I just attended the ICWSM conference in Boulder, CO and found something that I didn’t expect.

We saw plenty of excitement and frenetic energy from presenters and audience members alike: expected.

We heard the clickity clack of the 90% laptop-enabled audience twittering, blogging, tagging and journaling, often right in the middle of presentations: expected.

We saw lurking industry types (sheesh, we WERE lurking industry types) studying the crowd, stalking stars, networking: expected.

What I saw that I didn’t expect, but probably should have, was serious scientific rigor. We watched presentations covering automated lexicon generation for fusion approaches to sentiment analysis, gender prediction algorithms, lemmatized size predictors for unknown corpi, hand built crawler engines, all complete with precision and recall numbers, standard deviations, and control groups! WHOA!

Perhaps I’m naive, and other marketing and larger social network spaces enjoy a similar level of rigorous study. I think because this medium is uniquely accessible, knowable at an atomic level, that the resultant findings and analysis had so much more confirmable, testable, scientific weight. Also, there was such a synergy between the social/psychological/relationship/authority/human dynamics side of this space with the computer science/machine learning/NLP/RegEX/Ajax/Perl/API side of the house. Both were represented, but uniquely both were integrated, working hand in hand to leverage the knowability of the space to get down to real new knowledge.

I felt like the social scientists and the computer scientists knew that they had created this new petri dish, this new ecosystem in which life was now flourishing, but that they had uniquely done so in such a way that the information about that ecosystem was so much more accessible that whole new levels of study were even possible.

The interesting thing was that given this vast improvement in access to data, in access to the raw materials for analysis, all anyone at the conference wanted was MORE. Give ‘em an inch…

More soon

By Miles Ward