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What is web science?, Page 3

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 →