Studying Community Dynamics

CS294h – 9 FEB 2010

USENET [Smith, Fiore]

Usenet Visualization (Viégas & Smith)Show correspondence patterns in text

forumsInitiate vs. reply; size and duration of

discussion

Newsgroup crowds / Authorlines

History Flow

Wikipedia History Flow [Viégas et al]

Group Lens

GroupLens / MovieLens [Univ. Minnesota]

GWAP

Games with a Purpose [von Ahn et al]

Many-Eyes / sense.us

Many Eyes [IBM]

Mankoff Green FB

StepGreen [Mankoff et al]

RESEARCH

existing system

augment environment

create new environment

observe environment

new system

self-experimentation

observation

participant-observation

obse

rver

part

icip

ant

new system

obse

rver

existing systempart

icip

ant

navelgazing

eat your owndog food

armchairphilosopher

field ofdreams

meddling researchers

obse

rver

existing systempart

icip

ant

new system

Research Approaches

Studying characteristics of online communities Collect usage data; Observe, interview users

Intervene in existing systems e.g., Facebook apps Controlled experimentation

Introduce + study new systems Requires massive investment (?)

Mining social media Recommendation and matching algorithms, …

Research Questions

How and why do people join communities?How is collective action organized?Why do people contribute? (Incentives)Issues of quality control, privacy, trust, …What are the interactions between social

structure and system design?

How do these findings generalize and inform the design of new socio-technical systems?

EXAMPLE: WORLD OF WARCRAFT

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft [Yee, Ducheneaut et al]

EXAMPLE: COORDINATION IN WIKIPEDIA

History Flow

Wikipedia History Flow [Viégas et al]

“Emergent” Order and Coordination

“Talk” Pages on Wikipedia

Viégas et al. 2007

Coordination on Wikipedia“… [we] note that administrative and coordinating elements seem to be growing at a faster pace than the bulk of articles in the encyclopedia [Wikipedia]”

Viégas et al. 2007

Wiki Dashboard

Wiki Dashboard [Suh et al]

EXAMPLE: COLLABORATIVE TAGGING

Collaborative Tagging & Rating

Forms of Tagging (Golder ‘05) Identifying what (or who) it is about.

(topics) Identifying what it is. (“blog”, “book”,

“video”) Identifying who owns it. Refining categories. Identifying qualities or characteristics.

(“funny”) Self reference. (“mystuff”) Task organizing. (“toread”)

Personal Tag Usage

Inferences from Tag Order?

Stability of Tag Use

[Chi & Mytkowicz]

[Budiu, Pirolli, & Hong]

EXAMPLE:SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

DEMODEMO

Who is mybest friend?

The Strength of Weak Ties“Interpersonal Ties” – Strong, Weak, or AbsentTie strength modeled as a combination of time,

emotional intensity, intimacy, and services.

Weak ties shown to: Provide the majority of the network structure Transmit novel information among groups

[Granovetter 73, 83]

Eliciting Tie Strength [Gilbert ‘09]

Model Prediction

How might you apply these results?