Summary
The article “Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories”, talks about a program called Themail. Themail is a visualization of the past emails you have. It grabs keywords from your emails and puts them into a visual portrait that you can use to visualize the kind of conversations you have with people. It has two layers, one of yearly words used frequently and another layer of monthly used words. They play on the size of words to help distinguish which words are used more frequently than others. Once they tested it out to the public, they were able to analyze that users either went with a haystack or needle method. The haystack method was more towards looking at things in a bigger picture. The users were more focused on the general kinds of conversations they were having with people. The needle method was more detail oriented and users wanted to find more specific conversations they had with people at specific times. At first people that followed the needle method were not impressed but when they were asked what kind of conversations they had, most users were able to remember and visualize what kind of conversation they had at that time. The application of this visualization is not for daily use because it uses an accumulation of emails from your past.

Reflection
This visualization is very interesting in how simple it is but how much information it gives to the users. It is simple parsing that grabs keywords that are used frequently from past emails; however, from this visualization, a user can get so much information of what kind of conversations and what kind of relationship they have with family and friends. It even allows two different uses. One that is more general and gives you a bigger picture of what kind of conversations you are having. The other view is more detailed and focuses on specific times and people you talk to. Both give you information on what conversations you have with that specific person and what kind of language you use. A simple visualization like this is amazing how little information is given but how meaningful that data is.

Questions
• Could this visualization be applied to other things than email like twitter?
• Is there a better way to represent the information in a different visual representation?
• If this is not really beneficial for daily use, is there a way we can make it useful to the user to keep checking?
• Is this information actionable or is it just interesting information people can get from using this visualization?

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Summary

The article “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter”, goes into details of researching what makes crowdsourced projects successfully funded. A key things that they noticed were language in how the project is pitched. They studied how certain phrases and words created a better platform for people to support projects. They also noticed that certain controls helped as well like the project goal, duration, etc.; however, the major reason did narrow down to the phrases used in the pitch. The way things are worded helps people feel more inclined to donate and support the project.

Reflection

From this article, I want to apply how we deliver our project pitch to gain as many supporters as possible. I want people to see our product and believe it is something meaningful and helpful to society. Our group will use this article to gain knowledge on what phrases work and which do not to gain more supporters. This may not help us financially because our project does not need financial help but rather support of people thinking it is a program that will benefit them.

Questions

• Which phrases worked better than other phrases?
• Do phrases help gain support even for not crowd funding but just crowd support?
• What controls will be applied to our program?

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Summary

The article “Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities” studies antisocial users. They study their behavior in different settings and the feedback they receive. This helps people spot antisocial users at an early stage. The study tries to answer three questions about antisocial users. They ask if they are created or born antisocial, if reactions promote antisocial behavior, and if antisocial users be spotted at an early stage. This study was data driven and the data proves the point that antisocial users are a problem. The community’s response is only making it worse however; there is a way to spot them early.

Reflection

This article ties with the team project my group and I are interested in working at. We want to catch the antisocial users and try to identify them with a label so other users will know to stay clear of that user. We will be using a way to scrub through the posts the user puts up and look for vulgar language or degrading terms. Instead of banning them, we would like to give them a chance. This means they are still able to stay online but the public will know of their reputation. This means they need to stop with the antisocial behavior or they will continue being blocked by other users. I believe this article showed me how much data can prove a point and help analyze user’s behavior. This is similar to what my group and I must accomplish to understand where to head with our project.

Questions

• What should people look at to determine if a user is antisocial?
• If one person is being antisocial, is there a chance that there are multiple in that one conversation to bring an argument?
  • Or can the antisocial user influence the rest of the community?
• What difference in punishment should an antisocial user face versus an antisocial person in the real world?

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Summary

The article “Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes” talks about how the online world is almost socially blind in interaction and communicating with one another. They study how in the real world, physical interaction influence everyday things around us like how the world is shaped in even architecture and design. They then go into discussing how we gain most of our knowledge from conversation. The prototype Babble is used to test these social interactions online by monitoring social activities and information. In the end they compare the digital world to a translucent door with a sign to warn people. They believe people must read and analyze what they see to govern their actions after. Instead they would like to make things transparent so the users may use their heuristic manners once they already see the other people as if it were a glass door.

In the article “The Chat Circles Series”, they talk about how text communication is becoming dominant in today’s world of communication; however, with text, you can miss the context, tone, and overall environment of the statement. This brought people to study ways to incorporate an environment into a text communication interface. There are a few programs that have tried this by using animations or pictures to communicate with text. Chat Circles and Chatscape are a couple studies that have been developed from basic ideas at first and continued to develop. Chat Circles started with a blank background with the ability to assign colors and shapes for each user. This creates a communication environment with basic function. They continued to add onto it with more features and then Chatscape created icons where you can assign animations and shape interactions. These small extra interactions help create more of a close relationship in communicating even with text alone.

Reflection

After reading the articles, I reflected on how tone and emotion is usually masked behind a text. When someone reads a text, they cannot hear or see the person. This happens to me very often where people take something I say the wrong way or miss the emotion behind it. There are apps now that animate text now like snapchat sends pictures with text and they have animated emoji. These icons help express more emotion and adds another dynamic to what you are saying. Even messenger has options to send gifs and emoji. I will need to consider how social interactions online through text need to find ways to implement emotion and voice. The digital world creates a wall between each user where there are certain guidelines to follow when interacting with one another; however, if we can tear down that wall and create a face to face interaction online, we may be able to see people interact at a more social level with manners they are already familiar with.

Questions

• What walls need to be taken down to create a more face to face interaction between users?
• What environment would Chat Circles and Chatscape be used for? Workplace or socializing with friends?
• What made them decide on that specific interface and the display of the environment?
• What other ideas can we implement to add more emotion, voice, and action to textual communication?
• Which additional function helps the users the most with feeling more connected with each other?

 

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Summary

In the article “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community”, Judith Donath talks about how identity is crucial in how users communicate online and in the real world. By examining the Usenet environment, their study was able to determine how people were able to identify users through different means and how it still caused many issues. Issues that include things like trolling where users will make a fake account just to ruin a thread. There is also a chance of corrupt data and information being put out there because of people using deception. Now Usenet is able to use many things from the way people talk, their signatures, and their posts to track the user down and find their identity and see if they are a reliable source or not.

The article, “An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community”, talks about a discussion board called “’/b/” at 4chan.org. This page allows users to post threads without creating an identity. This brings up a discussion of what difference it makes when people put a label to a post identifying it with a person or as anonymous. This article explains how the anonymous posts on the 4chan page brought it so many diverse threads that leads to a cultural influence. Compared to other major sites like Facebook and Twitter, 4chan creates more of a cultural influence in memes and viral posts because so many diverse people can post things and be seen without the worry of having that thread pointed back at them. This also is affected by the constant change in popularity of threads that keep changing every couple of minutes. In the end this article concludes the influence anonymity can bring out the most from people and be shared with a large audience to create cultural changes and influences.

Reflection

After reading these two articles, I got a better understanding of the online world by looking at how identity plays a role in how people communicate online. I took away the fact that identity can be a good thing and a bad thing when posting on a social networking site. It can allow people to post things and gain diversity in ideas and lead to cultural influence; however, it can also bring people to post useless things that can even hurt the spread of meaningful data. I think if there is a good way of monitoring the anonymity of users, it can be beneficial to the sharing of ideas and continue moving our culture.

Questions

• If there are new ways people are hiding their identities online, what other precautions can we make to limit the number of fake identities?
• What other things can we look at besides voice, language, etc. to identify a user?
• What are the negative influences anonymity brings?
  • For example, the recent VT YikYak threat that put police on high alert.
• What makes people post more being anonymous than with an identity? Especially if their thread gets popular, they try to take credit for it afterwards.

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Naaman, Mor, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai. “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” ACM Digital Library, ACM, dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718953. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summary

The author of this article talks about the study they conducted on 350 Twitter users and categorized the users’ posts. This allowed them to monitor the actions and behaviors of the users as well as the differences. They call this a “social awareness stream” (SAS) where they monitor social activity and detect patterns in activities of users. SAS takes in three factors including the public nature of connection, the brevity and the connection space of the information. Using this they were able to discover three activities that were predominant of users including information seeking, sharing, and social activity. They explained what kind of information they took in from the users and how they used that data to analyze the activity of the users. They tried to answer three main questions of common messages, differences between users in messages and content. This analysis helped them determine what kind of activity the majority of users focus on.

Reflection

This article helps me think about a few things about using social awareness streams as a tool. It is a powerful tool to understand the public user. When I interned at a big data company, they focused on creating actionable consumer intelligence by having select number of users monitored. This gave the company so much information from demographics to little actions the user would make. I believe with this data the developer/seller can know what his target audience is prioritizing. This article pointed out that from their analysis that the user focus was on their “self” more than “sharing”. This means twitter is an outlet for users to gain information for themselves. It is also used to hold onto relationships between users and create connections. This is important information that Twitter can use to implement new ideas and make their platform more user friendly.

Questions

What other areas did users focus on?

What other factors may be taken into consideration in SAS?

What other activities did users commit besides the major three?

Questions I can ask for my project

What is the focus of your users?

What questions do you need to ask to analyze your data?

What can you do with the information you gather?

What can you change to benefit the user using the platform?

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