Advanced topics in sociotechnical systems: methods and concepts of trace data

This workshop will refine the methods and concepts of sociotechnical systems. Through interactive training we will provide the workshop participants a mix of qualitative interpretation with quantitative, data driven approaches. The workshop will be divided into two parts. First, a conceptual grounding exercise featuring the motivations of participants in sociotechnical research, followed by small group discussions (led by organizers) about the sui generis of “traces" in our work. The second part will be four different technical breakout skills sessions about data collection, preparation, and analysis from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. This advanced methods workshop builds upon the established base of people and practices to further the impact of sociotechnical research. It is directed towards scholars with exposure to Sociotechnical Systems research and ideas as well as researchers from other domains including science and technology studies, data science, social computing, new media literacies, HCI, critical information studies, and infrastructure studies

Adaptive Information Visualization for Personalized Access to Educational Digital Libraries

Personalization is one of the emerging ways to increase the power of modern Digital Libraries. The Knowledge Sea II system presented in this paper explores social navigation support, an approach for providing personalized guidance within the open corpus of educational resources. Following the concepts of social navigation we have attempted to organize a personalized navigation support that is based on past learners’ interaction with the system. The study indicates that Knowledge Sea II became the students' primary tool for accessing the open corpus documents used in a programming course. The social navigation support implemented in this system was considered useful by students participating in the study of Knowledge Sea II. At the same time, some user comments indicated the need to provide more powerful navigational support, such as the ability to rank the usefulness of a page

Investigating the adoption of local online communities

While Internet researchers have largely investigated worldwide information sharing, less attention has been paid to the effect of the Internet on how place-based communities share locally relevant information. My PhD work aims to provide a deeper understanding of the interplay of communities' characteristics and systems' design decisions that affects the adoption, sustainability and impact of local online information systems. My research combines analysis of neighborhoods' publicly available data, user surveys and interviews, content analysis of archival online data, and field experiments. In my dissertation, I will investigate e-Democracy.org, which is one of the oldest and most sustainable attempts to provide virtual spaces for neighborhoods

Exploring Dynamics of Facebook Health Support Groups: a Leadership Perspective

Online health support groups are among the most popular Internet groups, being employed daily to share and seek health-related information, support, and advice. The leaders of these groups often employ various strategies to encourage and regulate participation. In this work, using a mixed methods data collection and research methodology, we follow a health support group leadership framework to examine how the organic peer-leadership strategies grows in two distinct Facebook groups, both dedicated to patients with Sickle Cell Disease. Our results highlight how these organic leadership strategies follow the standard leadership frameworks in more traditional context. Our results also shows that different leadership strategies lead to different group dynamics in terms of level of interaction and content of the discussions

A STUDY OF SOCIAL NAVIGATION SUPPORT UNDER DIFFERENT SITUATIONAL AND PERSONAL FACTORS

"Social Navigation" for the Web has been created as a response to the problem of disorientation in information space. It helps by visualizing traces of behavior of other users and adding social affordance to the information space. Despite the popularity of social navigation ideas, very few studies of social navigation systems can be found in the research literature. In this dissertation, I designed and carried out an experiment to explore the effect of several factors on social navigation support (SNS). The purpose of the experiment was to identify situations under which social navigation is most useful and to investigate the effect of personal factors, e.g., interpersonal trust, and gender on the likelihood of following social navigation cues. To gain a deeper insight into the effect of SNS on users' information seeking behavior, traditional evaluation methodologies were supplemented with eye tracking. The results of the study show that social navigation cues affect subjects' search behavior; specifically, while under time pressure subjects were more likely to use SNS. SNS was successful in guiding them to relevant documents and allowed them to achieve higher search performance. Reading abilities and interpersonal trust had a reliable effect on the SNS-following behavior and on subjects' subjective opinion about SNS. The effect of the gender was less pronounced than expected, contrary to the evidence in the literature

Impact of Self-Disclosure on Newcomers in Online Communities

User-generated online communities such as online discussion boards have become an importance element of life in information society. However, their success is accompanied with challenges. Particularly, their high reliance on user-generate content makes ensuring a continuous flow of newcomers vital to their existence. Newcomers face various difficulties due to their lack of commitment and familiarity with the community and many online communities experience high quitting rate of newcomers. In the current work, we aim to study how self-disclosure can be used as a mechanism to encourage more effort and commitment from newcomers. We present our results from exploring the relationship between self-disclosure and newcomers’ effort and commitment in an online community. Our results show that self-disclosure has significant positive associations with newcomers’ subsequent effort in the community.ye

Welcome New Americans! Investigating the role of hyper-local online communities in integration of immigrants

The United States has a continuously growing immigrant population. A problem many of these New Americans may face is adapting to the new culture. Researchers have been investigating ways technology can play a role in supporting acculturation of the immigrant population. In this work, we studied the role of a particular class of technological support, hyper-local online communities, designed to support individuals living in the same geographical boundaries. Through a survey of a 50 immigrants from two distinct areas in the US, we investigated whether utilization of hyper-local online communities can be associated with better integration with the local community demonstrated as increase sense of belonging and satisfaction. We also investigated potential factors contributing to utilization of such platforms. We report the results of our study; highlight potential implications for design of technology for immigrants and discuss future direction of research in this area