Knowledge sharing and Yahoo Answers: Everyone knows something

Yahoo Answers (YA) is a large and diverse question-answer forum, acting not only as a medium for sharing technical knowledge, but as a place where one can seek advice, gather opinions, and satisfy one's curiosity about a countless number of things. In this paper, we seek to understand YA's knowledge sharing activity. We analyze the forum categories and cluster them according to content characteristics and patterns of interaction among the users. While interactions in some categories resemble expertise sharing forums, others incorporate discussion, everyday advice, and support. With such a diversity of categories in which one can participate, we nd that some users focus narrowly on speci c topics, while others participate across categories. This not only allows us to map related categories, but to characterize the entropy of the users' interests. We nd that lower entropy correlates with receiving higher answer ratings, but only for categories where factual expertise is primarily sought after. We combine both user attributes and answer characteristics to predict, within a given category, whether a particular answer will be chosen as the best answer by the asker.ARI Intel Research National Science Foundation (0325347)Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58015/1/fp840-adamic.pd

Communicating Climate Change In Internet Discussion Fora: Processes and Implications

Communicating climate change issues in the Internet era requires new strategies that incorporate online communication. The rapid growth of new media and widespread use of the internet has marked everyday lifestyles in modern society. Information on a wide range of social issues, including climate change, is disseminated and debated through online discussions in internet fora. In this research, communication on internet fora and other potential forms of online social interaction are explored, to identify ways to enhance climate change communication on the Internet. The thesis raises three research questions to explore the communication context of internet fora discussion, namely: what are characteristics of the communication process on internet fora? Who is involved in the communication process? What influences do these online communication activities have on users’ everyday activities? The research applies a mixed-methods approach of analysing the usage of Internet fora and the contents of fora communication activities to explore these questions. This includes qualitative reviews of topic-thread discussions to reveal users’ roles in discussions, as well as surveys of fora users. It is argued that with increasing levels of interaction among communicators (people who post or reply to articles in order to express or respond ideas) on internet fora, these communicators are mobilised to join the online discussion process, competing for opinion leadership. The online discussions further contribute to the formation of opinions on climate change, as climate change and related issues are discussed The thesis thereby aims to contribute to the development of effective approaches for opinion formation and climate change communication online, and to encourage individuals to discuss changing behaviour patterns and public engagement of greenhouse gas reduction actions

Understanding and Augmenting Expertise Networks.

This thesis investigates large scale knowledge searching and sharing processes in online communities and organizations. It focuses on understanding the relationship between social networks and expertise sharing activities. The work explores design opportunities of these social networks to bootstrap knowledge sharing, by using the specific social characteristics of social networks which can lead to sizeable differences in the way expertise is searched and shared. The potential impact of this approach was examined in three related studies using data from Java Forum, Yahoo Answers, and Enron. The Java Forum study investigated how people asked and answered questions in this online community using advanced social network analysis metrics. Furthermore, it explored algorithms that made use of the network structure to evaluate expertise levels. It also used simulations to explore possible social structures and dynamics that would affect the interaction patterns and network structure in online communities. The Yahoo Answers study extended the Java Forum study into a more general community setting and covered much more diverse knowledge sharing dynamics. It analyzed both content properties and social network interactions across sub-forums with different types of knowledge, as well as examined the range and depth of knowledge that users share across these sub-forums. The Enron study, on the other hand, investigated how social network structure could affect the expertise searching process in organizational communication networks using simulations and social network analysis. Based on findings in these studies, a novel expertise sharing system, QuME, was proposed and developed. This thesis provides a network theoretical foundation for the analysis and design of knowledge sharing communities. It explores new opportunities and challenges that arise in online social interaction environments, which are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and important. This work also has direct implications for practitioners. The ability to add the level of expertise would be a major step forward for expertise finding systems, and would likely open up a range of new application possibilities.Ph.D.InformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58450/1/junzh_1.pd

Investigating and Supporting Sensemaking within Online Health Communities

This dissertation focuses on understanding and supporting individual and collective sensemaking within online health communities (OHCs). This major goal was achieved in three aims. In Aim 1, this dissertation contributes a rich descriptive account of collective sensemaking in OHCs forums by describing how it occurs and develops, what triggers it, what elements constitute collective construction of meaning, and what conversational moves positively contribute to this process. Further, it describes how collective sensemaking in OHCs is impacted by the interplay between informational and socio-emotional needs of OHCs members. Moreover, it examines how design of different social computing platforms influences OHCs members’ ability to meet their informational and socio-emotional needs and engage in collective sensemaking. In Aim 2, this dissertation explores the design space of tools for supporting individual sensemaking through optimized information access. Through the design and evaluation of a prototype DisVis it examines the impact of such tools on OHCs members’ ability to understand information within discussion threads. In the final Aim 3, this dissertation proposes a novel approach for meeting the three main needs identified in Aims 1 and 2: promoting individual sensemaking, while at the same time encouraging collective sensemaking, and facilitating development of social awareness and ties among community members. The design and evaluation of the novel solution for visualizing discussion threads that synergistically addresses these three needs—dSense—provides insights for future research and design of interactive solutions for supporting individual and collective sensemaking within OHCs

Understanding people through the aggregation of their digital footprints

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 160-172).Every day, millions of people encounter strangers online. We read their medical advice, buy their products, and ask them out on dates. Yet our views of them are very limited; we see individual communication acts rather than the person(s) as a whole. This thesis contends that socially-focused machine learning and visualization of archived digital footprints can improve the capacity of social media to help form impressions of online strangers. Four original designs are presented that each examine the social fabric of a different existing online world. The designs address unique perspectives on the problem of and opportunities offered by online impression formation. The first work, Is Britney Spears Span?, examines a way of prototyping strangers on first contact by modeling their past behaviors across a social network. Landscape of Words identifies cultural and topical trends in large online publics. Personas is a data portrait that characterizes individuals by collating heterogenous textual artifacts. The final design, Defuse, navigates and visualizes virtual crowds using metrics grounded in sociology. A reflection on these experimental endeavors is also presented, including a formalization of the problem and considerations for future research. A meta-critique by a panel of domain experts completes the discussion.by Aaron Robert Zinman.Ph.D

Computational Approaches to Characterizing Online Health Communities

Online health communities (OHCs) have been increasingly popular among patients with chronic or life-threatening illnesses for the exchange of social support. Contemporary research of OHCs relies on methods and tools to handle analytics of massive user-generated content at scale to complement traditional qualitative analysis. In this thesis, we aim at advancing the area of research by providing computational tools and methods which facilitate automated content analysis, and by presenting applications of these tools to investigating member characteristics and behaviors. We first provide a framework of conceptualization to systematically describe problems, challenges, and existing solutions for OHCs from a social support standpoint, to bridge the knowledge gap between health psychology and informatics. With this framework in hand, we define the landscape of online social support, summarize current research progress of OHCs, and identify research questions to investigate for this thesis. We then build a series of computational tools for analyzing OHC content, relying on techniques of machine learning and natural language processing. Leveraging domain-specific features, our tools are tailored to handle content analysis tasks on OHC text effectively. Equipped with computational tools, we demonstrate how characteristics of OHC members can be identified at scale in an automated fashion. In particular, we build up multi-dimensional descriptions for patient members, consisting of what topics they focus on, what sentiment they express, and what treatments they discuss and adopt. Patterns of how these member characteristics change through time are also investigated longitudinally. Finally, relying on computational analytics, members' behaviors of engagement such as debate and dropping-out are identified and characterized. Studies presented in this thesis discover static and longitudinal patterns of member characteristics and engagement, which are potential research hypotheses to be explored by health psychologists and clinical researchers. The thesis also contributes to the informatics community by making computational tools, lexicons, and annotated corpora available to facilitate future research

Challenges and perspectives of hate speech research

This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research

The Datafied Society. Studying Culture through Data

As more and more aspects of everyday life are turned into machine-readable data, researchers are provided with rich resources for researching society. The novel methods and innovative tools to work with this data not only require new knowledge and skills, but also raise issues concerning the practices of investigation and publication. This book critically reflects on the role of data in academia and society and challenges overly optimistic expectations considering data practices as means for understanding social reality. It introduces its readers to the practices and methods for data analysis and visualization and raises questions not only about the politics of data tools, but also about the ethics in collecting, sifting through data, and presenting data research. AUP S17 Catalogue text As machine-readable data comes to play an increasingly important role in everyday life, researchers find themselves with rich resources for studying society. The novel methods and tools needed to work with such data require not only new knowledge and skills, but also a new way of thinking about best research practices. This book critically reflects on the role and usefulness of big data, challenging overly optimistic expectations about what such information can reveal, introducing practices and methods for its analysis and visualization, and raising important political and ethical questions regarding its collection, handling, and presentation

The citizen-user and the crowd-mediated politics of the Five Star Movement

This thesis described the trajectory of the Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S, 2005- 2014) from the perspective of the citizens who, as Internet users, participated in in the political enterprise. Citizen-users, enabled and empowered by Internet and mobile technologies, shaped and sustained the identity and evolution of the movement that became the M5S. The case study selected for this research, the M5S, is exceptional due to the magnitude of its success; but its features (Internet-centered and fluid ideology) are becoming more common among political organisations in Western democracies. The goal of the thesis is to assess the impact of the Internet on the political process, through its connecting, mobilising, organising, and to characterise the shape of political talk among citizens. This is achieved by applying quantitative methods, including network analysis and natural language processing, on 10 years of user-generated data collected mainly from four sources: the blog of the Movement’s founder, the M5S official forum, Facebook and Meetup.com. The thesis finds that the online discussion fora fostered diversity without fragmentation, and contributed on at least one occasion to shape the policy agenda of the M5S. Furthermore, the meetups of the Movement maintained their capacity to attract and mobilise users, and their territorial distribution clearly correlate with local results of the M5S in two elections, suggesting a positive impact of Internet-enabled mobilisation. Finally, given the votes received in the 2013 general election, the political communication generated over the Internet offset the low attention dedicated by TV news broadcast to the Movement during the electoral campaign. As Internet and mobile technologies are routinised, it is easy to see how their importance in political organisation and deliberation will grow. By studying the application of ICTs in the case of the M5S, this thesis offers insights into their use in practice, as well as pointing to possible democratic risks if online deliberation is non controlled to guarantee its fairness and openness but instead steered by the leadership, turning a deliberating community of citizen-users into a noisy crowd