Connected Action

A while back I posted links to some research on Web 2.0 tools and scientific collaboration. For anyone who might be interested, there is a Workshop on Research 2.0 offered as part of the next Conference on e-Social Science. The call for papers was recently posted, and abstracts are due on 15 May, 2008.

Excerpt from the workshop description:

Participation in online, social networking activities has become highly popular in contemporary society. Commercial websites integrating with a range of Web 2.0 tools have created a new discourse, replacing the static, top-down nature of Web 1.0. Web 2.0 is also changing the way we do research. It has been envisioned that a well-designed social networking site can facilitate communications between scientists at different physical locations and in different disciplines, and can encourage them or at least make it easier for them to share their data and findings, and possibly recreate and reuse these resources. Research 2.0 is the term commonly used to describe the extension of Web 2.0 tools to support academic and other research. But do all lessons we have learnt from generic social networking sites apply to scientific social networking ones? Or are there any substantial differences between the two, given the specific needs of users working in scientific field?

Format of the workshop

This full-day workshop aims to map current territory of Research 2.0 (What Web 2.0 applications exist in research and how have they been adopted), and to identify the opportunities and challenges in the development and implementation of Research 2.0. It will consist of a number of short papers and a discussion session identifying promising research directions and initiating interdisciplinary collaboration.

Clay Shirky posted his talk from last week’s Web 2.0 conference as a wonderful piece on what he calls social surplus - extra cognitive capacity that people don’t know how to spend at first. He argues that our next revolution is the shift from spending our spare cognitive cycles consuming content - watching TV - to spending our spare cognitive cycles consuming, producing, and sharing content.

It’s an interesting train of thought. I particularly like the bit at the end:

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In a recent Guardian column, Cory Doctorow discusses his tips and tricks for email. He highlights his favorite piece of “email ninjitsu” - sorting by subject - in this boingboing post. But what caught my attention was this bit from the full article text:

Colour-code messages from known senders

Somewhere in the guts of your email client is a simple tool for adding “rules” or “filters” for the mail you send and receive. Here’s a simple pair that have made my mail more manageable: first, add to your address book everyone who receives mail from you; second, change the colour of messages from known senders to a different tone from your regular mail (I use a soothing green).

This lets you tell, at a glance, whether a message is from someone you’ve seen fit to send a message to in times gone by. This is particularly useful for picking misidentified spam out of your spam folder: anything from a known sender that your mailer mistakenly stuck in there is probably worth a closer look.

It’s a simple concept, right? People you talk to are probably more important to you than people you don’t talk to. Yet email clients don’t really do a good job with this. They sort by date. Or by subject. Or author. If you want to know which messages are from senders who get mail from you, you have to set up a rule based on some grouping function in your address book.

A few years back, Marc’s group released a little app, called the Social Network and Relationship Finder (SNARF), which allowed you to view messages - in all their threaded glory - sorted by a few simple relationship measures. You could look at mail from folks you replied to. You could sort by how often you replied to them. You could sort by how often they sent you mail. And so on.

SNARF is only available if you use Outlook, the UI isn’t anything pretty to look at, and it had its functional limitations (the acronym got a few unflattering comments, too). Still, people who used it seemed to like it, and it was certainly handy for quickly locating the critical emails in a mass of unread messages.

I’d like someone to develop this functionality in a full-featured mail client, because having to run a separate app is a serious drawback. In general, I think messaging software - whether it’s a social media app or a system like email or IM - should allow the user to access, understand, and use the structure of relationships around them in order to improve their experience with the system. This is obviously not an easy task, but it’s something for us to keep in mind.

I saw an article posted to Slashdot yesterday about how scientists are using Web 2.0 tools to facilitate collaboration. The original piece, published in Scientific American, offers some food for thought around these parts. The article is pretty basic, but it covers several of the key pros and cons of using these technologies from the science community’s perspective.

I’ve recently been reading some articles about e-research, e-science, and e-social science. Essentially, scholars in science and technology studies, sociology of science, computer supported cooperative work, and other fields have been discussing new communications technologies and their impact on scientific advancement and discovery for some time. The crux of the matter is the tension between benefit and management. The technologies allow for rapid collaboration, and that can be great, but if it’s not properly managed - and if users don’t have the right tools and policies to engage in productive collaboration - all kinds of problems can result. From simple inefficiency to disputes over credit for discovery, use of these collaborative tools in the scientific process is not a simple matter of getting people accounts and convincing them to use the wiki, or the blog, or whatever.

Finding and solving these problems is an interesting space for research and development. How might scientists benefit from the use of social media tools? What types of research are the best fit for online collaboration? How can we build and design tools and collaboration environments that allow scientists to pursue their research without having to spend a lot of energy in managing the technology? Some of the relevant research questions in this space have been addressed in last year’s special issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication on e-Science and at past CSCW meetings. There’s been plenty of work at the Oxford Internet Institute on e-science as well, ranging from general questions on collaboration in the social sciences to specific questions on infrastructure and policy.

I had the opportunity to chat with Michael Joroff of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning the other day, and we had an interesting conversation about the importance of being able to bridge boundaries between disciplines. He said the world has come to the point where the most successful people are multi-lingual - that is, able to converse with people from a variety of different spheres of knowledge. Such people are ideally positioned to serve as integrators of diverse and previously separate information. These integrators can therefore synthesize advances in different fields, create innovative solutions to both long-standing and newly relevant problems, and serve as collaborative bridges between related but disconnected disciplines. This puts these individuals in a powerful position indeed.

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Increasingly, technical conferences are featuring topics that make them look like sociology conferences! The upcoming Conference on Information and Knowledge Management describes itself as targeted at the “database, information retrieval, and knowledge management communities. The purpose of the conference is to identify challenging problems facing the development of future knowledge and information systems.” But the conference has a number of topics that focus on sociological themes:

At the recent ICWSM 2008 in Seattle I had an opportunity to present some thoughts about what makes social media social. The question is important because so many different types of interaction systems are considered social and they cannot all be the same thing. In an effort to categorize these systems one dimension that seems important is the size of the groups producing and consuming social media. In some cases on a single person creates an object that is then shared with many. In other cases many people create an object and then share it with just a few others. These dimensions open up a space in which different systems can be located and distinguished from one another.

A common misconception is that social media is authored by a large group (for example that many many people contribute to a Wikipedia page). In practice, I think most social media objects are authored by individuals or small groups and are intended to be consumed by small or large groups (most Wikipedia pages attract only a handful of people to make regular contributions). In aggregate, these objects become collective goods — what most of the great stuff on the Internet is made of: archives, collections, discussions, data sets, and more collectively authored by potentially millions of people.

The emerging sweet spot may be the creation of objects through the activity of large groups (think of the movements of whole financial markets, or the contributions of behavior from millions of search engine users) that are then consumed by large groups (in the form of market data or optimized search results).

There are other dimensions of social media beyond the size of the producer and consumer populations and I will try to post about some others. The nature of the digital object being produced or consumed is an important dimension, as is the level of interaction possible. Over time I would like to construct a taxonomy of social media systems so that we can clearly distinguish between email, wiki pages and massively multiplayer role playing games, all of which seem to be labeled “social media”.

Welcome to all those Interested in sociology, technology, social media, mobile social software, or any and all forms of online communication. This blog is intended as a repository for information about research on computer-mediated collective action from a sociological perspective. Many people, from marketing, research and development, engineering, academic research, to managers of e-business are increasingly finding social science has methods and concepts that can help us understand the Internet-connected world we live in. We are fascinated by the changes these tools are making possible and hope to shed some light on ideas and research that can help you productively navigate the changes.

We’ll be updating this blog fairly often with pointers to interesting research and applications along with musings based on our own experiences. We hope you’ll find it informative, entertaining, enlightening, or some combination of the three.

Poke around, find out who we are, and pardon our dust as we finish constructing the site. We’ll be updating the various static pages in the next few weeks, but the blog is now live for posting and content updates, so stay tuned!