Public bookmarks and private benefits: An analysis of incentives in social computing

Users of social computing websites are both producers and consumers of the information found on the site. This creates a novel problem for web-based software applications: how can website designers induce users to produce information that is useful for others? We study this question by interviewing users of the social bookmarking website del.icio.us. We find that for the users in our sample, metadata reflecting who bookmarked a webpage better supports information seeking than free-form keyword metadata (tags). We explain this finding by describing differences in the way that the design of del.icio.us motivates users to contribute by providing personal benefits for bookmarking and tagging.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61317/1/1450440240_ftp.pd

The Spoken British National Corpus 2014:design, compilation and analysis

The ESRC-funded Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University (CASS) and the English Language Teaching group at Cambridge University Press (CUP) have compiled a new, publicly-accessible corpus of spoken British English from the 2010s, known as the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). The 11.5 million-word corpus, gathered solely in informal contexts, is the first freely-accessible corpus of its kind since the spoken component of the original British National Corpus (the Spoken BNC1994), which, despite its age, is still used as a proxy for present-day English in research today. This thesis presents a detailed account of each stage of the Spoken BNC2014’s construction, including its conception, design, transcription, processing and dissemination. It also demonstrates the research potential of the corpus, by presenting a diachronic analysis of ‘bad language’ in spoken British English, comparing the 1990s to the 2010s. The thesis shows how the research team struck a delicate balance between backwards compatibility with the Spoken BNC1994 and optimal practice in the context of compiling a new corpus. Although comparable with its predecessor, the Spoken BNC2014 is shown to represent innovation in approaches to the compilation of spoken corpora. This thesis makes several useful contributions to the linguistic research community. The Spoken BNC2014 itself should be of use to many researchers, educators and students in the corpus linguistics and English language communities and beyond. In addition, the thesis represents an example of good practice with regards to academic collaboration with a commercial stakeholder. Thirdly, although not a ‘user guide’, the methodological discussions and analysis presented in this thesis are intended to help the Spoken BNC2014 to be as useful to as many people, and for as many purposes, as possible

Mirrors and entrances

This thesis is a collection of thirty poems written primarily over the seven-month span from September 1967 through March 1968. The poems here represent for me not only a conscious turning away from the formal metrics which had characterized my verse, but also a concentrated effort to view one central problem from various angles. The collection is divided into three parts. The second and third sections are loose in their connections, serving to bring together poems which might be termed respectively 'poems of learning' and 'songs and dances.' The major part of the thesis, however, deals with the problem of self-definition. Assuming that everything is either "me" or "not-me," the mirror tells half the story, while entrance into other forms of life tells the other half. The title poem explores both of these possibilities. The first part of this poem, as well as other mirror poems, suggests that man's face appears in almost every imaginable circumstance. It often springs up when least expected, as in "From a Boat, Face Down." But, as the epigraph of the title poem states, man is best-loved when ne is unseen: thus, the entrances. By imagining myself into the skin of animals or into the veins of leaves, I lose the human quality and identify with something more basic in nature. Total identification with animals, such as in "One Raccoon Fiendishly Murdered by a fixture of Salt and Cement," or with growing plants, as in "Metastasis," expands the human consciousness beyond its normal bounds. It seems to me that what is lovable in man is not his humanity; but, despite his ritual concern with himself, his power to sense unity with other natural forms

Pictures in words : indexing, folksonomy and representation of subject content in historic photographs

Subject access to images is a major issue for image collections. Research is needed to understand how indexing and tagging contribute to make the subjects of historic photographs accessible. This thesis firstly investigates the evidence of cognitive dissonance between indexers and users in the way they attribute subjects to historic photographs, and, secondly, how indexers and users might work together to enhance subject description. It analyses how current indexing and social tagging represent the subject content of historic photographs. It also suggests a practical way indexers can work with taggers to deal with the classic problem of resource constraints and to enhance metadata to make photo collections more accessible. In an original application of the Shatford/Panofsky classification matrix within the applications domain of historic images, patterns of subject attribution are explored between taggers and professional indexers. The study was conducted in two stages. The first stage (Studies A to D) investigated how professional indexers and taggers represent the subject content of historic photographs and revealed differences based on Shatford/Panofsky. The indexers (Study A) demonstrated a propensity for specific and generic subjects and almost complete avoidance of abstracts. In contrast, a pilot study with users (Study B) and with baseline taggers (Studies C and D) showed their propensity for generics and equal inclination to specifics and abstracts. The evidence supports the conclusion that indexers and users approach the subject content of historic photographs differently, demonstrating cognitive dissonance, a conflict between how they appear to think about and interpret images. The second stage (Study E) demonstrated that an online training intervention affected tagging behaviour. The intervention resulted in increased tagging and fuller representation of all subject facets according to the Shatford/Panofsky classification matrix. The evidence showed that trained taggers tagged more generic and abstract facets than untrained taggers. Importantly, this suggests that training supports the annotation of the higher levels of subject content and so potentially provides enhanced intellectual access. The research demonstrated a practical way institutions can work with taggers to extend the representation of subject content in historic photographs. Improved subject description is critical for intellectual access and retrieval in the cultural heritage space. Through systematic application of the training method a richer corpus of descriptors might be created that enhances machine based information retrieval via automatic extraction

Robust Dialog Management Through A Context-centric Architecture

This dissertation presents and evaluates a method of managing spoken dialog interactions with a robust attention to fulfilling the human user’s goals in the presence of speech recognition limitations. Assistive speech-based embodied conversation agents are computer-based entities that interact with humans to help accomplish a certain task or communicate information via spoken input and output. A challenging aspect of this task involves open dialog, where the user is free to converse in an unstructured manner. With this style of input, the machine’s ability to communicate may be hindered by poor reception of utterances, caused by a user’s inadequate command of a language and/or faults in the speech recognition facilities. Since a speech-based input is emphasized, this endeavor involves the fundamental issues associated with natural language processing, automatic speech recognition and dialog system design. Driven by ContextBased Reasoning, the presented dialog manager features a discourse model that implements mixed-initiative conversation with a focus on the user’s assistive needs. The discourse behavior must maintain a sense of generality, where the assistive nature of the system remains constant regardless of its knowledge corpus. The dialog manager was encapsulated into a speech-based embodied conversation agent platform for prototyping and testing purposes. A battery of user trials was performed on this agent to evaluate its performance as a robust, domain-independent, speech-based interaction entity capable of satisfying the needs of its users

A CRITICAL REVIEW OF CURRENT APPROACHES AND PRACTICES IN COMPUTING ETHICS EDUCATION

Recent scandals caused by the results of negligent, malicious, or shortsighted software development practices highlight the need for software developers to consider the ethical implications of their work. Computing ethics has historically been a marginalized area within computing disciplines, so educators in these disciplines do not have a common background for teaching the topic. Computing ethics education, although often a required part of coursework, can vary widely in the method of implementation from university to university. In this report I summarize the insights I gained from interviewing four educators from three different institutions on their pedagogical approaches to computing ethics. I found there to be a few terms that had very different contextual meanings for the different educators. Case study and group discussion in particular are two terms with a diversity of purposes, methods of use, and literal meanings among the interviewees. I summarize three different methods of extending engineering ethics education beyond one ethics course. I review software tools designed to assist with ethical reflection or to encourage thoughtful discussion, and I make an argument for which elements of those tools seemed to assist in thoughtful consideration and discussion. Finally, I propose a sketch of an ethically sensitive software design, and consider the implications of applying software to ethical reflection. I conclude with some areas for future study that could benefit the development of a software intervention for ethics, as well as the field of ethics education in general