120 research outputs found
Beyond opening up the black box: Investigating the role of algorithmic systems in Wikipedian organizational culture
Scholars and practitioners across domains are increasingly concerned with
algorithmic transparency and opacity, interrogating the values and assumptions
embedded in automated, black-boxed systems, particularly in user-generated
content platforms. I report from an ethnography of infrastructure in Wikipedia
to discuss an often understudied aspect of this topic: the local, contextual,
learned expertise involved in participating in a highly automated
social-technical environment. Today, the organizational culture of Wikipedia is
deeply intertwined with various data-driven algorithmic systems, which
Wikipedians rely on to help manage and govern the "anyone can edit"
encyclopedia at a massive scale. These bots, scripts, tools, plugins, and
dashboards make Wikipedia more efficient for those who know how to work with
them, but like all organizational culture, newcomers must learn them if they
want to fully participate. I illustrate how cultural and organizational
expertise is enacted around algorithmic agents by discussing two
autoethnographic vignettes, which relate my personal experience as a veteran in
Wikipedia. I present thick descriptions of how governance and gatekeeping
practices are articulated through and in alignment with these automated
infrastructures. Over the past 15 years, Wikipedian veterans and administrators
have made specific decisions to support administrative and editorial workflows
with automation in particular ways and not others. I use these cases of
Wikipedia's bot-supported bureaucracy to discuss several issues in the fields
of critical algorithms studies, critical data studies, and fairness,
accountability, and transparency in machine learning -- most principally
arguing that scholarship and practice must go beyond trying to "open up the
black box" of such systems and also examine sociocultural processes like
newcomer socialization.Comment: 14 pages, typo fixed in v
Trace Ethnography Workshop: iConference 2015
This workshop introduces participants to trace ethnography, building a network of scholars interested in the collection and interpretation of trace data and distributed documentary practices. The intended audience is broad, and participants need not have any existing experience working with trace data from either qualitative or quantitative approaches. The workshop provides an interactive introduction to the background, theories, methods, and applications–present and future–of trace ethnography. Participants with more experience in this area will demonstrate how they apply these techniques in their own research, discussing various issues as they arise. The workshop is intended to help researchers identify documentary traces, plan for their collection and analysis, and further formulate trace ethnography as it is currently conceived. In all, this workshop will support the advancement of boundaries, theories, concepts, and applications in trace ethnography, identifying the diversity of approaches that can be assembled around the idea of ‘trace ethnography’ within the iSchool community
The Types, Roles, and Practices of Documentation in Data Analytics Open Source Software Libraries: A Collaborative Ethnography of Documentation Work
Computational research and data analytics increasingly relies on complex
ecosystems of open source software (OSS) "libraries" -- curated collections of
reusable code that programmers import to perform a specific task. Software
documentation for these libraries is crucial in helping programmers/analysts
know what libraries are available and how to use them. Yet documentation for
open source software libraries is widely considered low-quality. This article
is a collaboration between CSCW researchers and contributors to data analytics
OSS libraries, based on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews. We
examine several issues around the formats, practices, and challenges around
documentation in these largely volunteer-based projects. There are many
different kinds and formats of documentation that exist around such libraries,
which play a variety of educational, promotional, and organizational roles. The
work behind documentation is similarly multifaceted, including writing,
reviewing, maintaining, and organizing documentation. Different aspects of
documentation work require contributors to have different sets of skills and
overcome various social and technical barriers. Finally, most of our
interviewees do not report high levels of intrinsic enjoyment for doing
documentation work (compared to writing code). Their motivation is affected by
personal and project-specific factors, such as the perceived level of credit
for doing documentation work versus more "technical" tasks like adding new
features or fixing bugs. In studying documentation work for data analytics OSS
libraries, we gain a new window into the changing practices of data-intensive
research, as well as help practitioners better understand how to support this
often invisible and infrastructural work in their projects
Characterizing Online Vandalism: A Rational Choice Perspective
What factors influence the decision to vandalize? Although the harm is clear,
the benefit to the vandal is less clear. In many cases, the thing being damaged
may itself be something the vandal uses or enjoys. Vandalism holds
communicative value: perhaps to the vandal themselves, to some audience at whom
the vandalism is aimed, and to the general public. Viewing vandals as rational
community participants despite their antinormative behavior offers the
possibility of engaging with or countering their choices in novel ways.
Rational choice theory (RCT) as applied in value expectancy theory (VET) offers
a strategy for characterizing behaviors in a framework of rational choices, and
begins with the supposition that subject to some weighting of personal
preferences and constraints, individuals maximize their own utility by
committing acts of vandalism. This study applies the framework of RCT and VET
to gain insight into vandals' preferences and constraints. Using a
mixed-methods analysis of Wikipedia, I combine social computing and
criminological perspectives on vandalism to propose an ontology of vandalism
for online content communities. I use this ontology to categorize 141 instances
of vandalism and find that the character of vandalistic acts varies by vandals'
relative identifiability, policy history with Wikipedia, and the effort
required to vandalize
Fourth Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE4)
This report records and discusses the Fourth Workshop on Sustainable Software
for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE4). The report includes a
description of the keynote presentation of the workshop, the mission and vision
statements that were drafted at the workshop and finalized shortly after it, a
set of idea papers, position papers, experience papers, demos, and lightning
talks, and a panel discussion. The main part of the report covers the set of
working groups that formed during the meeting, and for each, discusses the
participants, the objective and goal, and how the objective can be reached,
along with contact information for readers who may want to join the group.
Finally, we present results from a survey of the workshop attendees
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