27,797 research outputs found
A Web-based System for Observing and Analyzing Computer Mediated Communications
Tracking data of user's activities resulting from Computer Mediated
Communication (CMC) tools (forum, chat, etc.) is often carried out in an ad-hoc
manner, which either confines the reusability of data in different purposes or
makes data exploitation difficult. Our research works are biased toward
methodological challenges involved in designing and developing a generic system
for tracking user's activities while interacting with asynchronous
communication tools like discussion forums. We present in this paper, an
approach for building a Web-based system for observing and analyzing user
activity on any type of discussion forums
Encounters on the social web: Everyday life and emotions online
Encounters also happen online nowadays and, yes, they are still difficult to describe, even though it is sometimes easier to observe them-and obtain data about them- than in the past. The internet is crucially 'shaping the interactions people have with one another' (Johns 2010: 499). With the recent explosion and popularity of Web 2.0 services and the social web, such as Facebook (FB), Twitter, and various other types of social media, internet users now have at their disposal an unprecedented collection of tools to interact with others. These modes of online sociability allow users to pursue social encounters with variable levels of involvement, attention, and activity (Papacharissi and Mendelson 2010). For many of us it is now difficult to imagine our social relationships without access to the internet. The social web plays an important role in relationships among internet users (Boyd 2006), with the expression, management and experience of emotions being key to the maintenance of these relationships
Visualization in cyber-geography: reconsidering cartography's concept of visualization in current usercentric cybergeographic cosmologies
This article discusses some epistemological problems of a semiotic and cybernetic
character in two current scientific cosmologies in the study of geographic
information systems (GIS) with special reference to the concept of visualization in
modern cartography.
Setting off from Michael Batty’s prolegomena for a virtual geography and Michael
Goodchild’s “Human-Computer-Reality-Interaction” as the field of a new media
convergence and networking of GIS-computation of geo-data, the paper outlines
preliminarily a common field of study, namely that of cybernetic geography, or just
“cyber-geography) owing to the principal similarities with second order cybernetics.
Relating these geographical cosmologies to some of Science’s dominant, historical
perceptions of the exploring and appropriating of Nature as an “inventory of
knowledge”, the article seeks to identify some basic ontological and epistemological
dimensions of cybernetic geography and visualization in modern cartography.
The points made is that a generalized notion of visualization understood as the use of
maps, or more precisely as cybergeographic GIS-thinking seems necessary as an
epistemological as well as a methodological prerequisite to scientific knowledge in
cybergeography. Moreover do these generalized concept seem to lead to a
displacement of the positions traditionally held by the scientist and lay-man citizen,
that is not only in respect of the perception of the matter studied, i.e. the field of
geography, but also of the manner in which the scientist informs the lay-man citizen
in the course of action in the public participation in decision making; a displacement
that seems to lead to a more critical, or perhaps even quasi-scientific approach as
concerns the lay-man user
Blog-based online journals for English As A Second Language learners
The research on the use of blogs as online journals was carried out with a group of twenty five Form Four students in a secondary school in Kuantan, Pahang. The aim of the research is to find out the effects of blogs as a tool in developing writing in English as A Second Language. The instruments include questionnaire, semi-structured interviews and analysis of the blogs content. The research covered students’ perspectives of blogs as the medium for online journals, the effectiveness of blogs as a tool to assist students’ writing skill and to what extent blogs could help students to enhance their writing skills. From the findings, it is discovered that there is a positive impact on the development of students’ writing throughout the research as gained through the instruments. From the research, the students claimed that blogs is an interesting medium for them to write their journals as compared to writing in their log books. Blogs also could help them developed their writing skill in English Language; and through the various features in blogs, students were able to write more effectively
The mechanics of trust: a framework for research and design
With an increasing number of technologies supporting transactions over distance and replacing traditional forms of interaction, designing for trust in mediated interactions has become a key concern for researchers in human computer interaction (HCI). While much of this research focuses on increasing users’ trust, we present a framework that shifts the perspective towards factors that support trustworthy behavior. In a second step, we analyze how the presence of these factors can be signalled. We argue that it is essential to take a systemic perspective for enabling well-placed trust and trustworthy behavior in the long term. For our analysis we draw on relevant research from sociology, economics, and psychology, as well as HCI. We identify contextual properties (motivation based on temporal, social, and institutional embeddedness) and the actor's intrinsic properties (ability, and motivation based on internalized norms and benevolence) that form the basis of trustworthy behavior. Our analysis provides a frame of reference for the design of studies on trust in technology-mediated interactions, as well as a guide for identifying trust requirements in design processes. We demonstrate the application of the framework in three scenarios: call centre interactions, B2C e-commerce, and voice-enabled on-line gaming
Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data
Use of socially generated "big data" to access information about collective
states of the minds in human societies has become a new paradigm in the
emerging field of computational social science. A natural application of this
would be the prediction of the society's reaction to a new product in the sense
of popularity and adoption rate. However, bridging the gap between "real time
monitoring" and "early predicting" remains a big challenge. Here we report on
an endeavor to build a minimalistic predictive model for the financial success
of movies based on collective activity data of online users. We show that the
popularity of a movie can be predicted much before its release by measuring and
analyzing the activity level of editors and viewers of the corresponding entry
to the movie in Wikipedia, the well-known online encyclopedia.Comment: 13 pages, Including Supporting Information, 7 Figures, Download the
dataset from: http://wwm.phy.bme.hu/SupplementaryDataS1.zi
A Review of the "Digital Turn" in the New Literacy Studies
Digital communication has transformed literacy practices and assumed great importance in the functioning of workplace, recreational, and community contexts. This article reviews a decade of empirical work of the New Literacy Studies, identifying the shift toward research of digital literacy applications. The article engages with the central theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic challenges in the tradition of New Literacy Studies, while highlighting the distinctive trends in the digital strand. It identifies common patterns across new literacy practices through cross-comparisons of ethnographic research in digital media environments. It examines ways in which this research is taking into account power and pedagogy in normative contexts of literacy learning using the new media. Recommendations are given to strengthen the links between New Literacy Studies research and literacy curriculum, assessment, and accountability in the 21st century
Deconvolving mutational patterns of poliovirus outbreaks reveals its intrinsic fitness landscape.
Vaccination has essentially eradicated poliovirus. Yet, its mutation rate is higher than that of viruses like HIV, for which no effective vaccine exists. To investigate this, we infer a fitness model for the poliovirus viral protein 1 (vp1), which successfully predicts in vitro fitness measurements. This is achieved by first developing a probabilistic model for the prevalence of vp1 sequences that enables us to isolate and remove data that are subject to strong vaccine-derived biases. The intrinsic fitness constraints derived for vp1, a capsid protein subject to antibody responses, are compared with those of analogous HIV proteins. We find that vp1 evolution is subject to tighter constraints, limiting its ability to evade vaccine-induced immune responses. Our analysis also indicates that circulating poliovirus strains in unimmunized populations serve as a reservoir that can seed outbreaks in spatio-temporally localized sub-optimally immunized populations
- …