In 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, politicsI’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 the [...]
The 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 [...]
Last 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 aggregators [...]
There 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 [...]
I 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, politicsWorking 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, politicsIn 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 [...]
Libby Hemphill and I are hosting a roundtable discussion at the 2008 iConference, hosted by UCLA, at the end of February.
Professional students, whether undergraduates or masters’ students, represent a significant portion of the iSchool community. How do iSchools effectively educate those students while continuing to develop successful research programs? This roundtable discussion will focus [...]
Also tagged conference, education, highered, iconference, ischools, practiceI’ve previously written a bit on the balance of research vs practice in professional programs, and so I was quite pleased to see this post by Dori Tunstall tonight:
Design education focuses too much on “practice” and not enough on “research.” What I mean by that controversial statement is that is that design education does [...]