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Web Science

Why Internet Piracy Research is Unclear

Piracy rate statistics are murky at best. Industry involvement in collection makes numbers hard to interpret and bias likely. But research on Pirates themselves remains murkier still. Law and Property Though we use the term “intellectual property”, copyrights were never really described in a ‘property’ context. The inception of copyright (Statute of Anne, 1710) granted “monopoly” and “responsibility” but not “ownership” outside of a contractual context. Continue reading →

What is Web Science and its Study

Web Science - beyond the Web as an everyday tool Web Science is an emerging interdisciplinary field or subject. Quite a few of us use the web on a daily basis and take many of its features for granted. Thinking critically about it as a piece of technology that shapes and is shaped by social forces allows us to understand what differentiates the web from other communication technologies. Doing this however is not easy. 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 →