BigBang

BigBang

BigBang is a tool for scientific analysis of Internet standards development and Internet governance communities.

With BigBang you can download mailinglist and analyze them using statistical, discursive, and network analysis.

You can use BigBang to research Internet governance communities, but it has also been used to analyze open source communities. You can even use BigBang in class or in a seminar to teach the basic of Jupyter notebooks.

We have included lists of potential mailinglists for you to scrape (e.g. IETF, ICANN, RIPE, W3C), and a lot of Jupyter notebooks to analyze the mailinglists.

To start analyzing right away, have a look at the readme file. If you get stuck, send an email to our user list and/or have a look at the tutorial:

Community

If you are interested in participating in BigBang development or would like support from the core development team, please subscribe to the bigbang-dev mailing list and let us know your suggestions, questions, requests and comments. A development chatroom is also available.

In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to make participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone.

News

BigBang version 1.0 is about to be released, some functionality you can now find in BigBang

• Fully updated to Python 3
• Mailman, W3C, IETF, RIPE, and ICANN mailing list crawling
• Implemented IETF entity resolution
• Integrated Glasgow IPL ietfdata tool to interact with the API of the IETF Datatracker
• .mbox parsing and data cleaning, including invalid date detection
• Preprocessing functionality for viewing archival data as daily activity and interaction networks
• Entity resolution with Levenshtein edit distance
• Email threading
• Analysis examples in Jupyter Notebooks demonstrating network analysis and cohort visualization.

Publications

These academic publications use BigBang as part of their methods:

• Nanni, Riccardo. “Digital Sovereignty and Internet Standards: Normative Implications of Public-Private Relations among Chinese Stakeholders in the Internet Engineering Task Force.” Information, Communication & Society 0, no. 0 (October 1, 2022): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2129270.
• Becker, Christoph., ten Oever, Niels, and Riccardo Nanni. 2022 “The standardisation of lawful interception technologies in the 3GPP: interrogating 5G and surveillance amid US-China competition“, TPRC2022, Washington DC https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4167105
• Benthall, Sebastian. 2015. “Testing Generative Models of Online Collaboration with BigBang.” In , 182–89. https://conference.scipy.org/proceedings/scipy2015/sebastian_benthall.html.
• Doty, Nick. 2015. “Reviewing for Privacy in Internet and Web Standard-Setting.” In Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 2015 IEEE, 185–192. IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7163224/
• Milan, Stefania, and Niels ten Oever. 2017. “Coding and Encoding Rights in Internet Infrastructure.” Internet Policy Review 6 (1)
• ten Oever, Niels. 2018. “Productive Contestation, Civil Society, and Global Governance: Human Rights as a Boundary Object in ICANN.” Policy & Internet, June. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.172.
• ten Oever, Niels. 2021. “‘This Is Not How We Imagined It’ - Technological Affordances, Economic Drivers and the Internet Architecture Imaginary.” New Media & Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444820929320
• ten Oever, N., Milan, S., & Beraldo, D. (2020). Studying Discourse in Internet Governance through Mailing-list Analysis. In D. L. Cogburn, L. DeNardis, N. S. Levinson, & F. Musiani (Eds.), Research Methods in Internet Governance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/4936/chapter/625914/Studying-Discourse-in-Internet-Governance-through

License

MIT, see LICENSE for its text. This license may be changed at any time according to the principles of the project Governance.

BigBang is maintained by sbenthall Niels ten Oever Christoph Becker and Nick Doty