Tadamasa KIMURA
Short Biography

Tadamasa Kimura is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Rikkyo University, a.k.a. St. Paul University in Japan. Before coming to Rikkyo in 2015, he was Professor at Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo and Head of Department of Cultural Anthropology, where he received his B.A. and M.A. He received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the State University of New York at Buffalo. As a graduate student, he was specialized in cognitive anthropology and cognitive semantics. After he returned to Japan from Buffalo in 1993, he was fascinated with the Internet and its socio-cultural implications to be explored. Since then, he has been engaged in Internet Studies based on anthropological and ethnographic research interests and methodology.

Specifically, he is known for his empirical and critical examination of “Digital Divide” (What is Digital Divide?: Toward Consensus Community. Iwanami Shoten, 2001, which won Telecom Social Science Publication Award of Telecommunications Advancement Foundation and Excellent Publications Award of Japan Association for Social Informatics) and “Digital Natives” (The Age of Digital Natives: Why Do They Tweet and Not Send Mail? Heibonsha, 2012). He has been involved in national and local governmental policy-making process as a member of a number of committees related to ICT and society issues.

In 2010s, when we have witnessed global explosion of smartphones and SNSs and enormous amount of social data has been produced and made available, he has been working on how to combine and integrate qualitative and quantitative data. He tackles this methodical challenge, while he is involved in extensive and intensive research on the formation, structure and socio-cultural effects of online public opinion (Net Yoron in Japanese). In collaboration with IT companies, he has made at once macroscopic and detailed analysis of millions of comments posted on news sites, SNSs, BBSs, blogs, forums and so on and their posters, deploying social network analysis, data mining and text mining. His most recent publication, Hybrid Ethnography. Shinyo-sha, 2018, is a painstaking result of such intellectual endeavors. He is also Deputy Director of Japanese research team of WIP, World Internet Project, and Principal Investigator of LDASU, Log Data Analysis of Smartphone Use, a research project collaborated with Fuller Inc. and MURC (Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting).