The post-lunch keynote at AoIR 2012 is by Liesbet van Zoonen, who begins with a recap of cultural theories of identity. These assume both individual and collective identities to be multiple rather than single, dynamic rather than static. Identity is something we do, not something we are. Research has been informed by these ideas, and we have a good understanding of how different groups use media to perform their identities. This has also been reflected in an understanding of diversity as a desirable goal for social policy.

There has been less attention on recent forces that work against the multiplicity …

My own paper started the post-lunch session at the CCC Symposium, discussing our Mapping Online Publics work in the field of Twitter research. I'll post up the slides and audio properly as soon as I can!

Slides and audio are below:

The next speaker at the CCC symposium is the fabulous Nancy Baym, who begins by noting how overwhelming the buzz about 'big data' has become. There's a great deal of fascination just with the things we can do with big data sources - tracing interesting patterns, attempting to predict future processes, making sense of data by using algorithmic tools.

But the outcomes of such research often remain predictable: they show what we already knew (that various social factors influence each other, for example), and the close studies mean that wider context is often missed. Internet studies has always been very …