eStorys: A visual storyboard system supporting back-channel communication for emergencies

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Journal of Visual Languages & Computing. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2010 Elsevier B.V.In this paper we present a new web mashup system for helping people and professionals to retrieve information about emergencies and disasters. Today, the use of the web during emergencies, is confirmed by the employment of systems like Flickr, Twitter or Facebook as demonstrated in the cases of Hurricane Katrina, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, and the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Polytechnic University. Many pieces of information are currently available on the web that can be useful for emergency purposes and range from messages on forums and blogs to georeferenced photos. We present here a system that, by mixing information available on the web, is able to help both people and emergency professionals in rapidly obtaining data on emergency situations by using multiple web channels. In this paper we introduce a visual system, providing a combination of tools that demonstrated to be effective in such emergency situations, such as spatio/temporal search features, recommendation and filtering tools, and storyboards. We demonstrated the efficacy of our system by means of an analytic evaluation (comparing it with others available on the web), an usability evaluation made by expert users (students adequately trained) and an experimental evaluation with 34 participants.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Banco Santander

A user-study examining visualization of lifelogs

With continuous advances in the pervasive sensing and lifelogging technologies for the quantified self, users now can record their daily life activities automatically and seamlessly. In the existing lifelogging research, visualization techniques for presenting the lifelogs and evaluating the effectiveness of such techniques from a lifelogger's perspective has not been adequately studied. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of four distinct visualization techniques for exploring the lifelogs, which were collected by 22 lifeloggers who volunteered to use a wearable camera and a GPS device simultaneously, for a period of 3 days. Based on a user study with these 22 lifeloggers, which required them to browse through their personal lifelogs, we seek to identify the most effective visualization technique. Our results suggest various ways to augment and improve the visualization of personal lifelogs to enrich the quality of user experience and making lifelogging tools more engaging. We also propose a new visualization feature-drill-down approach with details-on-demand, to make the lifelogging visualization process more meaningful and informative to the lifeloggers

Empirical analysis of internal social media and product innovation: Focusing on SNS and social capital

Recently social media such as Blog and SNS has been introducing by many firms for means of sharing information inside the firm, in particular to promote product and process innovation. This paper attempts to examine the relationship between social media and product innovation, and research questions are summarized as follows: (i) whether social capital influences the use of social media; (ii) whether social media promotes product innovation; and (iii) whether the effect of social media on product innovation is different in the manufacturing and service industry. The analysis clarifies that social capital in the firm is indispensable for the effective use of social media. Managerial attitudes toward innovation and social media are requirements for firms to promote product innovation. Managers thus should make an effort to raise social capital and nurture reciprocal culture for SNS use inside the firm. The paper finds that social media for product innovation is more important in the service industry than manufacturing. Social media makes it easy to obtain customers' information and share it among related sections, because social media enables to expand channels to make contact directly with the customer in the service industry.Social Media , Product Innovation,Social Capital,Ordered Probit Regression

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

The Spatial Self: Location-Based Identity Performance on Social Media

This is the author's final manuscript. Copyright 2014 SAGE PublicationsAs a growing number of social media platforms now include location information from their users, researchers are confronted with new online representations of individuals, social networks, and the places they inhabit. To better understand these representations and their implications, we introduce the concept of the “spatial self”: a theoretical framework encapsulating the process of online self-presentation based on the display of offline physical activities. Building on previous studies in social science, humanities, and computer and information science, we analyze the ways offline experiences are harnessed and performed online. We first provide an encompassing interdisciplinary survey of research that investigates the relationships between location, information technology, and identity performance. Then, we identify and characterize the spatial self as well as examine its occurrences through three case studies of popular social media sites: Instagram, Facebook, and Foursquare. Finally, we offer possible research directions and methodological considerations for the analysis of geocoded social media data