Summary:

Themail is a tool used to create a visualization of the content of emails between people. Words that are frequently used for long periods of time (yearly words) are displayed as well as words that are frequently used over the course of a month. It can be used to show the progression of a relationship between two people or the timeline of events that have occurred during a person’s life. The researchers sent Themail to participants to be used outside of a lab to get a more natural response. They found that 80% of the participants used Themail to look at the broader visualization of their emails (“ the haystack”) and 20% of the participants used it to look at the more detailed aspects (“the needle”). The participants that used “the haystack” mode tended to look at the relationships between friends and families. Themail was compared by users to photobooks as a way to look back on events.  On the other hand, participants that used “the needle” mode were more likely to look at the emails sent between coworkers or ones that were work related.

 

Reflection:

I thought the visualization Themail used was really interesting but also a bit confusing and chaotic at first glance. Having the yearly words kind of more faint in the background was an odd choice as you would think those words would have more significance if they’ve been used over the course of a year or more. I also really liked that the monthly words were interactive. It would be fun to scan through emails and easily access the original email the word originated from. I also liked the use of spacing to show how long a person went without communicating with the other person. Adding the use of circles to represent the email messages made the different visualizations almost overwhelming. Since the study was done with only 12 participants, I would like to see it done on a larger scale to see if the trends the researchers found still hold true.

 

Questions:

What would a similar study done on a social media platform (like Facebook Messenger) show?

How would the use of different visualizations change how the users interact with Themail?

 

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Summary

The researchers of “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” explore what makes a Kickstarter campaign successful by looking at what phrases they use on their homepage. With their dependent variable being whether they were funded or not funded they also controlled for several variables such as having a video or how long the campaign lasted. They created a dictionary by scraping phrases used in a Kickstarter’s homepage using Beautiful Soup. They grouped the phrases they had scraped into meaningful categories using LIWC. They then ran a statistical analysis using penalized logistic regression on their findings. They found several trends that indicated success. For instance, if a Kickstarter offered reciprocity they were more likely to be funded. However, if they showed signs of doubt or used negative wording like “not been able to” they were less likely to be funded.

 

Reflection

Some of their results didn’t surprise me like their findings on reciprocity and social proof. A lot of it can be linked to psychology and sociology and how the behavior of others can affect how likely we are to participate in something. I think it would have been interesting to see, like the researchers suggest, how exploring the social network aspect can affect Kickstarter campaigns. It was interesting to see which phrases seemed to have a positive relationship with whether a campaign got funded though. There were some odd phrases like “dressed up” that weren’t obvious to me why that would make a negative impact. I also thought it funny that “cats” seemed to have a positive impact and could only reach the same conclusions the researchers did.

 

Questions

Would exploring more the reasoning of why the phrases have such an impact reveal any new information?

Would the same study on a different crowdfunding site reveal similar results or are these findings unique to Kickstarter?

Is there any correlation between the phrasing and the average size of donation?

 

 

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Summary

In “Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities”, Cheng takes a look at what defines anti-social behavior and if it can be predicted. Using 3 different websites, CNN, IGN, and Breitbart, he studies the difference between future banned users (FBU) and never banned users (NBU). He finds that there are noticeable differences between FBUs and NBUs. For instance, FBUs tend to use more negative language, post more often, the quality of their posts are poorer than NBUs, and their posts are more likely to get deleted the longer they are online. He also looked at the different types of anti-social behavior. Some users called Hi-FBUs had their posts deleted more often than Low-FBUs due to the language they use in their posts. He outlined a four ways to identify anti-social behavior:

• Post readability
• How often/where they post
• Community interactions
• If moderators delete the post

Using those features they were able to predict if the user would be banned after the first five posts made by a user with an AUC of 0.8.

 

Reflection

One thing I found interesting was the difference between the websites themselves. CNN was much quicker to ban a user than IGN. I suppose this could be attributed to the credibility of the website as CNN is slightly more legitimate or serious than IGN or perhaps due to the presence of moderators. I also thought it unsurprising that FBUs wrote poorer quality posts than NBUs since their purpose is probably to incite (and poorly written posts themselves can do that) so they wouldn’t take the time to write more eloquently.

 

Questions

Is there an alternative to moderators or community feedback that would help prevent anti-social behavior?

Would more crowdsourcing change or affect the outcome of some of their results?

How could we encourage anti-social users to be more social?

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Summary

In the paper “Social Translucence”, Erikson looks at the importance of a socially translucent system. The importance of a translucent system is that there is still some privacy but otherwise the user can see other users. In order for people to be able to communicate in the virtual world they need to be able to “see” each other as much as possible. For an effective system, it needs to have:

• Visibility
• Awareness
• Accountability

He focuses on the basis of a knowledge community, a place where users go to share and gather knowledge. Similarly in this paper, he also looks at different designs focused on making some social cues visible to the users. Erikson used social proxies as a way to show users where other users where and how involved they were in conversations.

In “The Chat Circle Series”, Donath explores how different designs for chat systems can affect how users communicate. Focusing on:

• Environment
• Communication channel
• Individual representation
• History
• Movement
• Context

It began with Chat Circles, a basic textual chat system where people are represented by circles. A user could move their circle from conversation to conversation. From there new designs were created to tweak different aspects of the original focus. Some designs incorporated more movement to make the conversations more realistic, others would try to increase the option for more context in order to stimulate conversation. One tried to switch from textual to audio and another had the conversations focused on moving toward a common goal to control an actor.

 

Reflection

Finding ways to bridge the gap between conversing in the virtual world vs in real life is an admirable goal. It is difficult to reflect aspects like intonation and facial expressions, key pieces to communicating, in a virtual space. I found it interesting that personal boundaries still existed even though a person can be represented by something like a circle. Social cues that you would think would only exist in real life were still present in the virtual world, such as the appropriate distance to maintain from someone when talking to them. The use of social proxies is an interesting idea to help users be aware of what other users are doing and how involved they are.

 

Questions

Would personifying the icons more increase the appearance of social cues?

Would experimenting with more or less social conformity effect conversations?

Is there a way to reflect intonation in a text based chat?

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Summary

In the paper “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community”, researchers take a look at Usenet newsgroups and how the users interact with one another. Since the newsgroups are in a virtual world, it can be more difficult to assess how competent a user is and if they are being honest or even correct in their responses. They discuss the implications of assessment signals vs conventional signals and how they relate to a virtual space. There are many ways to establish who a person is such as through their “voice”, the language they use in their messages, the signatures, the email address they use etc. However, even with these indicators some people, known as “trolls”, can still deceive people. They incite arguments and controversy. Some people ignore the trolls, others argue with them. On Usenet, users are able to block certain users’ posts to prevent seeing material from trolls using a killfile and in some groups moderators can remove a troll.

 

In the paper “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community”, they looked at the 4chan. 4chan is a website where users post images and other users can reply to the posts. The catch is that depending on the amount of posts and the popularity of a post, the posts can be deleted in a short amount of time. The researchers found that posts rarely last longer than 4 minutes before they are deleted forever. Users also have the option of having a username or being anonymous however 90% of users chose to be anonymous.

 

Reflection

The study done on Usenet is pretty outdated given that it’s about 20 years old. It would be interesting to see a similar study done on Reddit which sounds somewhat similar to Usenet to see if anything has changed since the late 1990s. It’s amazing how much power anonymity gives to a user since there are few to no repercussions for what is said. The lack of rejection and the ability to be whoever you want to be is an interesting social concept brought about by the anonymity found online. It’s also quite dangerous as some people take what is said online for face value and don’t fact check. People can be taken advantage of or do ill-advised things as a result of trolling. When it gets to that point, I start to wonder if there should be a more severe punishment when the intent is to do harm to someone.

 

Questions

• How do trolls impact someone’s social interactions outside of the web? Do they become more cynical?
• What motivates a troll to post inflammatory things when it only brings them negative attention?
• Do people fact check people online the same way they do people in real life?
• Should there be more severe consequences for “trolling” in order to help prevent it? Where do we draw the line?

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Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 31 Aug. 2017.

Summary

In “Why we Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”, the researchers explore microblogging sites, focusing on twitter in particular. They collected data on hubs and authorities, the impact of the geographical locations of users, and the relationships users form with other users. They looked at the motivation behind why people post. They researched who people followed based on their geographical location.

Overall they made some general conclusions. The people who communicate across the globe typically speak with other people who speak the same language. They found that there were 3 categories of relationships: information sharing, information seeking, and friendship. They found that the main reason people use Twitter is to post about their daily life activities.

 

Reflection

As someone who is not familiar with twitter I thought it was interesting that the most common thing people do is posting about the trivial things they do on a daily basis. I was also unaware that it’s used for information sharing. I find it surprising that people seek knowledge on microblogging websites where the user is so limited in how much they can write.

I wish the researchers had expanded a little more on their conclusion. They mention briefly at the end about how twitter should create more specific communities for family or co-workers but I think it would’ve been interesting to learn more about the relationships between the users in the different categories they established. Like why people feel the need to follow so many people when the relationship isn’t being reciprocated and how these relationships affect the user outside of twitter. For instance, do the people the user follows have an effect on the user’s own posts?

 

Questions

• What are the main types of information being shared in microblogging (i.e. gaming was mentioned)?
• What makes Twitter different than other microblogging websites?
• Other than a common language, are there other factors that determine friends/followers based on geographical location?
• Would doing a similar analysis on a non-microblogging website such as Facebook reveal drastically different results in terms of motivation for posting and relationships?
• What makes a user keep using Twitter once they start?

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