User evaluation outside the lab: the trial of Físchlár-News

A user study of Físchlár-News system was conducted in Spring 2004 with 16 users, each user using the system for a 1-month period. Físchlár-News is an experimental online news archive that incorporates various automatic content-based video indexing techniques and a news story recommender algorithm to process and index the daily 9 o’clock broadcast news from TV and allows its users to browse, search, be recommended, and play news stories on a conventional web browser. Pre and post-trial questionnaires, interaction logging and incident diary methods collected both qualitative and quantitative usage data during the trial period. While the details of the findings from this evaluation is reported elsewhere, in this paper we report the details of the methodology taken and our experience of conducting this evaluation

Enriching ontological user profiles with tagging history for multi-domain recommendations

Many advanced recommendation frameworks employ ontologies of various complexities to model individuals and items, providing a mechanism for the expression of user interests and the representation of item attributes. As a result, complex matching techniques can be applied to support individuals in the discovery of items according to explicit and implicit user preferences. Recently, the rapid adoption of Web2.0, and the proliferation of social networking sites, has resulted in more and more users providing an increasing amount of information about themselves that could be exploited for recommendation purposes. However, the unification of personal information with ontologies using the contemporary knowledge representation methods often associated with Web2.0 applications, such as community tagging, is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we propose a method for the unification of tags with ontologies by grounding tags to a shared representation in the form of Wordnet and Wikipedia. We incorporate individuals' tagging history into their ontological profiles by matching tags with ontology concepts. This approach is preliminary evaluated by extending an existing news recommendation system with user tagging histories harvested from popular social networking sites

Broadcasting to the masses or building communities: Polish political parties online communication during the 2011 election

The professionalisation of political communication is an evolutionary process (Lilleker & Negrine, 2002), a process that adapts to trends in communication in order to better engage and persuade the public. One of the most dramatic developments in communication has been the move towards social communication via the Internet. It is argued to affect every area of public communication, from commercial advertising and public relations to education (Macnamara, 2010). It is no longer sufficient to have an online presence; we are now in an age of i-branding; with the ‘i’ standing for interactive. Yet, trends in online political electoral campaigning over recent years indicate a shallow adoption of Web 2.0 tools, features and platforms; limited interactivity; and managed co-production. The Internet is now embedded as a campaigning tool however, largely, the technologies are adapted to the norms of political communication rather than technologies impacting upon internal organizational structures, party relationships to members and supporters, or the content and style of their communication. We examine these themes, and develop them through a focus on the targeting and networking strategies of political parties, in more detail in the context of the Polish parliamentary election of 2011. Through a sophisticated content analysis and coding scheme our paper examines the extent to which parties use features that are designed to inform, engage, mobilise or allow interaction, which audiences they seek to communicate with and how these fit communication strategies. Comparing these findings with maps built from webcrawler analysis we build a picture of the strategies of the parties and the extent to which this links to short and long term political goals. This paper firstly develops our rationale for studying party and candidate use of the Internet during elections within the Polish context. Secondly we develop a conceptual framework which contrasts the politics as usual thesis (Margolis & Resnick, 2000) with arguments surrounding the social shaping of technologies (Lievrouw, 2006) and the impact on organisational adoption of communication technologies and post-Obama trends in Internet usage (Lilleker & Jackson, 2011) and posit that, despite the threats from an interactive strategy (Stromer-Galley, 2000) one would be expected within the context of a networked society (Van Dyjk, 2006). Following an overview of our methodology and innovative analysis strategy, we present our data which focuses on three key elements. Firstly we focus on the extent to which party and candidate websites inform, engage, mobilise or permit interaction (Lilleker et al, 2011). Secondly we assess the extent to which websites attract different visitor groups (Lilleker & Jackson, 2011) and build communities (Lilleker & Koc-Michalska, 2012). Thirdly we assess the reach strategies of the websites using Webcrawler technology which analyses the use of hyperlinks and whether parties lock themselves within cyberghettoes (Sunstein, 2007) or attempt to harness the power of the network (Benkler, 2006)

Developing a MovieBrowser for supporting analysis and browsing of movie content

There is a growing awareness of the importance of system evaluation directly with end-users in realistic environments, and as a result some novel applications have been deployed to the real world and evaluated in trial contexts. While this is certainly a desirable trend to relate a technical system to a real user-oriented perspective, most of these efforts do not involve end-user participation right from the start of the development, but only after deploying it. In this paper we describe our research in designing, deploying and assessing the impact of a web-based tool that incorporates multimedia techniques to support movie analysis and browsing for students of film studies. From the very start and throughout the development we utilize methodologies from usability engineering in order to feed in end-user needs and thus tailoring the underlying technical system to those needs. Starting by capturing real users’ current practices and matching them to the available technical elements of the system, we deployed an initial version of our system to University classes for a semester during which we obtained an extensive amount of rich usage data. We describe the process and some of the findings from this trial

Weblog For Teachers And Students

Educators are always looking for interesting and innovative ways in which to improve the communications skills of their students and in communicating with their students. This is even more important when the students are studying online. Weblogs, originally a simple web browser based system for updating websites, have developed into powerful web based content management systems, capable of acting as a platform for learning that can accelerate the development of expertise learner behaviour. There is a trend to utilize the benefits of the e-learning as a mechanism to improve learning performance of campus-based students. Whilst traditional methods, such as face-to-face lectures, tutorials, and mentoring, remain dominant in the educational sector, universities are investing heavily in learning technologies, to facilitate improvements with respect to the quality of learning. This study explores into the role of weblogs in supporting teachers during their teaching practice and the key factors determining their engagement with weblogs. Underlying our study is an integrative approach that puts weblogs alongside with other popular media in use. An online community was intentionally built with weblogs to facilitate reflection and social interaction among dispersed teachers. In parallel, multiple channels of communication were employed for peer interaction of students. Weblogs were perceived as valuable in relieving isolation, documenting their experience, and expressing their personal feelings. This study sustains our conviction that the integrative approach is vital to have a comprehensive picture of interaction among a community. Our study deepens the insights into the distinct benefit of weblogs as educational media and informs the future development of an online community with weblogs. Weblogs provide a chance for students to experience writing in a public space where their work can have real value both for their classmates and for a wider community. This prepares students for a networked world where communication is essential and often social and where writing can have consequences

WEBLOG FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

Educators are always looking for interesting and innovative ways in which to improve the communications skills of their students and in communicating with their students. This is even more important when the students are studying online. Weblogs, originally a simple web browser based system for updating websites, have developed into powerful web based content management systems, capable of acting as a platform for learning that can accelerate the development of expertise learner behaviour. There is a trend to utilize the benefits of the e-learning as a mechanism to improve learning performance of campus-based students. Whilst traditional methods, such as face-to-face lectures, tutorials, and mentoring, remain dominant in the educational sector, universities are investing heavily in learning technologies, to facilitate improvements with respect to the quality of learning. This study explores into the role of weblogs in supporting teachers during their teaching practice and the key factors determining their engagement with weblogs. Underlying our study is an integrative approach that puts weblogs alongside with other popular media in use. An online community was intentionally built with weblogs to facilitate reflection and social interaction among dispersed teachers. In parallel, multiple channels of communication were employed for peer interaction of students. Weblogs were perceived as valuable in relieving isolation, documenting their experience, and expressing their personal feelings. This study sustains our conviction that the integrative approach is vital to have a comprehensive picture of interaction among a community. Our study deepens the insights into the distinct benefit of weblogs as educational media and informs the future development of an online community with weblogs. Weblogs provide a chance for students to experience writing in a public space where their work can have real value both for their classmates and for a wider community. This prepares students for a networked world where communication is essential and often social and where writing can have consequences

An Exploratory Study of COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus with the community. This resulted in 1 500 tweets relating to 1 274 false and 276 partially false claims, respectively. Exploratory analysis of author accounts revealed that the verified twitter handle(including Organisation/celebrity) are also involved in either creating (new tweets) or spreading (retweet) the misinformation. Additionally, we found that false claims propagate faster than partially false claims. Compare to a background corpus of COVID-19 tweets, tweets with misinformation are more often concerned with discrediting other information on social media. Authors use less tentative language and appear to be more driven by concerns of potential harm to others. Our results enable us to suggest gaps in the current scientific coverage of the topic as well as propose actions for authorities and social media users to counter misinformation.Comment: 20 pages, nine figures, four tables. Submitted for peer review, revision

Webometric analysis of departments of librarianship and information science: a follow-up study

This paper reports an analysis of the websites of UK departments of library and information science. Inlink counts of these websites revealed no statistically significant correlation with the quality of the research carried out by these departments, as quantified using departmental grades in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise and citations in Google Scholar to publications submitted for that Exercise. Reasons for this lack of correlation include: difficulties in disambiguating departmental websites from larger institutional structures; the relatively small amount of research-related material in departmental websites; and limitations in the ways that current Web search engines process linkages to URLs. It is concluded that departmental-level webometric analyses do not at present provide an appropriate technique for evaluating academic research quality, and, more generally, that standards are needed for the formatting of URLs if inlinks are to become firmly established as a tool for website analysis

A categorisation framework for a feature-level analysis of social network sites

Social media (SM) have enabled new forms of communication, interaction, and connectivity that affect individuals on a personal and professional level. But SM is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of technologies with both distinct and shared capabilities. In addition, while there is an agreed-upon definition of these systems, a comprehensive list of features and their affordances does not exist. Hence, this study sought to create a feature-level categorisation framework for analysing the use of social network sites (SNS). This categorisation was undertaken using the concept of affordances, which framed the high-level characteristics as well as distinct SNS features, to better understand the divergence in SNS capabilities and inform the study of different types of SM. The framework was created from an analysis of the literature on SNS affordances and a system investigation into three types of SNS (Facebook, YouTube and Twitter). The comprehensive review was undertaken using two families of SNS affordances (social and content affordances) identified in the literature to categorise and compare the platforms. The study reveals a diverse collection of features which afford behaviour in six areas of activity: profile building, social connectivity, social interactivity, content discovery, content sharing and content aggregation. Finally, the framework provides a basis from which the usage and management of SM within organisations can be more rigorously investigated

Weblog and short text feature extraction and impact on categorisation

The characterisation and categorisation of weblogs and other short texts has become an important research theme in the areas of topic/trend detection, and pattern recognition, amongst others. The value of analysing and characterising short text is to understand and identify the features that can identify and distinguish them, thereby improving input to the classification process. In this research work, we analyse a large number of text features and establish which combinations are useful to discriminate between the different genres of short text. Having identified the most promising features, we then confirm our findings by performing the categorisation task using three approaches: the Gaussian and SVM classifiers and the K-means clustering algorithm. Several hundred combinations of features were analysed in order to identify the best combinations and the results confirmed the observations made. The novel aspect of our work is the detection of the best combination of individual metrics which are identified as potential features to be used for the categorisation process.The research work of the third author is partially funded by the WIQ-EI (IRSES grant n. 269180) and DIANA APPLICATIONS (TIN2012-38603-C02-01), and done in the framework of the VLC/Campus Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Perez Tellez, F.; Cardiff, J.; Rosso, P.; Pinto Avendaño, DE. (2014). Weblog and short text feature extraction and impact on categorisation. Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems. 27(5):2529-2544. https://doi.org/10.3233/IFS-141227S2529254427