184 research outputs found
The Archives Unleashed Project: Technology, Process, and Community to Improve Scholarly Access to Web Archives
The Archives Unleashed project aims to improve scholarly access to web archives through a multi-pronged strategy involving tool creation, process modeling, and community building -- all proceeding concurrently in mutually --reinforcing efforts. As we near the end of our initially-conceived three-year project, we report on our progress and share lessons learned along the way. The main contribution articulated in this paper is a process model that decomposes scholarly inquiries into four main activities: filter, extract, aggregate, and visualize. Based on the insight that these activities can be disaggregated across time, space, and tools, it is possible to generate "derivative products", using our Archives Unleashed Toolkit, that serve as useful starting points for scholarly inquiry. Scholars can download these products from the Archives Unleashed Cloud and manipulate them just like any other dataset, thus providing access to web archives without requiring any specialized knowledge. Over the past few years, our platform has processed over a thousand different collections from over two hundred users, totaling around 300 terabytes of web archives.This research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as Start Smart Labs, Compute Canada, the University of Waterloo, and York University. We’d like to thank Jeremy Wiebe, Ryan Deschamps, and Gursimran Singh for their contributions
The Limits of Popularity-Based Recommendations, and the Role of Social Ties
In this paper we introduce a mathematical model that captures some of the
salient features of recommender systems that are based on popularity and that
try to exploit social ties among the users. We show that, under very general
conditions, the market always converges to a steady state, for which we are
able to give an explicit form. Thanks to this we can tell rather precisely how
much a market is altered by a recommendation system, and determine the power of
users to influence others. Our theoretical results are complemented by
experiments with real world social networks showing that social graphs prevent
large market distortions in spite of the presence of highly influential users.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, KDD 201
Upstream reciprocity in heterogeneous networks
Many mechanisms for the emergence and maintenance of altruistic behavior in
social dilemma situations have been proposed. Indirect reciprocity is one such
mechanism, where other-regarding actions of a player are eventually rewarded by
other players with whom the original player has not interacted. The upstream
reciprocity (also called generalized indirect reciprocity) is a type of
indirect reciprocity and represents the concept that those helped by somebody
will help other unspecified players. In spite of the evidence for the
enhancement of helping behavior by upstream reciprocity in rats and humans,
theoretical support for this mechanism is not strong. In the present study, we
numerically investigate upstream reciprocity in heterogeneous contact networks,
in which the players generally have different number of neighbors. We show that
heterogeneous networks considerably enhance cooperation in a game of upstream
reciprocity. In heterogeneous networks, the most generous strategy, by which a
player helps a neighbor on being helped and in addition initiates helping
behavior, first occupies hubs in a network and then disseminates to other
players. The scenario to achieve enhanced altruism resembles that seen in the
case of the Prisoner's Dilemma game in heterogeneous networks.Comment: 10 figures, Journal of Theoretical Biology, in press (2010
Using mixed methods to track the growth of the Web: tracing open government data initiatives
In recent years, there have been a rising number of Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives; a political, social and technical movement armed with a common goal of publishing government data in open, re-usable formats in order to improve citizen-to-government transparency, efficiency, and democracy. As a sign of commitment, the Open Government Partnership was formed, comprising of a collection of countries striving to achieve OGD. Since its initial launch, the number of countries committed to adopting an Open Government Data agenda has grown to more than 50; including countries from South America to the Far East.Current approaches to understanding Web initiatives such as OGD are still being developed. Methodologies grounded in multidisciplinarity are still yet to be achieved; typically research follows a social or technological approach underpinned by quantitative or qualitative methods, and rarely combining the two into a single analytical framework. In this paper, a mixed methods approach will be introduced, which uses qualitative data underpinned by sociological theory to complement a quantitative analysis using computer science techniques. This method aims to provide an alternative approach to understanding the socio-technical activities of the Web. To demonstrate this, the activities of the UK Open Government Data initiative will be explored using a range of quantitative and qualitative data, examining the activities of the community, to provide a rich analysis of the formation and development of the UK OGD community
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