Currently browsing author

Leslie Carr

I am a Professor of Web Science ** at the University of Southampton. ** What's one of those? It means I study the impact of the web on society — the way in which the global communications infrastructure changes our personal, social and economic landscape. How does the Web threaten our privacy, the quality of our relationships, our intellectual property, our creative industries and even our high streets? At the same time, what new opportunities does it open up for new kinds of industries and new kinds of sociability? With my colleagues and students in the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton and with our partners from industry and government, I am trying to understand how to identify the future opportunities of the digital economy whilst trying to navigate its current challenges, to maximise the social and economic benefit that the online world offers.

Twitter Homepage RSS

Tutor Interview Series: Susan Halford and Les Carr – What Next?

Briefly tell me what your session is going to be about. Week 6 will take a brief look back over the MOOC and consider 'what next'? It will be clear by now that the Web is evolving, and it will not remain as it is today. In this week we will consider where the Web might be in another 25 years, looking at emergent trends such as the internet of things, linked data and the semantic web. Continue reading →

Tutor Interview Series: Susan Halford and Les Carr – Introduction to Web Science

Briefly tell me what your session is going to be about - Week 1 introduces Web Science - the study of the World Wide Web. The session will trace the origins and evolution of the Web, exploring the social, economic, political, cultural and - last but not least - technical processes that together come to shape the largest human information system in history. Continue reading →

Web Science: A Reading List

Web Science is a new subject, and although we have debated the opportunity for being first to write a textbook with an introductory, interdisciplinary perspective, neither we nor any of the other Web Science researchers across the world have so far taken the plunge. There is the fabulously comprehensive (and reassuringly expensive) Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies but it's hardly an introductory text. Continue reading →

First thoughts on web science

The Web is an amazing piece of technology that has changed the way that we exchange information, buy groceries, chat to friends, keep up to date with news and watch films. As my colleague Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt says "It's changed the way we make love and war - and it ain't finished yet". So it's no surprise that scientists want to study it and its impact on society, to see if we can understand it better, to see if we can learn to avoid the problems that it opens up (e.g. Continue reading →