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The final presenter at AoIR 2015 today is Anissa Tanweer, whose interest is in the shift towards big data. This has been a major buzzword, and has enabled the rise of data science; her team has conducted an ethnography of the data science environment.

One of the major challenges in working with big data is how researchers envision their data; it is no longer possible to visually review the entire dataset, for example, and the picture of the dataset is constantly evolving. This is especially crucial in moments of breakdown that require a repair of the dataset, and may lead …

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Smiljana Antonijević, whose interest is in the emerging field of the digital humanities. How did this field come to be imagined? It's founding story is generally associated with the Jesuit priest Roberto Busa and his interest in using digital technologies for information management; this gradually developed into humanities computing or linguistic computing. The arrival of personal computing further broadened this, and the term digital humanities finally emerged in the mid-1990s.

Digital humanities has been visible especially in digital mapping of specific geographic sites. In developing literature databases, and in other key uses; there …

Up next at AoIR 2015 is the fabulous Luca Rossi, whose interest is in how scientific media events are now mediated via Twitter. His focus here is on the Rosetta mission and the Philae probe's landing on comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mission was launched before Twitter was, but the approach and landing of the probe was covered closely by dedicated Twitter accounts and in widely promoted hashtags like #WakeUpRosetta.

This created a great deal of awareness and anticipation, and Luca's project gathered some 400,000 tweets related to the relevant hashtags. Using the approach for classifying hashtags that Stefan Stieglitz and …

The next session at AoIR 2015 is starting with Catherine Brooks, whose interest is in scientific collaboration: how do scientists organise themselves and manage their data? This is an increasingly crucial question in (big) data-enabled science. One problem is that of dark data – unused, overlooked, rejected data from past research projects, which could be placed on cloud-based storage platforms to make them useful again.

These questions could be understood from actor-network theory or human and technology studies perspectives – the ultimate goal could be the democratisation of data, to increase their further usefulness. Data often follow the paths of …

The next speakers at AoIR 2015 are Kristen Guth and Alex Leavitt, who begin by highlighting Twitter's 2015 attempts to reduce the plagiarism of jokes by retweeting. Their real focus is on humour during the 2012 presidential debates in the US, though, and they focus on the three presidential debates during the campaign.

The team used live coding and dynamic keyword management during the debate, to capture as much as possible of the Twitter discussion around the debates. This resulted in 427 linguistic rules capturing some 33m tweets from 5.4m users, of which some 51% were retweets.

Audiences and journalists …

The next AoIR 2015 speaker is Stacey May Koosel, whose interest is in the temporalities of digital culture. She worked with articles to explore the concept of tl;dr (too long; didn't read) – in relation to our consciousness of time. Tl;dr is related to information overload, and emerged in 2003; it may point to decreasing attention spans, and show how we are overwhelmed by the information deluge we are now faced with. We negotiate it by employing pattern recognition.

One artist, for example – a compulsive hoarder – used his collection in his art, showing the volume of this material …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Veronika Kalmus, whose interest is in the idea of iTime, or the impact of smartphones on our perceptions of social time (and space). There is a sense of the acceleration of social time and social life, partly due to the impact of digital technologies. What are the social, political, and psychological implications of such a speeding-up?

Ben Agger introduced the concept of 'iTime', referring to the impact of smartphones o n our perceptions of time. This challenges boundaries between public and private, between work and leisure time, and it has both …

The next session at AoIR 2015 is exploring timing issues, and the first paper by Sarah Muñoz-Bates is about the effects of Google on how people perceive topics. For example, what is the effect of seeing the term 'illegal' rather than 'undocumented' in relation to migrants? Does it cross the line and criminalise the person; is it racialised in a way that other terms are not?

Google participates in this debate with the word choices that it provides to users as they enter their search queries. These are largely driven by the words and phrases that Web users and content …

And we're off! AoIR 2015 proper starts with a keynote by Micha Cárdenas, who begins with a choice: as the planet is dying, do we want to stay in hell or move to an ice planet? By popular vote, hell it is.

But hell is, well, hellish, and unbearable, and now we're offered a chance of the ocean moon or the ice planet – this time, we're choosing the ocean moon (and this is all highly interactive, with audience members literally racing up to the podium to choose our adventure).

This is a performance of an interactive hypertext fiction …

It's that time of the year when everything else stops and the international community of Internet researchers assembles for the annual AoIR conference. This time we're in Phoenix – arguably the warmest location AoIR has held its conference to date, and a trend very much worth continuing. I have a particularly good reason for coming to the conference this year – in addition to the usual programme of keynotes and presentations, my colleagues have seen fit to elect me as Vice-President of the Association of Internet Researchers, and I'm humbled by the honour of being able to help …