{"id":127,"date":"2023-09-22T11:33:10","date_gmt":"2023-09-22T11:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/?p=127"},"modified":"2024-01-18T16:51:46","modified_gmt":"2024-01-18T16:51:46","slug":"conference-report-ic2s2-the-9th-international-conference-on-computational-social-science-copenhagen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/2023\/09\/22\/conference-report-ic2s2-the-9th-international-conference-on-computational-social-science-copenhagen\/","title":{"rendered":"Conference Report: IC2S2 \u2013 The 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science, Copenhagen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By G. Mason<\/p>\n

The 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science was held in Copenhagen in July and saw 728 delegates from across the world enjoy a day of tutorials and then a further three packed days of key notes and shorter talks.\u00a0 This was complimented by a huge range of posters which were exhibited each day.<\/p>\n

Keynote \u2013 <\/i><\/b>Jevin<\/i><\/b> West, University of Washington (US) Information Science:<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Jevin kicked off the conference with two questions asking: \u201cCan we muster enough elective energy to take action for ourselves in politics, health etc\u201d.\u00a0 and \u201chow do we solve a problem like misinformation?\u201d\u00a0 His answer to both was: basically \u201cyou don\u2019t, but you can do things better\u201d.<\/p>\n

One myth he wanted to debunk<\/i><\/b>: anti vaccine equals anti-science.\u00a0 This is not true, people who are anti vaxers look to science to inform their views too.\u00a0 The public like to think that they can do their own research, but they often depend on the \u201ccredentials of experts\u201d, whether they are scientists or lay experts.\u00a0 He then asked \u201cdo journals still matter as credential makers?\u201d\u00a0 The conclusion was that \u201cyes they do\u201d, however, highly regarded professionals are less likely to publish in journals as they do not see the need to be \u201cpublished\u201d as their research is readily available and \u201cout there\u201d.<\/p>\n

Perceived expertise: <\/i><\/b>what are the prevalence and relative influence of perceived\/lay\u00a0 experts who spread Covid-19 vaccine misinformation?\u00a0 Data & methods – 4.3m tweets and 5.5 m users that included vaccine discussion during April 2021 were examined and manually labelled.\u00a0 It was found that anti-vaccine supporters shared lots of perceived expert knowledge, tweets, likes etc.\u00a0 Perceived experts were more influential in the community than real experts e.g. health professionals.\u00a0 Perceived experts had a sizeable presence in the anti-vaccine community and are seen as important.<\/p>\n

Perceived expertise to perceived consensus around Covid-19:<\/i><\/b> Papers were being discussed in both communities \u2013 science based and anti-mask wearing. How papers were referenced had an effect, they could be split into epidemiology and physical experiments in the science community.\u00a0 In the online community it was separated by mask and non-mask wearing.\u00a0 The conclusion was that perceived expertise leads to a perceived consensus.<\/p>\n

Much laughter was heard when he explained Brandolinis Law, from Wikipedia the definition is: \u201cEasy to create BS, hard to clean it up!\u201d\u00a0 When asked, ChatGPT produced a definition of Brandolinis law that was complete BS; the irony of it!<\/p>\n

For the Future:<\/i><\/b> Jevin stated that we need to find out how to measure the prevalence of and exposure to misinformation.\u00a0 We need to teach science from an early age with social science, future generations will then understand the bridge between science and social science;\u00a0 and we need to save the planet from social media so we do not destroy ourselves!\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (Anecdote on the next page . Ed)<\/i><\/p>\n

Take away main message <\/i><\/b>– \u201cWe need critical thinking skills more than ever\u201d.<\/p>\n

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Please note that conference reports reflect the opinions and views of the presenters<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By G. Mason The 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science was held in Copenhagen in July and saw 728 delegates from across the world enjoy a day of tutorials… Continue reading Conference Report: IC2S2 \u2013 The 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science, Copenhagen<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1669,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conference-report","without-featured-image"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1669"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":128,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions\/128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/caiss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}