[Bigbang-dev] An Introduction

Sebastian Benthall sbenthall at gmail.com
Tue Aug 30 16:38:02 PDT 2016


Thanks for outlining all this, Harsh.

I'm working on a brief proposal for some research using BigBang that I hope
to be able to share with you this week. It takes things in a direction
different from what's been discussed on this list so far.

I've been personally rather swamped with wrapping up a number of summer
projects and so haven't made as rapid progress consolidating the BigBang
work from the DMI workshop as I'd have liked. Part of this is that I
haven't been on a real vacation in many months. Please expect me to be more
responsive when I get back from traveling Sept. 13.

On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 10:00 PM, Harsh Gupta <mail at hargup.in> wrote:

> At CIS I analyzed technical alternatives of Encrypted Media Extensions
> (EME) [1] draft specification which were proposed in the discussion on
> public-html mailing list of W3C. I analyzed the alternatives on the
> strength of content protection, privacy, security, accessibility and
> interoperability, which are the major points of debate in the EME
> controversy. The report is not there is public yet. I also did a diversity
> analysis on the participants of the debate where I found out that out of 48
> participants no one was from Asia, Africa or South America. The notebook
> for this analysis has been added to BigBang as an example [2]. I also spent
> some time looking at the work of Social Web working group at W3C [3],
> though nothing concrete came out of it.
>
> Before this I've also worked on Wikipedia Human Gender Indicators [4], a
> project which highlights gender gap in biographies of wikipedia. I've
> started getting into the more social/political sides of tech only a year
> ago, so I don't have a niche yet. My earlier experiences have been more
> software development oriented, including a Google Summer of Code in SymPy
> and an internship at Continuum.
>
> [1]: https://hsivonen.fi/eme/
> [2]: https://github.com/sbenthall/bigbang/blob/master/examples/
> EME%20Diversity%20Analysis.ipynb
> [3]: https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg
> [4]: http://whgi.wmflabs.org/
>
> --
>   Harsh Gupta
>   mail at hargup.in
>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 19, 2016, at 04:06 PM, Sebastian Benthall wrote:
>
> Hi Harsh,
>
> Thanks for this introduction and for your contributions so far.
> It's great to have you involved in the project.
>
> Niels or Davide would be better able to represent the work going on at
> Datactive [1].
> I can talk about ideas we've been tossing around at Berkeley's School of
> Information [2] and with a contact at the Center for Democracy and
> Technology (CDT) [3].
>
> * CDT has confirmed an interest in measuring the effectiveness of civil
> society in pushing the public interest agenda in the IETF. One project we
> may work on is finding several cases of public interest related topics,
> including both advocacy 'successes' and advocacy 'failures', and try to map
> out how communications played out in each case. The goal for this project
> would be ideally be to get strategic insight into effective organizing
> around these kinds of issues.
>
> * I have a research interest in the statistical modeling of communication
> networks in general. This is related to some of the more advocacy based
> research but could also be seen as a study in applied math. I am hoping to
> use BigBang to develop some novel modeling and analysis algorithms for
> communications metadata.
>
> * An idea that just occurred to me the other day that could be interest
> which I haven't discussed with anybody yet.... We could also look at
> crossing data from Internet Governance lists with another data set and see
> what comes up. I'm thinking specifically the Panama Papers
> <https://panamapapers.icij.org/>. It's just possible we could detect the
> influence of offshore finance on Internet governance. That would be quite a
> find.
>
> Just a few ideas. The project is at this point very open ended. I'd really
> like to hear more about the work you did for CIS, if you don't mind sharing.
>
> All best,
> Seb
>
>
>
> [1] : https://data-activism.net/
> [2] : http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/
> [3] : https://cdt.org/
>
> On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 2:27 PM, Harsh Gupta <mail at hargup.in> wrote:
>
> Hello BigBang developers,
>
> I'm Harsh Gupta, a fifth year undergrad student at Indian Institute of
> Technology Kharagpur, studying Mathematics and Computing. I was an
> intern at CIS India [1] this summer and used BigBang to do diversity
> analysis on the participants of the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
> debate happening at W3C [2]. I met Sebastian at SciPy in July where he
> told me about the plans to use to BigBang to analyze ICANN. I'm in
> general interested in the social + political dimensions of technology.
>
> Where can I read more details of the research you plan to carry out, and
> what are the ways I can get involved?
>
> I'm hoping to churn out a thesis out the work, a part of which I need to
> submit by the end of this semester.
>
>
>
>
> [1]: http://cis-india.org/
> [2]: https://github.com/sbenthall/bigbang/pull/259
>
> --
> Harsh Gupta
> mail at hargup.in
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>
>
>
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