arXiv subjects

David Kernot

Publications and source records attributed to David Kernot.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Ethical conundrums: Hacked data in the study of far-right violent extremism

Ethical conduct in digital research is full of grey areas. Disciplinary, institutional and individual norms and conventions developed to support research are challenged, often leaving scholars with a sense of unease or lack of clarity. The growing availability of hacked data is one area. Discussions and debates around the use of these datasets in research are extremely limited. Reviews of the history, culture, or morality of the act of hacking are topics that have attracted some scholarly attention. However, how to undertake research with this data is less examined and provides an opportunity for the generation of reflexive ethical practice. This article presents a case-study outlining the ethical debates that arose when considering the use of hacked data to examine online far-right violent extremism. It argues that under certain circumstances, researchers can do ethical research with hacked data. However, to do so we must proactively and continually engage deeply with ethical quandaries and dilemmas.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

Practical Guidelines for Ideology Detection Pipelines and Psychosocial Applications

Online ideology detection is crucial for downstream tasks, like countering ideologically motivated violent extremism and modeling opinion dynamics. However, two significant issues arise in practitioners' deployment. Firstly, gold-standard training data is prohibitively labor-intensive to collect and has limited reusability beyond its collection context (i.e., time, location, and platform). Secondly, to circumvent expense, researchers employ ideological signals (such as hashtags shared). Unfortunately, these signals' annotation requirements and context transferability are largely unknown, and the bias they induce remains unquantified. This study provides guidelines for practitioners requiring real-time detection of left, right, and extreme ideologies in large-scale online settings. We propose a framework for pipeline constructions, describing ideology signals by their associated labor and context transferability. We evaluate many constructions, quantifying the bias associated with signals and describing a pipeline that outperforms state-of-the-art methods ($0.95$ AUC ROC). We showcase the capabilities of our pipeline on five datasets containing more than 1.12 million users. We set out to investigate whether the findings in the psychosocial literature, developed for the offline environment, apply to the online setting. We evaluate at scale several psychosocial hypotheses that delineate ideologies concerning morality, grievance, nationalism, and dichotomous thinking. We find that right-wing ideologies use more vice-moral language, have more grievance-filled language, exhibit increased black-and-white thinking patterns, and have a greater association with national flags. This research empowers practitioners with guidelines for ideology detection, and case studies for its application, fostering a safer and better understood digital landscape.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2018

Did William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd Write Edward III?

William Shakespeare is believed to be a significant author in the anonymous play, The Reign of King Edward III, published in 1596. However, recently, Thomas Kyd, has been suggested as the primary author. Using a neurolinguistics approach to authorship identification we use a four-feature technique, RPAS, to convert the 19 scenes in Edward III into a multi-dimensional vector. Three complementary analytical techniques are applied to cluster the data and reduce single technique bias before an alternate method, seriation, is used to measure the distances between clusters and test the strength of the connections. We find the multivariate techniques robust and are able to allocate up to 14 scenes to Thomas Kyd, and further question if scenes long believed to be Shakespeare's are not his.

cs.CL↗