Summary

The paper “Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories” introduces Themail, a different take on visualizing email archives. Using interaction histories found in email archives, the typographic visualization is able to create a visual representation of relationships. The visual representation is composed of words found in the content of exchanged messages to characterize and show how relationships change over time. Keywords are shown on a timeline in a series of columns where the keywords are shown in different colors and sizes based on their frequency and distinctiveness. Themail is capable of displaying multiple layers of information where yearly words are large faint words that show up in background and monthly words are columns of yellow words show up in the foreground. Yearly words are the most used terms over a year of email exchange while monthly words are the most distinctive and frequently used words over a month of email exchange. When studying the use of Themail by users, two main interaction modes were noticed: the haystack mode and the needle mode. About 80% of participants used the haystack mode while 20% used the needle mode. The haystack mode presents the overall patterns of the visualization while the needle mode focuses on the individual pieces of information.

Reflection

Themail reminded me of word clouds except the words are in column format. Personally, I do not see how it can be useful especially since I do not use email that often for long term communication. I did not understand the anecdotes of users enjoying the visualization for family use because it seems like the actual writings would have more value than the individual words. Nowadays, I think the use of this would better fit for text messaging or instant messaging because those ways are more common for communication. Visualizing instant messaging would probably different since people usually do not write as if they are writing an email when texting.

Questions

• What other structures/organization of the words could be helpful?
• How could this be used in other modes of communication?

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Summary:

The paper “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” examines the factors that contribute to the success of crowdfunding projects on Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a crowdfunding site for various projects to potentially earn all or no funding from online backers depending on whether the project’s funding goal is reached or not respectively. The paper builds off a similar prior study by looking at the language of the project pitch in addition to more project attributes. It was found that language such as word choice and phrasing played a large role in the success of crowdfunding projects. The phrases were selected by processing and filtering scraped project descriptions. Additional variables included project goal/duration, number of pledge levels, minimum pledge amount, featured in Kickstarter, video present/duration, etc. The phrases were categorized into six categories: reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, social identity, liking, and authority.

Reflection:

I found the results of the paper to be interesting and not too surprising since language is powerful and important if used correctly, especially since seemingly similar words have different conations. It is used all the time in marketing, so the results of the paper could be applied to other crowdsourcing site or products in general since the phrases were not selected for specifically Kickstarter. For example, the language aspect could possibly be applied to a product on Amazon or a channel on YouTube to increase success rates.

Questions:

• Are the phrases equally influential to all audiences/readers/consumers of the project?
• How different do the results vary depending on the site?
• Are the phrases only influential to the reader if the reader is not aware of the influence?
• How well does this apply to non-crowdsourcing sites?
• How many people read the project description completely versus just watching the video/pictures.
• Would first impressions or prior knowledge of the project affect the success?

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Summary

The paper “Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities” focuses on antisocial behavior in online communities such as CNN, IGN, Breitbart, etc. by analyzing banned users from such online communities. These banned users negatively affect other users and the online communities by undesired behaviors such as trolling, flaming, bullying, and harassment. The paper describes these users’ behavior to worsen over time, and causing the online communities to become less tolerant of their behaviors. The paper explains how it is possible to characterize, identify, and also predict antisocial users and their behaviors.

Reflection

I found this paper to be interesting and relatable. I have seen and dealt with antisocial behavior in also every online community I’ve visited. This is especially true for online communities that are anonymous or don’t involve real world identity. I think this makes antisocial behavior easier for some users since they believe that their behavior cannot be tied back to their real identity. I think being able to predict and identify potential FBUs is a step in the right direction. This would allow for online communities to focus more on growing their content than having to worry about antisocial behavior. This would also allow for online communities to be safer since users wouldn’t have to deal with harsh posts or offline danger. Offline danger is a real problem since users can be targeted physically by users with antisocial behaviors. This could be anything from written threats to SWATing. I also am interested in the moderating systems since these systems are also subjected to antisocial behavior. There are many instances where these systems are abused such as abusive moderators, one-sided voting, and false reporting.

Questions

• In a system of using down-votes to moderate bad posts, how often is this system abused?
• Does banning users with antisocial behaviors actually help or worsen the situation?
• Is it possible for a user’s post to be legitimate, but also be perceived as antisocial behavior because their view is different?
• Does hiding a post have any impact over deleting a post?
• What do FBUs have to gain?
• Which type of moderating system is the most fair and efficient?
• Which type of moderating system is most prone to abuse?

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Summary

The paper “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” focuses on designing systems that are more engaging and productive to promote communication and collaboration among large groups of people online. It mentions how current systems impose a barrier between users such that it leaves room for second guessing what is being said between users. The paper states that understanding how to better current designs is important for the development of more realistic and immersive experiences similar to physical interactions.

The paper “The Chat Circles Series” discusses the popularity of text-based chatting as well as some areas that could be improved. It centers around a collections of graphical chat programs with the purpose of improving socials interactions and making communication more expressive. Each individual program in the collection has its own variation and involvement on social interaction. The paper states that the use of a basic and open representation of the user and the environment contributes to the development of alternative to current systems.

Reflection 

I agree and can relate to how it can sometimes be difficult to figure out the intent of a person’s message through only text. It is especially difficult if there is not much context to the conversation or if the person is a stranger. However, it has become easier with emojis, stickers, and GIFs/images. Text messaging has definitely improve since the papers were published. Some of the problems discussed in the papers have been addressed. For example, many platforms indicate whenever someone is typing. I thought some of the programs in the paper “The Chat Circles Series” were interesting. However, I think a lot of them are unnecessary or not practical since it would increase the learning curve. I believe that a good text message app should be simple (as in focus on text), but have enough features to make the conversation engaging and expressive. In my opinion, the shapes and other changes allowed for even more interpretation for the ordinary user.

Questions

• Do certain words or phrases make a text message harder or easier to interpret the intent of the writer?
• Does text messaging on certain platforms (such as Snapchat vs email) help interpret messages?
• Does text messaging on different devices (such as PC vs mobile) affect the way messages are interpreted.
• What kind of text-based messaging (text messaging, email, etc.) is more productive?
• Is it possible for text messaging to ever be the same as a physical person-to-person conversation?

 

 

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Summary

The paper “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community” aims to understand how identity is created in a virtual community. In addition, it examines the effects of identity deception and its causes. To achieve this, the paper focuses on the identity and deception in the Usenet newsgroups. The paper states understanding this will help create better online communities.

The paper “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community” centers around 4chan and its discussion board /b/. More specifically, it discusses anonymity and ephemerality attributes of 4chan and /b/. The paper states that the anonymity and ephemerality found in 4chan and /b/ can be used to understand the effects of anonymity and ephemerality of other online communities.

Reflection

I agree that identity plays an important role in building an online community, especially those geared towards social networking. Not only is it important to establish a person’s credibility, it holds the person accountable for their actions online. Even with identity, some people can still be hurtful and negative online. However, without identity, people are more likely to do so. For example, while Yik Yak was still around, it was known for its cyberbullies because users were “masked” from one another, making them essentially anonymous.

Similarly, the same can be said for ephemerality. In a sense, ephemerality encourages people to put less thoughts into their actions online with the idea that what they post will eventually “disappear.” As a result, people may be inclined to post whatever they want.

Although the lack of identity gives rise to trolls, it also presents the opportunity for internet personas. These are people who adopt different personalities online usually for mutual humor or entertainment unlike trolls. Many of these personas can be found on Twitter.

I understand why some people wish not to maintain an identity or opt for an alias online such as for privacy or freedom like mentioned in “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community.” Nowadays, it is fairly easy to follow a person across different online communities. Not to mention that their identity online may affect their chances for a job.

Questions

• How does a person’s identity remain across different online communities?
• How many views does a thread get on average before expiring?
• Doesn’t using an email instead of a handle cause privacy issues?
• Why do people feed trolls?

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Mor Naaman , Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai. “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” ACM Digital Library, ACM, http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities.” http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718953. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summary

The paper “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” looks at the microblogging phenomenon. More specifically, it focuses on Twitter, one of many platforms containing microblogging content. Using Twitter’s API, the paper finds that Twitter is popular worldwide with most popularity in North America, and has interactions of users between different continents based on available user data. With some analysis, the paper categorizes main user intentions on Twitter as Daily Chatter, Conversations, Sharing information/URLs, and Reporting news. Similarly, the paper categorizes main users as Information Source, Friends, and Information Seeker. In addition, the paper states that a user may have many intentions and/or many roles in many communities. The paper indicates improvements and ideas for new features for user retention can be found through the knowledge of how and why users are using a platform.

The paper “Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams” also focuses on Twitter, an example of what the paper calls “social awareness streams.” Using data through Twitter’s API, the paper analyses the activity of users on Twitter to categorize Twitter messages by its content. The paper finds that a majority of users focuses on themselves, and the minority share information. Of the two, the users who share information are found to be more social.

Reflection

I do not use Twitter at all, but I can imagine how Twitter users can be categorized into the categories specified in the papers. I am more familiar with Snapchat, and I believe that it can be considered a microblogging platform. However, Snapchat is more focused on photos and videos with less text unlike Twitter. I can see Snapchat users and user intentions fitting into certain categories. For example, with the recent share URL feature on Snapchat it is more obvious some user intentions are to share information/urls.

The importance of understanding how and why users use a platform as discussed in the “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” paper can be seen in Snapchat. Many improvements and new features on Snapchat come from how users use Snapchat. For example, before, a snap could only contain one line of text, but users were able to get around it by pasting a text with multiple lines into the snap. Now, Snapchat allows snaps to have more than one line of text. Another example is how video snaps can only record for a certain amount of time. Often, users took multiple video snaps to capture a long moment. Now, Snapchat added a feature so that multiple video snaps can be recorded continuously.

Questions

• The “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” paper mentions continents interacting more with each other when the language is common, and the data supports that North America interacts less with others while others interact more with North America. Is this because English is learned in other continents, so other continents can interact with North America more easily?
• I understand why Snapchat is popular for updating daily activities since snaps disappear after 24 hours, but why do people use Twitter for daily activity updates?

 

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