News/Research

Alum Stuart Geiger Published in Big Data & Society

19 Oct, 2017

Alum Stuart Geiger Published in Big Data & Society

Stuart Geiger is an ethnographer and post-doctoral scholar at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at UC-Berkeley. He has had many published pieces regarding his research and data collection.

A recent work titled "Beyond opening up the black box: Investigating the role of algorithmic systems in Wikipedian organizational culture" was published in Big Data & Society.

Geiger explains in the abstract: "I report from an ethnography of infrastructure in Wikipedia to discuss an often understudied aspect of this topic: the local, contextual, learned expertise involved in participating in a highly automated social–technical environment. Today, the organizational culture of Wikipedia is deeply intertwined with various data-driven algorithmic systems, which Wikipedians rely on to help manage and govern the ‘‘anyone can edit’’ encyclopedia at a massive scale. These bots, scripts, tools, plugins, and dashboards make Wikipedia more efficient for those who know how to work with them, but like all organizational culture, newcomers must learn them if they want to fully participate."

The article focuses on organizational culture, automation, bots, peer production, online communities, and ethnography, and is also a part of special theme on Algorithms in Culture.

Read his full work here.