Connected Action

The Second Conference on Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice (OD2005/DIAC-2005) was held at Stanford University May 20-22, 2005. From that event there is now a book,  Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice, edited by Todd Davies and Seeta Peña Gangadharan (CSLI Publications, November 2009).  All content in the book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share [...]

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Here is a great piece of social media research from the University of Maryland, College of Information Studies.
Prof. Jen Golbeck and Justin Grimes analyzed 6,000 tweets from United States Congress members.  They found some interaction but a dominant broadcast pattern of use with a focus on self-promotion.  The Washington Post headlines the results as “Tweeting Their [...]

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The 2009 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting was held in San Francisco, California, August 8-11.
The ASA attracts thousands of sociologists, a subsection of whom have  a passion for the study of the Internet and its many forms of social impacts and uses.  The Communications and Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association [...]

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A new book E-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice edited by Nicholas W. Jankowski on the ways social science research is being changed by the rise of social media has just been released by Routledge.  My colleagues and I contributed a chapter on the ways that information visualization of social media is a useful technique to [...]

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I just read a new paper from Jennifer Preece and Ben Shneiderman that provides a nice framework for the ways people contribute at different rates to collective projects in general and social media on the Internet in particular.
Preece, Jennifer and Shneiderman, Ben (2009).  The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation, AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction [...]

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The recent 2009 ICWSM conference featured research into the nature of a wide range of social media.
Some highlights:
An Examination of Language Use in Online Dating Profiles
Meenakshi Nagarajan, Marti Hearst
Event Detection and Tracking in Social Streams
Hassan Sayyadi, Matthew Hurst, Alexey Maykov
Gephi: An Open Source Software for Exploring and Manipulating Networks
Mathieu Bastian, Sebastian Heymann, Mathieu Jacomy
Information Diffusion [...]

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[Vladimir Barash is liveblogging the ICWSM conference]
10.30am A categorical model for discovering latent structure in social annotations (Said Kashoob)
Given a collection of web objects, users and tags, can we model the underlying tag generation process?
-Discover implict communities of interest?
-Categories of related tags?
-For given category, id most relevant objs for category
-compare categories
Initial thoughts: content-based topic modeling [...]

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[Vladimir Barash is liveblogging the ICWSM conference]
9-10AM: A Tempest: Or, on the Flood of Interest in Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and the Computational Treatment of Subjective Language (Lillian Lee)
-Sentiment analysis using discussion structure: clasify speeches in US congressional floor debates as supporting or opposing proposed legislation -Individual doc classifier -agreement (degree) classifier for pairs of [...]

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There has been significant progress in the NodeXL project!  We have just released version .84 that includes support for “schemes” that can set a collection of display attributes in a single click.  Along with updates to the menu ribbon, NodeXl v.84 is becoming a full featured platform for social network analysis in Excel.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/sets/72157617504025567/
I attended a [...]

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This year’s CITASA awards have been announced!  CITASA is the Communications and Information Technology section of the American Sociological Association.  It gathers together more than 300 sociologists interested in the ways groups of people make use of computation and networks. This year the line up is uniformly high quality scholarship about the nature of societies [...]

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I attended the “Studying Society In A Digital World” conference at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.  They just posted most of the conference slides.  I took some pictures and have inserted them next to the link for slides where I had a picture (or a good one!).  The conference was very [...]

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Another conference focused on research on blogs and other forms of social media is “ICWSM” – the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.  I was able to attend the previous meeting of this conference last March in Seattle and give a talk about different classifications of social media and I am looking forward to [...]

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A great conference on social aspects of technology is coming up soon:

C&T 2009
June 25-27, 2009
The Pennsylvania State University
Information Sciences and Technology Building
In an increasingly networked world, the concept of community has taken on new meanings and inspired the development of a wide range of technologies aimed at forging connections, improving communication, and enabling coordination among [...]

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This past week the Economist published a piece entitled Primates On Facebook that described some research done by the Facebook Data Team. Unfortunately, the article did not include any of the data visualizations, so we thought we would take the opportunity to describe our approach, the data, and our analysis in more detail.

For more details, [...]

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After ten years at Microsoft Research I have decided it is time to move on.  My time at MSR has been a remarkable one.  I have had the opportunity to work with very smart and focused people intent on making technical strides on many defining aspects of computing.  It has been a pleasure to work [...]

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