by Stuart Macdonald, Elizabeth Pearson, Ryan Scrivens, and Joe Whittaker This article summarises a recent paper published in Lara Frumkin, John Morrison, and Andrew Silke’s A Research Agenda for Terrorism Studies (Elgar). Historically one of the greatest challenges for the study of extreme or terrorist groups was access. Today, online spaces offer researchers a level…
machine learning
This is the fourth and final in a series of four original Blog posts; the first is HERE the second is HERE the third is HERE. [Ed.] By Matti Pohjonen The previous cluster of methods looked at in the blog post series included methods developed to extrapolate insight from the content produced online and on social…
This is the third in a series of four original Blog posts; the first is HERE and the second is HERE. [Ed.] By Matti Pohjonen The previous blog posts looked at the costs and benefits of using network analysis to identify extremist networks. It suggested that one challenge in such network analysis-based research approaches is…
This is the second in a series of four original Blog posts; the first is HERE. [Ed.] By Matti Pohjonen The first blog post in this series explored how researchers interested in computational methods can assess the trade-off between the validity of the methods used and the potentially adverse social costs of using them in…
This series of four blog posts builds on discussions had during the ‘Inside the Black Box of “Terrorism Informatics”: A Cost-benefit Analysis of Using Computational Techniques in Violent Online Political Extremism Research’ workshop organised by VOX-Pol in 2018. [Ed.] By Matti Pohjonen One of the most pressing challenges in research on violent online extremism is…
By Raheel Nawaz The UK government – with considerable pomp and ceremony – recently unveiled a new online tool for detection and removal of jihadi videos boasting a high success rate. It has been claimed by the Home Office that the machine learning tool, which the government developed with ASI Data Science, can identify 94%…
By Ryan Scrivens There’s been a shift in recent years in how researchers investigate online communities, whether it’s the study of how extremists communicate through social media or analysis of users connecting through online health forums. In particular, scholars who do this work are shifting from manual identification of specific online content to algorithmic techniques…
