Matthew L Williams
Biographic Data
| ID | 3925045 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew L Williams |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew L |
| FAMILY NAME | Williams |
| SIGNATURE | WILLIAMS M L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2566-6063 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 389 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Coming together, playing together: A mixed methods investigation of older adults’ experiences with virtual band instruction
Recent studies have shown an increase in virtual music instruction for adult learners, several examples of which grew from efforts to continue music instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, many music educators created virtual learning opportunities that challenged assumptions about access, participation, and instructional practices. Notably, some older adults embraced virtual music offerings and experienced positive social and…
The digital turn in police image work: Determinants of adoption, use and perceived effectiveness of social media communications in forces in England & Wales
This paper examines police use of social media platforms in England and Wales. Based on a novel linked dataset consisting of survey data from 38 forces, police Twitter communications from all 43 forces, and qualitative interviews with corporate communications staff, analysis shows variation in patterns of adoption and usage, and perceptions of effectiveness by a range of organisational and policy factors. Drawing on the notion of ‘image work’, th…
Linking survey with Twitter data: Examining associations among smartphone usage, privacy concern and Twitter linkage consent
Linking survey and social media data has gained popularity. However, obtaining consent from respondents to link social media is a known challenge. Using data from a nationally representative survey of the U.K. this study investigated whether respondents' a) activity frequency, b) activity variety and c) technical skills with smartphones are associated with consent to link Twitter data to survey responses. Additionally, this study explored mediati…
Understanding virtual rehearsal participation through self-determination theory
The motivation to participate in ensemble rehearsals may be influenced by the rehearsal environment. With the emergence of the virtual rehearsal environment, there is a need to gain a better understanding of how online rehearsals affect participation decisions. The purpose of this study was to determine the applicability of one theory of motivation, Self-Determination Theory, to older adults’ decisions to participate or not participate in virtual…
Representation in music: College students’ perceptions of ensemble repertoire
Culturally responsive pedagogy in music education is becoming increasingly crucial for all students, in all types of music programs, and at all levels of education as demographic shifts occur in schools. In music ensembles, the selection of repertoire is a critical component of culturally responsive pedagogy. The purpose of this study was to investigate student perceptions of repertoire in college music ensembles. This study was guided by the fol…
The Effect of the Brexit Vote on the Variation in Race and Religious Hate Crimes in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
This paper examines possible mechanisms behind the spike in racially or religiously-aggravated (RR) offences after the Brexit vote. It adds to the current literature in five significant ways: (1) it provides the first Brexit-related RR hate crime comparison between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; (2) it reports on results from a national-level panel model that adds to the debate in the literature on whether pro-leave or pro-rema…
Fear of Economic Cybercrime Across Europe: A Multilevel Application of Routine Activity Theory
Despite the increasing prevalence of cybercrime and its study by criminologists, very little research has examined the extent, nature, and impact of fear of cybercrime. In this study, we conducted a multilevel analysis of the 2018 Eurobarometer Cybersecurity Survey to test the applicability of routine activities theory on fear of economic cybercrime. We contribute to the literature by demonstrating that: (1) fear of economic cybercrime varies acr…
Disrupting drive-by download networks on Twitter
This paper tests disruption strategies in Twitter networks containing malicious URLs used in drive-by download attacks. Cybercriminals use popular events that attract a large number of Twitter users to infect and propagate malware by using trending hashtags and creating misleading tweets to lure users to malicious webpages. Due to Twitter’s 280 character restriction and automatic shortening of URLs, it is particularly susceptible to the propagati…
Small Business Support Is Associated with the Quantity, Quality, and Usage of Youth Physical Activity Opportunities in Urban, Low-Income, African American Neighborhoods
Disrupting networks of hate: Characterising Hateful Networks and Removing Critical Nodes
Hateful individuals and groups have increasingly been using the Internet to express their ideas, spread their beliefs and recruit new members. Understanding the network characteristics of these hateful groups could help understand individuals' exposure to hate and derive intervention strategies to mitigate the dangers of such networks by disrupting communications. This article analyses two hateful followers' networks and three hateful retweet net…
The Effect of Focus of Attention on Error Detection Ability
The teaching of error detection is a complicated process, made more so by our evolving understanding of the psychological processes involved with attention itself. The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of listener attention on the error detection process. Guiding research questions were as follows: (1) In what ways does directing attention influence one’s ability to detect errors? and (2) Does voicing of error influence participants…
Antisemitism on Twitter: Collective Efficacy and the Role of Community Organisations in Challenging Online Hate Speech
In this article, we conduct a comprehensive study of online antagonistic content related to Jewish identity posted on Twitter between October 2015 and October 2016 by UK-based users. We trained a scalable supervised machine learning classifier to identify antisemitic content to reveal patterns of online antisemitism perpetration at the source. We built statistical models to analyze the inhibiting and enabling factors of the size (number of retwee…
Linking Survey and Twitter Data: Informed Consent, Disclosure, Security, and Archiving
Linked survey and Twitter data present an unprecedented opportunity for social scientific analysis, but the ethical implications for such work are complex-requiring a deeper understanding of the nature and composition of Twitter data to fully appreciate the risks of disclosure and harm to participants. In this article, we draw on our experience of three recent linked data studies, briefly discussing the background research on data linkage and the…
Linking Twitter and Survey Data: The Impact of Survey Mode and Demographics on Consent Rates Across Three UK Studies
In light of issues such as increasing unit nonresponse in surveys, several studies argue that social media sources such as Twitter can be used as a viable alternative. However, there are also a number of shortcomings with Twitter data such as questions about its representativeness of the wider population and the inability to validate whose data you are collecting. A useful way forward could be to combine survey and Twitter data to supplement and …
Are youth suicide memorial sites on Facebook different from those for other sudden deaths
To explore possible distinctive features of online memorials for youth suicides, amid concerns about glorification, we compared public Facebook memorials for suicides and road traffic accident deaths, using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. People who posted on memorial sites wrote at greater length about suicides, using longer words and more quotation marks. Words suggesting causation and achievement were more prevalent in suicide memo…
Hate in the Machine: Anti-Black and Anti-Muslim Social Media Posts as Predictors of Offline Racially and Religiously Aggravated Crime
National governments now recognize online hate speech as a pernicious social problem. In the wake of political votes and terror attacks, hate incidents online and offline are known to peak in tandem. This article examines whether an association exists between both forms of hate, independent of ‘trigger’ events. Using Computational Criminology that draws on data science methods, we link police crime, census and Twitter data to establish a temporal…
Under the Corporate Radar: Examining Insider Business Cybercrime Victimization through an Application of Routine Activities Theory
Cybercrime is recognized as one of the top threats to UK economic security. On a daily basis, the computer networks of businesses suffer security breaches. A less explored dimension of this problem is cybercrimes committed by insiders. This paper provides a criminological analysis of corporate insider victimization. It begins by presenting reviews of insider criminal threats and routine activities theory as applied to cybercrime. Analysis of the …
Interaction and Transformation on Social Media: The Case of Twitter Campaigns
The increasing popularity of social media platforms creates new digital social networks in which individuals can interact and share information, news, and opinion. The use of these technologies appears to have the capacity to transform current social configurations and relations, not least within the public and civic spheres. Within the social sciences, much emphasis has been placed on conceptualizing social media's role in modern society and the…
Legislative language and judicial politics: The effects of changing parliamentary language on UK immigration disputes
Why does the British government increasingly lose immigration cases in court? More broadly, what can explain the changing behaviour of appeal court judges? It is because government powers to manage immigration, delegated by Parliament, are increasingly couched in indeterminate language. Indeterminacy in legislation not only allows for executive discretion but also encourages litigation. Parliament has therefore provided the cause of action, and j…
The Grammar of Politics: A Brief History of Legislative Language in Britain
Legislative language is a crucial, yet somewhat overlooked element of British politics. So how has the language of British legislation changed over the past century? For this study, all 191,080 pages of legislation enacted between 1900 and 2015 were assessed for changes in the quantity of legislation, and 5,878 sections of legislation from 1920 to 2015 were analysed for changes to the quality of language. Parts of speech that affect the subject, …
Towards an Ethical Framework for Publishing Twitter Data in Social Research: Taking into Account Users' Views, Online Context and Algorithmic Estimation
New and emerging forms of data, including posts harvested from social media sites such as Twitter, have become part of the sociologist's data diet. In particular, some researchers see an advantage in the perceived 'public' nature of Twitter posts, representing them in publications without seeking informed consent. While such practice may not be at odds with Twitter's terms of service, we argue there is a need to interpret these through the lens o…
Digital wildfires: Hyper-Connectivity, Havoc and a Global Ethos to Govern Social Media
The last 5--10 years have seen a massive rise in the popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr etc. These platforms enable users to post and share their own content instantly, meaning that material can be seen by multiple others in a short period of time. The growing use of social media has been accompanied by concerns that these platforms enable the rapid and global spread of harmful content. A report by the World Ec…
Generations of interdisciplinarity in bioinformatics
Bioinformatics, a specialism propelled into relevance by the Human Genome Project and the subsequent -omic turn in the life science, is an interdisciplinary field of research. Qualitative work on the disciplinary identities of bioinformaticians has revealed the tensions involved in work in this "borderland." As part of our ongoing work on the emergence of bioinformatics, between 2010 and 2011, we conducted a survey of United Kingdom-based academi…
Crime Sensing with Big Data: The Affordances and Limitations of using Open Source Communications to Estimate Crime Patterns
This paper critically examines the affordances and limitations of big data for the study of crime and disorder. We hypothesize that disorder-related posts on Twitter are associated with actual police crime rates. Our results provide evidence that naturally occurring social media data may provide an alternative information source on the crime problem. This paper adds to the emerging field of computational criminology and big data in four ways: (1)…
Guardians Upon High: An Application of Routine Activities Theory to Online Identity Theft in Europe at the Country and Individual Level
Online fraud is the most prevalent acquisitive crime in Europe. This study applies routine activities theory to a subset of online fraud, online identity theft, by exploring country-level mechanisms, in addition to individual determinants via a multi-level analysis of Eurobarometer survey data. This paper adds to the theory of cybercrime and policy debates by: (1) showing that country physical guardianship (e.g. cyber security strategy) moderates…
Researching online populations: The Use of Online Focus Groups for Social Research
The survivability of 'traditional' methods within computer-mediated settings is dependent upon their capacity to be utilized and adapted to the technology that mediates human interaction online. This article addresses the established focus group method and evaluates its success in online applications, using as examples two quite different research projects. The first, drawn from research into the employment experiences of inflammatory bowel disea…
Towards an Ethical Framework for Publishing Twitter Data in Social Research: Taking into Account Users' Views, Online Context and Algorithmic Estimation
New and emerging forms of data, including posts harvested from social media sites such as Twitter, have become part of the sociologist's data diet. In particular, some researchers see an advantage in the perceived 'public' nature of Twitter posts, representing them in publications without seeking informed consent. While such practice may not be at odds with Twitter's terms of service, we argue there is a need to interpret these through the lens o…
Digital social research, social media and the sociological imagination: Surrogacy, augmentation and re-orientation
Technological innovation in digital communications, epitomised in the shift from the informational web (Web1.0) to the interactional web (Web2.0), provokes new opportunities and challenges for social research. Web2.0 technologies, particularly the new social media (e.g. social networking, blogging and micro-blogging) as well as the increased accessibility of the World Wide Web through highly portable and prevalent devices like smart phones, table…
Characters to Victory: Using Twitter to predict the UK 2015 General Election
Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination: A collaborative response
In this paper, we reflect on the disciplinary contours of contemporary sociology, and social science more generally, in the age of ‘big and broad’ social data. Our aim is to suggest how sociology and social sciences may respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by this ‘data deluge’ in ways that are innovative yet sensitive to the social and ethical life of data and methods. We begin by reviewing relevant contemporary methodological d…
Cyberhate on Social Media in the aftermath of Woolwich: A Case Study in Computational Criminology and Big Data
This paper presents the first criminological analysis of an online social reaction to a crime event of national significance, in particular the detection and propagation of cyberhate on social media following a terrorist attack. We take the Woolwich, London terrorist attack in 2013 as our event of interest and draw on Cohen’s process of warning, impact, inventory and reaction to delineate a sequence of incidents that come to constitute a series o…
Policing cyber-neighbourhoods: Tension monitoring and social media networks
We propose that late modern policing practices, that rely on neighbourhood intelligence, the monitoring of tensions, surveillance and policing by accommodation, need to be augmented in light of emerging ‘cyber-neighbourhoods’, namely social media networks. The 2011 riots in England were the first to evidence the widespread use of social media platforms to organise and respond to disorder. The police were ill-equipped to make use of the intelligen…
Tweeting the terror: Modelling the social media reaction to the Woolwich terrorist attack
Little is currently known about the factors that promote the propagation of information in online social networks following terrorist events. In this paper we took the case of the terrorist event in Woolwich, London in 2013 and built models to predict information flow size and survival using data derived from the popular social networking site Twitter. We define information flows as the propagation over time of information posted to Twitter via t…
Knowing the Tweeters: Deriving Sociologically Relevant Demographics from Twitter
A perennial criticism regarding the use of social media in social science research is the lack of demographic information associated with naturally occurring mediated data such as that produced by Twitter. However the fact that demographics information is not explicit does not mean that it is not implicitly present. Utilising the Cardiff Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) this paper suggests various techniques for establishing or estimating…
Avatar watching: Participant Observation in Graphical Online Environments
Increasingly, social science researchers are turning to the internet to study forms of 'virtual' culture. In tandem there has been a degree of trepidation and innovation in the application of research methodology to the online arena. As its focus this article takes the application of participant observation to the virtual field. Drawing upon narratives elicited from community members of an online graphical social space, methodological questions a…
Linking Twitter and Survey Data: The Impact of Survey Mode and Demographics on Consent Rates Across Three UK Studies
In light of issues such as increasing unit nonresponse in surveys, several studies argue that social media sources such as Twitter can be used as a viable alternative. However, there are also a number of shortcomings with Twitter data such as questions about its representativeness of the wider population and the inability to validate whose data you are collecting. A useful way forward could be to combine survey and Twitter data to supplement and …
Twenty years on: Lesbian, gay and bisexual police officers' experiences of workplace discrimination in England and Wales
Twenty years ago Mark Burke's pioneering research into homosexuality and policing evidenced widespread prejudice and hostility toward lesbian, gay and bisexual police officers in nine forces across England and Wales. These serving officers were felt to represent the most serious kind of contamination and threat to the integrity of the British Police Service by their heterosexual colleagues. Twenty years on this research, which represents one of t…
Policing diversity in the digital age: Maintaining order in virtual communities
Members of `terrestrial' communities are migrating in ever-increasing numbers to a new `Third Space' that manifests outside traditional geographical physical boundaries. This online space consists of purely social relations where interaction and community are performed at-a-distance. The diversifying populations of these virtual villages, towns and cities now constitute very real communities. Online non-gaming spaces such as Ebay, Active Worlds a…
Under the Corporate Radar: Examining Insider Business Cybercrime Victimization through an Application of Routine Activities Theory
Cybercrime is recognized as one of the top threats to UK economic security. On a daily basis, the computer networks of businesses suffer security breaches. A less explored dimension of this problem is cybercrimes committed by insiders. This paper provides a criminological analysis of corporate insider victimization. It begins by presenting reviews of insider criminal threats and routine activities theory as applied to cybercrime. Analysis of the …
Guardians Upon High: An Application of Routine Activities Theory to Online Identity Theft in Europe at the Country and Individual Level
Online fraud is the most prevalent acquisitive crime in Europe. This study applies routine activities theory to a subset of online fraud, online identity theft, by exploring country-level mechanisms, in addition to individual determinants via a multi-level analysis of Eurobarometer survey data. This paper adds to the theory of cybercrime and policy debates by: (1) showing that country physical guardianship (e.g. cyber security strategy) moderates…
Hate Crime Victimization in Wales: Psychological and Physical Impacts Across Seven Hate Crime Victim Types
This paper presents findings from the All Wales Hate Crime Project. Most hate crime research has focused on discrete victim types in isolation. For the first time, internationally, this paper examines the psychological and physical impacts of hate crime across seven victim types drawing on quantitative and qualitative data. It contributes to the hate crime debate in two significant ways: (1) it provides the first look at the problem in Wales and …
Policing cybercrime: Networked and social media technologies and the challenges for policing
Cybercrime is now regarded as a major threat to society, yet common understandings of the change are developing slowly. This book explores the challenges to policing created by the increased professionalism of criminals and (separately) the new forms of deviance brought by social network media.This book was originally published as a speci
Hate in the Machine: Anti-Black and Anti-Muslim Social Media Posts as Predictors of Offline Racially and Religiously Aggravated Crime
National governments now recognize online hate speech as a pernicious social problem. In the wake of political votes and terror attacks, hate incidents online and offline are known to peak in tandem. This article examines whether an association exists between both forms of hate, independent of ‘trigger’ events. Using Computational Criminology that draws on data science methods, we link police crime, census and Twitter data to establish a temporal…
Policing and Cybersociety: The Maturation of Regulation within an Online Community
This article maps the maturation of regulation within an online social setting known as “Cyberworlds”. It provides an empirical example of online regulation at a “grassroots” level, adding to the wider debate of Internet governance. Detailed online observations and narratives elicited from over sixty online community members via a “virtual” focus group show the existence of a range of regulatory modes in operation. Online community members descri…
Linking Survey and Twitter Data: Informed Consent, Disclosure, Security, and Archiving
Linked survey and Twitter data present an unprecedented opportunity for social scientific analysis, but the ethical implications for such work are complex-requiring a deeper understanding of the nature and composition of Twitter data to fully appreciate the risks of disclosure and harm to participants. In this article, we draw on our experience of three recent linked data studies, briefly discussing the background research on data linkage and the…
Problems and Prospects with Policing the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Community in Wales
Using data from a survey of 354 lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people living in Wales, we tested two models that included demographic characteristics (sex, age, children, disability, income, employment status), Wales‐related variables (Welsh as first language, geographic region) and LGB‐related variables (currently in same‐sex relationship, participates in LGB events, visibility of sexual orientation, physical victimization as a result of sexual…
Special issue: Introduction
Crime Sensing with Big Data: The Affordances and Limitations of using Open Source Communications to Estimate Crime Patterns
This paper critically examines the affordances and limitations of big data for the study of crime and disorder. We hypothesize that disorder-related posts on Twitter are associated with actual police crime rates. Our results provide evidence that naturally occurring social media data may provide an alternative information source on the crime problem. This paper adds to the emerging field of computational criminology and big data in four ways: (1)…
The Effect of the Brexit Vote on the Variation in Race and Religious Hate Crimes in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
This paper examines possible mechanisms behind the spike in racially or religiously-aggravated (RR) offences after the Brexit vote. It adds to the current literature in five significant ways: (1) it provides the first Brexit-related RR hate crime comparison between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; (2) it reports on results from a national-level panel model that adds to the debate in the literature on whether pro-leave or pro-rema…
Fear of Economic Cybercrime Across Europe: A Multilevel Application of Routine Activity Theory
Despite the increasing prevalence of cybercrime and its study by criminologists, very little research has examined the extent, nature, and impact of fear of cybercrime. In this study, we conducted a multilevel analysis of the 2018 Eurobarometer Cybersecurity Survey to test the applicability of routine activities theory on fear of economic cybercrime. We contribute to the literature by demonstrating that: (1) fear of economic cybercrime varies acr…
A stimulation program for low birth weight infants
A stimulation program for low birth weight infants. S Scarr-Salapatek, and M L WilliamsCopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.62.5.662 Published Online: October 07, 2011
Fashioned Intimacies: Maoriland and Colonial Modernity
Problems and Prospects with Policing the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Community in Wales
Using data from a survey of 354 lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people living in Wales, we tested two models that included demographic characteristics (sex, age, children, disability, income, employment status), Wales‐related variables (Welsh as first language, geographic region) and LGB‐related variables (currently in same‐sex relationship, participates in LGB events, visibility of sexual orientation, physical victimization as a result of sexual…
Notional Defined Contribution Accounts: Neoliberal Ideology and the Political Economy of Pension Reform
Notional defined contribution (NDC) accounts represent a new model for social security reform that so far has been adopted in seven countries. While NDC schemes remain public, they call for the individual accounts favored by neoliberal policy analysts. NDC schemes would address many of the demographic and fiscal problems threatening pension systems but, depending on the country, could do so in a way that puts low-paid workers and women at greater…
Researching online populations: The Use of Online Focus Groups for Social Research
The survivability of 'traditional' methods within computer-mediated settings is dependent upon their capacity to be utilized and adapted to the technology that mediates human interaction online. This article addresses the established focus group method and evaluates its success in online applications, using as examples two quite different research projects. The first, drawn from research into the employment experiences of inflammatory bowel disea…
Virtually Criminal
Amidst the sensationalist claims about the dangers of the Internet, Virtually Criminal provides an empirically grounded criminological analysis of deviance and regulation within an online community. It integrates theory and empiricism to forge an explanation of cybercrime whilst offering new insights into online regulation. One of the first studies to further our understanding of the causes of cyber deviance, crime and its control, this groundbre…
Ethnography and Data Re-Use: Issues of Context and Hypertext
This paper seeks to open up debate around context and the re-analysis of stored qualitative data. How to ensure that subsequent users of deposited datasets can appreciate and be guided by the context of the original study? The paper introduces the idea of hypertext as one way of facilitating this. We discuss how ‘context’ might be thought through in particular relation to ethnography, where it is frequently difficult to distinguish between data a…
Policing diversity in the digital age: Maintaining order in virtual communities
Members of `terrestrial' communities are migrating in ever-increasing numbers to a new `Third Space' that manifests outside traditional geographical physical boundaries. This online space consists of purely social relations where interaction and community are performed at-a-distance. The diversifying populations of these virtual villages, towns and cities now constitute very real communities. Online non-gaming spaces such as Ebay, Active Worlds a…
Policing and Cybersociety: The Maturation of Regulation within an Online Community
This article maps the maturation of regulation within an online social setting known as “Cyberworlds”. It provides an empirical example of online regulation at a “grassroots” level, adding to the wider debate of Internet governance. Detailed online observations and narratives elicited from over sixty online community members via a “virtual” focus group show the existence of a range of regulatory modes in operation. Online community members descri…
Avatar watching: Participant Observation in Graphical Online Environments
Increasingly, social science researchers are turning to the internet to study forms of 'virtual' culture. In tandem there has been a degree of trepidation and innovation in the application of research methodology to the online arena. As its focus this article takes the application of participant observation to the virtual field. Drawing upon narratives elicited from community members of an online graphical social space, methodological questions a…
Digital social research, social media and the sociological imagination: Surrogacy, augmentation and re-orientation
Technological innovation in digital communications, epitomised in the shift from the informational web (Web1.0) to the interactional web (Web2.0), provokes new opportunities and challenges for social research. Web2.0 technologies, particularly the new social media (e.g. social networking, blogging and micro-blogging) as well as the increased accessibility of the World Wide Web through highly portable and prevalent devices like smart phones, table…
Twenty years on: Lesbian, gay and bisexual police officers' experiences of workplace discrimination in England and Wales
Twenty years ago Mark Burke's pioneering research into homosexuality and policing evidenced widespread prejudice and hostility toward lesbian, gay and bisexual police officers in nine forces across England and Wales. These serving officers were felt to represent the most serious kind of contamination and threat to the integrity of the British Police Service by their heterosexual colleagues. Twenty years on this research, which represents one of t…
Policing cybercrime: Networked and social media technologies and the challenges for policing
Cybercrime is now regarded as a major threat to society, yet common understandings of the change are developing slowly. This book explores the challenges to policing created by the increased professionalism of criminals and (separately) the new forms of deviance brought by social network media.This book was originally published as a speci
Policing cyber-neighbourhoods: Tension monitoring and social media networks
We propose that late modern policing practices, that rely on neighbourhood intelligence, the monitoring of tensions, surveillance and policing by accommodation, need to be augmented in light of emerging ‘cyber-neighbourhoods’, namely social media networks. The 2011 riots in England were the first to evidence the widespread use of social media platforms to organise and respond to disorder. The police were ill-equipped to make use of the intelligen…
Special issue: Introduction
Knowing the Tweeters: Deriving Sociologically Relevant Demographics from Twitter
A perennial criticism regarding the use of social media in social science research is the lack of demographic information associated with naturally occurring mediated data such as that produced by Twitter. However the fact that demographics information is not explicit does not mean that it is not implicitly present. Utilising the Cardiff Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) this paper suggests various techniques for establishing or estimating…
Hate Crime Victimization in Wales: Psychological and Physical Impacts Across Seven Hate Crime Victim Types
This paper presents findings from the All Wales Hate Crime Project. Most hate crime research has focused on discrete victim types in isolation. For the first time, internationally, this paper examines the psychological and physical impacts of hate crime across seven victim types drawing on quantitative and qualitative data. It contributes to the hate crime debate in two significant ways: (1) it provides the first look at the problem in Wales and …
Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination: A collaborative response
In this paper, we reflect on the disciplinary contours of contemporary sociology, and social science more generally, in the age of ‘big and broad’ social data. Our aim is to suggest how sociology and social sciences may respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by this ‘data deluge’ in ways that are innovative yet sensitive to the social and ethical life of data and methods. We begin by reviewing relevant contemporary methodological d…
Tweeting the terror: Modelling the social media reaction to the Woolwich terrorist attack
Little is currently known about the factors that promote the propagation of information in online social networks following terrorist events. In this paper we took the case of the terrorist event in Woolwich, London in 2013 and built models to predict information flow size and survival using data derived from the popular social networking site Twitter. We define information flows as the propagation over time of information posted to Twitter via t…
Who Tweets? Deriving the Demographic Characteristics of Age, Occupation and Social Class from Twitter User Meta-Data
This paper specifies, designs and critically evaluates two tools for the automated identification of demographic data (age, occupation and social class) from the profile descriptions of Twitter users in the United Kingdom (UK). Meta-data data routinely collected through the Collaborative Social Media Observatory (COSMOS: http://www.cosmosproject.net/) relating to UK Twitter users is matched with the occupational lookup tables between job and soci…
Cyber Hate Speech on Twitter: An Application of Machine Classification and Statistical Modeling for Policy and Decision Making
The use of “Big Data” in policy and decision making is a current topic of debate. The 2013 murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich, London, UK led to an extensive public reaction on social media, providing the opportunity to study the spread of online hate speech (cyber hate) on Twitter. Human annotated Twitter data was collected in the immediate aftermath of Rigby's murder to train and test a supervised machine learning text classifier that dist…
Indeterminate sovereignty and the rule of law: A descriptive analysis of changes to parliament’s use of language
Digital wildfires: Hyper-Connectivity, Havoc and a Global Ethos to Govern Social Media
The last 5--10 years have seen a massive rise in the popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr etc. These platforms enable users to post and share their own content instantly, meaning that material can be seen by multiple others in a short period of time. The growing use of social media has been accompanied by concerns that these platforms enable the rapid and global spread of harmful content. A report by the World Ec…
Generations of interdisciplinarity in bioinformatics
Bioinformatics, a specialism propelled into relevance by the Human Genome Project and the subsequent -omic turn in the life science, is an interdisciplinary field of research. Qualitative work on the disciplinary identities of bioinformaticians has revealed the tensions involved in work in this "borderland." As part of our ongoing work on the emergence of bioinformatics, between 2010 and 2011, we conducted a survey of United Kingdom-based academi…
Crime Sensing with Big Data: The Affordances and Limitations of using Open Source Communications to Estimate Crime Patterns
This paper critically examines the affordances and limitations of big data for the study of crime and disorder. We hypothesize that disorder-related posts on Twitter are associated with actual police crime rates. Our results provide evidence that naturally occurring social media data may provide an alternative information source on the crime problem. This paper adds to the emerging field of computational criminology and big data in four ways: (1)…
Sociology (31 works) · Computer Science (30 works) · Political science (26 works) · Law (19 works) · Social media (19 works) · World Wide Web (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Criminology (13 works) · Social Media and Politics (12 works) · Internet privacy (11 works)