Qi Zhang

Qi Zhang

Interested in particle matter generated by thermal runaway of lithium-ion batteries and its toxicity

Posts by Collection

portfolio

publications

talks

The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools

Published in International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, 2009

A short paper showing the recent explosive growth of automated editors (or bots) in Wikipedia, which have taken on many new tasks in administrative spaces.

Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices

Published in Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2011

We detail the methodology of ‘trace ethnography’, which combines the richness of participant-observation with the wealth of data in logs so as to reconstruct patterns and practices of users in distributed sociotechnical systems

Actor-Network Theory

Published in Social Aspects of Information Systems course, 2013

An introduction to Actor Network Theory for students in the Masters of Information Management and Systems (MIMS) course

Size Matters: How Big Data Changes Everything

Published in Bangkok Scientifique, 2013

A talk introducing various concepts around large-scale data analysis to a general audience, including spam detection and governmental survellance.

Robotic Ethics and Opportunities

Published in Robots and New Media, 2014

A panel discussing the ethical and political issues that are raised with autonomous robots and software bots.

Governing the Commons

Published in History of Information, 2014

A lecture on the history of Wikipedia, in the broader context of the history of reference works.

Moderating Online Conversation Spaces

Published in Social Aspects of Information Systems course, 2015

An overview of how various online platforms moderate content, discussing issues that link up to the theories discussed in the Social Aspects of Information Systems class.

Peer Production and Wikipedia

Published in Social Aspects of Information Systems course, 2015

An overview of Wikipedia and other peer production platforms, discussing issues that link up to the theories discussed in the Social Aspects of Information Systems class.

The Bot Multiple: Unpacking the Materialities of Automated Software Agents

Published in Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S), 2015

I examine the roles that automated software agents (or bots) play in the governance and moderation of Wikipedia, Twitter, and reddit – three online platforms that differently uphold a related set of commitments to ‘open’ and ‘public’ online participation.

Why bots are my favorite contribution to Wikipedia

Published in Wikipedia 15th Anniversary Birthday Bash, 2016

A short talk to open up an event celebrating the 15th anniversary of Wikipedia. The prompt we were given was "Why [x] is my favorite contribution to Wikipedia."

Scraping Wikipedia Data

Published in The Hacker Within, BIDS, 2016

A tutorial (with Jupyter notebooks) about how to use APIs to query structured data from Wikipedia articles and the Wikidata project.

Community Sustainability in Wikipedia: A Review of Research and Initiatives

Published in PyData SF, 2016

Wikipedia relies on one of the world’s largest open collaboration communities. Since 2001, the community has grown substantially and faced many challenges. This presentation reviews research and initiatives around community sustainability in Wikipedia that are relevant for many open source projects, including issues of newcomer retention, governance, automated moderation, and marginalized groups.

“The Wisdom of Bots:” An ethnographic study of the delegation of governance work to information infrastructures in Wikipedia

Published in Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S), 2016

Wikipedians rely on software agents to govern the ‘anyone can edit’ encyclopedia project, in the absence of more formal and traditional organizational structures. Lessons from Wikipedia’s bots speak to debates about how algorithms are being delegated governance work in sites of cultural production.

Demystifying Algorithmic Processes: The Case of Wikipedia

Published in The 21st Annual BCLT/BTLJ Symposium, 2017

This talk is part of a panel session titled “Demystifying Algorithmic Processes: What is the role of algorithms in online platforms, what can they do and not do, and how should they be governed?”

Jupyter and the Changing Rituals around Computation

Published in JupyterCon, 2017

We (Stuart Geiger, Brittany Fiore-Gartland, and Charlotte Cabasse-Mazel) share ethnographic findings made observing and working with Jupyter notebooks, focusing on how people use Jupyter to create and deliver computational narratives in particular local contexts, like classrooms, hackathons, research collaborations, and more.

Computational Ethnography and the Ethnography of Computation

Published in Berkeley Institute for Data Science, 2017

Ethnography is traditionally a qualitative and inductive methodology – with its origins in cultural anthropology – that is now widely used to holistically investigate people’s lived experiences in and across cultures. In this talk, I define and discuss two ways of thinking about the role of ethnographic methods around computation, then discuss how my research relates to both.

Are the bots really fighting? Behind the scenes of a reproducible replication

Published in UC-Berkeley Department of Statistics: Reproducible and Collaborative Data Science, 2017

A guest lecture for Fernando Perez’s STAT 159/259 course on Reproducible and Collaborative Data Science, in which I discuss issues of open science and reproducibility around our recent paper Operationalizing conflict and cooperation between automated software agents in Wikipedia: A replication and expansion of ‘Even Good Bots Fight’

“But it wouldn’t be an encyclopedia; it would be a wiki”: The changing imagined affordances of wikis, 1995-2002

Published in 2017 Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers, 2017

This paper examines the early history of “anyone can edit” wiki software – originally developed in 1995, six years before Wikipedia’s origin. While today, the idea of a wiki is associated with large-scale, massively-distributed encyclopedic knowledge production, this was not always the case. Articles on pre-Wikipedia wikis were often closer to a Joycean stream of consciousness than Wikipedia’s Britannica-inspired texts that speak in single voice, and the underlying wiki platform lacked many of the affordances that are now taken for granted in wiki platforms. In fact, the creator of the first wiki advised Wikipedia’s co-founders that the goals of creating a general-purpose encyclopedia and a wiki were inherently contradictory.

The Humanity of Artificial Intelligence

Published in Bay Area Science Festival, 2017

Today, “artificial intelligence” seems to be everywhere – in our phones, vacuums, hospitals, and inboxes – but it can be hard to separate science fiction from science fact. Many discussions about AI imagine a fully autonomous superintelligence that designs itself with little to no human intervention, making decisions in ways that humans cannot possibly understand. Yet the work of designing, developing, engineering, training, and testing such systems requires a massive amount of human labor, which is typically erased when such systems are released as products. In this talk, I give a human-centered, behind-the-scenes introduction to machine learning, illustrating the creative, interpretive, and often messy work humans do to make autonomous agents work. Understanding the humanity behind artificial intelligence is important if we want to think constructively about issues of bias, fairness, accountability, and transparency in AI.

Computational Ethnography and the Ethnography of Computation: The Case for Context

Published in School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018

Ethnography is traditionally a qualitative and inductive methodology that is now widely used to holistically investigate people’s lived experiences in and across cultures. In this talk, I define and discuss two ways of thinking about the role of ethnographic methods around computation, then discuss how my research relates to both.

Computational Ethnography and the Ethnography of Computation: The Case for Context

Published in School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018

Ethnography is traditionally a qualitative and inductive methodology that is now widely used to holistically investigate people’s lived experiences in and across cultures. In this talk, I define and discuss two ways of thinking about the role of ethnographic methods around computation, then discuss how my research relates to both.

Computational Ethnography and the Ethnography of Computation: The Case for Context

Published in College of Information Studies, University of Maryland at College Park, 2018

Ethnography is traditionally a qualitative and inductive methodology that is now widely used to holistically investigate people’s lived experiences in and across cultures. In this talk, I define and discuss two ways of thinking about the role of ethnographic methods around computation, then discuss how my research relates to both.

Publics: Witnessing and Measuring

Published in UC-Berkeley: Human Contexts and Ethics of Data course, 2018

A guest lecture for Cathryn Carson and Margo Boenig-Liptsin’s course on Human Contexts and Ethics of Data (HIST 182C, STS 100C), focusing on how various publics generate, analyze, and interpret data.

The Human Contexts of Data: Infrastructures, Institutions, and Interpretations

Published in University of Manchester, Data Science Institute, 2018

In this talk, I discuss the role of qualitative and ethnographic methods in relation to computer, information, and data science. These holistic, reflexive, and meta-level approaches to studying data and computation in context help us better understand how to both support and practice data analytics at various scales.

Computational Ethnography and the Ethnography of Computation: The Case for Context

Published in IT University of Copenhagen, ETHOSlab, 2018

Ethnography is traditionally a qualitative and inductive methodology that is now widely used to holistically investigate people’s lived experiences in and across cultures. In this talk, I define and discuss two ways of thinking about the role of ethnographic methods around computation, then discuss how my research relates to both.

Key Values: What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Open Science’

Published in Open Science Symposium, Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2018

Openness in science is hard to disagree with as an abstract principle, but what exactly do we mean when we call for science to be made open – or more open than before? In this talk, I introduce and unpack the many different goals, strategies, products, values, and assumptions of the broad open science movement.

The Human Contexts of Computation and Data: Infrastructures, Institutions, and Interpretations

Published in University of California at San Diego, The Design Lab, 2018

In this talk, I discuss the role of qualitative and ethnographic methods in relation to computer, information, and data science. These holistic, reflexive, and meta-level approaches to studying data and computation in context help us better understand how to both support and practice data analytics at various scales.

Knowing User Populations at Scale: From the Science of the State to Platform Governmentality

Published in 2018 Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, 2018

How can institutions that own and operate large-scale social media platforms come to know “their users” at scale? In this talk, I discuss ways of knowing user populations at scale, drawing on Foucault’s account of governmentality, particularly the role of statistics in the formation of the modern nation state.

The Types, Roles, and Practices of Documentation in Data Analytics Open Source Software Libraries: A Collaborative Ethnography of Documentation Work

Published in 2018 European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 2018

Data analytics increasingly relies on open source software (OSS) libraries that extend scripted languages like python and R. Software documentation for these libraries is crucial for people across all experience levels, but documentation work raises many challenges, particularly in open source communities. In this collaboration between ethnographers and data scientists, we discuss the types, roles, practices, and motivations around documentation in data analytics OSS libraries.

Designing and Using Data Science Ethically

Published in Machine Learning and User Experience San Francisco (MLUXSF), 2018

With the rise of Machine Learning and AI to solve human-focused needs, how do we design and use data science ethically to help empower and support people?

Ethics and Policy Implications of Big Data

Published in University of California, San Diego, 2019

Panelist on the ‘Knowledge and Culture’ panel at this workshop on algorithms and big data, sponsored by a number of different departments across UCSD.

teaching

CCTP-783: Qualitative Data Analysis (Fall 2009)

Published:

Graduate course, Teaching assistant
CCTP-783 is a core methods course for the CCT program, one of multiple classes M.A. students can take to satisfy their core methods requirement.

INFO-103: History of Information (Spring 2014)

Published:

Undergraduate course, Teaching assistant
INFO 103 is an elective undergraduate course in the UC-Berkeley School of Information, crosslisted with History, Media Studies, and Cognitive Science.

Software Carpentry Instructor

Published:

Software Carpentry is a global non-profit organization that provides free, short workshops on scientific computing and data science. I have been a certified instructor with SWC since May 2016.

Peer Learning Group Coordinator

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Since Fall 2016, I have been the lead coordinator for The Hacker Within, a weekly peer learning group for scientific computing and data science, which is run out of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science.