Posts By: admin

Payal Arora – The making of art knowledge via Google Images in rural India

By admin, November 11, 2013

Payal Arora is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication – Faculty of History, Culture and Communication at Rotterdam Erasmus University. With a research interest in digital learning, she contributed to the conference with a very interesting (albeit also worrying) study on the  search results Google provides to Indian pupils in rural [...]

Anton Tantner – Human Search Engines and Intelligence Offices of the Analogue Age

By admin, November 11, 2013

Short interview with Anton Tantner from network cultures on Vimeo. Much critique and debate at the 2nd edition of Society of the Query took place around the way that knowledge – a complex, dynamic and essentially cognitive (human) process – is indexed and retrieved via algorithmic identification made possible by software search engines. This cold, [...]
Cross posting from my KMi blog (which has paragraph level...

Evaluating Google as an Epistemic Tool

By admin, December 4, 2012

Cross posting from my KMi blog (which has paragraph level commenting enabled to facilitate discussion). I’ve just read an article which explicitly considers the evaluation of search engines with respect to their epistemic functions under a social epistemological perspective. There’s a pre-print available http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/simpson/simpson_index.html and the citation is: Evaluating Google as an Epistemic Tool, Metaphilosophy [...]

On the way to academic search engine optimization?

By admin, November 14, 2012

I have recently talked about academic search engine optimization at the EASST conference in Copenhagen. The term was coined by Beel et al. (2010) who suggested that academic papers should be adapted to the technology of search engines in order to be indexed and ranked properly, for example by using correct metadata and carefully selecting [...]
This summer, I attended the summer school of the Digital...

Digital Methods Winter School

By admin, October 25, 2012

This summer, I attended the summer school of the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam. I can say that I have learned a lot there and I believe that anybody who does research on search engines will find some of the DMI tools useful. My comparative study of Google Autocomplete is one example [...]

Googling “9/11”: A cross-cultural comparison of suggestions for a loaded term

By admin, October 1, 2012

In my recent blog post I explained the politics of autocomplete, a feature that suggests queries while they are being typed. We may wonder how this is affected by the trend of creating tailor-made search engine results for specific audiences. How do Google´s suggestions differ from country to country (and language to language)? Methodology and [...]

The politics of autocomplete

By admin, September 20, 2012

In September 2010 Google introduced autocomplete (also Google Suggest) to its search engine. Based on previous queries, it tries to predict what we want to search for while we are still typing. How does this impact search engine usage and what to do the suggested queries tell us about our societies? Already now it is [...]

Society of the Query returns

By admin, September 10, 2012

Search engines are so deeply rooted in our daily routines that most people rarely think about them. It is a black boxed technology, appearing simple on the surface but with a sophisticated infrastructure and complicated functionalities underneath. The hype around Facebook and other social media platforms has drawn the attention even further away from these [...]
At the end of project the INC needs to report...

Full report SotQ

By admin, January 6, 2011

At the end of project the INC needs to report to the funders of a project. Download the full report here with all the blogposts gathered. Full report of the Society of the Query conference.
In the Xmas issue of the New York Review of...

Robert Darnton writes about the challenges that libraries face these days

By admin, December 20, 2010

In the Xmas issue of the New York Review of Books Robert Darnton writes about the challenges that libraries face these days. Towards the end of his article he discusses the initiative to start a Digital National Archive in the United States. In this context Darnton makes some interesting remarks about Google Books: “Perhaps even [...]