Studying Human Translation Behavior with User-Activity Data

The paper introduces a new research strategy for the investigation of human translation behavior. While conventional cognitive research methods make use of think aloud protocols (TAP), we introduce and investigate User- Activity Data (UAD). UAD consists of the translator’s recorded keystroke and eye-movement behavior, which makes it possible to replay a translation session and to register the subjects’ comments on their own behavior during a retrospective interview. UAD has the advantage of being objective and reproducable, and, in contrast to TAP, does not interfere with the translation process. The paper gives the background of this technique and an example on a English-to-Danish translation. Our goal is to elaborate and investigate cognitively grounded basic translation concepts which are materialized and traceable in the UAD and which, in a later stage, will provide the basis for appropriate and targeted help for the translator at a given moment

Evaluating Multilingual Gisting of Web Pages

We describe a prototype system for multilingual gisting of Web pages, and present an evaluation methodology based on the notion of gisting as decision support. This evaluation paradigm is straightforward, rigorous, permits fair comparison of alternative approaches, and should easily generalize to evaluation in other situations where the user is faced with decision-making on the basis of information in restricted or alternative form.Comment: 7 pages, uses psfig and aaai style

Vandalism on Collaborative Web Communities: An Exploration of Editorial Behaviour in Wikipedia

Modern online discussion communities allow people to contribute, sometimes anonymously. Such flexibility sometimes threatens the reputation and reliability of community-owned resources. Such flexibility is understandable, however, they engender threats to the reputation and reliability in collective goods. Since not a lot of previous work addressed these issues it is important to study the aforementioned issues to build an innate understanding of recent ongoing vandalism of Wikipedia pages and ways to preventing those. In this study, we consider the type of activity that the anonymous users carry out on Wikipedia and also contemplate how others react to their activities. In particular, we want to study vandalism of Wikipedia pages and ways of preventing this kind of activity. Our preliminary analysis reveals (~ 90%) of the vandalism or foul edits are done by unregistered users in Wikipedia due to nature of openness. The community reaction seemed to be immediate: most vandalisms were reverted within five minutes on an average. Further analysis shed light on the tolerance of Wikipedia community, reliability of anonymous users revisions and feasibility of early prediction of vandalism

Performative Work: Bridging Performativity and Institutional Theory in the Responsible Investment Field

Callon’s performativity thesis has illuminated how economic theories and calculative devices shape markets, but has been challenged for its neglect of the organizational, institutional and political context. Our seven-year qualitative study of a large financial data company found that the company’s initial attempt to change the responsible investment field through a performative approach failed because of the constraints posed by field practices and organizational norms on the design of the calculative device. However, the company was subsequently able to put in place another form of performativity by attending to the normative and regulative associations of the device. We theorize this route to performativity by proposing the concept of performative work, which designates the necessary institutional work to enable translation and the subsequent adoption of the device. We conclude by considering the implications of performative work for the performativity and the institutional work literatures