Tobias Escher at the OII

About a good month ago, Tory MP Dominic Raab hit the news as he was demanding removal of his parliamentary email address from a campaigning website (this even made it into the headlines in Germany). The story so far The story itself is quickly told: Basically, an MP says “please remove my parliamentary e-mail address [...]

Honour where honour is due: Our colleague Max Loubser got his PhD from Oxford just last week and this is really just to say: Congratulations! Well done! So  proud. And just that little bit envious Read more about Max and his work.

It is no secret that I’m a great admirer of mySociety’s work and I even try to contribute a little bit to it myself through some of the research I do for them but today I would just like to share briefly an example of how much difference it can make to research whether or [...]

The silence around this blog has largely been due to my efforts of making headway with my doctoral thesis. As a quick update, the title and abstract follow below: The Internet and the Representativeness of Political Participation A comparison of citizen-initiated contacts with Members of Parliament in Germany and the UK This thesis explores the [...]

It is the time of year again where we (as doctoral students of the Oxford Internet Institute) have the sudden urge to get out from our dark, only LCD screen-lit cellars of the institute into the real world. To this end we have been organising an OII DPhil trip for the second time now whose [...]

Now it is official: The Summer Doctoral Programme 2008 of the Oxford Internet Internet Institute is over. Two weeks of intense seminars have clearly left everyone involved longing for some time to rest. But just as the many many recent experiences are slowly starting to settle, at least for me a powerful impression is sinking [...]

I have been very lucky to be on this year’s Summer Doctoral Programme – a two-week doctoral workshop run by the OII for a number of years now with great success. This year it is in partnership with the Web Science Research Initiative by the likes of Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall and Danny Weitzner to [...]

Last Wednesday we had another one of our joint PhD seminars, this time with our colleagues from the Department of Media and Communication from the University of Leicester. Three PhD students came over together with their supervisor Gillian Youngs to present their very interesting and timely research on issues surrounding digital technology in China and [...]

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the Doctoral Colloquium of the 3rd Annual e-Social Science conference in Ann Arbour (Michigan). Within the vast array of topics covered in the presentations (as one expression of the diversity of approaches to e-Social Science) I saw some pretty interesting research so here a selection: Anna Barford [...]

Some time ago I started working on a paper that is analysing how blogs and citizen journalism might change the traditional agenda setting process. The agenda setting theory states in a nutshell that the media might not tell people WHAT TO THINK but rather WHAT TO THINK ABOUT. One of the hopes inscribed into blogs [...]