The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) is a multi-disciplinary institute based at the University of Oxford, England, and housed in buildings owned by Balliol College, Oxford. It is devoted to the study of the societal implications of the Internet, with the aim of shaping research, policy and practice in the UK, Europe and around the world. It is the main UK member of the World Internet Project.
The Oxford Internet Institute was initiated by Derek Wyatt then MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey and Andrew Graham, Master of Balliol College, and launched in 2001 by an initial endowment of £10 million from The Shirley Foundation together with £5 million of public funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The first director of the Institute was Professor William Dutton. Professor Helen Margetts was appointed the second director of the Institute on 1 October 2011.[1]
Since 2006 the OII has run its own doctoral programme entitled "Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences."[2] In October 2009 it launched a one-year MSc called "The Social Science of the Internet." [3]
The OII is located at the southern end of St Giles' in central Oxford near the Martyrs' Memorial. It celebrated its first decade in 2011.
In November 2011, the Guardian Data Blog published the graphs resulting from a mapping of "geotagged" articles (being those given cartographic coordinates—such as this one) within six various language-versions of Wikipedia: English; Arabic; Egyptian Arabic; French; Hebrew and Persian.[4] Mark Graham is the OIII-based author of the study.