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And I've arrived at the 2012 Association of Internet Researchers conference – my annual pilgrimage to catch up with the family. We start with a quick burst of Ignite talks, which itself begins with John Carter McKnight. He notes the two fundamental axioms of video games studies: games teach, and games don't teach. The Red Cross has posed the question: Is there a way for first-person shooter games to include a more accuracy representation of international humanitarian law? Such laws are not especially firm, of course - much different from the rules in video games, which are more like gravity …

The final speaker (that went fast) at the CCC Symposium is Annette Markham, who begins by posing the question "What counts as data?" An answer to that question might provide an opportunity to bridge 'big data' and qualitative research - because what counts as data also defines what is considered to be viable, credible, or interesting findings.

The focus on 'data' results in a focus on the process of data collection, which minimises the other phases of inquiry that are vital to the production of knowledge and understanding. What's missing here are the other aspects of research which are also …

We continue at the CCC Symposium with the great Alex Halavais, who is interested in the first place in the hidden patterns in data, and the learning - the evolution of ideas - which might result from them. But how do we detect such learning, such change? One indicator could be the popularity of content or users - success may be measured in the amount of attention received, for example. But all of this also happens at multiple scales, in multiple contexts - search engines cannot simply produce one result, for example, but must produce the right results for a …

The next speaker at the CCC Symposium is Christina Lioma, whose focus is on search engines. These, too, are repositories of data, but contain unstructured, heterogeneous, and noisy data - we're using them to find needles in haystacks (using various search logics, in fact: known needles in known haystacks, unknown needles in unknown haystacks, etc.). The discipline of information retrieval aims to develop theoretical principles for modifying and quantifying information and topical relevance.

Search engine algorithms retrieve, store, and match data to user needs; in doing so, they draw on query logs and user logs to improve the functioning of …

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 Rasmussen Helles, who takes us back to the problem of 'big data'. Such data lend themselves well to visualisation, but this also creates substantial new problems as we make sense of data through their visual representations: we may see the patterns in the data, but we still don't necessarily know what they mean.

To establish such media usually requires much more manual approaches of analysis, beyond (algorithmic) visualisation. This means content coding – a structured interpretation of data at a meaningful level, which cannot be done automatically at this point – …

The next speaker at the CCC Symposium is Casper Radil, whose interest is in the analytical construction of Web data. How might we talk about the relationship between server access data and the actual communication processes which take place as users engage with the Websites themselves? Casper's approach is digital space analysis, which is an approach to contextualising the different forms of metadata which are created as users access Web content.

This also marks a shift from Web analytics, as a specific form, to digital analytics more broadly, which recognises that data about online practices now stem from a variety …

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 …

I'm spending the day at the Centre for Communication and Computing at the University of Copenhagen, where Klaus Bruhn Jensen has brought together a bunch of AoIR folks, including myself, for a one-day symposium called "Digital Data - Lost, Found and Made". I'll be speaking about our Twitter research in the afternoon.

Klaus begins by noting that there are three degrees of media: humans as media, the mass media, and network media - and our understanding of media and their flows has changed considerably over the years. From the two-step flow model we've now moved to the three …