Understanding information diversity in the era of repurposable crowdsourced data

Organizations successfully leverage information technology for the acquisition of knowledge for decision-making through information crowdsourcing, which is gathering information from a group of people about a phenomenon of interest to the crowdsourcer. Information crowdsourcing has been used to drive business insight and scientific research, providing crowdsourcers access to information outside their traditional reach. Crowdsourcers seek high-quality data for their information crowdsourcing projects and require contributors who can provide data that meet predetermined requirements. Crowdsourcers recruit contributors with high levels of relevant knowledge or train contributors to ensure the quality of data they collect. However, when crowdsourced data needs to fit more than a single usage scenario because the requirements of the project changed or the data needs to be repurposed for tasks other than the one(s) for which it was initially collected, the ability of contributors to provide diverse data that can meet multiple requirements is also desirable. In this thesis, I investigate how the domain knowledge a contributor possesses affects the diversity and quality of data they report. Using an experiment in which 84 students randomly assigned to three knowledge conditions reported information about artificial stimuli, I found that explicitly trained contributors provided less diverse data than either implicitly trained or untrained contributors. In addition, I looked at the longitudinal effect of knowledge on the diversity of data reported by contributors. Using review data from Amazon.com and organism sighting data from NLNature.com (a citizen science data crowdsourcing platform), I studied the impact of knowledge on the diversity and quality of crowdsourced data. The results show that experience reduced the diversity and usefulness of contributed data. The study provides insights for crowdsourcers in industry and academia on how to manage and utilize their crowds effectively to collect high-quality reusable data

Designing human-centered technologies to mobilize social media data into institutional contexts

Social media platforms have become an established and alternative mechanism for communities to mobilize and exchange information in response to humanitarian or local crises. Due to the richness of experiences accumulated on social media platforms, this content can be valuable for civil and non-profit organizations working to address social and development challenges. At the core of my dissertation is to examine what entails not only analyzing social media data but also the implications of integrating the insights obtained from that analysis into the context of actors and institutions who might act upon those insights, such as civil and non-profit organizations. Using social media data as evidence by institutions to inform their work entails three main challenges —accuracy, representation, and context— due to the nature of social media data. Additionally, using this type of content to inform the design of interventions and technologies that will support the studied communities entails reflecting on how we make sense of data. Within the CSCW and HCI community, there has been a growing focus on using a computational approach to establish metrics and develop tools to analyze and make inferences from social media data. However, by constraining the examination of this type of data through the exclusive use of computational techniques, there is a high risk of neglecting the social, cultural, and temporal context of the data. In response, my fieldwork consisted in following a mixed-methods approach to understanding the underlying situations that force communities to use social media platforms as a means of organization and the implications for non-profit organizations to make social media data actionable to inform their work. Based on the findings of my fieldwork, I designed, deployed, and evaluated a toolkit addressed to practitioners working in civil and non-profit organizations interested in using data from Twitter to identify local capacities, monitor community crises, and develop interventions. The toolkit comprises computational tools that allow searching, collecting, and analyzing data from Twitter. Additionally, the toolkit includes a manual and worksheets that guide practitioners to critically approach social media data and recognize the possibilities and limitations of this type of data by considering the challenges previously mentioned —accuracy, representation, and context. In summary, the outcome of my research provides empirical evidence and situated tools for approaching social media data not as an independent identity but rather in light of the interplay between the online and offline behavior of the communities that produce such data. This dissertation offers two contributions to the growing body of work in HCI and CSCW invested in reflecting on the transformative character of data. First, it illuminates the large ecosystem of norms and practices of multiple actors, infrastructures, and databases that we need to consider to mobilize data from online platforms into institutional contexts. Second, the design of the toolkit proposes an actionable example of how to promote a situated examination of data. While my research has focused only on examining data from social media platforms, the contributions of my work are meaningful in the broader context of data-centric technologies. As we continue to deploy this technology, it is imperative to interrogate the assumptions and biases encapsulated within those technologies, specifically the data that feed them, and how they impact our understanding of human networks and communities.Ph.D

2014 Digital Rsearch in the Humanities and Arts (Full (DRHA): Full paper proceedings

This publication includes a selection of peer reviewed academic papers. The full paper/Proceedings publication for the DRHA2014 conference showcase up to-date discussions, dynamic debates and innovative keynotes and aims to open a discussion on defining digital communication futures, as a theme that connects interdisciplinary practices, focusing particularly on issues of communication and its impact on creative industries

Forging Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Importance of Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities

New forms of digital data and tools or methods, for instance those that cross academic disciplines and domains, those that feature teams of scholars instead of single scholars, and those that involve individuals from outside the academy, can enable new forms of scholarship and teaching in the digital humanities. Such scholarship can promote reuse of digital data, provoke new research questions, and cultivate new audiences. Digital curation, the process of managing a trusted body of information for current and future use, can help maximize the value of research in the digital humanities. This exploratory qualitative study centered on the salience of digital curation to the digital humanities. A case study predicated upon semi-structured interviews, it explored the creation, use, storage, and planned reuse of data by 45 interviewees involved with nineteen Office of Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (SUG) projects. Similarly, the study sought to determine what digital curation skills had been employed in these projects and what digital curation skills project personnel felt were most important in doing such work. Interviewees grappled with challenges surrounding data, collaboration and communication, planning and project management, awareness and outreach, resources, and technology. This study sought to understand the existing practices and needs of those engaged in digital humanities work and how closely these practices and needs align with the digital curation literature. It established a baseline for future research in this area and suggested key skills for digital curation work in the digital humanities. Finally, it provided a learning model for guiding such education.Doctor of Philosoph

Music Encoding Conference Proceedings 2021, 19–22 July, 2021 University of Alicante (Spain): Onsite & Online

Este documento incluye los artículos y pósters presentados en el Music Encoding Conference 2021 realizado en Alicante entre el 19 y el 22 de julio de 2022.Funded by project Multiscore, MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001103

The Object of Platform Studies: Relational Materialities and the Social Platform (the case of the Nintendo Wii)

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, inaugurated thePlatform Studies series at MIT Press in 2009.We’ve coauthored a new book in the series, Codename: Revolution: the Nintendo Wii Video Game Console. Platform studies is a quintessentially Digital Humanities approach, since it’s explicitly focused on the interrelationship of computing and cultural expression. According to the series preface, the goal of platform studies is “to consider the lowest level of computing systems and to understand how these systems relate to culture and creativity.”In practice, this involves paying close attentionto specific hardware and software interactions--to the vertical relationships between a platform’s multilayered materialities (Hayles; Kirschenbaum),from transistors to code to cultural reception. Any given act of platform-studies analysis may focus for example on the relationship between the chipset and the OS, or between the graphics processor and display parameters or game developers’ designs.In computing terms, platform is an abstraction(Bogost and Montfort), a pragmatic frame placed around whatever hardware-and-software configuration is required in order to build or run certain specificapplications (including creative works). The object of platform studies is thus a shifting series of possibility spaces, any number of dynamic thresholds between discrete levels of a system

Localizing the media, locating ourselves: a critical comparative analysis of socio-spatial sorting in locative media platforms (Google AND Flickr 2009-2011)

In this thesis I explore media geocoding (i.e., geotagging or georeferencing), the process of inscribing the media with geographic information. A process that enables distinct forms of producing, storing, and distributing information based on location. Historically, geographic information technologies have served a biopolitical function producing knowledge of populations. In their current guise as locative media platforms, these systems build rich databases of places facilitated by user-generated geocoded media. These geoindexes render places, and users of these services, this thesis argues, subject to novel forms of computational modelling and economic capture. Thus, the possibility of tying information, people and objects to location sets the conditions to the emergence of new communicative practices as well as new forms of governmentality (management of populations). This project is an attempt to develop an understanding of the socio-economic forces and media regimes structuring contemporary forms of location-aware communication, by carrying out a comparative analysis of two of the main current location-enabled platforms: Google and Flickr. Drawing from the medium-specific approach to media analysis characteristic of the subfield of Software Studies, together with the methodological apparatus of Cultural Analytics (data mining and visualization methods), the thesis focuses on examining how social space is coded and computed in these systems. In particular, it looks at the databases’ underlying ontologies supporting the platforms' geocoding capabilities and their respective algorithmic logics. In the final analysis the thesis argues that the way social space is translated in the form of POIs (Points of Interest) and business-biased categorizations, as well as the geodemographical ordering underpinning the way it is computed, are pivotal if we were to understand what kind of socio-spatial relations are actualized in these systems, and what modalities of governing urban mobility are enabled

Music Encoding Conference Proceedings 2021. 19–22 July, 2021 University of Alicante (Spain): Onsite & Online. Edited by Stefan Münnich and David Rizo

Conference proceedings of the Music Encoding Conference 2021 with Foreword by Stefan Münnich and David Rizo

The emergence of participatory learning: authenticity, serendipity and creative playfulness

This thesis is my reflection about my experiences of researching a participatory culture. It began as a traditional research project into peer learning, evolved into a type of participatory research, and has ended up going beyond that as I found myself writing myself into the story and including autoethnographical elements in the final version. The subject of this research is an open, online community called CLMOOC (Connected Learning Massive Open Online Collaboration), which I have belonged to for the last six years, and my focus is to investigate how learning can occur in a participatory culture such as CLMOOC and how, it its turn, a vibrant learning community can emerge from a summer CPD course and become a self-sustaining entity. I use the literature about connected learning, constructionism and participatory cultures in order to understand the theoretical framework that CLMOOC is built on, and use socio-cultural models of Community of Practice (CoP) and affinity spaces in order to understand its structure. Ultimately, I reject both of these as being problematic, though I conclude that the construct of an affinity space is in many ways a better fit. I consider the design of the original MOOC by looking at the literature from the original designers and show how their clever design overcomes many of the issues with other open learning spaces (such as MOOCs) and how the structures they put in place allow a tightly-connected participatory culture to emerge and thrive. I use a variety of methods in order to investigate CLMOOC. Social Network Analysis helps me to analyse the tight-knit community and thematic analyses highlight the beliefs and values that members share. As my thesis is that CLMOOC is a culture of participatory learning, I also set out a series of vignettes to ascertain what the practices are in CLMOOC, and to see how they align with the beliefs and values of the community. I conclude that CLMOOC is, indeed, a participatory culture based on the principles of connected learning, and its practices can be understood as being remix and bricolage. I close by presenting a series of reflective questions for educators who are interested in developing meaningful learning experiences for students in higher education, and offering some tentative suggestions for implementation