Summary

The article “Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories” is about Themail, a visualization that shows how people correspond to each other and how their relationship changes over time. It explains the parsing approach and interface, and further implications for research related to email content visualization. According to the article, users store a vast amount of emails ranging from insignificant to important. While many of these emails are insignificant, the pattern of emailing in which we develop becomes important. Two major themes are discussed: the appreciation of the overall picture, known as the haystack, and seeking specific pieces of information, known as the needle. Email visualizations fall into four main categories: thread based visualizations, social-network visualizations, temporal visualizations, and contact-based visualizations. Themail displays its information in yearly words and monthly words. Yearly words are used to show a broad overall tone of the relationship. This shows what people are usually conversing about, while ignoring words that are only used on special occasion. Monthly words are used to show a much more detailed portrait of past email exchanges. People were excited to look back at their email archives, and preferred looking at archives related to their family and loved ones.

Reflection

I believe that Themail is an extremely useful tool that should be used by all people that frequently email. Although I had never heard of it before, I would be very interested to interact with the tool to see the visualizations of my email archives. I think that this is something that should be more publicly broadcasted to the public, because many people do not delete their emails. People keep emails of conversations, news, and other relevant information that could be useful to analyze. It would be interesting to see this tool used on other platforms besides email. Many people have conversations on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and rarely delete their messages. Seeing also how their results vary between platforms, analyzing whether or not they talk about certain topics more on specific platforms.

Questions

Are there any other visualizations out there like this?

Could this tool be incorporated into other social computing platforms?

 

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Summary

The article “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” is about a crowdfunding site “Kickstarter”, and the factors that lead to success on the site. The paper begins with a description of how crowdfunding websites are becoming increasingly popular, It is argued that the specific language used generates roughly around 58% of success funding the project. Research to test this theory was done on a corpus of 45K Kickstarter projects analyzing duration, project goal amount, presence of a video, and language. Out of 9 million phrases, 20,000 phrases were studied and analyzed. It is believed that knowing these specific phrases can help sites improve in the future. Six categories were developed to understand the effects of persuasion on users. Reciprocity argues that people tend to return a favor after receiving one. Scarcity means people attach more value to products if they are hard to come by. Social proof is people tend to rely on others to decide how to act, while social identity is a person’s knowledge that he or she belongs to a social group. This social group is usually established among individuals with common interests or beliefs. Liking is the idea that people are more likely to comply with another person if they like them. Lastly, authority argues that people often resort to expert opinions for making decisions. Other characteristics that have an effect on the success of the funding are social progress, emotion, cogitative thinking, personal concerns and perception rates. All of these ideas go into how a product sells, and whether or not people will invest in them.

Reflection

After reading this article, I am more aware of how our language changes people’s perceptions about products. It is very powerful and can make or break a project. Personally I had never heard of the website Kickstarter before, but am intrigued to look into donating through the site. The idea that different phrases effect the way people react to products is extraordinary. It makes me think about previous products that I have purchased, and whether or not these persuasion techniques were used on me. Although, there were many words that were tagged as negative predictors that did not come across to me that way. Phrases such as “new form of”, “information at”, and “models of” are words I personally would have used in a Kickstarter post. It would be interesting to see how many Kickstarter users actually research the phrases that they use in their posts, whether it be related to reciprocity, scarcity or authority. I think the idea of reciprocity is a large contributing factor to whether or not people donate to the project. Most people I know will only contribute to something if they are going to get something in return. If users are persuaded into believing this product is something that will benefit them, then they are more likely to volunteer. I think that if more inventors and entrepreneurs knew about this type of research, they would be much more successful raising money.

Questions

Can this research be applied to other types of websites? (Social media, news articles, blogs, etc.)

What websites already apply this type of work?

What percentage of people posting on Kickstarter actually research their vocabulary before posting?

How does Kickstarter’s competition differ?

Is Kickstarter failing in any aspect that others are succeeding on? Does this have to do with user’s language?

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Summary:

The article “Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities” analyzes undesirable user participation in online communities, and how to detect them early on before they are banned from communities. The goal of this is to minimize troll-like behavior, which results in more positive online communities. There are already methods of trying to prevent this, such as reporting posts, down voting, and blocking. Although these methods are still in place, there is still a large amount of trolling in the online communities. The study uses three online discussion-based communities: CNN.com, Breitbart.com, and IGN.com. Through this, users were categorized as Future-Banned Users (FBUs) or Never-Banned Users (NBUs). While going through the users’ behaviors, the article evaluates three main questions regarding how and when users start deviant behavior online. NBU’s and FBU’s can be analyzed to find out more information about whether or not someone will be banned. Design features such as post content, user activity, community response, and actions of community moderators help do this. The Never-Banned Users and Future-Banned Users are split by the rate in which their posts are deleted. Depending on how fast a post is deleted, it can be predicted whether or not the account should be taken down.

Reflection:

The actions of the Future-Banned Users imply that they will produce deviant behavior, even before referring to them as “FBU’s”. From using social media sites such as Twitter, most of the deviant content that I come across does not make much sense. The irregular tweets are usually a mix of inappropriate words replying to a previous tweet or being stated. Most Future-Banned Users write much differently than accounts that I follow, and it is easy to spot out. As discussed in the article, most deviant content is concentrated within individual threads. What if the threads are private? Is there an efficient way to monitor that without intruding someone’s privacy? I do think that this is a major issue within online social communities, but it may be harder to solve with privacy issues.

Questions:

Is there a way to prevent deviant content that is private?

Why do people feel the need to post deviant tweets?

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Summary:

The article “The Chat Circles Series: Explorations in designing abstract graphical communication interfaces” explores various interfaces and how social interaction changes by what the interface looks like. Design features such as background space, individual representation, movement implementation, communication channels, and history depiction change how users communicate. When talking online, the environment is completely different than communicating in person. Design concepts have been tested through different interfaces such as Chat Circles and Chatscape, by adding certain elements to see the different social interactions. Chat Circles uses simple 2D graphics, implementing colored circles that change size and brightness level. The different elements help create different experiences for the user, but all contain the idea of making communication between users easier to understand. The visuals help text conversations become more life-like and understandable.

Reflection:

Before reading, I never thought about how the interactions through technology and in reality are so different. There are many benefits and disadvantages of communicating through online text chats. When using online chat methods, users can go back through the history of their conversations. If they are not completely invested into the conversation, users can multitask while communicating then check back and read the conversation fully later. The user’s attention can be somewhere else during the conversation. I personally like to multitask and talk to people as I am completing daily activities. However, messaging online can lose emotional context with the other users. Cues such as tone and emotion are hard to be expressed online. The invention of emojis has greatly helped this issue. Users are able to insert emotional faces into their text messages, to help the receiver understand their tone. Most people use online messaging as a primary source of contact. As technology advances, creating better visualizations for communicating is essential to clearly understanding what a person means or receiving the proper information.

Questions:

Is it possible to truly understand context and social cues through text messaging?

I know I message people via text messaging more than I talk to them in person; is it better to steer away from communicating only through texts?

In what other ways can we express emotion online? Is it needed?

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Summary:

The first article “An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community” analyzes the online community 4chan’s and its’ discussion board “/b/”. It focuses on the board’s design choices of online ephemerality and anonymity, and how they influence its culture. 4chan is an image-based bulletin board where users can post comments and images about a variety of topics. A content analysis was performed on the /b/ discussion board, showing the effects of being able to post anonymously on a large scale. Being able to be anonymous increases creativity and stronger community identity, but loses credibility and communication can be impersonal. The ability of online ephemerality is rare in the evolving online community we live in today; almost everything we do stays on the internet forever.

The second article “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community” is focused on how identity is defined in an online community and the effects of identity deception and the conditions that structure it. The article studies Usenet newsgroups, which is an information exchange. People feel the need to help others by answering questions and providing knowledge. Having an identity is critical to gaining a reputation and credibility. The article also goes into deception, and why people feel the need to deceive others. Assessment signals and conventional signals are used in the Handicap Principle, which models the relation between deception and honesty.

Reflection:

Having the ability to post anonymously online is extremely dangerous. When no one can be held accountable for their actions, there are no repercussions for wrong doing online. Due to being anonymous, there is no way to guarantee the legitimacy of the information. Most information that is online, unless coming from a credible source, is incorrect in some form. I think that in order for information to be posted in an answer to a question, we should develop an efficient way to check the credibility of the source. People are more likely to believe information if it comes from a credible source, but the only way to accomplish this is to have an identity. Before reading these articles, I did not understand the true importance of having an online identity. Different personas can be created easily, so it’s hard to know exactly who each person is in real life. Although being able to talk freely increases creativity online, sometimes it may do more harm than good.

Questions:

Is there already an efficient way for people to check the credibility of a source?

What is the psychological reasoning behind deception?

In what other ways does deception play a role in online social media sites?

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Works Cited

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summary

I analyzed the article “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. The purpose of the article was to first understand the purpose of microblogging, and how it differs from other forms of communication. Microblogging is defined as a form of blogging that lets you send updates to the public and friends about your life via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web. This is different than blogging, because it provides a much faster and updated form of communication. The author describes the growth of Twitter, which initially expanded to 94,000 users just eight months after the launch. There are people from across the globe that use the microblogging site, but it is most popular in populated cities such as Tokyo, New York and San Francisco. The author notes that the number of new users has slowed down, while the number of daily posts has been consistent throughout the years. In order to resolve this, the author analyzes the user intentions of Twitter users. These include daily chatter, conversations, sharing information and reporting news. There are also many user roles, which include information source, friends and information seeker. Most people that use the microblogging site fall under many of these categories. While using the overall user intentions, we can infer the community intention. This is used to improve the microblogging site to gain more users.

Reflection

I found this article to be very interesting. As a frequent Twitter user, I had never heard of the others services Jaki and Pownce. It would be interesting to look into the correlation of the other services’ frequent user locations, and the differences between those services and Twitter. If those services have different features that make them popular in certain locations, somehow incorporating them into Twitter could make the platform much more successful. I think the idea of microblogging is fascinating; people can instantly update millions of followers with news, important information, what they’re doing with their life, and more. I believe this concept is just taking off. Years ago, we thought blogging and emailing was a fast way of communicating with people. With the way technology is changing, people will find new innovative ways to take microblogging to the next level, and to deliver information faster than ever before. When I use Twitter, I think I would fall into the category of “information seeker” and “friend”. I follow news sites, celebrities, friends, and informative sites to learn information about friends and what’s going on in the world. It’s very easy to find tweets about information you’re looking for. Twitter has a feature called “hashtag”, which produces a list of tweets that include the hashtag. It’s curious to see the what’s trending on the site, meaning that a majority of users are interested it. This information could be used to change the way Twitter presents its information. Twitter has a much larger pool of information than normal websites, because millions of people are contributing to it. It would be interesting to look into why people use microblogging so much frequently than other forms of communication. People can easily find information on news sites and text message to communicate with their friends. Why feel the need to share so much information in a short amount of time? The psychological reasons for it would be thought-provoking to research.

Questions

Why haven’t other microblogging sites been as successful as Twitter; what makes Twitter different?

Due to other countries’ cultures being diverse, do all countries have the same user roles and user intentions?

Are there other microblogging sites that are more popular in other countries? If so, how do they compare to Twitter?

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