R. Stuart Geiger

R. Stuart Geiger

Ethnographer of computation and computational ethnographer

Assistant Professor at UC San Diego, Department of Communication & Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute

Sitemap

A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.

Pages

Posts

Best Practices Team Challenges

11 minute read

Published:

A summary of the first BIDS Best Practices lunch discussion, where we shared the challenges of doing research in groups.

Research Software Engineers and Data Scientists: More in Common

5 minute read

Published:

A cross-post of a piece about defining the roles, scopes, and challenges of data scientists and research software engineers, in which we conclude we have more in common and that our differences come more from the context in which these terms and roles emerged.

New article about algorithmic systems in Wikipedia and going ‘beyond opening up the black box’

13 minute read

Published:

I'm excited to share a new article, "Beyond opening up the black box: Investigating the role of algorithmic systems in Wikipedian organizational culture" (open access PDF here). It is published in Big Data & Society as part of a special issue on "Algorithms in Culture," edited by Morgan Ames, Jason Oakes, Massimo Mazzotti, Marion Fourcade, and Gretchen Gano. The special issue came out of a fantastic workshop of the same name held last year at UC-Berkeley, where we presented and workshopped our papers, which were all taking some kind of socio-cultural approach to algorithms (broadly defined). This was originally a chapter of my dissertation based on my ethnographic research into Wikipedia, and it has gone through many rounds of revision across a few publications, as I've tried to connect what I see in Wikipedia to broader conversations about the role of highly-automated, data-driven systems across platforms and domains.

Critical data studies track at the 2016 4S/EASST Annual Conference

28 minute read

Published:

This is an updated schedule of track 113, Critical Data Studies, at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Society of the Social Study of Science (4S) and the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST). Please contact Stuart Geiger if you have any questions.

A dynamically-generated robots.txt: will search engine bots recognize themselves?

7 minute read

Published:

I built a script that dynamically generates a robots.txt file for search engine bots, who download the file when they seek direction on what parts of a website they are allowed to index. By default, it directs all bots to stay away from the entire site, but then presents an exception: only the bot that requests the robots.txt file is allowed full reign over the site.

Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms

1 minute read

Published:

This is a new article published in Information, Communication, and Society as part of their annual special issue for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. This year’s special issue was edited by Lee Humphreys and Tarleton Gillespie, who did a great job throughout the whole process.

When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes?

less than 1 minute read

Published:

I’ve written a number of papers about the role that automated software agents (or bots) play in Wikipedia, claiming that they are critical to the continued operation of Wikipedia. This paper tests this hypothesis and introduces a metric visualizing the speed at which fully-automated bots, tool-assisted cyborgs, and unassisted humans review edits in Wikipedia. In the first half of 2011, ClueBot NG – one of the most prolific counter-vandalism bots in the English-language Wikipedia – went down for four distinct periods, each period of downtime lasting from days to weeks. Aaron Halfaker and I use these periods of breakdown as naturalistic experiments to study Wikipedia’s quality control network. Our analysis showed that the overall time-to-revert damaging edits was almost doubled when this software agent was down. Yet while a significantly fewer proportion of edits made during the bot’s downtime were reverted, we found that those edits were later eventually reverted. This suggests that human agents in Wikipedia took over this quality control work, but performed it at a far slower rate.

About a bot: reflections on building software agents

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This post for Ethnography Matters is a very personal, reflective musing about the first bot I ever developed for Wikipedia. It makes the argument that while it is certainly important to think about software code and algorithms behind bots and other AI agents, they are not immaterial. In fact, the physical locations and social contexts in which they are run are often critical to understanding how they both ‘live’ and ‘die’.

Bots and Cyborgs: Wikipedia’s Immune System

less than 1 minute read

Published:

My frequent collaborator Aaron Halfaker has written up a fantastic article with John Riedl in Computer reviewing a lot of the work we’ve done on algorithmic agents in Wikipedia, casting them as Wikipedia’s immune system. Choice quote:  “These bots and cyborgs are more than tools to better manage content quality on Wikipedia—through their interaction with humans, they’re fundamentally changing its culture.”

An apologia for instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes and other serious things

13 minute read

Published:

I don’t normally pick on people whose work I really admire, but I recently saw a tweet from Mark Sample that struck a nerve: “Look, if you don’t instagram your first pumpkin spice latte of the season, humanity’s historical record will be dangerously impoverished.”  While it got quite a number of retweets and equally snarky responses, he is far from the first to make such a flippant critique of the vapid nature of social media.  It also seriously upset me for reasons that I’ve been trying to work out, which is why I found myself doing one of those shifts that researchers of knowledge production tend to do far too often with critics: don’t get mad, get reflexive.  What is it that makes such a sentiment resonate with us, particularly when it is issued over Twitter, a platform that is the target of this kind of critique?  The reasons have to do with a fundamental disagreement over what it means to interact in a mediated space: do we understand our posts, status updates, and shared photos as representations of how we exist in the world which collectively constitute a certain persistent performance of the self, or do we understand them a form of communication in which we subjectively and interactionally relate our experience of the world to others?

The ethnography of robots: interview at Ethnography Matters

11 minute read

Published:

This was an interview I did with the wonderful Heather Ford, originally posted at Ethnography Matters (a really cool group blog) way back in January. No idea why I didn’t post a copy of this here back then, but now that I’m moving towards my dissertation I’m thinking about this kind of stuff more and more.  In short, I argue for a non-anthropocentric yet still phenomenological ethnography of technology, studying not the culture of the people who build and program robots, but the culture of those the robots themselves.

Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution

13 minute read

Published:

In the Wikipedia research community — that is, the group of academics and Wikipedians who are interested in studying Wikipedia — there has been a pretty substantial and longstanding problem with how research is published. Academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty, are deeply invested and entrenched in an system that rewards the publication of research. Publish or perish, as we’ve all heard.   The problem is that the overwhelming majority of publications which are recognized as ‘academic’ require us to assign copyright to the publication, so that the publisher can then charge for access to the article.  This is in direct contradiction with the goals of Wikipedia, as well as many other open source and open content creation communities — communities which are the subject of a substantial amount of academic research.

Helvetica: A Documentary, A History, An Anthropology

13 minute read

Published:

I recently saw Helvetica, a documentary directed by Gary Hustwit about the typeface of the same name — it is available streaming and on DVD from Netflix, for those of you who have a subscription.  As someone who studies ubiquitous socio-technological infrastructures (and Helvetica is certainly one), I know how hard it is to seriously pay attention to something  that which we see every day.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but as Susan Leigh Star reminds us, the more widespread an infrastructure is, the more we use it and depend on it, the more invisible it becomes — that is, until it breaks or generates controversy, in which case it is far too easy.  But to actually say something about what well-oiled, hidden-in-plain-sight infrastructures are, how they came to have such a place in our society, and why they won out over their competitors is a notoriously difficult task.  But I came to realize that the film is less of a history of fonts, and more of an anthropology of design.

The Lives of Bots

less than 1 minute read

Published:

I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore.  (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.)  We’ve had some great conferences and are putting out an edited book on Wikipedia quite soon.  My chapter is on bots, and the abstract and link to the full PDF is below:

Structural Transformation was Habermas’s first of thirty books

9 minute read

Published:

So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about the Internet and the public sphere is going to flare up for the third time (1993-5 and 2001-3 are the other two times). Since Habermas is generally credited for bringing this notion of the public sphere to the forefront of popular, political, and academic discourse, it is natural to cite him.  Then critique him to death, talking about how we need to get beyond an old white guy’s theories.  And it feels good, I know.

Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices

1 minute read

Published:

This is a paper I co-authored with David Ribes and recently presented at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences.  It’s a qualitative methodology based on analyzing logging data that we developed through my research on Wikipedia, but has some pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups.  It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to identify and ban malicious contributors.

Perils of Keyword-Based Bibliometrics: ISI’s ‘1990 Effect’

11 minute read

Published:

Have you done historical bibliometric analysis of a scientific field or topic area and found that there is a massive increase in research articles after 1990?  Are you using ISI’s Web of Science and searching by topic or keyword?  If so, don’t make the same mistake I did: these results aren’t because of some sea change or paradigm shift, but rather result from a poorly-documented shift in how ISI began indexing articles after 1990.

Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere

1 minute read

Published:

This is a paper that I recently got published in gnovis, which is a peer-reviewed journal run entirely by graduate students at Georgetown’s Communication, Culture, and Technology program.  It is a sneakishly Latourian intervention into the debate between Habermasians and post-Habermasians regarding the Internet as a (part of the) public sphere.   They have been arguing for some time about whether the Internet (and specifically blogging) leads to political fragmentation or real collective action.  However, they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere.  The article is up in HTML on the gnovis site, but I’ve also made a full-text, metadata friendly PDF simply because Google Scholar likes those.   The abstract is after the jump.

Capital ‘I’ for Internet?

4 minute read

Published:

Do you capitalize “Internet?” Some scholars from the emerging field of ‘Internet studies’ say no. I say yes.

The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal

1 minute read

Published:

With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network.

Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account

3 minute read

Published:

In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era.

Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0

43 minute read

Published:

I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use. Instead of asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality?

Review: Talking About Machines by Julian Orr

6 minute read

Published:

This is a review of Julian Orr’s Talking About Machines, an ethnography of Xerox photocopier technicians. Blurring the line between ethnomethodology, organizational communication, infrastructure studies, human-computer/machine interaction, business administration, and traditional ethnography of work, his study reveals more than just the daily practices of what may initially seem like a boring job.

Response: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

7 minute read

Published:

A response to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which his work is applied to a personal vignette of experimentation practices in a High School Physics class. When in the course of scientific education should students be allowed to modify scientific theories to fit experimental data instead of modifying experiments to fit the theories?

Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach

29 minute read

Published:

This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia.

FAS Virtual Worlds Almanac: A Semantic Structured Wiki

less than 1 minute read

Published:

As some of you might know, I work part-time at the Federation of American Scientists. Most of what I do has involved the creation of a wiki for virtual worlds, and I am proud to say that it is ready for the world. It is not simply a wiki, but a structured semantic wiki. This means that when you edit a page on a virtual world, you get a customizable form instead of a massive textbox. Check it out!

WebCite: An On-Demand Internet Archive

1 minute read

Published:

As someone who studies Internet culture, one of my biggest problems is “link rot,” or broken links.  I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive, but they are usually six to eight months behind on even the most popular sites.  I also applaud sites like Wikipedia for providing stable version histories so that I can point to a specific revision of a page.  However, for all other websites, the only option is self-archiving, which is technically difficult and fraught with problems.  What I have found incredibly useful is WebCite, a free webpage archiving service that fills in this gap.

Technology in the Classroom: A Response to Arthur Bochner

5 minute read

Published:

An outright ban on technology in the classroom - which may or may not include the pen and paper - is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive.

Google Search for “Phenomenology of Spirit” Suggests “Nebraska State Flower”

less than 1 minute read

Published:

As you may know, Google often thinks it knows what you are looking for better than you do.  It will suggest different search queries and display them underneath the top three results for your original query.  So I did a simple Google search for “Phenomenology of Spirit,” an 1807 book written by German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel today and found a very interesting suggestion.

Words and Things: A De-Re-Sub-Post-Construction of Rhizomatic and Non-Arborescent Stratum in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This was my final project for an Information Studies class I took back in 2006, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas.  Our assignment was to transform information from one form to another, and I chose to perform this analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.  I scanned and OCRed the entire book and did a visual frequency representation of certain words.  I analyzed by chapter and comprehensively with certain core themes in the work.  I also did a comprehensive analysis with more general or common words. It is intended to look the way it does, as I am going for a “1960s IBM goes to the academy” look. Take what you will from it: it is about 35% art, 25% snarky pastiche, 15% pretending to be linguistics, and -5% serious intellectual critique.  Here is a sample:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Attribution-ShareAlike

3 minute read

Published:

Content on my website and my Flickr account has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license for a while.  I was pretty proud of myself.  But then I got to thinking: why don’t I choose Attribution-ShareAlike?  Obviously, it was product of two kneejerk reactions: I don’t want someone else to make money off my stuff, and I don’t want someone messing with my stuff.

Wikimania 2008: New Paradigms for New Tomorrows with Ismail Serageldin

5 minute read

Published:

Director of the Library of Alexandria, Dr. Ismail Serageldin gave a keynote speech on the first day of Wikimania 2008 titled, New Paradigms for New Tomorrows.  It was quite thoughtful and inspiring – the man is one of the most amazing individuals I have heard.  He is learned in so many different areas of academic and cultural knowledge, as well as incredibly wise.  I would recommend watching the video of his speech, but if you are pressed for time you can read my notes.

Wikimania 2008: Collaborative research on Wikiversity with Cormac Lawler

1 minute read

Published:

Collaborative research on Wikiversity by Cormac Lawler (user Cormaggio on Wikimedia projects) at the University of Manchester.  Wikiversity is a relatively young project in the Wikimedia umbrella, but I think it is a natural development and a great space to realize the potential of all the educators currently on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and all the other projects.

Wikimania 2008: State of the Mediawiki

1 minute read

Published:

State of the Mediawiki, a presentation give at Wikimania by some developers of Mediawiki and maintainers of the Wikimedia installation of it

Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia as Real Utopia with Edo Navot

5 minute read

Published:

Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments.  The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement.  I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read Wikipedia as Real Utopia: Governance, knowledge production, and the institutional structure of Wikipedia – Edo Navot, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sociology. Here follows my rough transcription of his speech, followed by my comments.  The fact that his is the only presentation I have so far commented on should be taken as a sign of respect, not of disparagement.  I rather enjoyed his presentation, pledge to read in depth as soon as possible (I have skimmed it), and admire him for being one of the few academics out there studying social and political thought on Wikipedia.

Wikimania 2008: Closing Ceremony

6 minute read

Published:

Here are my notes from the closing ceremony of Wikimania. It was really an amazing conference and I was very honored to be there.

Wikimania 2008: Flagged Revisions with Philipp Birken

5 minute read

Published:

From “Flagged Revisions,” a presentation at Wikimania 2008 by Philip Birken. In my opinion, flagged revisions realize the concept of stable versions without making the article actually stable.  It is not a system of voting to approve new revisions – a new revision is approved when only one autoconfirmed user says it is vandalism-free.  Yes, it won’t solve everything, but it will make things much better.  We can get rid of protecting articles that are experiencing heavy vandalism if we do this, because an edit only updates to the public when it is flagged as not-vandalism by a trusted user. However, vandals (or any other user) immediately sees the results of their edit for an hour, which is just ingenious.  Also, you can choose whether the most recent revision is shown by default, or make it so that certain users (like anonymous users) only see the most recent reviewed revision.  For those who feel that it threatens “the wiki way,” I suggest making the most recent version appear by default and giving people the option to see the latest reviewed version.

Wikimania 2008: Wikipedia Administrators / Arbcom Panel

5 minute read

Published:

This panel was at Wikimania 2008, and featured James Forrester, Andrew Lih, Kat Walsh, and Charles Matthews. Everyone except for Lih is or has been on the Arbitration Committee, and this turned into a discussion about admins.

Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia

2 minute read

Published:

As an ethnographer, I enter into communities, learn their customs, beliefs, and practices, then report back to the academy to share what I have discovered. In this presentation, I wish to do the opposite, presenting to the Wikipedian community an ethnography of academics as they relate to Wikipedia.

Wikimania 2008: Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East

7 minute read

Published:

Content and the Internet in the (Globalized) Middle East, Dr. Ahmed Tantawi, Technical Director, IBM Middle East and North Africa.  Another copy of my notes from Wikimania 2008 – this was the keynote speech on the second day of the conference.  He began by warning us that, “I’ve changed this presentation, and I’ll change it during.  That is open content, yes?”  Everyone laughed.

Wikimania 2008: Education and the Wiki Paradigm: A Tug of War?

2 minute read

Published:

This was part of the opening keynote in Wikimania 2008, given by the Egyptian Deputy Minister of Communication and IT, Hoda Baraka. Here are my notes, again without any commentary – I apologize for them not being cleaner.

Wikimania 2008: Opening Keynote with Egyptian Minister Ahmed Darwish

3 minute read

Published:

The official theme or slogan for this year’s Wikimania is “the knowledge revolution that is changing wisdom.” I think this phrase – especially the difference between knowledge and wisdom – was chosen very carefully and I think it is an excellent distinction to make. This morning’s opening ceremony began with a speech from the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Ahmed Darwish. I will relay his comments here, without much analysis – that will come later, when I have the time.

Wikimania 2008

less than 1 minute read

Published:

I am currently in Egypt for Wikimania 2008, which is being held this year at the Library of Alexandria. On Sunday, I will be presenting my ethnographic analysis of conceptions and misconceptions academics hold about Wikipedia. This presentation was going to be about old, computer-illiterate professors but has turned into something much more interesting: a commentary on Wikipedia’s status in the so-called postmodern digital humanities. I will update the post on this site as I finalize my presentation.

User-Generated Content as an Ethical Relation

4 minute read

Published:

I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize - not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? And is this bad?

Real, Virtual Communities: A Response to Brian Williams

5 minute read

Published:

Brian Williams talked about how this year’s primary season has shown that even in the age of the Internet, we still have a longing for real communities. I take issue with his use of “virtual community” and claim that most political communities are virtual.

Memetic Inkblots

7 minute read

Published:

I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them.

Why aren’t the GPL and the GFDL freely licensed?

4 minute read

Published:

Works licensed under the GPL and the GFDL can be modified and then freely redistributed, as long as the modified versions are released under the same conditions. Why are we not allowed to modify these licenses and redistribute them?

Review: 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker

7 minute read

Published:

Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda.

A Communicative Ethnography of Argumentative Strategies in a Wikipedian Content Dispute

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This presentation was adapted from a chapter in my Senior thesis on Wikipedia’s legal system that focused on a dispute over the inclusion of images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an article about him, using a methodology of communicative ethnography. Most who opposed the image were not familiar with Wikipedia’s unique method of content regulation and dispute resolution, as well as its editorial standards and principles. However, most who argued in favor of keeping the image knew these and initially used them to their advantage. This ethnographic study of the communicative strategies used by the parties involved in the dispute shows how new editors to the user-written encyclopedia first emerged in a hostile communicative environment and subsequently adapted their argumentative strategies. This conflict is an excellent example of how disputes are resolved in Wikipedia, showing how this new media space regulates its own content.

Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia

1 minute read

Published:

My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system.

The Facticity of Art

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This is a piece of web art or net art, with an included work of art criticism about the piece. The work makes the argument that while interactive digital art can be considered user-centered, this new style and medium is only centered around those possibilities that the creator wishes to make available to the user. You can see The Facticity of Art at http://stuartgeiger.com/art/art-intro.shtml.

Response: Patchwork Girl by Shelly Jackson

5 minute read

Published:

This is a response to they hypertext fiction work Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson.  It is comprised in part of ‘patches’ of other works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  I have made this essay entirely out of parts from the novel.

Response: Neuromancer by William Gibson

5 minute read

Published:

William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer tells the story of a team of radically different technologically-savvy individuals who are recruited by a young artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who desires to bypass the limitations placed on it by its owners and the authorities.

Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell

4 minute read

Published:

In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, we have given up the virtual reality fantasy that dominated predictions made in previous decades in lieu of subtler revolution: that of the networked self, the Me++.

Web Design: Blueprints on the CSS Zen Garden

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This was a CSS stylesheet I wrote for the CSS Zen Garden, which is a really cool concept in web design. There is a standard HTML page in which all the content is wrapped up in div tags, and the idea is to write a CSS stylesheet that makes it pretty. Mine was based on blueprints, and can be accessed here. It turns out that I didn’t make into the accepted designs, but I did get on the list of those that didn’t make the cut. I can see why – it needs some cleaning up around the lines which I might do if I have some time. But I’ll take being top of that list.

Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities

18 minute read

Published:

The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self.

Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response by Colonialism

10 minute read

Published:

Embracing Trobriand cricket as an instance in which domineering cultural empires were repelled is a flawed concept which masks the very forms of domination that it attempts to criticize.

Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?

15 minute read

Published:

Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist.

portfolio

IPoXP: Internet Protocol over Xylophone Players

We introduce IP over Xylophone Players (IPoXP), a novel Internet protocol between two computers using xylophone-based Arduino interfaces. In our implementation, human operators are situated within the lowest layer of the network, transmitting data between computers by striking designated keys. We discuss how IPoXP inverts the traditional mode of human-computer interaction, with a computer using the human as an interface to communicate with another computer

0 (the game)

One of the many forks of the popular game 1024 by Veewo Studio (which is conceptually similar to Threes by Asher Vollmer). Try to combine all the 0 tiles until they add up to 1.

Apparent Things

A Twitter bot powered by tweets proclaiming that something ‘is apparently a thing.’

robots.txt.php

An algorithmically-generated robots.txt, which disallows all bots with one exception: the bot requesting the file is allowed full access.

dystopedia

A Markov chain Twitter bot trained on titles of Wikipedia articles that have been deleted.

AcademicPages

AcademicPages is a ready-to-fork GitHub Pages template for academic personal websites, based on structured data in markdown files. I created it for this website, then released it so others can make their own, which are hosted for free by GitHub. Over 500 people have!

hasAGIarrived.com

Published:

A single-serving site that displays if Artificial General Intelligence has arrived or not.

Society Reset Button

Published:

A speculative fictional device that displays the state of Society and invites you to reset it.

publications

Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere

Published in Gnovis, 2009

Habermasians have been debating about the role of the Internet in the public sphere, but they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart (2009). “Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere.” Gnovis: A Journal of Communication, Culture, and Technology. 10(1). http://www.stuartgeiger.com/papers/gnovis-habermas-blogopublic-sphere.pdf
Download Paper

The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools

Published in Proceedings of Wikisym, 2009

A short paper showing the recent explosive growth of automated editors (or bots) in Wikipedia, which have taken on many new tasks in administrative spaces.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart (2009). “The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools.” In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. New York: ACM Digital Library. http://www.stuartgeiger.com/papers/geiger-wikisym-bots.pdf
Download Paper

The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal

Published in Proceedings of CSCW , 2010

This paper traces out a heterogeneous network of humans and non-humans involved in the identification and banning of a single vandal in Wikipedia.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart and David Ribes (2010). “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal.” In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2012). New York: ACM Digital Library. http://www.stuartgeiger.com/papers/cscw-sustaining-order-wikipedia.pdf
Download Paper

Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices

Published in Proceedings of HICSS , 2011

We detail the methodology of ‘trace ethnography’, which combines the richness of participant-observation with the wealth of data in logs so as to reconstruct patterns and practices of users in distributed sociotechnical systems

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart and David Ribes (2011). “Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices.” In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). http://www.stuartgeiger.com/trace-ethnography-hicss-geiger-ribes.pdf
Download Paper

Participation in Wikipedia’s Article Deletion Processes

Published in Proceedings of WikiSym, 2011

This paper investigates Wikipedia's article deletion processes, finding that it is heavily populated by specialists.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart and Heather Ford. (2011) “Participation in Wikipedia’s Deletion Processes.” In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym 2011). New York: ACM Digital Library. http://www.stuartgeiger.com/papers/article-deletion-wikisym-geiger-ford.pdf
Download Paper

The Lives of Bots

Published in Wikipedia: A Critical Point of View, 2011

I describe the complex social and technical environment in which bots exist in Wikipedia, emphasizing not only how bots produce order and enforce rules, but also how humans produce bots and negotiate rules around their operation.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart. (2011). “The Lives of Bots.” In G. Lovink and N. Tkacz (eds.) In Wikipedia: A Critical Point of View. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. http://www.stuartgeiger.com/lives-of-bots-wikipedia-cpov.pdf
Download Paper

Black-boxing the user: internet protocol over xylophone players (IPoXP)

Published in Proceedings of CHI (alt.CHI), 2012

We introduce IP over Xylophone Players (IPoXP), a novel Internet protocol between two computers using xylophone-based Arduino interfaces

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart, Yoon J. Jeong, and Emily Manders (2012). “Black-Boxing the User: Internet Protocol over Xylophone Players.” In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (alt.CHI 2012). New York: ACM Digital Library. http://stuartgeiger.com/ipoxp.pdf

Defense Mechanism or Socialization Tactic? Improving Wikipedia’s Notifications to Rejected Contributors

Published in Proceedings of ICWSM, 2012

A descriptive study of Wikipedia's highly-automated socialization processes and an A/B test to improve templated messages to newcomers.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart, Aaron Halfaker, Maryana Pinchuk, and Steven Walling (2012). “Defense Mechanism or Socialization Tactic? Improving Wikipedia’s Notifications to Rejected Contributors.” In Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2012). http://stuartgeiger.com/defense-mechanism-icwsm.pdf
Download Paper

“Writing up rather than writing down”: Becoming Wikipedia Literate

Published in Proceedings of WikiSym, 2012

We introduce and advocate a multi-faceted theory of literacy to investigate the knowledges and organizational forms are required to improve participation in Wikipedia’s communities.

Recommended citation: Ford, Heather and R. Stuart Geiger. (2012). “”Writing up rather than writing down”: Becoming Wikipedia Literate.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym 2012). New York: ACM Digital Library. http://www.stuartgeiger.com/becoming-wikipedia-literate.pdf
Download Paper

Artifacts that Organize: Delegation in the Distributed Organization

Published in Information and Organization, 2012

This paper studies the role of computational infrastructure and organizational structure in the Open Science Grid.

Recommended citation: Ribes, David, Steve Jackson, R. Stuart Geiger, Matt C. Burton, and Tom Finholt (2012). “Artifacts that organize: Delegation in the distributed organization.” Information and Organization 23:1–14. http://www.stuartgeiger.com/artifacts-that-organize.pdf
Download Paper

The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration Community: How Wikipedia’s reaction to sudden popularity is causing its decline

Published in American Behavioral Scientist, 2013

A mixed-method, multi-study analysis of editor retention, socialization, gatekeeping, and governance in Wikipedia.

Recommended citation: Halfaker, Aaron., R. Stuart Geiger, Jonathan Morgan, and John Riedl. (2013). “The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia’s reaction to sudden popularity is killing it." American Behavioral Scientist 57(5). http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0002764212469365
Download Paper

When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes?

Published in Proceedings of WikiSym, 2013

This paper examines what happened when one of Wikipedia's counter-vandalism bots unexpectedly went offline.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart and Halfaker, Aaron. (2013). “When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes?” In Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym 2013). http://stuartgeiger.com/wikisym13-cluebot.pdf
Download Paper

The Next Generation of Scientists: Examining the Experiences of Graduate Students in Network-Level Social-Ecological Science

Published in Ecology and Society, 2013

We examined how graduate students experienced and social-ecological research initiative within the large-scale, geographically distributed Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network.

Recommended citation: Romolini, Michele., Sydne Record, Rebecca. Garvoille, Y. Marusenko, and R. Stuart Geiger. (2013) “The Next Generation of Scientists: Examining the Experiences of Graduate Students in Network-Level Science." In Ecology and Society 18(3). http://stuartgeiger.com/lter-network-level-science-es.pdf
Download Paper

Bots, bespoke code, and the materiality of software platforms

Published in Information, Communication, and Society, 2014

This article introduces and discusses the role of bespoke code in Wikipedia, which is code that runs alongside a platform or system, rather than being integrated into server-side codebases.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart. (2014). “Bots, Bespoke Code, and the Materiality of Software Platforms.” Information, Communication, and Society 17. http://stuartgeiger.com/bespoke-code-ics.pdf
Download Paper

Snuggle: Designing for efficient socialization and ideological critique

Published in Proceedings of CHI, 2014

This paper discusses the Snuggle project, built to support newcomer socialization and reflexive critique of Wikipedia's existing socialization processes.

Recommended citation: Halfaker, Aaron., Geiger, R. Stuart., and Treveen, Loren. (2014). “Snuggle: Designing for Efficient Socialization and Ideological Critique.” In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI 2014). http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/Snuggle/halfaker14snuggle-personal.pdf
Download Paper

Defining, Designing, and Evaluating Civic Values in Human Computation and Collective Action Systems

Published in Proceedings of HCOMP, Citizen-X Workshop, 2014

We review various crowdsourcing and collective action systems, identifying particular sets of civic values and assumptions.

Recommended citation: Matias, N. and Geiger, R.S. “Defining, Designing, and Evaluating Civic Values in Human Computation and Collective Action Systems.” In Proceedings of HCOMP 2014, Citizen-X Workshop. http://stuartgeiger.com/defining-civic-values-hcomp-matias-geiger.pdf.
Download Paper

Bot-based collective blocklists in Twitter: the counterpublic moderation of harassment in a networked public space

Published in Information, Communication, and Society, 2016

This article introduces and discusses bot-based collective blocklists (or blockbots) in Twitter, which have been developed by volunteers to combat harassment in the social networking site in a more decentralized and counterpublic way than actions taken by Twitter, Inc. staff. I discuss how such forms of automation require that communities encode specific understandings of what harassment is and how to identify it, relating these cases to several longstanding issues around the governance and moderation of the public sphere.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart. (2016). “Bot-based collective blocklists in Twitter: the counterpublic moderation of harassment in a networked public space.” Information, Communication, and Society 19(6). http://stuartgeiger.com/blockbots-ics.pdf
Download Paper

Summary Analysis of the 2017 GitHub Open Source Survey

Published in SocArxiv Preprints, 2017

This report is a high-level summary analysis of the 2017 GitHub Open Source Survey dataset, presenting frequency counts, proportions, and frequency or proportion bar plots for every question asked in the survey.

Recommended citation: R. Stuart Geiger. (2017). Summary Analysis of the 2017 GitHub Open Source Survey. _SocArXiv Preprints._ doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/ENRQ5

Operationalizing conflict and cooperation between automated software agents in Wikipedia: A replication and expansion of ‘Even Good Bots Fight’

Published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Compter Interaction, 2017

A mixed-method trace ethnographic analysis of issues around the governance of automated software agents in Wikipedia, focusing on how to interpret cases where bots reverted each other’s edits.

Recommended citation: R. Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker. 2017. "Operationalizing conflict and cooperation between automated software agents in Wikipedia: A replication and expansion of Even Good Bots Fight." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (Nov 2017 issue, CSCW 2018 Online First) 1, 2, Article 49. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3134684. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:conflict-bots-wp-cscw.pdf.
Download Paper

Beyond opening up the black box: Investigating the role of algorithmic systems in Wikipedian organizational culture

Published in Big Data & Society, 2017

Scholars and practitioners across domains are increasingly concerned with algorithmic transparency and opacity, interrogating the values and assumptions embedded in automated, black-boxed systems, particularly in user-generated content platforms. I report from an ethnography of infrastructure in Wikipedia to discuss an often understudied aspect of this topic: the local, contextual, learned expertise involved in participating in a highly automated social-technical environment.

Recommended citation: R. Stuart Geiger. (2017). "Beyond opening up the black box: Investigating the role of algorithmic systems in Wikipedian organizational culture." Big Data & Society 4(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717730735
Download Paper

The Types, Roles, and Practices of Documentation in Data Analytics Open Source Software Libraries: A Collaborative Ethnography of Documentation Work

Published in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (JCSCW), 2018

Data analytics increasingly relies on open source software (OSS) libraries that extend scripted languages like python and R. Software documentation for these libraries is crucial for people across all experience levels, but documentation work raises many challenges, particularly in open source communities. In this collaboration between ethnographers and data scientists, we discuss the types, roles, practices, and motivations around documentation in data analytics OSS libraries.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R.S., Varoquaux, N., Mazel-Cabasse, C., and Holdgraf, C. (2018). "The Types, Roles, and Practices of Documentation in Data Analytics Open Source Software Libraries: A Collaborative Ethnography of Documentation Work." Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (JCSCW), 27(3). DOI:10.1007/s10606-018-9333-1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10606-018-9333-1

Career Paths and Prospects in Academic Data Science: Report of the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environments Survey

Published in , 2018

This report of a survey of academic data scientists discusses what data science in the academy is, and various issues around the career paths for those in universities who practice and support data science. We provide evidence-based recommendations about how universities can better support an emerging set of roles and responsibilities around data and computation within and across academic fields.

Recommended citation: R. Stuart Geiger, Charlotte Mazel-Cabasse, Chihoko Cullens, Laura Noren, Brittany Fiore-Gartland, Diya Das, and Henry Brady (2018). _Career Paths and Prospects in Academic Data Science: Report of the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environments Survey._ Report. Berkeley, California: UC-Berkeley Institute for Data Science. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xe823/

Reports from the BIDS Best Practices in Data Science Series

Published in , 2018

An ongoing series of short papers that report from discussions where we share our experiences doing data science well (or at least better), for many definitions of the term.

Recommended citation: R. Stuart Geiger, Dan Sholler, Aaron Culich, Ciera Martinez, Fernando Hoces de la Guardia, François Lanusse, Kellie Ottoboni, Marla Stuart, Maryam Vareth, Nelle Varoquaux, Sara Stoudt, and Stéfan van der Walt. "Challenges of Doing Data-Intensive Research in Teams, Labs, and Groups: Report from the BIDS Best Practices in Data Science Series." _BIDS Best Practices in Data Science Series._ Berkeley Institute for Data Science: Berkeley, California. 2018. doi:10.31235/osf.io/a7b3m

The Rise and Fall of the Note: Changing Paper Lengths in ACM CSCW, 2000-2018

Published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACMHCI, CSCW 2019), 2019

A short paper (or note) quantitatively examining changing paper lengths in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, focusing on the rise and fall of the 4-page note format.

Recommended citation: R. Stuart Geiger. 2019. "The Rise and Fall of the Note: Changing Paper Lengths in ACM CSCW, 2000-2018." Proceedings of the ACM Human Computer Interaction (PACMHCI) 3, CSCW, Article 222 (November 2019), 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359324 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.10808.pdf
Download Paper

ORES: Lowering Barriers with Participatory Machine Learning in Wikipedia

Published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW 2020), 2019

This paper presents an overview and case studies of ORES, Wikipedia’s real-time machine learning as a service platform, which is designed in line with Wikipedia’s values of open participation, decentralization, and continual iteration. ORES decouples and reduces incidental complexity around several aspects of applying machine learning in a user-generated content platform, including curating training data sets, building models to serve predictions, auditing predictions, and developing interfaces or automated agents that act on those predictions.

Recommended citation: Aaron Halfaker and R. Stuart Geiger. 2019. "ORES: Lowering Barriers with Participatory Machine Learning in Wikipedia."Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4, CSCW2, Article 148 (October 2020), 37 pages. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.05189.pdf https://doi.org/10.1145/3415219
Download Paper

Garbage In, Garbage Out? Do Machine Learning Application Papers in Social Computing Report Where Human-Labeled Training Data Comes From?

Published in Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* 2020), 2019

Many machine learning projects for new application areas involve teams of humans who label data for a particular purpose, from hiring crowdworkers to the paper’s authors labeling the data themselves. In this paper, we investigate to what extent a sample of machine learning application papers in social computing – specifically papers from ArXiv and traditional publications performing an ML classification task on Twitter data – give specific details about whether best practices in human annotation were followed.

Recommended citation: R. Stuart Geiger, Kevin Yu, Yanlai Yang, Mindy Dai, Jie Qiu, Rebekah Tang, and Jenny Huang. 2020. "Garbage In, Garbage Out? Do Machine Learning Application Papers in Social Computing Report Where Human-Labeled Training Data Comes From?" In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* ’20), January 27–30, 2020, Barcelona, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 18 pages. https://stuartgeiger.com/papers/gigo-fat2020.pdf https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372862
Download Paper

The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects

Published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW 2021), 2021

We report findings from an interview-based study of maintainers of free and/or open-source software (F/OSS) projects. F/OSS maintainers perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions.

Recommended citation: R. Stuart Geiger, Dorothy Howard, and Lilly Irani. 2021. "The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 5, CSCW1, Article 175 (April 2021), 28 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449249 https://stuartgeiger.com/papers/maintaining-scaling-foss-cscw2021.pdf
Download Paper

‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ Revisited: What Do Machine Learning Application Papers Report About Human-Labeled Training Data?

Published in Quantitative Science Studies, 2021

Supervised machine learning, in which models are automatically derived from labeled training data, is only as good as the quality of that data. We report to what extent a random sample of ML application papers across disciplines give specific details about whether best practices were followed in labeling training data.

Recommended citation: R. Stuart Geiger, Dominique Cope, Jamie Ip, Marsha Lotosh, Aayush Shah, Jenny Weng, and Rebekah Tang. 2021. "'Garbage in, garbage out' revisited: What do machine learning application papers report about human-labeled training data?" Quantitative Science Studies 2(3). https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00144
Download Paper

Community, Time, and (Con)text: A Dynamical Systems Analysis of Online Communication and Community Health among Open-Source Software Communities

Published in Cognitive Science, 2022

Open-source software projects, maintained largely by unpaid volunteers, face recruitment and retention challenges. Using dynamical systems analysis of community communications, we found that sentiment and gratitude expressions significantly shape newcomer retention, with impacts modulated by the context of first contact.

Recommended citation: Paxton, A., Varoquaux, N., Holdgraf, C. and Geiger, R.S. (2022), Community, Time, and (Con)text: A Dynamical Systems Analysis of Online Communication and Community Health among Open-Source Software Communities. Cognitive Science, 46: e13134. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13134

Opinion: ChatGPT is this generation’s Wikipedia. We have an opportunity to learn from the past

Published in San Diego Union Tribune, 2023

This is an op-ed published in the San Diego Union Tribune as part of a set of commentaries on ChatGPT.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart. (2023, June 19). "Opinion: ChatGPT is this generation's Wikipedia. We have an opportunity to learn from the past." San Diego Union Tribune. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/story/2023-06-19/opinion-chatgpt-wikipedia-artificial-intelligence-ai-schools-education

Making Algorithms Public: Reimagining Auditing From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern

Published in International Journal of Communication, 2024

Through four algorithmic audit cases, we demonstrate how scoping decisions shape audit outcomes and reflect institutional power. We propose moving beyond technical certification toward building infrastructures for democratic understanding and contestation, recognizing auditing as a political practice that must engage with institutional reform, not just algorithmic behavior.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R. Stuart, Udayan Tandon, Anoolia Gakhokidze, Lian Song, and Lilly Irani. (2024). "Making Algorithms Public: Reimagining Auditing From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern." International Journal of Communication, 18, 634-655. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/download/20811/4455

Asking an AI for salary negotiation advice is a matter of concern: Controlled experimental perturbation of ChatGPT for protected and non-protected group discrimination on a contextual task with no clear ground truth answers

Published in PLoS ONE, 2025

We audited four ChatGPT versions with 98,800 prompts each for bias in salary negotiation advice. We found statistically significant gaps by gender, university, and major, with the largest variations between model versions and employee vs. employer perspectives. Results were inconsistent across versions, raising concerns about using ChatGPT for contextual tasks without clear ground truth.

Recommended citation: Geiger, R.S., O'Sullivan, F., Wang, E., & Lo, J. (2025). "Asking an AI for salary negotiation advice is a matter of concern: Controlled experimental perturbation of ChatGPT for protected and non-protected group discrimination on a contextual task with no clear ground truth answers." PLoS ONE 20(2): e0318500. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0318500

talks

Actor-Network Theory

Published:

An introduction to Actor Network Theory for students in the Masters of Information Management and Systems (MIMS) course

Robotic Ethics and Opportunities

Published:

A panel discussing the ethical and political issues that are raised with autonomous robots and software bots.

Governing the Commons

Published:

A lecture on the history of Wikipedia, in the broader context of the history of reference works.

Moderating Online Conversation Spaces

Published:

An overview of how various online platforms moderate content, discussing issues that link up to the theories discussed in the Social Aspects of Information Systems class.

Peer Production and Wikipedia

Published:

An overview of Wikipedia and other peer production platforms, discussing issues that link up to the theories discussed in the Social Aspects of Information Systems class.

Scraping Wikipedia Data

Published:

A tutorial (with Jupyter notebooks) about how to use APIs to query structured data from Wikipedia articles and the Wikidata project.

Community Sustainability in Wikipedia: A Review of Research and Initiatives

Published:

Wikipedia relies on one of the world’s largest open collaboration communities. Since 2001, the community has grown substantially and faced many challenges. This presentation reviews research and initiatives around community sustainability in Wikipedia that are relevant for many open source projects, including issues of newcomer retention, governance, automated moderation, and marginalized groups.

Jupyter and the Changing Rituals around Computation

Published:

We (Stuart Geiger, Brittany Fiore-Gartland, and Charlotte Cabasse-Mazel) share ethnographic findings made observing and working with Jupyter notebooks, focusing on how people use Jupyter to create and deliver computational narratives in particular local contexts, like classrooms, hackathons, research collaborations, and more.

Computational Ethnography and the Ethnography of Computation

Published:

Ethnography is traditionally a qualitative and inductive methodology – with its origins in cultural anthropology – that is now widely used to holistically investigate people’s lived experiences in and across cultures. In this talk, I define and discuss two ways of thinking about the role of ethnographic methods around computation, then discuss how my research relates to both.

“But it wouldn’t be an encyclopedia; it would be a wiki”: The changing imagined affordances of wikis, 1995-2002

Published:

This paper examines the early history of “anyone can edit” wiki software – originally developed in 1995, six years before Wikipedia’s origin. While today, the idea of a wiki is associated with large-scale, massively-distributed encyclopedic knowledge production, this was not always the case. Articles on pre-Wikipedia wikis were often closer to a Joycean stream of consciousness than Wikipedia’s Britannica-inspired texts that speak in single voice, and the underlying wiki platform lacked many of the affordances that are now taken for granted in wiki platforms. In fact, the creator of the first wiki advised Wikipedia’s co-founders that the goals of creating a general-purpose encyclopedia and a wiki were inherently contradictory.

The Humanity of Artificial Intelligence

Published:

Today, “artificial intelligence” seems to be everywhere – in our phones, vacuums, hospitals, and inboxes – but it can be hard to separate science fiction from science fact. Many discussions about AI imagine a fully autonomous superintelligence that designs itself with little to no human intervention, making decisions in ways that humans cannot possibly understand. Yet the work of designing, developing, engineering, training, and testing such systems requires a massive amount of human labor, which is typically erased when such systems are released as products. In this talk, I give a human-centered, behind-the-scenes introduction to machine learning, illustrating the creative, interpretive, and often messy work humans do to make autonomous agents work. Understanding the humanity behind artificial intelligence is important if we want to think constructively about issues of bias, fairness, accountability, and transparency in AI.

Computational Ethnography and the Ethnography of Computation: The Case for Context

Published:

Ethnography is traditionally a qualitative and inductive methodology that is now widely used to holistically investigate people’s lived experiences in and across cultures. In this talk, I define and discuss two ways of thinking about the role of ethnographic methods around computation, then discuss how my research relates to both.

Computational Ethnography and the Ethnography of Computation: The Case for Context

Published:

Ethnography is traditionally a qualitative and inductive methodology that is now widely used to holistically investigate people’s lived experiences in and across cultures. In this talk, I define and discuss two ways of thinking about the role of ethnographic methods around computation, then discuss how my research relates to both.

Computational Ethnography and the Ethnography of Computation: The Case for Context

Published:

Ethnography is traditionally a qualitative and inductive methodology that is now widely used to holistically investigate people’s lived experiences in and across cultures. In this talk, I define and discuss two ways of thinking about the role of ethnographic methods around computation, then discuss how my research relates to both.

Publics: Witnessing and Measuring

Published:

A guest lecture for Cathryn Carson and Margo Boenig-Liptsin’s course on Human Contexts and Ethics of Data (HIST 182C, STS 100C), focusing on how various publics generate, analyze, and interpret data.

The Human Contexts of Data: Infrastructures, Institutions, and Interpretations

Published:

In this talk, I discuss the role of qualitative and ethnographic methods in relation to computer, information, and data science. These holistic, reflexive, and meta-level approaches to studying data and computation in context help us better understand how to both support and practice data analytics at various scales.

Computational Ethnography and the Ethnography of Computation: The Case for Context

Published:

Ethnography is traditionally a qualitative and inductive methodology that is now widely used to holistically investigate people’s lived experiences in and across cultures. In this talk, I define and discuss two ways of thinking about the role of ethnographic methods around computation, then discuss how my research relates to both.

Key Values: What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Open Science’

Published:

Openness in science is hard to disagree with as an abstract principle, but what exactly do we mean when we call for science to be made open – or more open than before? In this talk, I introduce and unpack the many different goals, strategies, products, values, and assumptions of the broad open science movement.

The Types, Roles, and Practices of Documentation in Data Analytics Open Source Software Libraries: A Collaborative Ethnography of Documentation Work

Published:

Data analytics increasingly relies on open source software (OSS) libraries that extend scripted languages like python and R. Software documentation for these libraries is crucial for people across all experience levels, but documentation work raises many challenges, particularly in open source communities. In this collaboration between ethnographers and data scientists, we discuss the types, roles, practices, and motivations around documentation in data analytics OSS libraries.

Designing and Using Data Science Ethically

Published:

With the rise of Machine Learning and AI to solve human-focused needs, how do we design and use data science ethically to help empower and support people?

Ethics and Policy Implications of Big Data

Published:

Panelist on the ‘Knowledge and Culture’ panel at this workshop on algorithms and big data, sponsored by a number of different departments across UCSD.

teaching

CCTP-783: Qualitative Data Analysis (Fall 2009)

Graduate course, Georgetown University, CCT program, 2009

Graduate course, Teaching assistant
CCTP-783 is a core methods course for the CCT program, one of multiple classes M.A. students can take to satisfy their core methods requirement.

INFO-203: Social Aspects of Information Systems (Spring 2012)

Graduate course, UC-Berkeley School of Information, 2012

Graduate course, Teaching assistant
INFO 203 is a required course for the UC-Berkeley's Master of Information Management & Systems (MIMS) program, and open to graduate students from all departments.

INFO-203: Social Aspects of Information Systems (Spring 2013)

Graduate course, UC-Berkeley School of Information, 2013

Graduate course, Teaching assistant
INFO 203 is a required course for the UC-Berkeley's Master of Information Management & Systems (MIMS) program, and open to graduate students from all departments.

INFO-103: History of Information (Spring 2014)

Undergraduate course, UC-Berkeley School of Information, 2014

Undergraduate course, Teaching assistant
INFO 103 is an elective undergraduate course in the UC-Berkeley School of Information, crosslisted with History, Media Studies, and Cognitive Science.

SOC-167: Sociology of Virtual Communities and Social Media (Spring 2014)

Undergraduate course, UC-Berkeley, Dept of Sociology, 2014

Undergraduate course, Adjunct lecturer
SOC 167 is an elective undergraduate course in UC-Berkeley's Sociology Department, providing a wide overview to how classic concepts in the social sciences play out in social media and virtual communities

SOC-167: Sociology of Virtual Communities and Social Media (Summer 2014)

Undergraduate course, UC-Berkeley, Dept of Sociology, 2014

Undergraduate course, Instructor of record
SOC 167 is an elective undergraduate course in UC-Berkeley's Sociology Department, providing a wide overview to how classic concepts in the social sciences play out in social media and virtual communities

Software Carpentry Instructor

Workshop series, Software Carpentry, 2016

Software Carpentry is a global non-profit organization that provides free, short workshops on scientific computing and data science. I have been a certified instructor with SWC since May 2016.

Peer Learning Group Coordinator

Peer learning group, UC-Berkeley, Berkeley Institute for Data Science, 2016

Since Fall 2016, I have been the lead coordinator for The Hacker Within, a weekly peer learning group for scientific computing and data science, which is run out of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science.