 registered users and 6,900 distinct tribes, earning revenue from job postings and class fields.

Tribes from a technical perspective

Not only do Twitter tribes have mutual interests, but they also share potentially subconscious language features as found in the 2013 study by researchers from Royal Holloway University of London and Princeton. Dr. John Bryden from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway states that it is possible to anticipate which community somebody is likely to belong to, with up to 80 percent accuracy. This research shows that people try to join societies based on the same interests and hobbies. In order to achieve this, publicly available messages were sent via Twitter to record conversations between two or more participants. As a result, each community can be characterised by their most used words. This approach can enrich new communities detection based on word analysis in order to automatically classify people inside social networks. The methods of identification of tribes relied heavily on algorithms and techniques from statistical physics, computational biology and network science.

A different approach is taken by Tribefinder. The system is able to identify tribal affiliations of Twitter users using deep learning and machine learning. The system establishes to which tribes individuals belong through the analysis of their tweets and the comparison of their vocabulary. These tribal vocabularies are previously generated based on the vocabulary of tribal influencers and leaders using keywords expressing concepts, ideas and beliefs. 

The final step to make the system learn on how to associate random individuals with specific tribes consists of the analysis of the language these influential tribal leaders use through deep learning. In so doing, classifiers are created using embedding and LSTM (long short-term memory) models. Specifically, these classifiers work by collecting the Twitter feeds of all the users from the tribes that Tribefinder is training on. On these, embedding is applied to map words into vectors, which are then used as input for the following LSTM models. Tribefinder analyzes the individual’s word usage in their tweets and then assigns the corresponding alternative realities, lifestyle, and recreation tribal affiliation based on the similarities with the specific tribal vocabularies.

An in-depth look into the research

The research had four main stages on which it focused: background, results, conclusions and methods.

Background

The language is a system of communication consisting of sounds, words, and grammar, or the system of communication used by people in a particular country or type of work. Language is perhaps the most important characteristic that distinguishes human beings from other animals. In addition, it has a wide range of social implications that can be associated with social or cultural groups. People usually group in communities with the same interests. This will result in a variation of the words they use because of the differentiation of terms from each domain. Therefore, the hypothesis of this study would be that this variation should closely match the community structure of the network. To test this theory, around 250,000 users from the social networking and microblogging site Twitter were monitored in order to analyse whether the groups identified had the same language features or not. As Twitter uses unstructured data and users can send messages to any other users, the study had to be based on complex algorithms. These algorithms had to determine the word frequency inside messages between people and make a link to the groups they usually visited.

Results and discussion

Communication between and within tribes of Twitter users clustered based on word usage. Tribes tend to communicate more within than between themselves.

The problem of detecting the community features is one of the main issues in the study of networking systems. Social networks naturally tend to divide themselves into communities or modules. However, some world networks are too big so they must be simplified before information can be extracted. As a result, an effective way of dealing with this drawback for smaller communities is by using modularity algorithms in order to partition users into even smaller groups. For larger ones, a more efficient algorithm called 'map equation' decomposes a network into modules by optimally compressing a description of information flows on the network. Each community was therefore characterised according to the words they used the most, based on a ranking algorithm. To determine the significance of word usage differences, word endings and word lengths were also measured and showed that the pattern found was the correct one. Moreover, these studies also helped in predicting community membership of users, by comparing their own word frequencies with community word usage. This helped in forecasting which community a certain user is going to access based on the words that they are using.

The proportion of users whose topological community association is correctly predicted by the study.

Conclusions

An illustration of the method for predicting which community a user is embedded in.

The aim of this research was to study the bond between community structure in a social network environment and language use within the community . The striking pattern that was found suggests that people from different clans tend to use different words based on their own interests and hobbies. This study can show how people make friends based on the same vocabulary range that they use. Even though this approach didn't manage to cover all people inside Twitter, it has several advantages over ordinary surveys that cover a smaller scale of groups: it is systematic, it is non-intrusive and it easily produces large volumes of rich data. Moreover, other cultural characteristics can be found out when extending this study. For example, whether individuals that belong to multiple communities use different word sets in each of them.

Methods

A process called snowball-sampling helped forming the sample network. Each user's tweets and messages were recorded and any new users referenced were added to a list from where they were picked to be sampled. Messages that were copies have been ignored. In order to find out the words that characterise each clan, the fraction of people that use a certain word was compared with the fraction of people that use that word globally. The difference between communities has also been measured by comparing the relative word usage frequency. Last but not least, individual word usage was compared with each community word usage to pick the best matching clan for individual users.

Different language misspellings within tribes

Words, and the way we spell them are in a continuous change, as we find new ways to communicate. Despite the fact that traditional dictionaries don't take into account the changes, online ones have adopted many of them. An interesting fact outlined in the research above is that communities tend to use their own misspelt words. According to Professor Vincent Jansen from Royal Holloway communities would misspell words in different ways, just as people have different regional accents. For example, Justin Bieber fans tend to end words in "ee" as in "pleasee", while school teachers tend to use long words. Moreover, the largest group found in the study was composed of African Americans who were using the words "nigga", "poppin", and "chillin". Members of this community also had the common habit of shortening the ends of the words, replacing "ing" with "in" and "er" with "a".

The campfire

Each tribe has an online-platform (such as Flickr or Tumblr), called campfire around which they gather. These campfires tend to enable one or more of the following three tribal activities:

• Cooperation (e.g. Wikipedia)
• Communication (e.g. Social networks)
• Cognition (e.g. Blogs)

However, some brands are building their own tribes around platforms outside of these.

Cooperation

Cooperation is the action of working together to the same end. Cooperation developed naturally over time, as it helped companies to streamline their research costs and to better answer to users' requirements. As a result, nowadays organisations are looking for flexible structures that can easily adapt to this rapidly changing environment. Groupware systems perfectly cater to these needs of companies. Informal communication predominates and specialists in certain domains exchange their experience with other people within the groupware environment. Collaboration and cooperation are available through instant messages; people can discuss, chat and swap ideas. Moreover, people can work together while they are located remotely from each other. Groupware can be split into three categories: communication, collaboration and coordination, depending on the level of cooperation and technology involved in the process. One of the biggest and well-known cooperation software is Wikipedia. 

The logo of Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a collaborative software because anyone can edit it. You can edit articles, view past revisions and discuss through a forum the current state of each article. Due to the fact that anyone can change it and find information very quickly, it has become one of the 10 most accessed sites on the Internet.

Advantages

Wikipedia has many advantages over other encyclopedias:

• It's free and open for anyone on the Internet;
• All past edits and chats from the forum are public and everyone can see them;
• Updates happen frequently;
• It contains millions of articles;
• Easy to use and learn.

Disadvantages

However, there are also some drawbacks:

• Information can be inaccurate;
• It is open to spam and vandalism;
• Some articles can contain omissions and be hard to understand;
• It can be too open sometimes (for confidential documentation);
• It requires Internet connectivity.

Communication

Communication is the act or an instance of communicating; the imparting or exchange of information, ideas, or feelings. Communication has drastically changed over time and social networks have changed the way people communicate. Even though people]can interact with each other 24/7, there is a new wave of barriers and threats. In the workplace environment, electronic Communication has overtaken face-to-face and voice-to-voice Communication by far. This major shift has been done in advantage of Generation Y, who prefer instant messaging than talking directly to someone. It is often said that it could become an ironic twist, but social media has the real potential of making us less social. However, there are studies that confirm that people are becoming more social, but the style in which they interact with each other has changed a lot. One of the major drawbacks of social networks is privacy, as people tend to trust others more rapidly and send more open messages about themselves. As a result, personal information can be easily exposed to other persons. Twitter and Facebook are two of the biggest social networks in the world.

Facebook

Facebook is currently the largest social network in the world with more than 1 billion people using this website. This actually means that one in seven people on Earth use Facebook. Facebook users share their stories, images and videos in order to celebrate and commemorate events together. They can also play social games and like other Facebook pages. Moreover, there is also a section called 'News Feed' where users can see social information from their friends or from the pages that they liked or shared. Each user has their own profile page that is called 'wall', where they can post all the above-mentioned materials (their friends can do this as well). The biggest advantage of Facebook is that you can make new friends, as well as find old acquaintances and restart socialising with them. One of the most useful feature of Facebook is the existence of groups. Users with the same interests can create a new group or take part in already existing ones to debate information and exchange their ideas. However, there are also groups that are created to declare an affiliation, such as an obsession for different subjects.

Twitter

Twitter is another social network that allows users to send and read short messages called 'tweets'. Even though messages can contain only 140 characters, this is the perfect length for sending status updates to followers. The main advantage of Twitter is that people can gain followers quickly and share ideas and links very fast. There are networks of influential people who can be connected via Twitter. On Twitter, tribes manifest themselves as followers of either a person, a company or an institution. As a result, it can be used as a marketing tool to make someone's product visible, on condition that a big tribe of followers is created. In order to do this, the right community must be built, as finding the right people can be a challenge. There are some steps that users could take into account in order to make connections and therefore make people follow them: search using Twitter search, follow the followers of other users, look at Twitter Lists, use #Hashtags and find third-party programs.

Cognition

Cognition is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and senses. People like to share their ideas and gather together via blogs. A blog is an online journal where people express themselves and want to get their voice heard. People tend to frequent blog communities due to the fact that they offer specific information in which the reader is interested. There are also business blogs that can be used to share information within a company. These can be used as a flexible medium, where employees can be informed about topics that can range from the use of new technology to the company policies. On blogs, people tend to gather in tribes or clans if they find information that can satisfy their interests. In order to accomplish this goal, bloggers title their postings in such way that they can catch people's attention. The biggest advantage of blogs is that bloggers tend to help each other when someone feels at a loss due to the fact that some bonds might have been created inside the community.

Conclusion

As Seth Godin states, "The Internet eliminated geography". People join tribes or clans because they find and share the same ideas and interests with other people. The main disadvantage of old tribes is that they couldn't influence group behaviour. On the other hand, new tribes are self-sustaining and can survive without a leader, they are not necessarily dialogue based and they are long lasting. As it has been demonstrated within this article, tribes have influenced the way languages, organisations and cultures work. They have redefined old concepts with the help of social media and have changed the way people will interact in the future.

Social web

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

The social web is a set of social relations that link people through the World Wide Web. The social web encompasses how websites and software are designed and developed in order to support and foster social interaction. These online social interactions form the basis of much online activity including online shopping, education, gaming and social networking websites. The social aspect of Web 2.0 communication has been to facilitate interaction between people with similar tastes. These tastes vary depending on who the target audience is, and what they are looking for. For individuals working in the public relation department, the job is consistently changing and the impact is coming from the social web. The influence, held by the social network is large and ever changing. 

 

As people's activities on the Web and communication increase, information about their social relationships become more available. Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, as well as the future Dataweb enable people and organizations to contact each other with persistent human-friendly names. Today hundreds of millions of Internet users are using thousands of social websites to stay connected with their friends, discover new "friends", and to share user-created content, such as photos, videos, social bookmarks, and blogs, even through mobile platform support for cell phones. By the second quarter in 2017, Facebook reported 1.86 billion members, and, in 2008, MySpace occupied 100 million users and YouTube had more than 100 million videos and 2.9 million user channels, and these numbers are consistently growing. The social Web is quickly reinventing itself, moving beyond simple web applications that connect individuals to live an entirely new way of life.

History

Like the telephone, the Internet was not created as a communication tool to interact socially, but evolved to become a part of everyday life. However, social interaction has been facilitated by the web for nearly the entire duration of its existence, as indicated by the continuing success of social software, which at its core centers around connecting individuals virtually with others whom they already have relationships with in the physical world. Email dates from the 1960s, and was one of the first social applications to connect multiple individuals through a network, enabling social interaction by allowing users to send messages to one or more people. This application, which some have argued may be the most successful social software ever, was actually used to help build the Internet. The web got its start as a large but simple Bulletin Board System (BBS) that allowed users to exchange software, information, news, data, and other messages with one another. Ward Christensen invented the first public BBS in the late 1970s, and another (named "The WELL") in the late 80's and early '90s arose as a popular online community. The Usenet, a global discussion system similar to a BBS that enabled users to post public messages, was conceived in 1979; the system found tremendous popularity in the 1980s as individuals posted news and articles to categories called "newsgroups". By the late 1990s, personal web sites that allowed individuals to share information about their private lives with others were increasingly widespread. On this fertile period of the web's development, its creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote that: 

“

The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner. What we believe, endorse, agree with, and depend on is representable and, increasingly, represented on the Web.

”

The term "social Web" was coined by Howard Rheingold for this network in 1996; Rheingold was quoted in an article for Time on his website "Electric Minds", described as a "virtual community center" that listed online communities for users interested in socializing through the Web, saying that "The idea is that we will lead the transformation of the Web into a social Web".

The social Web developed in three stages from the beginning of the '90s up to the present day, transforming from simple one-way communication web pages to a network of truly social applications. During the "one-way conversation" era of online applications in the mid '90s, most of the nearly 18,000 web pages in existence were "read only", or "static web sites" with information flowing exclusively from the person or organization that ran the site; although the web was used socially at this time, communication was difficult, achieved only through individuals reacting to each other's posts on one web page by responding to them on their own personal web page. In the mid '90s, Amazon and other pioneers made great progress in advancing online social interaction by discovering how to link databases to their web sites in order to store information as well as to display it; in concert with other innovations, this led to the rise of read-write web applications, allowing for a "two-way conversation" between users and the individual or organization running the site. As these web applications became more sophisticated, people became more comfortable using and interacting with them, bandwidth increased, and access to the Internet became more prevalent, causing designers to begin implementing new features that allowed users to communicate not only with a site's publishers, but with others who visited that site as well. Despite being a small step forward technologically, it was a huge step socially, enabling group interaction for the first time, and it has been claimed that this social exchange between many individuals is what separates a web application from a social Web application.

The first social networking sites, including Classmates.com (1995) and SixDegrees.com (1997), were introduced prior to social media sites. It has been argued that the transition towards social media sites began after the world's first online interactive diary community Open Diary was founded on December 19, 1998; currently still online after ten years, it has hosted over five million digital diaries. Open Diary successfully brought online diary writers together into one community as an early social networking site, and it was during this time that the term "weblog" was coined (later to be shortened to the ubiquitous "blog" after one blogger jokingly turned weblog into the sentence "we blog"). Some claim that this marked the beginning of the current era of social media, with "social media" being a term that entered into both common usage and prominence as high-speed Internet became increasingly available, growing in popularity as a concept and leading to the rise of social networking sites such as Myspace (2003) and Facebook (2004). It has been argued that this trend towards social media "can be seen as an evolution back to the Internet's roots, since it re-transforms the World Wide Web to what it was initially created for: a platform to facilitate information exchange between users."

Evolution

The social Web is quickly becoming a way of life: many people visit social networking sites at least once per day, and in 2008 the average amount of time per visit to MySpace hovered around twenty-six minutes (the length of a sitcom). Furthermore, the astoundingly rapid growth of the social Web since the '90s is not projected to slow down anytime soon: with less than 20% of the world's population using the Internet, the social Web is felt by some to still be in its infancy. The line between social networking and social media is becoming increasingly blurred as sites such as Facebook and Twitter further incorporate photo, video, and other functionalities typical of social media sites into users' public profiles, just as social media sites have been integrating features characteristic of social networking sites into their own online frameworks. One notable change that has been brought about by the merging of social networking/media is the transformation of social web applications into egocentric software that put people at the center of applications. Although there had been discussion about a sense of community on the web prior to these innovations, modern social web software makes a wider set of social interactions available to the user, such as "friending" and "following" individuals, even sending them virtual gifts or kisses. Social Web applications are typically built using object oriented programming, utilizing combinations of several programming languages, such as Ruby, PHP, Python, ASP.NET and/or Java. Often APIs are utilized to tie non-social websites to social websites, one example being Campusfood.com.

Blogs and wikis

Both blogs and Wikis are prime examples of collaboration through the Internet, a feature of the group interaction that characterizes the social Web. Blogs are used as BBS for the 21st century on which people can post discussions, whereas Wikis are constructed and edited by anyone who is granted access to them. Members of both are able to see the recent discussions and changes made, although for many blogs and Wikis such as Wikipedia this is true even for non-members. Blogs and Wikis allow users to share information and educate one another, and these social interaction are focused on content and meaning. Blogs and Wikis are used by both those writing them and those who reference them as resources. Blogs allow members to share ideas and other members to comment on those ideas, while Wikis facilitate group collaboration: both of these tools open a gateway of communication in which social interaction allows the web to develop. These sites are used by teachers and students alike to accomplish the goal of sharing education, and working in a community with other scholars enables the users to see different interpretations of similar subjects as well as to share resources that might not be available to them otherwise.

Mobile connectivity support

The lives of social web users are increasingly interconnected with their online profiles and accounts, such to the extent that many social networking and social media sites now offer support for mobile devices and internet phone connectivity. Popular social web sites such Facebook Mobile, Orkut, Twitter, and YouTube have led the way for other sites to enable their users to post and share new content with others, update their statuses and receive their friends' updates and uploaded content via mobile platforms. The central aim for both sites offering these mobile services and for those who use them is for the user to maintain contact with their friends online at all times; it allows them to update their profiles and to communicate with each other even when they are away from a computer. It is predicted that this trend will continue in the future, not as other sites follow suit to offer similar services, but as they are extended to other mobile devices that social web users will carry with them in years to come. Social web mobile applications can also allow for augmented reality gaming and experiences; examples of such include SCVGR and Layar.

Social features added to non-social sites

Web sites that are not built around social interaction nevertheless add features that enable discussion and collaboration out of an interest in expanding their user bases—a trend that is projected to continue in the coming years. As early as 1995 electronic retailer Amazon had implemented such features, especially the customer review, to great success; Joshua Porter, author of Designing for the Social Web, writes: 

“

At Amazon, customer reviews act like a magnet, pulling people down the page. That's the content people want...They keep scrolling until they hit the reviews, which in some cases are up to 6000 pixels down from the top of the page! Nobody seems to mind...Customer reviews allow people to learn about a product from the experience of others without any potentially biased seller information. No wonder everyone wanted to shop at Amazon. They had information that no other site had: they had the Truth. And that truth, interestingly enough, arose from simply aggregating the conversation of normal people.

”

These customer reviews contribute valuable information that individuals seek out, and are written by users for free simply out of a desire to share their experiences with a product or service with others; the quality and value of each review is further determined by other users, who rate them based upon whether or not they found the feedback helpful, "weeding out the bad (by pushing them to the bottom [of the page])."

Non-retailer, special interest websites have also implemented social web features to broaden their appeal: one example is Allrecipes.com, a community of 10 million cooks that share ideas and recipes with one another. In addition to exchanging recipes with others through the website, users are able to rate and post reviews of recipes they have tried, and to provide suggestions as to how to improve or alter them; according to the website, "The ratings/reviews...are a valuable resource to our community because they show how the members and their families feel about a recipe. Does the recipe get raves—or does it never get made again? Your opinion counts". This feedback is used to evaluate and classify recipes based upon how successfully they passed through the site's "editorial process" and to what extent they were approved by site members, potentially resulting in receiving "Kitchen approved" status that is comparable to Wikipedia's "good article" nomination process. The site has also augmented its services by including social features such as user blogs and connecting with other social networking/media sites like Facebook to expand its presence on the social Web. The recipes found on this website become part of the social web as other members rank them, comment and provide feedback as to why the recipe was good or bad, or to share ways in which they would change it.

The integration of "social" features has also begun to extend into non-Web media forms including print and broadcast. Increasingly prevalent mobile devices have offered a platform for media companies to create hybridised media forms which draw upon the social web, such as the Fango mobile app offered by Australian partnership Yahoo!7 which combines traditional TV programming with live online discussions and existing social networking channels.

Social art

Artists use the social Web to share their art, be it visual art on sites like deviantART, video art on YouTube, musical art on YouTube or iTunes, or physical art, such as posting and selling crafted items on Craigslist. Artists choose to post their art online so that they can gain critiques on their work, as well as just have the satisfaction of knowing others can experience and enjoy their work. With this social web generation, students spend more time using social tools like computers, video games, video cameras and cell phones. These tools allow the art to be shared easily, and aid in the discussion.

Collaborative efforts facilitated by the social web

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing has become one of the ways in which the social Web can be used collaborative efforts, particularly in the last few years, with the dawn of the semantic web and Web 2.0. Modern web applications have the capabilities for crowdsourcing techniques, and consequently the term is now used exclusively for web-based activity. Examples include sites such as SurveyMonkey.com and SurveyU.com; for example, SurveyMonkey enables users to administer surveys to a list of contacts they manage, then collect and analyze response data using basic tools provided on the website itself and finally export these results once they are finished.

Crowdsourcing is used by researchers in order to emulate a traditional focus group, but in a less expensive and less intimate atmosphere. Due to the nature of the social Web, people feel more open to express what their thoughts are on the topic of discussion without feeling as though they will be as heavy scrutinized by the rest of the group when compared to a traditional setting. The Internet serves as a screen, helping to evoke the purest feedback from the participants in the group, as it removes much of a mob mentality.

Facebook has also been a mode in which crowdsourcing can occur, as users typically ask a question in their status message hoping those that see it on his or her news feed will answer the question, or users may opt to use the poll option now available to obtain information from those within their friends network.

Community-based software projects

Through the use of the social Web, many software developers opt to participate in community-based open-source software projects, as well as hacking projects for proprietary software, kernel (computing) modifications, and freeware ports of games and software. Linux iterations are perfect examples of how effective and efficient this sort of collaboration can be. Google's Android operating system is another example, as many coders work on modifying existing hardware kernels and ROMs to create customized forms of a released Android version. These collaborative efforts for Android take place typically through xda-developers and androidforums.com.

Mobile application development

Most of the modern mobile applications, and indeed even browser applications, come from released software development kits to developers. The developers create their applications and share them with users via "app markets". Users can comment on their experiences with the applications, allowing all users to view the comments of others, and thus have a greater understanding of what is to be expected from the application. Typically there is also a rating a system in addition to comments.

Mobile social Web applications are built using various APIs. These APIs allow for the interaction and interconnection of data on one social database, be it Facebook, Twitter, or Google Account, thus creating a literal web of data connections. These applications then add to the user experience specific to the application itself. Examples include TweetDeck and Blogger.

From the social web to real life

The way in which individuals share intimate details, and perform tasks such as dating, shopping, and applying for jobs is very different from in previous generations. Now, one's preferences, opinions, and activities are routinely shared with a group of friends with whom they may or may not ever meet were it not for the social web.

Many social websites use online social interaction to create a bridge to real life interaction. Relationships are formed between individuals via the internet and then become more personal through other forms of communication. An example of this type of interaction is found on eBay: with more than 94 million active users globally, eBay is the world's largest online marketplace, where anyone can buy and sell practically anything. This website allows individuals to sell items and other to bid on these items. At the end of the auction, the buyer pays the seller; the buyer then sends the purchased product to the winner of the auction. The relationship begins on the internet, but extends into real life interaction. Ways in eBay facilitates this interaction include Skype, a leading online communications service that enables people to communicate through voice or video online for free. eBay Inc. acquired Skype in 2005 and significantly expanded its customer base to more than 480 million registered users in nearly every country on earth. The end result of all eBay transactions is a seller providing the buyer with a product, most commonly via mail: web interaction ending in a real world exchange.

The relationship that is formed with eBay users is similar to the users of Craigslist. Users place items that they want to sell on the website, and other users that are looking to purchase these items contact the seller. Craigslist is used to bring together individuals and organizations and connect them to the resources, tools, technology and ideas they need to effectively engage in community building and see the impact of their actions. This is done via email or over the telephone. The buyer and the seller form a meeting in which goods are exchanged for money. Without this type of website, the buyer would not know that the product was available by the seller. This type of website allows members of a physical community to network with the other members of their community to exchange goods and services.

The transaction from web to real life is seen on a macro scale most recently on dating websites, which are used to search and match other users. These websites allow members with a common interest, to find others with this same interest. Academics who have studied the industry believe that it and other forms of electronic communication such as e-mail and social networks are starting to have a significant effect on the ways in which people find love. Users are able to interact with one another and find if they have common interests. Many sites have been developed that target many different interest groups, and relationships form and develop using the internet. If the users decide that they share a mutual bond, they are able to interact via the telephone, and eventually in person. The relationship begins on the internet, but can lead to real life dating and eventually even marriage.