Current projects in Oxford Internet Institute

PUBLICATIONS:

Dutton, W.H. and Helsper, E. (2007) Oxford Internet Survey 2007 Report: The Internet in Britain (Oxford Internet Institute).

Guerra, G.A., Zizzo, D.J., Dutton. W.H. and Peltu, M. (2003) Economics of trust in the information economy: issues of identity, privacy and security OII Research Report No. 1 .

Noam, E., Hay, D., Baye, M.R. and Morgan, J. (2003) The Internet: still wide open and competitive? OII Internet Issue Brief No. 1 .

Caldas, A., David, P.A. and Ormanidhi, O. (2005) Digital information network technologies, organisational performance and productivity Report for Cisco-funded project: 'Internet and productivity in public services: innovative pathways for e-government' (Oxford Internet Institute).

Birmingham, P. and Davies, C. (2005) Implementing broadband Internet in the classroom: key issues for research and practice OII Research Report No. 6 .

Nash, V., Dutton, W.H. and Peltu, M. (2004) Innovative pathways to the next level of e-learning OII Forum Discussion Paper No. 2 .

Schroeder, R., Caldas, A., Mesch, G. and Dutton, W. (2005) The World Wide Web of Science: Reconfiguring Access to Information Paper on the 'World Wide Web of Science' project, presented at the annual conference of The National Centre for e-Social Science in 2005, in the session 'Social Shaping of e-Research' .

Schroeder, R., Fry, J. and Virkar, S. (2006) The World Wide Web of Science and Global Expertise: Democratizing Access to Knowledge? Paper presented at the World Wide Web of Science Workshop at the OII in February 2006 .

Yorick Wilks (2006) What is the Semantic Web and what will it do for eScience? OII Research Report No. 12 .

Dutton, W.H. (2004) Social transformation in the information society WSIS Publication Series (UNESCO: Paris).

1. COMPANIONS

COMPANIONS aims to change the way we think about the relationships of people to computers and the Internet by developing a virtual conversational 'Companion'.

PUBLICATIONS:

Benyon, D. and Mival, O. (2008) Landscaping Personification Technologies: from Interactions to Relationships.In: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008).

2. DIGITISED RESOURCES: A USAGE AND IMPACT STUDY

Are digital resources succeeding at reaching their intended users, or are they being missed because of poor information seeking skills among the target users? There are a number of challenges in assessing the use and impact of online digital resources: these include new methods, shifts in the way that people access resources, new audiences, and new forms of information-seeking behaviour among different audiences. The project combines quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure the impact of online scholarly resources.

3. NETWORKS FOR WEB SCIENCE

Web Science brings together computer scientists and engineers, social scientists and policy makers to study complex information systems as personified by the Web. In other words, Web Science is the study of decentralized information systems. Web Science encompasses science, engineering, social understanding and capacity building. The aim of this proposal is to establish networks of researchers from different technical and social science research disciplines to begin to develop a Web Science research agenda through the exchange of PhD students and collaborative workshops, the results of which will be disseminated through detailed review papers.

4. OXFORD INTERNET SURVEYS

Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS) research is designed to offer detailed insights into the influence of the Internet on everyday life in Britain.

Launched in 2003 by the Oxford Internet Institute, OxIS is an authoritative source of information about Internet access, use and attitudes. Some of the areas covered include: digital and social inclusion and exclusion; regulation and governance of the Internet; privacy, trust and risk concerns; social networking and entertainment; and online education.

5. E-LEARNING RESEARCH GROUP

The e-Learning Research group is concerned with a wide range of issues concerning teaching and learning in the digital age. It focuses on the role of new technologies in developing and revolutionising educational theory and practice in a variety of educational contexts in the 21st century.

6. Virtual communities of practice: the open source software community

This is developing and applying new automated data extraction techniques, quantitative methods of analysis and empirical findings about the organisation, governance and performance of the large Internet-connected communities that develop free and open source software, such as the Linux kernel, the Mozilla browser and the Apache Webserver. It is being undertaken by teams at Stanford University and partner institutions in the UK, France and the Netherlands

7. World Internet Project

The World Internet Project (WIP) is a major, international, collaborative project looking at the social, political and economic impact of the Internet and other new technologies. Conceived as the study of the Internet that should have been conducted of television in its early days, the WIP believes that the Internet's influence will ultimately be far greater than television.

8. World Wide Web of Humanities

The World Wide Web is enormous and is in constant flux, with more web content lost to time than is currently accessible via the live Web. The growing body of archived web material available to researchers is immensely valuable as a record of important aspects of modern society, but there is little, if any, supporting infrastructure, processes and trusted methods available to facilitate domain specific Internet research. Humanities researchers are expected to individually assemble research data and e-Research tools needed for analysis. This can be cost-prohibitive in terms of resources and time.

This project aims to begin to address this gap by establishing a framework for e-Humanities (also called Digital Humanities) research using available open source tools and technologies and archived web content to create novel research interfaces to the first of many, scholarly, e-Humanities web collections