Revealing individual and collective pasts : visualizations of online social archives

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 118-125).As mediated communication becomes an increasingly central part of everyday life, people have started going online to conduct business, to get emotional support, to find communities of interest, and to look for potential romantic partners. Most of these social activities take place primarily through the exchange of conversational texts that, over time, accrue into vast archives. As valuable as these collections of documents may be for our comprehension of the online social world, they are usually cumbersome, impenetrable records of the past. This thesis posits that history visualization- the visualization of people's past presence and activities in mediated environments- helps users make better sense of the online social spaces they inhabit and the relationships they maintain. Here, a progressive series of experimental visualizations explores different ways in which history may enhance social legibility. The projects visualize the history of people's activities in four different environments: a graphical chat room, a wiki site, Usenet newsgroups, and email. History and the persistent nature of online communication are the common threads connecting these projects. Evaluation of these tools shows that history visualizations can be utilized in a variety of ways, ranging from aids for quicker impression formation and mirrors for self-reflection, to catalysts for storytelling and artifacts for posterity.by Fernanda Bertini Viégas.Ph.D

Understanding the effect of interactions in social networks on the performance and sustainability of organizations and online communities

Communication technologies have allowed us to exchange information in social networks to create collective output. I have been interested in how people create collective output and what we need to do for performance and an organization’s survival. Thus, my research’s objective is to use network experiments to understand the effect of communication technology affordances on organization performance and the sustainability of online communities. To fulfill this objective, I examine (1) the effect of centralized communication network on organization adaptability when the environment changes, (2) the effect of sharing filters in social networks on the frequency distribution of shared events, and (3) the effect of audience size on individual participation in a synchronous online community. With the findings from the studies, I aim to extend our knowledge about the implementation of communication technologies in our workplace and society

The Use of Electronic Participation Tools in Urban Planning Projects in Toronto, Ontario

The public’s involvement in urban planning projects has been a contested and evolving topic. In this paper, I address how planners have changed their approach to participation in planning and how they are incorporating electronic participation tools into that process. I have adapted the assessment framework by Tambouris, Liotas and Tarabanis (2007) for the use of electronic participation tools in public policy consultations to urban planning projects. I evaluated eighteen active urban planning projects in Toronto, Ontario, comparing how these projects are using electronic participation tools to engage the community. I found that electronic participation tools are, for the most part, being used to inform members of the community rather than for drawing feedback and that these tools are not being used to create opportunities for the community to make substantial changes to the projects. Members of the community who are using the electronic participation tools are self-selected participants and therefore tend to be more likely to engage in planning processes generally. The main take away from my research is that urban planning projects in Toronto are integrating electronic participation tools into their participation strategy, but the electronic participation tools are not being used strategically to remedy current barriers and gaps to participation

From Cultural Diversity To Group Creativity: Using Language-Retrieved Pictures To Support Computer-Mediated Intercultural Brainstorming

International and intercultural groups increasingly perform various kinds of knowledge work that require groups to brainstorm or generate new ideas, such as problem solving, intelligence analysis and design. One observation based on the understanding of cultural differences and group idea generation suggests that cultures, or socially shared systems of concepts and practices among communities of people, introduce both benefits and obstacles to intercultural brainstorming. Cultural diversity in concepts and ways of thinking is in general beneficial, while cultural discrepancy in social norms, communication styles and language can be detrimental to idea sharing and brainstorming outcomes. The major goal of this dissertation is to reconcile the tension between the benefits and obstacles of intercultural collaboration. In this dissertation, I investigate how people with different cultural backgrounds communicate to perform brainstorming. I further propose brainstorming support tools accordingly, and evaluate the designs in the contexts of cross-cultural and cross-lingual brainstorming. The dissertation considers that using computers to retrieve and display language-retrieved pictures, which are pictures relevant to the ongoing conversation, can effectively support intercultural brainstorming. As individuals from different cultures vary in terms of how they perceive and interpret image content, the design attempts to present pictures to elicit diverse thoughts from members of intercultural groups. A study confirms the usefulness of this design for American-Chinese intercultural groups. The dissertation further considers to bridge cultures at the language level, using machine translation (MT) to allow group members to produce and read ideas in their native languages. Another study shows that MT supports the production of ideas but not the comprehension of ideas. The results point to the need to further investigate the detailed processes for producing and comprehending ideas in intercultural groups to inform future designs. The dissertation contributes to the understanding of computer-mediated intercultural brainstorming with behavioral studies and design work, and shows the need for technical designs to take understanding of various aspects of culture, such as social and communicative norms, cognition and languages spoken, into consideration

An interdisciplinary approach to brand association research

Purpose. This paper discusses the current role of qualitative research in the analysis of the relations between brands and consumers in new market spaces, with particular reference to how it can be enhanced with quantitative techniques to study interactions in online communities. Design/methodology/approach. The paper reviews key scientific contributions in the area of qualitative marketing research. Drawing from this theoretical background, the authors then propose the integration of digital ethnography (a qualitative approach) with quantitative text mining as an innovative approach to gain insights into perceptions of brand associations among online consumers. Findings. The paper contributes to a greater awareness of both limitations and new perspectives in relation to qualitative market research, while suggesting innovative paths for future research. Practical implications. The new methodological approach described can be used to better understand brand knowledge based on consumer brand associations. These insights can then be applied towards developing and implementing effective branding strategies. Originality/Value. The authors propose an interdisciplinary methodology to study consumer behaviour in online communities which incorporates digital ethnography and computer-assisted textual analysis. Particularly the latter technique (borrowed from the field of linguistics) has not yet been exploited extensively in marketing research, but is capable of offering new types of knowledge with important implications for strategic brand management

Hierarchical Audio Structure For Online Collaboration

As online communication is increasingly used for collaborative purposes, it is important to rethink some of the audio and text-based chat environments currently in use today. Popular online video conferencing tools like Zoom and Skype, and text-based tools like Discord offer a sleuth of features and allow users to interact and exchange ideas freely. However, they may not be well suited for certain types of tasks, namely a virtual classroom with hierarchical breakrooms for focused discussions in virtual spaces. This thesis develops a hierarchical-based communication system that is conducive for the aforementioned tasks. The audio structure is built within a virtual environment and implemented using the Unity game engine and the Dissonance Voice Chat package. Users can navigate in the virtual space as avatars and have access to increasingly private audio and text chat channels called audio regions. Users can communicate exclusively on these audio regions but may hear communication at dimmed volumes on parent channels. This allows them to hear announcements from public channels while still retaining focus of discussion on private channels. We performed a comparative analysis of our audio structure with popular online communication tools like Zoom, Skype and Discord on two types of activities or games

Turning Unstructured and Incoherent Group Discussion into DATree: A TBL Coherence Analysis Approach

Despite the rapid growth of user-generated unstructured text from online group discussions, business decision-makers are facing the challenge of understanding its highly incoherent content. Coherence analysis attempts to reconstruct the order of discussion messages. However, existing methods only focus on system and cohesion features. While they work with asynchronous discussions, they fail with synchronous discussions because these features rarely appear. We believe that discussion logic features play an important role in coherence analysis. Therefore, we propose a TCA method for coherence analysis, which is composed of a novel message similarity measure algorithm, a subtopic segmentation algorithm and a TBL-based classification algorithm. System, cohesion and discussion logic features are all incorporated into our TCA method. Results from experiments showed that the TCA method achieved significantly better performance than existing methods. Furthermore, we illustrate that the DATree generated by the TCA method can enhance decision-makers’ content analysis capability

Building Grounded Theory with Social Media Data

The growing popularity and constant innovations of social media platforms and applications have transformed ways of interacting, working, creating value and innovating. We elaborate upon how building theory from case studies may be adapted to the opportunities and challenges of social media environments. We delve into key challenges of the research process: case study design, data analysis, and engaging in multi methods

Web 2.0 technologies for learning: the current landscape – opportunities, challenges and tensions

This is the first report from research commissioned by Becta into Web 2.0 technologies for learning at Key Stages 3 and 4. This report describes findings from an additional literature review of the then current landscape concerning learner use of Web 2.0 technologies and the implications for teachers, schools, local authorities and policy makers