With our sponsors France Stratégie and MSH Paris-Saclay, we convene an international conference on micro-work in Paris on June 13, 2019, followed by the first INDL (International Network on Digital Labor) workshop on June 14. The event will include a “meet the microworkers” panel on June 13, where workers, platform owners and client companies will take the stage. There will also be presentations of the results of national and international surveys (notably ours, DiPLab) on these emerging forms of work, and discussions with French and international academic and institutional experts.
After Uber, Deliveroo and other on-demand services, micro-work is a new form of labor mediated by digital platforms. Internet and mobile services recruit crowds to perform small, standardized and repetitive tasks on behalf of corporate clients, in return for fees ranging from few cents to few euros. These tasks generally require low skills: taking a picture in a store, recognizing and classifying images, transcribing bits of text, formatting an electronic file… Despite their apparent simplicity, these micro-tasks performed by millions of people around the world, are crucial to create the databases needed to calibrate and “train” artificial intelligence algorithms.
Internationally, Amazon Mechanical Turk is the most widely known micro-work platform. In France and in French-speaking Africa, other platforms are attracting a growing number of workers to supplement or even substitute for their primary income. How widespread is the phenomenon? How to recognize, organize and regulate this new form of work? How, finally, does it relate to traditional forms of employment?
Presentations and discussions are held in French and English, with simultaneous translation.
As part of the upcoming NetSci2018 conference in Paris, I co-organize a satellite event that aims to foster interdisciplinary reflection on how methods from social science can be upscaled to large network structures and on how methods from complex systems can be downscaled to deal with small heterogeneous structures.
The idea is to reconcile two traditions of research that have remained separate so far. Sociology typically handles small but rich networks where a wealth of network attributes results from the complexity of the data collection design. Differences across nodes and edges enable to capture the social processes underlying network structures and their dynamics. Instead, the complex systems tradition handles large but poorly-specified networks. Assuming statistical equivalence of graph entities, a mean field treatment suffices to describe the aggregate properties of the network. Today’s network data-sets contain an unprecedented quantity of relational information within and between all possible levels: individuals, social groups, organizations, and macro entities. Such large and rich network structures expose the implicit limitations of the two above-mentioned approaches: classical sociological methods cannot be upscaled because of their heavy algorithms, and those from complex systems lose track of the multi-faceted nature of social actors, their relationships and their processes.
Our satellite event aims to move forwards, inviting an inter-disciplinary reflection and exploring ways in which these limitations can be overcome.
I co-organize this Satellite to the NETSCI2018 Conference in Paris, 12 June 2018. We are now accepting submissions of proposals for presentations.
Information on the Satellite
In traditional research paradigms, sociology handles small but rich networks where the richness of network attributes is derived from the specific buildup of the data collection process. In the sociological approach, differences among nodes and edges are key to describe network properties and the ensuing dynamical social processes. Instead, the complex systems tradition deals with large but poor networks. Assuming statistical equivalence of graph entities, a mean field treatment serves to describe the aggregate properties of the network. Today’s network datasets contain an unprecedented quantity of relational information at all, and between all, the possible levels: individuals, social groups, political structures, economical actors, etc. We finally deal with large and rich network structures that expose the implicit limitations of the two abovementioned approaches: the traditional methods from social science cannot be upscaled because of their algorithmic complexity and those from complex systems lose track of the complex nature of the actors, their relationships and their processes. This workshop has the aim of developing an interdisciplinary reflection on how methods from social science could be upscaled to large network structures and on how methods from complex systems could be downscaled to deal with small heterogeneous structures.
We are proud that five prominent international scholars are our invited speakers: Camille Roth, SciencesPo Paris; Matthieu Latapy, LIP6UPMC Paris; Alessandro Lomi, ETH Zurich; Fariba Karimi, GESIS Cologne; Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University.
Contributions
We invite abstracts of published or unpublished work for contributed talks to take place at the satellite symposium. We expect a broad range of topics to be covered, across theory, methodology, and application to empirical data, relating to an interdisciplinary reflection on how methods from social science could be upscaled to large network structures and on how methods from complex systems could be downscaled to deal with small heterogeneous structures.
Submissions are required to be at most 650 words long and should include the following information: title of the talk, author(s), affiliation(s), email address(es), name of the presenter, abstract. Papers or submissions longer than 1 page will not be accepted.
Important dates
Abstract submission deadline is March 25, 2018. Notification of acceptance will be no later than April 23, 2018.
All participants and accepted speakers will have to register through the NETSCI2018 website.
With a group of colleagues from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and in Collaboration with OuiShare, we are studying networking at the event. The OuiShare Fest aims, among other things, to bring people together: we want to see how interactions between participants facilitate circulation of ideas and possibly give rise to future collaborations.
Twitter conversations are one way through which participants in an event engage with the programme, comment and discuss about the talks they attend, prolong questions-and-answers sessions. Twitter feeds have become part of the official communication strategy of major events and serve documentation and information purposes, both for attendees and for outsiders. While tweeting is becoming more an more a prerogative of “official” accounts in charge of event communication, it is also a potential tool in the hands of each participant, allowing anyone to join the conversation at least in principe. Earlier, I have discussed how the Twitter discussion networks formed at the OuiShare Fest 2016, a major gathering of the collaborative economy community that took place last May in Paris, were one opportunity to see such mechanisms in place.
Here is a similar analysis, performed after the OuiShareFest Barcelona – the Spanish-language version of the event that I had the chance of attending last week. The size of this event is smaller than its Paris counterpart but nonetheless impressive: I mined 3497 tweets with the official hashtag of the event, #OSfestBCN, mostly written during the two days of the event (my count stopped the day after). Do Twitter #OSfestBCN conversations describe the community?
First, when did people tweet? As often happens, there are more tweets on the first than the second day of the event, and there are more tweets during the first hours of each day, though the difference between morning and afternoon is not dramatic; tweeting declines only at night, when the fest’s activities are suspended. Online activity is not independent of what happens on the ground – quite on the contrary, it follows the timings of physical activity.
Who tweeted most? Obviously the official @OuiShare_es account, who published 630 tweets – nine times as many as the second in the ranking. Those who follow immediately are all individuals, who have between 50-70 tweets each.
Who tweeted with whom? What interests me most are conversations – who interacts with whom. The most explicit way of seeing this with Twitter data is to look at replies: who replied to whom. This corresponds to a small social network of 134 tweeters (the coloured points in the next Figure). Ties among them are represented as lines in the figure, and the size of points depends on the number of their incoming ties, that is, the number of replies received. Beyond the official @OuiShare_es account, several tweeters receive a lot of replies: they are mostly speakers, track leaders, or otherwise important actors in the community.
Now, who tweeted about whom? This is also an important aspect of Twitter conversations. We can capture it with the social network of mentions, associating each tweeter with those they mentioned, and counting the number of times they did so. This will be a larger network (with 2553 mentions) compared to the net of replies, as mentions can be of many types and also include retweets.
The below figure represents the network of mentions. As before, the colored points are tweeters (the larger they, the more often they have been mentioned by others), while lines between them are mentions (the thicker they are, the higher the number of times a user has mentioned another). Colors represent a measure called “modularity”, which identifies clusters of nodes whereby internal connections are stronger than the connections they have with nodes in other clusters; so for example, a purple node is more likely to have mentioned other purple nodes, than blue nodes.
Modularity is computed based only on counts of ties, without considering the nature of their conversations (what the mention is about) ou other qualities of nodes (gender, nationality, language of tweeters, etc.). And yet, it clearly identifies specific sub-communities. The very numerous, central purple nodes are the OuiShare community: connectors, activists, and others close to the organization especially within Spain. The green nodes at the bottom-left are the catalan community, including representatives of local authorities,notably the Barcelona municipality. The blue nodes at the bottom are different actors and groups from other parts of Spain. The few black nodes on the left are the international OuiShare community, and the sparse orange ones at the top are other international actors.
This analysis is part of a larger research project, “Sharing Networks“, led by Antonio A. Casilli and myself, and dedicated to the study of the emergence of communities of values and interest at the OuiShare Fest 2016. Twitter networks will be combined with other data on networking – including informal networking which we are capturing through a (perhaps old-fashioned, but still useful!) survey.
The analyses and visualizations above were done with the package TwitteR in R as well as Gephi.
Twitter conversations are one way through which participants in an event engage with the programme, comment and discuss about the talks they attend, prolong questions-and-answers sessions. Twitter feeds have become part of the official communication strategy of major events and serve documentation and information purposes, both for attendees and for outsiders. While tweeting is becoming more an more a prerogative of “official” accounts in charge of event communication, it is also a potential tool in the hands of each participant, allowing anyone to join the conversation at least in principe. Participants may become aware of each other, perhaps using the opportunity of the event to meet face-to-face, start relationships and even collaborations. A Nesta study insisted on the potential for using social media data to attain a quantitative understanding of events and their impacts on participants’ networks.
The OuiShare Fest 2016, a major gathering of the collaborative economy community that took place last week in Paris, was one opportunity to see such mechanisms in place. Tweeting was easy – with an official hashtag, #OSFEST16, although related hashtags were also widely used. I mined a total of 12440 tweets over the four days of the event. Do Twitter conversations related to the Fest bring to light the emergence of a community? While it’s too early for any deep analysis, some descriptive results can already be shown.
First, when did people tweet? Mostly at the beginning of each day’s programme (9am on the first two days, 2pm on the third day). Tweeting was more intense in the first day and declined over time (Figure 1). The comparatively low participation on the fourth day is due to the fact that the format was different – an open day in French (rather than an international conference in English), whereby local people were free to come and go. Online activity is not independent of what happens on the ground – quite on the contrary, it follows the timings of physical activity.
Figure 1: Tweets over time.
Who tweeted most? Our dataset has a predictable outlier, the official @OuiShareFest Twitter account, who published 727 tweets – twice as many as the second in the ranking. But let’s look at the people who had no obligation to tweet, and still did so: who among them contributed most to documenting the Fest? Figure 2 shows the presence of some other institutional accounts among the top 10, but the most active include a few individual participants. Ironically, one of them was not even physically present at the Fest, and followed the live video streaming from home. In this sense, Twitter served as an interface between event participants and interested people who couldn’t make it to Paris.
Figure 2: Ten most active tweeters (excluding @OuiShareFest).
What was the proportion of tweets, replies and retweets? Original tweets are interesting for their unique content (what are people talking about?), while replies and retweets are interesting because they reveal social interactions – dialogue, endorsement or criticism between users. Figure 3 shows that the number of replies is small compared to tweets and retweets.
Figure 3: Tweets, replies and retweets
Let’s now look closer at the replies. By taking who replied to whom, we can build a social network of conversations between a group of tweeters. It’s a relatively small network of 311 tweeters (the coloured points in Figure 4), with 321 ties among them (the lines in Figure 4). The size of points depends on the number of their incoming ties, that is, the number of replies received: even if the points haven’t been labelled, I am sure you can tell immediately which one represents the official @OuiShareFest account… the usual suspect! But let’s look at the network structure more closely. Some ties are self-loops, that is, people replying to themselves. (Let’s be clear, it’s not a sign of social isolation, but simply a consequence of the 140-character limit imposed on Twitter: self-replies are meant to deliver longer messages). A lot of other participants are involved in just simple dyads or small chains (A replies to B who replies to C, but then C does not reply to A), unconnected to the rest. There is a larger cluster formed around the most replied-to users: here, some closure becomes apparent (A replies to B who replies to C who replies to A) and enables this sub-network to grow.
Figure 4: the network of replies.
Now, my own experience of tweeting at the Fest suggested that tweets were multilingual. Apart from the fourth day, there seemed to be a large number of French-speaking participants. A quick-and-dirty (for now) language detection exercise revealed that roughly 60% of tweets were in English, 25% in French, the rest being split between different languages especially German, Spanish, and Catalan. So, did people reply to each other based on the language of their tweets? It turns out that quite a few tweeters were involved in conversations in multiple languages. Figure 5 is a variant of Figure 4, colouring nodes and ties differently depending on language. A nice mix: interestingly, the central cluster is not monolingual and in fact, is kept together by a few, albeit small, multi-lingual tweeters.
Figure 5: the network of replies, by language.
Let’s turn now to mentions: who are the most mentioned tweeters? Again, I’ll take out of the analysis @OuiShareFest, hugely ahead of anyone else with 832 mentions received. Below, Figure 6 ranks the most mentioned: mostly companies (partners or sponsors of the event such as MAIF), speakers (such as Nathan Schneider, Nilofer Merchant), and key OuiShare personalities (such as Antonin Léonard). Mentions follow the programme of the event, and most mentioned are people and organizations that play a role in shaping it.
Figure 6: Most mentioned tweeters.
Mentions are also a basis to build another social network – of who mentions whom in a tweet. This will be a larger network compared to the net of replies, as mentions can be of many types and also include retweets (which as we saw above, are very numerous here). There are 17248 mentions (some of which are repeated more than once) in the network. They involve 796 users who mention others and are mentioned in turn; 550 users who are mentioned, but do not mention themselves; and 1680 users who mention others, but are not themselves mentioned.
A large network such as this is more difficult to visualize meaningfully, and I had to introduce some simplifications to do so. I have included only pairs in which one had mentioned the other at least twice: this makes a network of 778 nodes with 2222 ties. The color of nodes depends on their modularity class (a group of nodes that are more connected with one another, than with any other nodes in the network) and their size depends on the number of mentions received. You will clearly recognize at the center of the network, the official @OuiShareFest account, which structures the bulk of the conversations. But even intuitively, other actors seem central as well, and their role deserves being examined more thoroghly (in some future, less preliminary analysis).
Figure 7: Network of Twitter mentions
This analysis is part of a larger research project, “Sharing Networks“, led by Antonio A. Casilli and myself, and dedicated to the study of the emergence of communities of values and interest at the OuiShare Fest 2016. Twitter networks will be combined with other data on networking – including informal networking which we are capturing through a (perhaps old-fashioned, but still useful!) survey.
The analyses and visualizations above were done with the packages TwitteR and igraph in R; Figure 7 was produced with Gephi.
Data Big and Small 