Arbitrary

Fifteen years ago, Carrie Brownstein, one half of feminist punk band Sleater-Kinney, was getting her hair cut when rowdy guitars started blaring through the salon’s speakers. What is this song, she thought, and who is this woman screaming? It took her a further 15 seconds to realise that the roars belonged to her bandmate, Corin Tucker. Their sound was scrappier than Brownstein remembered. The song she’d struggled to recognise? Dig Me Out: a galloping three-minute track that catapulted the band to international acclaim in…

Wow, that was quick. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and took it private in October, I figured we’d have a while before things took a turn. Then, after he laid off about half the company’s employees, that estimate shortened a bit. Now, after last night’s Spaces brouhaha, during which Musk confronted journalists he banned for retweeting links about the ElonJet tracker and then abruptly killed the feature entirely, that timeline has moved up considerably. To be clear: Twitter isn’t going to die…

Photo by Peter Olexa on UnsplashReadings in computational social scienceThis article comments on three papers associated with computational social science research: (1) Do Cascades Recur? (Cheng et al., 2016); (2) Integrating Text and Image: Determining Multimodal Document Intent in Instagram Posts (Kruk et al., 2019); and (3) Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures (Breiman, 2001); these papers focus on (1) recurrence in content sharing on social media (here, Facebook); (2) the use of multimodal data (image–caption pairs)…