Gathering Background Knowledge for Story Understanding through Crowdsourcing

Successfully comprehending stories involves integration of the story information with the reader\u27s own background knowledge. A prerequisite, then, of building automated story understanding systems is the availability of such background knowledge. We take the approach that knowledge appropriate for story understanding can be gathered by sourcing the task to the crowd. Our methodology centers on breaking this task into a sequence of more specific tasks, so that human participants not only identify relevant knowledge, but also convert it into a machine-readable form, generalize it, and evaluate its appropriateness. These individual tasks are presented to human participants as missions in an online game, offering them, in this manner, an incentive for their participation. We report on an initial deployment of the game, and discuss our ongoing work for integrating the knowledge gathering task into a full-fledged story understanding engine

A hermeneutic inquiry into user-created personas in different Namibian locales

Persona is a tool broadly used in technology design to support communicational interactions between designers and users. Different Persona types and methods have evolved mostly in the Global North, and been partially deployed in the Global South every so often in its original User-Centred Design methodology. We postulate persona conceptualizations are expected to differ across cultures. We demonstrate this with an exploratory-case study on user-created persona co-designed with four Namibian ethnic groups: ovaHerero, Ovambo, ovaHimba and Khoisan. We follow a hermeneutic inquiry approach to discern cultural nuances from diverse human conducts. Findings reveal diverse self-representations whereby for each ethnic group results emerge in unalike fashions, viewpoints, recounts and storylines. This paper ultimately argues User-Created Persona as a potentially valid approach for pursuing cross-cultural depictions of personas that communicate cultural features and user experiences paramount to designing acceptable and gratifying technologies in dissimilar locales

Live Blogging and Social Media Curation: Challenges and Opportunities for Journalism

Blogging and social media’s contribution to a realignment of the relationship between journalists and their audiences is discussed by Einar Thorsen in Live Blogging and Social Media Curation. Journalists are facing challenges to preserve traditional standards, such as verification of information and sources, whilst also capitalising on the opportunities afforded by the immediacy, transparency and interactive nature of online communication. Thorsen analyses these issues through two case studies: one focuses on ‘live’ blogging and elections, and a second looks at the role of social media in the Arab Spring. He demonstrates how journalists face new challenges in relation to social media curation, whilst the emergent forms and practices also present a wealth of opportunities

Motivation drivers of millenniums for engaging in crowdsourcing ventures

Double DegreeCrowdsourcing, as the name implies, runs and succeeds on the crowd – the individuals who voluntarily dedicate their time towards this problem solving approach. Therefore, understanding the participation’s underlined motivations is a crucial requirement towards an effective crowdsourcing venture. Current research struggles with assessing these motivations while taking into consideration the variety of crowdsourcing scenarios. Simultaneously, there is a lack of a common motivational variable framework, on which literature can develop upon. To contribute towards these gaps, this research deploys a factorial survey to 174 respondents of the Millennium generation, through which it assesses this particular crowd’s perception of four commonly analyzed motivational dimensions in current crowdsourcing motivation literature: Sense of Cooperation & Community; Monetary Compensation; Sense of Efficacy; and Signaling & Human Capital Advancement. Results found Monetary Compensation and Sense of Efficacy to be motivations supporting the millennial generation participation in crowdsourcing ventures. Research and managerial contributions are discussed, as well the limitations of this study

Citizen science in information systems research: Evidence from a systematic literature review

Citizen science refers to partnerships between scientists and the public in scientific research. Citizen science is considered as an emerging approach for conducting research in the field of information systems (IS). However, there is a fragmented understanding of citizen science in the IS community. As a result, we conducted a systematic literature review on citizen science in IS field aiming at understanding what and how IS scholars view and conduct their research related to citizen science. We searched papers from the database of the basket of eight senior journals, 47 SIG recommended journals by the Association for Information Systems, and the proceedings of five major conferences in IS including ICIS, ECIS, HICSS, PACIS, and AMCIS. Our findings provide the current status of citizen science research in IS field, such as how scholars view about citizen science, how to set up a citizen science project, or how citizen science is adopted in IS community. This research also contributes to the field by laying out suggestions for the future research of citizen science

What Makes a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign? A Case Study of Success Factors in Reward-Based Crowdfunding of Technology-Based Campaigns

Crowdfunding has become a popular method for founders of new ventures to acquire funding from individuals all around the world for varied projects. However, the factors influencing crowdfunding success are not well understood. This research aims to identify what makes a successful crowdfunding campaign by determining factors leading to success in crowdfunding campaigns, as well as explaining why and how those proposed factors influence crowdfunding success. The primary data for this qualitative case study were collected from three reward-based crowdfunding campaign founders in technology-based projects by using semi-structured interviews. Secondary data were gathered through direct observation from the case campaign websites. An inductive approach was used for this research. Thus, the analysis and theory building came during and after the data gathering. The research data were categorized and analyzed within and across the cases, and finally compared with existing research and theories. The research results indicated that there are at least seven factors influencing crowdfunding success, including product, pre-campaign community, team, presentation, awareness, preparation, and authenticity. Additionally, several explanations were provided to help understand why these factors were considered important. The main implications of this research concern product attributes and pre-campaign communities. The campaign founders considered products and various product attributes as one of the most important factors in crowdfunding success, suggesting further research of their dynamics in different campaign categories in reward-based crowdfunding. In addition, crowdfunding campaigns were found to benefit from pre-campaign communities by allowing crowds to be committed and involved in projects even before they enter a crowdfunding stage, thus increasing attention and the amount of potential funders. Finally, this research argues that more research is required to better understand the crowdfunding phenomenon by gathering data from new and diverse sources.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

A crowdsourcing study of perceived credibility of Reddit content based on a novel data scraping tool

Crowdsourcing-tutkimus Reddit-sisällön koetusta uskottavuudesta uudenlaisen tiedonkaavintatyökalun avulla. Tiivistelmä. The internet is a forever growing trove of information. It is well known, both in the public and in academia that in the last years the unhindered access to the internet gave everyone more opportunities to post fake or misleading content. Furthermore, the growing interest in artificial intelligence and large language models showed how easy it is for people to be provided, possibly by mistake, with misleading content through AI tools. These tools are trained on content from the world wide web, but one might wonder, how might these AI tools know which content is believable and which is not? The current thesis aims to contribute to the credibility literature of online media through a crowdsourcing survey based on content gathered — through a tool designed and build for the purposes of this thesis — from the Reddit social media platform. The data gathering tool was designed to scrape Reddit and store historical data from Reddit posts, something that no other tool has done before, and using the scraped data it offers the possibility of creating surveys for assessing credibility of Reddit posts. The thesis aimed to find what features of Reddit posts affect credibility. Once the survey participants assessed the credibility of multiple Reddit posts, both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis were conducted on the results. Findings show that popularity does not affect perceived credibility, however topic familiarity and experience of using Reddit have a weak positive affect on credibility. Furthermore, agreeable and content that is easy to understand were also affecting credibility positively, however content that contained jargon or that participants disagreed with or found offensive impacted credibility negatively. Among other findings, this thesis defines three types of credibility evaluation, “shallow evaluation”, “in-depth evaluation” and “experience-based evaluation”, that can help future research in understanding and designing credibility studies. The thesis brings several contributions to the literature. Firstly, it both complements and challenges past findings in credibility research of online media. Furthermore, the research puts forward the three levels of credibility evaluation, which can be used in future research and analyzed more thoroughly. Finally, the artifact that was built for the study, the open-source data gathering tool, offers a new way for researchers to gather data from Reddit, but it also gives the possibility to store historical data of a post, something that no other tool does, and enables possible new avenues for research in this direction

Social media and investigative journalism in South Africa: The extent to which investigative journalists in South Africa use social media to further their investigations, the impact and its pitfalls.

This research explores the level to which investigative journalists in South Africa use social media applications to further their investigations. As social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter are instant tools for news agencies and reporters, investigative journalists are also benefitting from the use of these tools. This paper will explore how these tools are used by investigative journalists in South Africa, for what purposes and explore the challenges that may arise. Emphasis is placed on Facebook and Twitter as the research found that these social media applications are the most commonly used applications by investigative journalists in South Africa. This research is located within two theories namely Jurgen Habermas’s (1989) theory of the public sphere and John Arundel Barnes’s (1954) social network theory. These theories explore how social media applications create networks that are beneficial for investigative journalists for a variety of reasons. The discussions that take place on social media applications contribute to the digital public sphere – a platform where people can come together to discuss issues of relevance to them. Investigative journalists form part of the digital public sphere and this adds value to investigations. This research further delves into the change of relationship investigative newsrooms have with their ‘audience’ because of social media applications. Social media applications, such as Twitter and Facebook, have led to consumers of news no longer being passive viewers or listeners of news, but rather having an opportunity to voice their opinions, provide feedback and share information that influences investigations. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods were used to ascertain which investigative journalists are using social media in their investigations followed by in- depth interviews across the country

Ethical Hacking for a Good Cause: Finding Missing People using Crowdsourcing and Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) Tools

Over 600,000 people go missing every year in the US alone. Despite the extensive resources allocated to investigating these cases, the high volume of missing person cases constitutes one of the biggest challenges for law enforcement agencies. One approach to tackle this challenge is using crowdsourcing. That is, volunteers use freely available tools and techniques to aid the existing efforts to investigate missing person cases. Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) refers to gathering information from publicly available sources and analyzing it through a comprehensive set of open-source tools to produce meaningful and actionable intelligence. OSINT has been applied to address various societal challenges and crimes, including environmental abuse, human rights violations, child exploitation, domestic violence, disasters, and locating missing people. Building on this premise, this case examines a crowdsourced initiative called Trace Labs that aims to assist law enforcement agencies in solving missing person cases using OSINT tools. The case emphasizes socio-technical aspects of cybersecurity, highlighting both the bright and dark sides of technology. It demonstrates the potential of information systems to serve the public good by examining topics such as open-source software, crowdsourcing, and intelligence gathering, while acknowledging that the very same underlying technology can be used for malicious purposes