Keynote talk at the Web Science Summer School, Singapore, 8 December 2014. Today we see the rise of Social Machines, like Twitter, Wikipedia and Galaxy Zoo—where communities identify and solve their own problems, harnessing commitment, local knowledge and embedded skills, without having to rely on experts or governments. The Social Machines paradigm provides a lens onto the interacting sociotechnical systems of our hybrid digital-physical world, citizen-centric and at scale—emphasising empowerment and sociality in a world of pervasive technology adoption and automation. This talk will present the Social Machines paradigm as an approach to social media analytics and a rethinking of our scholarly practices and knowledge infrastructure.

1. The Social Machines Paradigm
David De Roure

2. Overview
1. Shifts in scholarship
2. Social Machines
3. Knowledge Infrastructure

3. The Big Picture
More people
More machines
Big Data
Big Compute
Conventional
Computation
“Big Social”
Social Networks
e-infrastructure
Online R&D
(Science
2.0)
Social
Machines
@dder

4. Edwards, P. N., et al. (2013) Knowledge Infrastructures: Intellectual Frameworks and
Research Challenges. Ann Arbor: Deep Blue. http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/97552

5. Christine Borgman

6. theODI.org

7. F i r s t

8. http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/science-and-technology-committee/news/report-responsible-use-of-data/

9. New Social Processes
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/series/reading-the-riots

10. www.zooniverse.org

11. Talk
Forum
Scientists
Image
Classification
Citizen Scientists
data reduction

12. http://www.climateprediction.net/ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2455/abstract

13. Digital Music
Collections
Student-sourced
ground truth
Community
Software
Supercomputer
Linked Data
Repositories
23,000 hours of
recorded music
Music Information
Retrieval Community
SALAMI

14. Notifications and automatic re-runs
Autonomic
Curation
Self-repair
New research?
Machines are users too

15. “In it” not “On it”
In it not on it

16. 1. Shifts in scholarship
2. Social Machines
3. Knowledge Infrastructure

17. Social Machines Principles of
Empowerment
Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social
constraint – the very processes from which society
arises. Computers can help if we use them to
create abstract social machines on the Web:
processes in which the people do the creative work
and the machine does the administration... The
stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new
social engines. The ability to create new forms of
social process would be given to the world at large,
and development would be rapid.
1
2
Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999 (pp. 172–175)

18. SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
(EPSRC) under grant number EPJ017728/1 and comprises the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Edinburgh. See sociam.org

19. SOCIAM - Social Machines - will research into pioneering methods
of supporting purposeful human interaction on the World Wide Web,
of the kind exemplified by phenomena such as Wikipedia and Galaxy
Zoo. These collaborations are empowering, as communities identify
and solve their own problems, harnessing their commitment, local
knowledge and embedded skills, without having to rely on remote
experts or governments.
http://sociam.org/

20. “Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all
human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that
built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and
must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—
has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking…
The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose
collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent
male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive
atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase
participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage…”
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/

21. Pip Willcox

23. PRAISE: Performance and pRactice Agents Inspiring Social Education
Mark d’Inverno
http://goldsmiths.musiccircleproject.com/

24. http://socialmachines.media.mit.edu/
Digital networks have radically increased the speed and scope with which individuals
can effect social change, transforming the relationship between people and
institutions. But the impact to date of this transformation has been more disruptive
and ad hoc, as opposed to constructive and systematic. Existing tools and practices
for harnessing the potential of digital networks have failed to sustain a public sphere
where institutions and individuals can come together to understand, learn and act
constructively on societal problems. By building “social machines” that bring system
solutions to such critical global challenges as gender equality and literacy learning,
the Laboratory for Social Machines seeks to contribute to the creation of the next
generation of the public sphere.

25. http://sociam.org/socm2015/

26. Trajectories... distinguished by purpose
Trajectories through Social Machines https://sites.google.com/site/bwebobs13/

27. Kuhn cycle
Normal Science – computer science is a puzzle-solving
activity under our current paradigm, inspired
by great achievements (in the left quadrants).
Successful social machines, like Wikipedia, are the
anomaly. They do not yield to standard techniques
despite attempts to extend those techniques and fit
social machines in as machines. cf Newtonian
mechanics.
We are in the period of crisis, where the failure of established
methods permits us to experiment with new methods to crack the
anomaly. We experiment with social machines as an underpinning
model.
If successful, social machines become the new paradigm and
scientific revolution has occurred. This is evidenced by the papers
and books that train the next generation.

28. 1. Shifts in scholarship
2. Social Machines
3. Knowledge Infrastructure

29. Web as lens
Web as artefact
Web
Observatories
http://www.w3.org/community/webobservatory/

30. A computationally-enabled
sense-making
network of expertise,
data, software,
models and narratives
Iain Buchan

31. Towards interoperable observatories
Technical and social interface
http://www.w3.org/community/webobservatory/

32. The Web
Observatory
Tiropanis, T., Hall, W., Shadbolt, N., De Roure, D., Contractor, N., and Hendler, J.
The web science observatory. IEEE Intelligent Systems 28, 2 (2013), 100–104.

33. The R Dimensions
Research Objects facilitate research that is
reproducible, repeatable, replicable, reusable,
referenceable, retrievable, reviewable, replayable,
re-interpretable, reprocessable, recomposable,
reconstructable, repurposable, reliable,
respectful, reputable, revealable, recoverable,
restorable, reparable, refreshable?”
@dder 14 April 2014
sci method
access
understand
new use
social
curation
Research
Object
Principles

34. Scholarly
Machines
David De Roure, JCDL 2013 Ecosystem

35. Richard O’Bierne

36. STORYTELLING AS A STETHOSCOPE
FOR SOCIAL MACHINES
1. Sociality through storytelling potential
and realization
Zooniverse is a highly
storified Social Machine
2. Sustainability through reactivity and
interactivity
Facebook doesn’t allow
for improvisation
3. Emergence through collaborative
authorship and mixed authority
Wikipedia assigns
authority rights rigidly
Ségolène Tarte, David De Roure and Pip Willcox, (2014). Working out the plot: the role of stories in social machines
http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/ora:8033

37. social machines
social machines
social machines
Not just machines —try calling them socials

38. 1. Shifts in scholarship beyond the fourth paradigm
– Crowd + Machines, and our automated future
2. Social Machines
– Humans are empowered, creative, subversive, curious
Ludere humanum est*
– A lens, a pattern, … and a new paradigm?
– You are designers of social machines
3. Knowledge Infrastructure
– Sensemaking network of Scholarly Social Machines
– Observatories, Social Objects, r* research
– Don’t forget it is fundamentally social
* Pip Willcox

39. rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org

40. The FORCE2015 Research Communication and
e-Scholarship Conference brings together researchers,
scholars, librarians, archivists, information scientists,
publishers, and research funders in a lively forum – to
broaden awareness of current efforts across disciplines,
but also to define the future through discussions,
challenge projects, demonstrations, and the seeding
of new partnerships and collaborations.

41. Pip Willcox

42. Thanks to Christine Borgman, Iain Buchan, Mark d’Inverno,
Chris Lintott, Richard O’Bierne, Kevin Page, Rob Simpson,
Ségolène Tarte, Pip Willcox; FORCE11, SOCIAM; Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation, EPSRC, ESRC, AHRC.
david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/people/dder
@dder
http://www.slideshare.net/davidderoure/social-machines-paradigm
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk
www.force11.org
sociam.org
EPSRC EP/J017728/1

43. www.oerc.ox.ac.uk
david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
@dder

44. Abstract
Today we see the rise of Social Machines, like Twitter, Wikipedia
and Galaxy Zoo—where communities identify and solve their
own problems, harnessing commitment, local knowledge and
embedded skills, without having to rely on experts or
governments.
The Social Machines paradigm provides a lens onto the
interacting sociotechnical systems of our hybrid digital-physical
world, citizen-centric and at scale—emphasising empowerment
and sociality in a world of pervasive technology adoption and
automation.
This talk will present the Social Machines paradigm as an
approach to social media analytics and a rethinking of our
scholarly practices and knowledge infrastructure.