When preparing our Persuasive 2010 paper on Three Good Things, we ended up cutting a section on using word clouds to support reflection. The section wasn’t central to this paper, but it highlights one of the design challenges we encountered, and so I want to share it and take advantage of any feedback. Our Three [...]
Tagged design, research, social software, three good things, word cloudsIn my upcoming CHI paper, “Presenting Diverse Political Opinions: How and How Much,” we used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) to recruit subjects and to administer the study. I’ll talk a bit more about the research questions and results in a future post, but I’ve had enough questions about using Mechanical Turk that I think a [...]
Tagged BALANCE, crowdsourcing, mechanical turk, politics, researchI’ve been meaning to post a simple update to my previous visualization of political blogs’ link similarities. In the previous post, I used GEM for layout, which was not, in hindsight, the best choice. In the visualization in this post, the edges between blogs (the nodes, colorized as liberal, independent, and conservative) are weighted as [...]
Tagged BALANCE, politics, research, visualizationThe first of my social software for wellness applications is available on Facebook (info page). Three Good Things supports a positive psychology exercise in which participants record three good things, and why these things happened. When completed daily – even on the bad days – over time, participants report increased happiness and decreased symptoms of [...]
Tagged facebook, happiness, positive psychology, research, social software, three good things, three positive things, wellnessLast week I presented our first Sidelines paper (with Daniel Zhou and Paul Resnick) at ICWSM in San Jose. Slides (hosted on slideshare) are embedded below, or you can watch a video of most of the talk on VideoLectures. Opinion and topic diversity in the output sets can provide individual and societal benefits. If news [...]
Tagged algorithm, BALANCE, conference, diversity, icwsm, news, politics, recommender systems, research, sidelinesThere are a number of visualizations of political bloggers’ linking behavior, notably Adamic and Glance’s 2005 work that found political bloggers of one bias tend to link to others of the same bias. Also check out Linkfluence’s Presidential Watch 08 map, which indicates similar behavior. These visualizations are based on graphs of when one blog [...]
Tagged BALANCE, blogs, graph, linking, networks, politics, research, visualizationI was pretty excited by the work that Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter did to identify and show the political leanings in the link behavior of blogs that are monitored by Memeorandum. They used singular value decomposition [1] on an adjacency matrix between sources and items based on link data from 360 snapshots of Memeorandum’s [...]
Tagged BALANCE, blogs, linking, news, opinion, politics, researchWorking with Paul Resnick and Xiaodan Zhou, I’ve started a project to build political news aggregators that better reflect diversity and represent their users, even when there is an unknown political bias in the inputs. We’ll have more on this to say later, but for now we’re making available a Google gadget based on a [...]
Tagged aggregation, BALANCE, news, opinion, politics, researchIn early September, I attended WikiSym 08 in Porto, Portugal, so this post is nearly two months overdue. In addition to presenting a short paper on the use of a wiki to enhance organizational memory and sharing in a Boeing workgroup, I participated on the WikiFest panel organized by Stewart Mader. Since then, a couple [...]
Tagged collaboration, conference, cscw, research, wiki