40 research outputs found

    Active Curation: algorithmic awareness for cultural commentary on social media platforms

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    This thesis examines how everyday social media users engage in curation practices to influence what news and information they see on their social feeds. It finds that cultural commentary content can act as a proxy for news on these platforms, contributing to public debate and the fifth estate. While much research has explored the implications of algorithmically driven recommender systems for content personalisation and news visibility, this thesis investigates a gap in our understanding of how social media users understand and respond to algorithmic processes, customising their feed in their day-to-day curation practices on these platforms. It explores how a group of Australians aged 18–30 respond to algorithmic recommender systems and how effective their practices are in shaping their social feeds. The study used a mixed methods approach that included a digital ethnography of social media use and a comparative content analysis of social media news exposure and topics in the legacy news cycle. This study develops a taxonomy of consumptive curation practices that users can engage in to influence their personalised social feeds. The study also examines users’ motivations for this curation and how effective these are in filtering news and ‘cultural commentary’ content into or out of their feed. The findings demonstrate that algorithmic literacy is a driver of active curation practices, where users consciously engage in practices designed to influence recommender processes that customise their social feed. They also demonstrate the prevalence of non-journalistic news-related content or ‘cultural commentary’ on social media platforms in the form of hot takes, memes, and satire, and how this cultural commentary can act as a proxy for the news, even for users who are news avoidant. These findings address gaps in our understanding of news discovery and consumption on social media platforms, with implications for how news businesses can reach emerging news audiences

    Library Publishing Curriculum Textbook

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    In the original, modular curriculum (2018) on which this textbook is based, each unit of the Library Publishing Curriculum contained an instructor’s guide, narrative, a slideshow with talking notes, bibliographies, supplemental material, and activities for use in a physical or virtual classroom for workshops and courses. This textbook version, produced in 2021, adapts the original narrative as the primary content (with very little additional editing) and incorporates the bibliographies, appendices, and images from the slideshow into a linear reading and learning experience for use by librarians or students learning on their own or as part of a classroom learning experience. The LPC hopes others use and extend this CC-BY version into even more learning opportunities to help create a more equitable publishing ecosystem

    Ubiquitous Computing

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    The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications

    Supporting Exploratory Search Tasks Through Alternative Representations of Information

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    Information seeking is a fundamental component of many of the complex tasks presented to us, and is often conducted through interactions with automated search systems such as Web search engines. Indeed, the ubiquity of Web search engines makes information so readily available that people now often turn to the Web for all manners of information seeking needs. Furthermore, as the range of online information seeking tasks grows, more complex and open-ended search activities have been identified. One type of complex search activities that is of increasing interest to researchers is exploratory search, where the goal involves "learning" or "investigating", rather than simply "looking-up". Given the massive increase in information availability and the use of online search for tasks beyond simply looking-up, researchers have noted that it becomes increasingly challenging for users to effectively leverage the available online information for complex and open-ended search activities. One of the main limitations of the current document retrieval paradigm offered by modern search engines is that it provides a ranked list of documents as a response to the searcher’s query with no further support for locating and synthesizing relevant information. Therefore, the searcher is left to find and make sense of useful information in a massive information space that lacks any overview or conceptual organization. This thesis explores the impact of alternative representations of search results on user behaviors and outcomes during exploratory search tasks. Our inquiry is inspired by the premise that exploratory search tasks require sensemaking, and that sensemaking involves constructing and interacting with representations of knowledge. As such, in order to provide the searchers with more support in performing exploratory activities, there is a need to move beyond the current document retrieval paradigm by extending the support for locating and externalizing semantic information from textual documents and by providing richer representations of the extracted information coupled with mechanisms for accessing and interacting with the information in ways that support exploration and sensemaking. This dissertation presents a series of discrete research endeavour to explore different aspects of providing information and presenting this information in ways that both extraction and assimilation of relevant information is supported. We first address the problem of extracting information – that is more granular than documents – as a response to a user's query by developing a novel information extraction system to represent documents as a series of entity-relationship tuples. Next, through a series of designing and evaluating alternative representations of search results, we examine how this extracted information can be represented such that it extends the document-based search framework's support for exploratory search tasks. Finally, we assess the ecological validity of this research by exploring error-prone representations of search results and how they impact a searcher's ability to leverage our representations to perform exploratory search tasks. Overall, this research contributes towards designing future search systems by providing insights into the efficacy of alternative representations of search results for supporting exploratory search activities, culminating in a novel hybrid representation called Hierarchical Knowledge Graphs (HKG). To this end we propose and develop a framework that enables a reliable investigation of the impact of different representations and how they are perceived and utilized by information seekers

    Flipping All Courses on a Semester:Students' Reactions and Recommendations

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