Category Archives: paper

After about two years of thinking and coding, my colleague Erik Borra and myself are happy to announce that the Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit (DMI-TCAT) is finally available for download. DMI-TCAT runs in a LAMP environment and allows for capturing data in a number of different ways via both the streaming and search APIs, and provides a whole battery of analytical approaches to investigating tweet collections. For a more detailed description check out the wiki on github. There is also a paper (paywall, preprint will follow) that details the tool and the thinking behind it.

The second issue of computational culture is out and I am really looking forward to plunging into it once my teaching schedule leaves me a little bit more time. I am very happy that my paper made it in. As I am currently preparing a lecture on visual analysis for a class, I’ve been using the text for a bit of fun.

James A. Danowski‘s co-word tool wordij is unfortunately no longer online (why?), but it’s a really interesting and powerful piece of software and I used it here to create an alternative view of the paper (click for bigger image) with the help of gephi:

Many Eyes is still has a few tricks up its sleeve and this word tree visualization is really quite a strong tool for exploring the use and context of select words in a text:

These really work quite well on this particular paper, but I hope to spend more time with text analysis over the next months – working on historical papers from computer and information science – to see how well these and other tools hold up in a truly exploratory context.

This preprint of a paper I have written about a year and a half ago, entitled Institutionalizing without Institutions? Web 2.0 and the Conundrum of Democracy, is the direct result of what I experienced as a major cultural destabilization. Born in Austria, living in France (and soon the Netherlands), and working in a field that has a strong connection with American culture and scholarship, I had the feeling that debates about the political potential of the Internet were strongly structured along national lines. I called this moral preprocessing.

This paper, which will appear in an anthology on Internet governance later this year, is my attempt to argue that it is not only technology which poses serious challenges, but rather the elusive and difficult concept of democracy. My impression was – and still is – that the latter term is too often used too easily and without enough attention paid to the fundamental contradictions and tensions that characterize this concept.

Instead of asking whether or not the Internet is a force of democratization, I wanted to show that this term, democratization, is complicated, puzzling, and full of conflict: a conundrum.

Published as: B. Rieder (2012). Institutionalizing without institutions? Web 2.0 and the conundrum of democracy. In F. Massit-Folléa, C. Méadel & L. Monnoyer-Smith (Eds.), Normative experience in internet politics (Collection Sciences sociales) (pp. 157-186). Paris: Transvalor-Presses des Mines.