Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

The discussions on the ethics and power relationship in big data social science research methodology (Crawford, 2014; Puschmann & Burgess, 2013, Schroeder, 2014; Tufekci, 2014) have raised issues on data access, ownership, control, and processing capacity. Based on recent Chinese Internet Research and Wikipedia Research, Liao will put forward some arguments and suggestions on the core question how big data industry of online expressions and attention may propel societies towards authoritarianism, or the opposite, democracy. Since big data analysis is often large-scale data analysis searching for useful and/or meaningful reductions, big data companies of online expressions and attention often scale up and then reduce online expressions to construct both social and personal meaningful information and communication spaces, thereby changing the power dynamics of online expressions and attention. They therefore pose major challenges and opportunities for scaling up democratic expression, association, assembly practices that tend to be small-scale. Liao will also suggest a few strategic directions for Taiwan in the context of both Chinese-speaking Internet and East Asia to build an economy of information more open to civic intervention and social inclusion.

Dr Liao is a recent DPhil graduate in Information, Communication and the Social Sciences, from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. With more than twelve years of combined information science, media/communication and open source/open data working experience, his research focus has been on user-generated data, social network analysis, Web analytics (webometrics), Chinese Internet Research and Wikipedia research. By comparing Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia, with their respective editorial processes, content features, and users’ reception (including search engine results pages and microblog posts), his DPhil thesis examines how cultural political boundaries are drawn in the process of creating, linking, and searching content on the Chinese Internet. Liao worked as a Yahoo! fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.) and as a doctoral fellow at the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica (Taiwan). He holds a master’s degree in computer science, a master of arts degree in journalism, along with degrees in electronic engineering, foreign languages and literature.