Last week, Sunlight Labs released Inbox Influence, a set of browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox) and bookmarklets that annotate senders and entities in the body of emails with who has contributed to them and to whom they have contributed. I really like the idea of using browser plugins to annotate information people encounter in their regular [...]
Also tagged privacy, recordsFor my second post on highlights from CHI this year, I’m focusing on papers related to opinion diversity and discourse quality. Normative influences on thoughtful online participation Abhay Sukumaran, Stephanie Vezich, Melanie McHugh, Clifford Nass Two lab experiments on whether it is possible to foster more thoughtful commenting and participation by participants in online discussion [...]
Also tagged chi, chi2011, conference, design, diversity, empathy, homophily, research, serendipityIn 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 [...]
Also tagged BALANCE, crowdsourcing, mechanical turk, 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 [...]
Also tagged BALANCE, research, visualizationLast 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 [...]
Also tagged algorithm, BALANCE, conference, diversity, icwsm, news, 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 [...]
Also tagged BALANCE, blogs, graph, linking, networks, 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 [...]
Also tagged BALANCE, blogs, linking, news, opinion, 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 [...]
Also tagged aggregation, BALANCE, news, opinion, researchA note came across the anthrodesign list earlier this week about redblueus.org, a website on which people who disagree about a certain issue are paired up, given some guidelines for productive conversation, and then have a facilitated discussion in reaction to a provided scenario. One of my concerns about virtual community and online discourse has [...]
Also tagged communityWhile reading the news the other day, I noticed that California’s attorney general, Bill Lockyer, filed suit against six automakers. Interesting. Lockyer is “demanding that they pay for environmental damage caused by the emissions of their vehicles.” Interesting, but irrational (as far as I can tell). To the best of my knowledge, the automakers have [...]
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