Using string-matching to analyze hypertext navigation

A method of using string-matching to analyze hypertext navigation was developed, and evaluated using two weeks of website logfile data. The method is divided into phases that use: (i) exact string-matching to calculate subsequences of links that were repeated in different navigation sessions (common trails through the website), and then (ii) inexact matching to find other similar sessions (a community of users with a similar interest). The evaluation showed how subsequences could be used to understand the information pathways users chose to follow within a website, and that exact and inexact matching provided complementary ways of identifying information that may have been of interest to a whole community of users, but which was only found by a minority. This illustrates how string-matching could be used to improve the structure of hypertext collections

Virtual Community Ventures: Success Drivers in the Case of Online Video Sharing

A recent wave of Internet-related entrepreneurship focused on virtual communities. It produced User-Community-Driven Internet ventures (UCDI-ventures), characterized by (1) user-contributed content, (2) network effects, and (3), an interactive community. Whereas light pole examples such as YouTube, MySpace, or Facebook have received high capital market valuations, many other ventures have failed, making research on the phenomenon and related success drivers worthwhile. This paper integrates three general venture success drivers from the entrepreneurship literature and two specific UCDIventure related ones. Drawing on the case of the online video sharing community Clipfish in Germany, it demonstrates the relevance of the proposed UCDI-venture success drivers. The paper concludes with an assessment of the five success drivers and suggests three steps of future research

Creating Preservation-Ready Web Resources

There are innumerable departmental, community, and personal web sites worthy of long-term preservation but proportionally fewer archivists available to properly prepare and process such sites. We propose a simple model for such everyday web sites which takes advantage of the web server itself to help prepare the site\u27s resources for preservation. This is accomplished by having metadata utilities analyze the resource at the time of dissemination. The web server responds to the archiving repository crawler by sending both the resource and the just-in-time generated metadata as a straight-forward XML-formatted response. We call this complex object (resource + metadata) a CRATE. In this paper we discuss modoai, the web server module we developed to support this approach, and we describe the process of harvesting preservation- ready resources using this technique

Social network extraction and analysis based on multimodal dyadic interaction

Social interactions are a very important component in people"s lives. Social network analysis has become a common technique used to model and quantify the properties of social interactions. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework to explore the characteristics of a social network extracted from multimodal dyadic interactions. For our study, we used a set of videos belonging to New York Times" Blogging Heads opinion blog. The Social Network is represented as an oriented graph, whose directed links are determined by the Influence Model. The links" weights are a measure of the"influence" a person has over the other. The states of the Influence Model encode automatically extracted audio/visual features from our videos using state-of-the art algorithms. Our results are reported in terms of accuracy of audio/visual data fusion for speaker segmentation and centrality measures used to characterize the extracted social network

SOCIAL CLASSIFICATION AND FOLKSONOMY IN ART MUSEUMS: EARLY DATA FROM THE STEVE.MUSEUM TAGGER PROTOTYPE

The collections of art museums have been assembled over hundreds of years and described, organized and classified according to traditions of art historical research and discourse. Art museums, in their role as curators and interpreters of the cultural record, have developed standards for the description of works of art (such as the Categories for the Description of Works of Art, CDWA) that emphasize the physical nature of art as artefact, the authorial role of the creator, the temporal and cultural context of creation and ownership, and the scholarly significance of the work over time. Collections managers have recorded conservation, exhibition, loan and publication history, along with significant volumes of internal documentation of acquisition and storage, that support the custody and care of artefacts of significant cultural value. But the systems of documentation and classification that support the professional discourse of art history and the management of museum collections have failed to represent the interests, perspectives or passions of those who visit [use?] museum collections, both on-site and online. As museums move to reflect the breadth of their audiences and the diversity of their perspectives, so must museum documentation change to reflect concerns other than the traditionally art historical and museological. Social tagging offers a direct way for museums to learn what museum-goers see in works of art, what they judge as significant and where they find or make meaning. Within the steve collaboration(http://www.steve.museum), a group of art museums is collectively exploring the role of social tagging and studying the resulting folksonomy (Bearman and Trant, 2005; Chun, Cherry, Hiwiller, Trant, and Wyman, 2006; Trant and Wyman, 2006). Analysis of terms collected in the prototype steve tagger suggests that social tagging of art museum objects can in fact augment museum documentation with unique access points not found in traditional cataloguing. Terms collected through social tagging tools are being compared to museum documentation, to establish the actual contributions made by naïve users to the accessibility of art museum collections and to see if social classification provides a way to bridge the semantic gap between art historians and art museums’ publics

RichTags: A Social Semantic Tagging System

Social tagging systems allow users associating arbitrary keywords (or tags, or labels) to resources they want to save for future recall. Such saved items are called posts or bookmarks and usually constitute shared information in social tagging systems (although access control mechanisms might be applied as well). This means that users of a social tagging system can save and share their bookmarks with each other. The term social stresses the fact that much of the usefulness of the system relies on the data the users submit and share with each other. As a member of this category of tools, RichTags aims to overcome some weaknesses of the conventional social tagging systems (folksonomies) by utilizing Semantic Web technologies. The defining characteristic of the system is that the tags constitute an ontology of meaningful concepts, which is collectively managed by the users of the system. Hence, the approach is called social semantic tagging. It overcomes the polysemy, the synonymy, and the basic level variation problems encountered in the conventional systems. As well, it offers higher precision and recall. Current realisation of semantic tagging basically concerns an effort to automatically derive semantics out of folksonomies without affecting the mechanism of tagging applied in them. In contrast, RichTags’s approach for semantic tagging is a social process relied on the collective intelligence of the users instead of automation methods. The later means that the users collectively expand the tag vocabulary throughout the tagging task, while consistency mechanisms are applied to keep the vocabulary consistent during this expansion. The basic factor that differentiates RichTags from existing proposals for the enhancement of tags with meaning is that the primary mechanism relies on human collective intelligence and not on automation methods. However, this does not mean that the proposed automation techniques could not be combined with RichTags; contrariwise they could be very useful to speed up the production of the initial set of semantic tags in the vocabulary. Finally, RichTags is not limited to enriching the tags with meaning as current efforts primarily aim to; instead it utilizes this semantic information to improve the tagging and the exploration tasks of tagging systems

Electronic Environments for Reading: An Annotated Bibliography of Pertinent Hardware and Software

In the development of new research environments, hardware has often been neglected. E-readers have (reasonably) successfully been developed for leisurely reading, but reading with the goal of writing demands a different approach. This bibliography has been written to inform the INKE research group on physical aspects of digital scholarly reading. It consists of two parts: a hardware section, including a description of commercial e-readers as well as an overview of academically developed digital reading devices and a software section, also including commercially available packages next to academically developed reading environments which allow for flexible manipulation of text and other modalities; as well as reflections on digital scholarly reading. Combined, the two sections inform an integrated approach in the development of new research environments

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning

Learning and teaching resource are available on the Web - both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors). They can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The remaining challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate Social information retrieval (SIR) methods, techniques and systems that provide learners and teachers with guidance in potentially overwhelming variety of choices. The aim of the SIRTEL’09 workshop is to look onward beyond recent achievements to discuss specific topics, emerging research issues, new trends and endeavors in SIR for TEL. The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners to present, and more importantly, to discuss the current status of research in SIR and TEL and its implications for science and teaching

Studying web 2.0 interactivity: a research framework and two case studies

With more than one third of the world’s population being online, the Internet has increasingly become part of modern living, giving rise to popular literature that often takes a teleological and celebratory perspective, heralding the Internet and Web 2.0 specifically, as an enabler of participation, democracy, and interactivity. However, one should not take these technological affordances of Web 2.0 for granted. This article applies an interaction framework to the analysis of two Web 2.0 websites viewed as spaces where interaction goes beyond the mere consultation and selection of content, i.e., as spaces supporting the (co)creation of content and value. The authors’ approach to interactivity seeks to describe websites in objective, structural terms as spaces of user, document, and website affordances. The framework also makes it possible to talk about the websites in subjective, functional terms, considering them as spaces of perceived inter-action, intra-action and outer-action affordances. Analysis finds that both websites provide numerous user, document, and website affordances that can serve as inter-action or social affordances