Yesterday I attended and presented at the APSA pre-conference “Machine Politics, Politics of the Machine.” Some highlights follow.

Bill D. Herman presented on web graph analysis using Issue Crawler to view the network of web sites related to copyright policy issues. He was able to show pretty clearly how those advocating less restrictive copyright have a much more central place online than they have in offline venues such as congressional testimony or mainstream print media, which is obvious, but it’s very important to have valid numbers to back that up.

I was also pleased with how Eduardo Neiva integrated his talk on Marx’s theory of technology and game theory as an alternative paradigm, with my much more applied type of presentation on using a wiki in the classroom.

The technology setup was excellent - a difficult and under appreciated task. In the first group of presentations I attended one presenter joined us via Skype - something that shouldn’t be difficult but could have easily gone wrong without good setup. I had two movie clips in my presentation and I needed to use the internet, but all the equipment I needed was already in the room and it wasn’t a problem at all.