CSCW2013 – 2 workshop papers & Texan fun

I recently returned from Texas, San Antonio where I was in attendance at the 16^th ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) conference. While there I gave Two workshop papers: 1. [W8:]¹ Collaborative Information Seeking: [Tracking Epistemic Beliefs and Sensemaking in Collaborative Information Retrieval, Knight, Buckingham Shum and Littleton (2013)]² 2. [W10:]³ CSCW and education: [Collaborative Sensemaking in Learning Analytics, Knight, Buckingham Shum and Littleton (2013)]⁴ The first described the use of KMI’s Cohere platform to support (epistemic) sensemaking around collaborative information seeking, while the second described the need for a combined CSCW and educational research agenda into the multi-level sensemaking around the visualisations of analytics at the various hierarchical levels – from students to governmental. Both papers were well received and the workshops were a productive networking opportunity with some possibility for collaboration in the future.

Hotel Lobby

View from my hotel room

Main Conference CSCW generally was exciting with a lot of

interesting work going on around collaborative information seeking, social q&A, and knowledge management tools such as Wikipedia. I’m slowly working through my pile of cards to keep in contact with those doing interesting work! There was also a lot of interest in what the OU is doing particularly with respect to FutureLearn and Learning Analytics. It was interesting to talk to people about these developments, and I think most people were keeping a suitably critical eye on things! I maintained a twitter archive from CSCW2013, which can be found here: (apparently I was the 2^nd most prolific tweeter) The conference was also testing out a scheduling and recommendation system.  I have to say I didn’t use the recommendation function (or, I tried it, but then didn’t use it) but the scheduling function was useful.  It would be interesting to have a scheduler prior to the event to try and minimise conflicts and maximise room stability – the constant movement between rooms was frustrating and I know when I was considering talks I weighted towards not-moving… Anyway, I’ve pasted the talks I (think) I attended below.  I’ll say a bit about some of them now.# Some Highlights We started the conference off with a masterclass both in how to, and how not to, do a talk – hell you can get away with it when you do it like this though :-): [Path dependent network advantage]⁵ (ACM Link:  [778)]⁶ charismatic and funny (and the only talk of the conference to include the phrase “full body condom”) the fact you couldn’t see some of the diagrams, and the presentation was from a pdf really wasn’t a problem. Interesting talk on whether those who act as brokers between network groups, those who have a solid network but don’t move outside it, or those who sometimes act as brokers but also have periods of ‘concentration’ do better (financially, in a particular context, etc.) all taken from trace data on scheduling and emails, etc. which was pretty amazing. (Probably unsurprisingly the ‘sometimes brokers, but not always’ people do best). There were quite a lot of talks on facebook interaction and social capital, and trust and credibility in social networks including microblogs such as twitter.  These were interesting but I was particularly excited by the social search, social navigation, social Q&A, and social knowledge building (or whatever we want to call it) around Wikipedia like tools (…all Wikipedia I think). For example: * [Social Navigation for Loosely-Coupled Information Seeking in Tightly-Knit Groups using WebWear]⁷  (ACM Link:  [^885]⁸) Explored the use of a system to track sites visited by work-groups (e.g. software engineers) working perhaps on different tasks, such that as they visit users may share the site, and when other users search they a) receive suggestions related to their colleague’s searches, and b) see the sites they found useful marked out on the SERP. Code on GitHub here * In [Collaborative Search Revisited]⁹ (ACM Link:  [^910]¹⁰) [Merrie Ringel Morris]¹¹ talked about her research on collaborative search and how it relates to her current work on social q&A. This is important for me because it isn’t always immediately obvious that collaborative search occurs – and Merrie’s work provides some good evidence that a) it does, and b) it has increased, and c) new technologies such as mobile phones are facilitating an increase in the activity (although sometimes in different ways to earlier occurrences), but still a heavy reliance on email.  I also had a chance to briefly talk to Merrie afterwards, so with the workshop too that means I think I’ve at least had a brief conversation with most of the ‘names’ in collab search…it helps that they’re all very approachable and doing interesting things (is it possible to be intimidatingly approachable? I know it sounds like an oxymoron but…) * There were quite a lot of talks on Wikipedia at the conference, including [Making Peripheral Participation Legitimate: Reader engagement experiments in Wikipedia]¹² (ACM Link:  [^872]¹³), [Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia]¹⁴ (ACM Link:  [873),]¹⁵ [Arguments about Deletion: How Experience Improves the Acceptability of Arguments in Ad-hoc Online Task Groups]¹⁶ (ACM Link:  [^897]¹⁷). I have got to do some wikipedia work (I have an idea…it’d be nice to do some data stuff on existing things though).  The nuance of measuring engagement (number of edits v. time spent editing, for example); understanding how to encourage editing (HCI, support areas (the teahouse for example), the feedback tool, etc.); and the nature of discourse on the sites (and how the site can measure/categorise this) is fascinating and has obvious applications in educational use of such software and techniques. A session I was, unsurprisingly, particularly interested in was the panel session: [Bursting Your (Filter) Bubble: Strategies for Promoting Diverse Exposure]¹⁸. I was particularly pleased to hear from [Travis Kriplean]¹⁹ whose work focuses on discourses of the web, and supporting sensemaking in information processing and seeking.  One tool of his I particularly like encourages users to add comments to paragraphs of articles (e.g. on wordpress) to précis the paragraph; the article author can then reply whether or not the précis is indeed what they were trying to get across.  The potential use for education is pretty obvious, but the concept generally is also pretty cool.  I’ve talked a lot on the blog about diversity aware search, personalisation, etc. so I won’t do that any more here except to say I have another post in draft re: the testimony of silence in search engine results, and this is something I think some of the panel discussion glossed:  It isn’t enough to encourage users to read “both sides” of the story, because it implies a) that they’re equally valid, b) that they encapsulate the whole story, and c) that they are fixed polar positions, but often these are not the case.  For example, I often notice when reading newspapers ‘opposed’ to my own view that it isn’t that they’re presenting stories in a different light, it’s that they just don’t carry the story at all – so the Guardian has a fantastic education section, but most other national papers neglect a lot of the things the Guardian reports on.  Understanding that absence in ‘filter bubbles’ is more complex than looking for the “other side”. One of the final sessions was a really interesting idea…a redelivery of the most cited paper from CSCW94: [Grouplens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews (CSCW 1994)]²⁰…although it might be a “you had to be there” thing, I’ve tried explaining why it was so funny (and interesting) a couple of times with mixed response (“100mb of data – A DAY! And my laptop only has 40mb, and I had to pay extra for that!”).  In any case, it was interesting to see the architecture they developed for collaborative filtering, issues they foresaw, where they saw it going (and where it has gone), and so on.  This was also an opportunity to revist some of the ‘filter bubble’ issues talked about in the panel, and there was some interesting talk about foresight and retrospect – I know I found some useful links/ideas from this but they’re temporarily escaping me (should check the twitter archive!) []²¹

Hotel Lobby

Talks Attended 2013-02-25 09:00-10:30 **[Path dependent network

advantage]⁵** Welcome and Opening Plenary ACM Link:  [^778]⁶ 2013-02-25 11:00-11:22 Rio Grande East [Closure vs. Structural Holes: How Social Network Information and Culture Affect Choice of Collaborators]²² Into the Petri Dish: Culture and Collaboration Session chair: Jofish Kaye, Yahoo!, USA ACM Link:  [^781]²³ 2013-02-25 11:22-11:44 Rio Grande East [The Effect of Message Content on Communication Processes in Intercultural and Same-Culture Instant Messaging Conversations]²⁴ Into the Petri Dish: Culture and Collaboration Session chair: Jofish Kaye, Yahoo!, USA ACM Link:  [^782]²⁵ 2013-02-25 11:22-11:44 Rio Grande Center [Impression formation in commons-based peer production: Activity traces and personal profiles in GitHub]²⁶ Source Work: Social Factors in Software Development Session Chair: Lionel Robert, University of Michigan ACM Link:  [^792]²⁷ 2013-02-25 11:44-12:06 Rio Grande West [Shared decision making needs a communication record]²⁸ On the Record: Information and Communication in Medical Contexts Session chair: Aleksandra Sarcevic, Drexel University ACM Link:  [^788]²⁹ 2013-02-25 12:06-12:30 Rio Grande Center [Activity traces and signals in software developer recruitment and hiring]³⁰ Source Work: Social Factors in Software Development Session Chair: Lionel Robert, University of Michigan ACM Link:  [^794]³¹ 2013-02-25 14:30-16:00 Regency West 5 [Bursting Your (Filter) Bubble: Strategies for Promoting Diverse Exposure]¹⁸ Panel: Bursting Your (Filter) Bubble: Strategies for Promoting Diverse Exposure 2013-02-25 15:14-15:36 Regency West 4 [What a Tangled Web We Weave: Lying Backfires in Location-Sharing Social Media]³² Sharing and Privacy Session Chair: Sameer Patil, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland ACM Link:  [^876]³³ 2013-02-25 16:30-16:52 Rio Grande East [Designing for Reflection and Collaboration to Support a Transition from Welfare to Work]³⁴ Making the World a Better Place Session Chair: Ed Cutrell, Microsoft Research India ACM Link:  [^830]³⁵ 2013-02-25 16:52-17:14 Regency West 4 [Beyond Trust and Reliability: Reusing Data in Collaborative Cancer Epidemiology Research]³⁶ Collaboration and Sharing in Scientific Work Session Chair: Steve Jackson, Cornell University ACM Link:  [^826]³⁷ 2013-02-25 17:14-17:36 Regency West 4 Explaining Field Differences in Openness and Sharing in Scientific Communities Collaboration and Sharing in Scientific Work Session Chair: Steve Jackson, Cornell University ACM Link:  [^827]³⁸ 2013-02-25 17:36-18:00 Rio Grande Center [Trust in Online News: Comparing Social Media and Official Media Use by Chinese Citizens]³⁹ Trust, Credibility, and Rumors: International Perspectives Session Chair: Wendy Kellogg, IBM Research ACM Link:  [^843]⁴⁰ 2013-02-25 18:00-20:30 [On the Openness, Quality and Diversity of Social Interaction on Facebook: An Exploratory Survey]⁴¹ Interactive Posters, Videos, & Demonstrations 2013-02-25 18:00-20:30 [Tools for Predicting Drop-off in Large Online Classes]⁴² Interactive Posters, Videos, & Demonstrations 2013-02-25 18:00-20:30 [Understanding the Potential of Social Questions in the Web Search]⁴³ Interactive Posters, Videos, & Demonstrations 2013-02-25 18:00-20:30 [Public Spheres: Ideas Taking Shape]⁴⁴ Interactive Posters, Videos, & Demonstrations 2013-02-25 18:00-20:30 [Facilitating Students’ Collaboration and Learning in a Question and Answer System]⁴⁵ ****Interactive Posters, Videos, & Demonstrations 2013-02-26 09:00-09:22 Regency West 4 [Indebtedness, Reciprocity, and Fairness in Local Online Exchange]⁴⁶ Local is Where It’s At Session Chair: Darren Gergle, Northwestern University ACM Link:  [^850]⁴⁷ 2013-02-26 09:22-09:44 Regency West 4 [Consequences of Content Diversity for Online Public Spaces for Local Communities]⁴⁸ ****Local is Where It’s At Session Chair: Darren Gergle, Northwestern University ACM Link:  [^851]⁴⁹ 2013-02-26 09:44-10:06 Rio Grande Center Users and Nonusers: Interactions between Levels of Adoption and Social Capital Understanding People’s Practices in Social Networks Session chair: Moira Burke, Facebook ACM Link:  [^867]⁵⁰ 2013-02-26 10:06-10:30 Rio Grande Center [Uses & Gratifications of a Facebook Media Sharing Group]⁵¹ Understanding People’s Practices in Social Networks Session chair: Moira Burke, Facebook ACM Link:  [^868]⁵² 2013-02-26 11:00-11:22 Regency West 5 [Social Navigation for Loosely-Coupled Information Seeking in Tightly-Knit Groups using WebWear]⁷ Social Media Analysis and Interventions Session Chair: Nicole Ellison, University of Michigan ACM Link:  [^885]⁸ 2013-02-26 11:22-11:44 Regency West 5 [Analyzing the Quality of Information Solicited from Targeted Strangers on Social Media]⁵³ Social Media Analysis and Interventions Session Chair: Nicole Ellison, University of Michigan ACM Link:  [^886]⁵⁴ 2013-02-26 11:44-12:06 Rio Grande Center [Making Peripheral Participation Legitimate: Reader engagement experiments in Wikipedia]¹² Wikipedia Supported Cooperative Work Session Chair: Niki Kittur, Carnegie Mellon University ACM Link:  [^872]¹³ 2013-02-26 12:06-12:30 Rio Grande Center [Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia]¹⁴ Wikipedia Supported Cooperative Work Session Chair: Niki Kittur, Carnegie Mellon University ACM Link:  [^873]¹⁵ 2013-02-26 14:30-14:52 Regency West 5 [Collaborative Search Revisited]⁹ Searching: Better Together? Session Chair: Mark Ackerman, University of Michigan ACM Link:  [^910]¹⁰ 2013-02-26 14:52-15:14 Regency West 5 [Online Silk Road: Nurturing Social Search through Knowledge Bartering]⁵⁵ Searching: Better Together? Session Chair: Mark Ackerman, University of Michigan ACM Link:  [^911]⁵⁶ 2013-02-26 15:14-15:26 Rio Grande East [Arguments about Deletion: How Experience Improves the Acceptability of Arguments in Ad-hoc Online Task Groups]¹⁶ Controversy, Arguments, Rule Breakers, and Politics Session Chair: David McDonald, University of Washington ACM Link:  [^897]¹⁷ 2013-02-26 15:36-16:00 Regency West 5 [Who wants to know? Question-asking and answering practices among Facebook users]⁵⁷ Searching: Better Together? Session Chair: Mark Ackerman, University of Michigan ACM Link:  [^913]⁵⁸ 2013-02-27 09:00-09:22 Rio Grande West [Investigating the Appropriateness of Social Network Question Asking as a Resource for Blind Users]⁵⁹ Q&A Session Chair: Matthew Bietz, University of California at Irvine, USA ACM Link:  [^915]⁶⁰ 2013-02-27 09:22-09:44 Regency West 5 [I Need Someone to Help! A Taxonomy of People-Finding Activities in the Enterprise]⁶¹ Leveraging a Social Network Session Chair: Rosta Farzan, University of Pittsburgh ACM Link:  [^931]⁶² 2013-02-27 09:44-10:06 Rio Grande West [To Answer or Not: What non-QA Social Activities can Tell]⁶³ Q&A Session Chair: Matthew Bietz, University of California at Irvine, USA ACM Link:  [^876]³³ 2013-02-27 09:44-10:06 Rio Grande Center [Opportunities via Extended Networks for Teens’ Informal Learning]⁶⁴ Computer Supported Young People Session Chair: Carman Neustaedter, Simon Fraser University, Canada ACM Link:  [^927]⁶⁵ 2013-02-27 09:44-10:06 Regency West 5 [Combining Social Information for Academic Networking]⁶⁶ Leveraging a Social Network Session Chair: Rosta Farzan, University of Pittsburgh ACM Link:  [^932]⁶⁷ 2013-02-27 10:06-10:30 Rio Grande West [Analysis of Factors Influencing the Response Rate in Social Q&A Behavior]⁶⁸ Q&A Session Chair: Matthew Bietz, University of California at Irvine, USA ACM Link:  [^918]⁶⁹ 2013-02-27 11:00-12:10 Rio Grande East [Grouplens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews (CSCW 1994)]²⁰ Special Session: The Most Cited CSCW Paper

Footnotes

1. http://cscw.acm.org/program_workshop.html#W8 ↩

2. http://oro.open.ac.uk/36553/ ↩

3. http://cscw.acm.org/program_workshop.html#W10 ↩

4. http://oro.open.ac.uk/36582/ ↩

5. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4055&conferenceID=97 ↩ ↩²

6. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441778 ↩ ↩²

7. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3964&conferenceID=97 ↩ ↩²

8. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441885 ↩ ↩²

9. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3920&conferenceID=97 ↩ ↩²

10. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441910 ↩ ↩²

11. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/merrie/ ↩

12. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4031&conferenceID=97 ↩ ↩²

13. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441872 ↩ ↩²

14. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4035&conferenceID=97 ↩ ↩²

15. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441873 ↩ ↩²

16. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4026&conferenceID=97 ↩ ↩²

17. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441897 ↩ ↩²

18. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4065&conferenceID=97 ↩ ↩²

19. http://abstract.cs.washington.edu/~travis/ ↩

20. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4068&conferenceID=97 ↩ ↩²

21. /static/2013/03/DSC05492.ARW_.jpg ↩

22. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3941&conferenceID=97 ↩

23. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441781 ↩

24. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3963&conferenceID=97 ↩

25. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441782 ↩

26. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3985&conferenceID=97 ↩

27. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441792 ↩

28. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3972&conferenceID=97 ↩

29. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441788 ↩

30. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4048&conferenceID=97 ↩

31. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441794 ↩

32. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3968&conferenceID=97 ↩

33. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441876 ↩ ↩²

34. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3959&conferenceID=97 ↩

35. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441830 ↩

36. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4020&conferenceID=97 ↩

37. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441826 ↩

38. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441827 ↩

39. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4008&conferenceID=97 ↩

40. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441843 ↩

41. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4085&conferenceID=97 ↩

42. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4109&conferenceID=97 ↩

43. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4087&conferenceID=97 ↩

44. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4072&conferenceID=97 ↩

45. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4098&conferenceID=97 ↩

46. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3929&conferenceID=97 ↩

47. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441850 ↩

48. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3974&conferenceID=97 ↩

49. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441851 ↩

50. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441867 ↩

51. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4050&conferenceID=97 ↩

52. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441868 ↩

53. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3984&conferenceID=97 ↩

54. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441886 ↩

55. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3962&conferenceID=97 ↩

56. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441911 ↩

57. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3928&conferenceID=97 ↩

58. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441913 ↩

59. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3947&conferenceID=97 ↩

60. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441915 ↩

61. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3992&conferenceID=97 ↩

62. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441931 ↩

63. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3986&conferenceID=97 ↩

64. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3982&conferenceID=97 ↩

65. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441927 ↩

66. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=4052&conferenceID=97 ↩

67. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441932 ↩

68. http://halley.exp.sis.pitt.edu/cn3/presentation2.php?presentationID=3971&conferenceID=97 ↩

69. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441918 ↩