Intelligent Information Interaction for Managing Distributed Collections of Web Documents

Digital collections are ubiquitous. However, not all digital collections are the same. While most digital collections have limited forms of change - primarily creation and deletion of additional resources - there exists a class of digital collections that undergo additional kinds of change. These collections are made up of resources that are distributed across the Internet and brought together into the collection via hyperlinking. This means the underlying collection members are not controlled by the curator of the collection. Resources can be expected to change as time goes on. To further complicate matters these collections can be hard to maintain when they are large, highly dynamic, or lacking active curation. Part of the difficulty in maintaining these collections is determining if a changed page is still a valid member of the collection. While others have tried to address this problem by measuring change and defining a maximum allowed threshold of change, these methods treat all change as a potential problems and treat web content as a static document despite its intrinsically dynamic nature. Instead, I approach the problem of determining significance of change on the web by embracing it as a normal part of a web document's lifecycle, Instead of using thresholds to identify abnormal changes, I determine the difference between what a maintainer expects a page to do and what it actually does. These models are created using a variety of feature extractors to find pertinent information in a page, a Kalman filter to model the history of a page and predict a next version and finally classification of results into either expected or unexpected change. I evaluate the different options for extractors and analyzers to determine the best options from my suite of possibilities. This work is informed by a series of studies on both web pages and potential collection maintainers, observations of the NSDL Pathways, and a ground-truth set of blog changes tagged by a human judgment of the kind of change. The results of this work showed a statistically significant improvement over a range of traditional threshold techniques when applied to the collection of tagged blog changes

Information Reliability on the Social Web - Models and Applications in Intelligent User Interfaces

The Social Web is undergoing continued evolution, changing the paradigm of information production, processing and sharing. Information sources have shifted from institutions to individual users, vastly increasing the amount of information available online. To overcome the information overload problem, modern filtering algorithms have enabled people to find relevant information in efficient ways. However, noisy, false and otherwise useless information remains a problem. We believe that the concept of information reliability needs to be considered along with information relevance to adapt filtering algorithms to today's Social Web. This approach helps to improve information search and discovery and can also improve user experience by communicating aspects of information reliability.This thesis first shows the results of a cross-disciplinary study into perceived reliability by reporting on a novel user experiment. This is followed by a discussion of modeling, validating, and communicating information reliability, including its various definitions across disciplines. A selection of important reliability attributes such as source credibility, competence, influence and timeliness are examined through different case studies. Results show that perceived reliability of information can vary greatly across contexts. Finally, recent studies on visual analytics, including algorithm explanations and interactive interfaces are discussed with respect to their impact on the perception of information reliability in a range of application domains

Examining Political Discourse on Online 8Kun and Reddit Forums

A recent example of political violence in the United States was that of the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack in connection with the certification of Joseph R. Biden’s victory over Donald J. Trump in the 2020 US presidential election. This thesis analyzes the events of January 6, 2021, through the lens of social media discourse. This thesis presents a workflow that acquired over 5 million 8kun and Reddit posts from various apolitical and political forums in the three months preceding and following the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. Techniques from text analysis are then used to group forums according to the similarities of their posting patterns. Five main groups of forums are identified. Finally, this thesis analyzes these forums for feelings of isolation and displacement from society in connection with the events of January 6, 2021. Such feelings were not clearly identified. This thesis demonstrates the challenges and opportunities of scraping and analyzing social media data

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

#GlockeAktiv: A corpus linguistic study of German youth language on YouTube

This thesis is a corpus linguistic investigation of the language used by young German speakers online, examining lexical, morphological, orthographic, and syntactic features and changes in language use over time. The study analyses the language in the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube‐Sprache ("Nottingham corpus of German YouTube language", or NottDeuYTSch corpus), one of the first large corpora of German‐language comments taken from the videosharing website YouTube, and built specifically for this project. The metadatarich corpus comprises c.33 million tokens from more than 3 million comments posted underneath videos uploaded by mainstream German‐language youthorientated YouTube channels from 2008‐2018. The NottDeuYTSch corpus was created to enable corpus linguistic approaches to studying digital German youth language (Jugendsprache), having identified the need for more specialised web corpora (see Barbaresi 2019). The methodology for compiling the corpus is described in detail in the thesis to facilitate future construction of web corpora. The thesis is situated at the intersection of Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC) and youth language, which have been important areas of sociolinguistic scholarship since the 1980s, and explores what we can learn from a corpus‐driven, longitudinal approach to (online) youth language. To do so, the thesis uses corpus linguistic methods to analyse three main areas: 1. Lexical trends and the morphology of polysemous lexical items. For this purpose, the analysis focuses on geil, one of the most iconic and productive words in youth language, and presents a longitudinal analysis, demonstrating that usage of geil has decreased, and identifies lexical items that have emerged as potential replacements. Additionally, geil is used to analyse innovative morphological productiveness, demonstrating how different senses of geil are used as a base lexeme or affixoid in compounding and derivation. 2. Syntactic developments. The novel grammaticalization of several subordinating conjunctions into both coordinating conjunctions and discourse markers is examined. The investigation is supported by statistical analyses that demonstrate an increase in the use of non‐standard syntax over the timeframe of the corpus and compares the results with other corpora of written language. 3. Orthography and the metacommunicative features of digital writing. This iii iv analysis identifies orthographic features and strategies in the corpus, e.g. the repetition of certain emoji, and develops a holistic framework to study metacommunicative functions, such as the communication of illocutionary force, information structure, or the expression of identities. The framework unifies previous research that had focused on individual features, integrating a wide range of metacommunicative strategies within a single, robust system of analysis. By using qualitative and computational analytical frameworks within corpus linguistic methods, the thesis identifies emergent linguistic features in digital youth language in German and sheds further light on lexical and morphosyntactic changes and trends in the language of young people over the period 2008‐2018. The study has also further developed and augmented existing analytical frameworks to widen the scope of their application to orthographic features associated with digital writing

An Investigation into the uncanny: character design, behaviour and context.

Whilst there has been a substantial amount of research into the uncanny valley, defining research that contextualises a character as they would normally be viewed remains an unexplored area. Often previous research focused solely on realistic render styles giving characters an unfair basis that tended towards the realistic, thus facilitating only one mode of animation style: realism. Furthermore, characters were not contextualized because researchers often used footage from previous productions. These characters also differed in quality as various artists worked on different productions. This research considers characterisation as three key components, the aesthetic, the behaviour and the contextualisation. Attempts were made to develop a greater understanding of how these components contribute to the appeal of a character within the field of 3D computer animation. Research consisted of two experiments. Both experiments were conducted using an online survey method. The first experiment used five different characters ranging from realistic to abstract. Each character displayed three different behaviours and the characters were contextualized within a six panel narrative. Data obtained from the first experiment was used to refine the second experiment. A further experiment was conducted to further define how combinations of different behaviours and the context containing a character affected the subject’s perception. The second experiment used three different character types and the characters were contextualized within a video stimulus. Findings from the first experiment indicated a strong relationship between character type and context. Interest with the various characters changed depending on adaptions to either the behaviour of the said character or the contextualisation. Certain character types based on appearance where better suited to different contexts than others. An abstract character was more likely to be perceived positively by the subject in a surprising context stipulated by the behaviour of the character and form of the narrative sequence. Other characters such as one based around an inanimate object found a greater positive reception with the subjects under sad contextual constraints rather than happy or surprise. The first experiment took into account various independent variables obtained from the subject and aimed to draw parallels if found between these variables and the subjects perception of a given character be it positive or negative. However, these variables namely gender, nationality and age had no effect on the subject’s perception. In the second experiment, it was found that in order for the realistic human character to be perceived more positively, the behaviour needed to match the context. When a mismatch occurred the subjects began to perceive the character more negatively. The cartoon character was however not affected by the mismatch of behaviour and context. The experiment was further expanded when two different character types were compared committing negative actions and having negative actions inflicted upon them and what effect it had on the subjects perception. It was found that a cartoon character committing a negative action was perceived positively whilst a human character committing the same act was perceived negatively. However, when a negative action was inflicted on these same characters, subjects were more concerned for the human character than the cartoon character. Results from both experiments confirm the idea that various characters are perceived very differently by the viewers and come with predefined notions within the viewer of how they should behave. What is expected of one character type is not acceptable for another character type. Cartoon characters can get away with bizarre behaviour. A real human character may have some sort of novel unusual behaviour, whilst a realistic CG human character is assessed on how realistically (normally) it behaves. This research expands upon previous research into this area by offering a greater understanding of character types and emphasising the importance of contextualisation

Reader Response in the Digital Age. Letters to the editor vs. below-the-line comments. A synchronic comparison.

Heralded by some as the biggest revolution of the Internet, with great egalitarian and democratic potential, web 2.0 and social media are frowned on by others as sites where users constantly compete to take centre stage, more often than not by sharing everyday banalities, thus flooding the web with “tedious piffle”. While it is true that it has never been so easy to put in your two cents’ worth, the concept of user-generated content – one of the buzzwords of today’s participatory web – can look back on a long tradition in newspapers, where letters to the editor have always been a highly popular way for readers to make their voices heard in public. In their move online, most newspapers added comment sections to their websites, thus taking readers’ letters to the digital level and providing the basis for the present synchronic study, which compares 1,000 below-the-line comments posted on the websites of the Guardian and the Times to 1,000 letters to the editor written to the same newspapers by addressing, one by one, four common claims about, or (mis-)conceptions of, this form of user-generated content. The analysis begins on the micro-linguistic level, comparing the data sets in terms of their orthographic, typographic, lexical and syntactic features and addressing the claim that the language used to communicate on the Internet differs substantially from the language used in other contexts. The focus then shifts to the interactional structures found in the two genres and the question of whether below-the-line comments, as a form of web 2.0, are really more interactive than traditional letters to the editor, which are commonly perceived as a means of ‘talking back’ to the newspaper or journalist rather than a forum for interactive debates among users. The discussion then moves on to matters of face, (im-)politeness and identity construction by first investigating the face-threatening act of criticising others as well as the act of providing positive feedback. This analysis was inspired by the fact that the two genres, although clearly related, are perceived very differently: while comment sections are often associated with aggressive and uninhibited verbal behaviour and numerous calls for their closure can be found, such concerns have not been voiced about letters pages in newspapers. Moreover, it has been claimed that via online comments, more and more private topics are entering the public sphere, thus leading to an increase in subjectivity and personalisation. This last claim is addressed by exploring strategies of personalisation and the moves used to construct an expert identity. The comparative analysis is thus concluded with a focus on the domain of social behaviour, investigating the different means contributors employ to create their own identity and that of the people talked about or addressed

Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2022

This open access book presents the proceedings of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)’s 29th Annual International eTourism Conference, which assembles the latest research presented at the ENTER2022 conference, which will be held on January 11–14, 2022. The book provides an extensive overview of how information and communication technologies can be used to develop tourism and hospitality. It covers the latest research on various topics within the field, including augmented and virtual reality, website development, social media use, e-learning, big data, analytics, and recommendation systems. The readers will gain insights and ideas on how information and communication technologies can be used in tourism and hospitality. Academics working in the eTourism field, as well as students and practitioners, will find up-to-date information on the status of research

Supporting users' influence in gamification settings and game live-streams

Playing games has long been important to mankind. One reason for this is the associated autonomy, as players can decide on many aspects on their own and can shape the experience. Game-related sub-fields have appeared in Human-Computer Interaction where this autonomy is questionable: in this thesis, we consider gamification and game live-streams and here, we support the users' influence at runtime. We hypothesize that this should affect the perception of autonomy and should lead to positive effects overall. Our contribution is three-fold: first, we investigate crowd-based, self-sustaining systems in which the user's influence directly impacts the outcome of the system's service. We show that users are willing to expend effort in such systems even without additional motivation, but that gamification is still beneficial here. Second, we introduce "bottom-up" gamification, i.e., the idea of self-tailored gamification. Here, users have full control over the gamification used in a system, i.e., they can set it up as they see fit at the system's runtime. Through user studies, we show that this has positive behavioral effects and thus adds to the ongoing efforts to move away from "one-size-fits-all" solutions. Third, we investigate how to make gaming live-streams more interactive, and how viewers perceive this. We also consider shared game control settings in live-streams, in which viewers have full control, and we contribute options to support viewers' self-administration here.Seit jeher nehmen Spiele im Leben der Menschen eine wichtige Rolle ein. Ein Grund hierfür ist die damit einhergehende Autonomie, mit der Spielende Aspekte des Spielerlebnisses gestalten können. Spiele-bezogene Teilbereiche werden innerhalb der Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion untersucht, bei denen dieser Aspekt jedoch diskutabel ist: In dieser Arbeit betrachten wir Gamification und Spiele Live-Streams und geben Anwendern mehr Einfluss. Wir stellen die Hypothese auf, dass sich dies auf die Autonomie auswirkt und zu positiven Effekten führt. Der Beitrag dieser Dissertation ist dreistufig: Wir untersuchen crowdbasierte, selbsterhaltende Systeme, bei denen die Einflussnahme des Einzelnen sich auf das Systemergebnis auswirkt. Wir zeigen, dass Nutzer aus eigenem Antrieb bereit sind, sich hier einzubringen, der Einfluss von Gamification sich aber förderlich auswirkt. Im zweiten Schritt führen wir "bottom-up" Gamification ein. Hier hat der Nutzer die volle Kontrolle über die Gamification und kann sie nach eigenem Ermessen zur Laufzeit einstellen. An Hand von Nutzerstudien belegen wir daraus resultierende positive Verhaltenseffekte, was die anhaltenden Bemühungen bestärkt, individuelle Gamification-Konzepte anzubieten. Im dritten Schritt untersuchen wir, wie typische Spiele Live-Streams für Zuschauer interaktiver gestaltet werden können. Zudem betrachten wir Fälle, in denen Zuschauer die gemeinsame Kontrolle über ein Spiel ausüben und wie dies technologisch unterstützt werden kann