The Politics of Systems

In April 2026, the Association of Internet Researchers organized an online roundtable on methods (if you are a member, you can watch it back here) with Annette N.

EDIT (24/08/2019): Netvizz is no longer publicly accessible and will very probably not come back in the future.

Social media platforms have become really huge.

When it comes to digital methods, one of the basic conundrums one encounters is the ambivalence between platform and practice.

When it comes to social media, YouTube is maybe the most understudied platform considering it’s enormous popularity in the context of popular culture, politics, and commerce.

EDIT (23/01/2015): Changed some text to make clear that you can still run Netvizz by grabbing the source code, registering a new app, and running it in developer mode.

In 1961, Information Pioneer Mortimer Taube (famous for popularizing mechanized coordinate indexing) wrote a book called Computers and Common Sense.

It’s a hot day in Amsterdam and writing is going slow.

After about two years of thinking and coding, my colleague Erik Borra and myself are happy to announce that the Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit (DMI-TCAT) is finally available for download.

Facebook is a nasty thing to study.