Syllabus for my eCommunties grad class
January 4, 2012 in Uncategorized by Cliff
Here’s a *relatively* final draft of the e-communities course I am teaching this semester. Some readings may shift around, but this is the basic structure.
by Cliff
by Cliff
American Behavioral Scientist and Wiki Research
November 8, 2011 in Articles by Cliff
Andrea Forte and I have been working with Barry Wellman to open an opportunity to do a special issue of the journal American Behavioral Scientist regarding research on Wikis, open collaboration, and Wikipedia.
ABS is a widely read journal that is picked p by many different research communities. Consequently, there’s a great chance to get work read by a broad audience of scholars interested in this area of research. One goal of this special issue is to highlight both the breadth and depth of the research being conducted in this area.
Special Issue on Open Collaboration and Wiki Research
American Behavioral Scientist
Editors: Andrea Forte, Cliff Lampe, Barry Wellman
In the past decade, the popularization of open collaboration tools have led to innovation and disruption of established processes in nearly every dimension of social life. Phenomena like transparency in governance, citizen journalism, open source, open content production, crowdsourcing and distributed innovation have captured the attention of scholars from diverse fields. Although Wikipedia made it a household term, in popular press, the term “wiki” has come to represent a much broader range of ideas than an editable web page.
We invite paper submissions that examine diverse aspects of open collaboration. By open collaboration we mean the development of novel social structures supported by technologies including wikis and other content management systems that allow people to share and build content. The intent of this special issue is to showcase cutting edge research on how open collaboration is organized and how systems that support it are designed, implemented and used in a variety of task contexts. We encourage submissions from diverse disciplines that study social systems, culture and technology.
Suggestions for submission topics include but are not limited to:
- Social structure and organization of open collaborations
- Motivation and incentive to participate
- Technical features of systems that support collaboration
- The use of reputation and rating in open collaboration systems
- The impact of open collaboration on
- education and learning
- scientific collaboration
- journalism
- government
- business
- knowledge management
American Behavioral Scientist (ABS) is a monthly, peer-reviewed journal that provides in-depth perspectives on contemporary topics throughout the social and behavioral sciences. Each issue offers comprehensive analysis of a single topic, examining inter-disciplinary, important, and diverse arenas.
Abstracts Due: Dec 15, 2011
Invitations to Submit: Jan 5
Papers Due: Mar 31
Notification: May 1
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Submission Procedure
Interested authors should submit an abstract of no more than 500 works by December 15th. The proposal should include A. the central research question(s), B. relevant analytical methods and theoretical frameworks, C. some basic description of what contribution the author(s) expect to make. Please include a brief (1-2 sentence) biography of the author(s).
Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be invited to submit a full manuscript of 7,000-8,000 words for review by March 31st. Since ABS is an interdisciplinary journal that serves a broad readership, authors should strive to make their contributions clear to non-specialist audiences.
Please email abstract submissions to aforte@drexel.edu, subject: ABS Wiki Research
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by Cliff
WikiSym 2011
October 4, 2011 in Articles by Cliff
I’m here in lovely Mountain View California at the WikiSym Conference. Really nice event, with some great talks you should check out.
Our paper here is:
Online and Offline Interactions in Online Communities
~ W. Mccully, C. Lampe, A. Sreenivasan, A. Velasquez and C. Sarkar
Here’s the abstract:
Online communities, while primarily enacted through technology-mediated environments, can also include offline meetings between members, promoting interactivity and community building. This study explores the offline interactions of online community members and its subsequent impact on online participation. We argue that offline interactions have a counterintuitive impact on online participation. Although these offline interactions strengthen relationships, these relationships undermine the community’s sustainability in terms of site participation. Participation has been defined as contribution of content to the online community. A multi-method analysis technique using content analysis, qualitative interviews, and server level quantitative data of users in Everything2.com supports our claim.
And the paper is (hopefully) WikiSym_2011 McCully et al.
by Cliff
Interview on Michigan Public Radio
September 24, 2011 in Uncategorized by Cliff
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jen White at Michigan Pubic Radio and talk about how technology and social influence affect the distribution and consumption of social media. A couple of key points I’m glad came out:
- There’s a strong intermingling of media at this point. Mass media stories are propagated to social media. Social media messages inform mass media attention. Both get talked about in “water cooler” conversations.
- Social influence matters. We adapt the information we’re absorbing from the source we’re receiving it from.
by Cliff
Spotify, Facebook, and self-presentation
September 24, 2011 in Uncategorized by Cliff
I have a very anti-hipster confession to make.
I don’t have great taste in music.
I mean, I have music I like, and music I think is good, but in general I pretty much watch my my friends are listening to, and go with that. It’s been like this pretty much forever. I think partially, it’s because I don’t listen to music all *that* often. In the car I listen to news. While working I listen to ambient or classical so I can focus. I do listen to music at the gym, but I’m heartily sick of my lifting mix and haven’t had the wherewithal to seek out new stuff.
Music choice is an intensely self-presentational thing. I can’t think of many other things that signal “coolness” and cultural literacy more than the types of music one listens to. People always joke about “guilty pleasure” listening, but we still hang a good portion of our ego on the fantastic choices in music we’ve made.
Recently, I was staying in the same hotel as Nosh Contractor, and he had shared his music file through iTunes. What are you going to do? Of course you’re going to listen to Nosh’s music. And it was fun. Some great rock tunes, very cool Indian music and some really interesting Chinese music I’d never heard. I felt like I new more about Nosh after my peek into his music tastes. When he and I talked about my voyage through his music library the next day, he seemed initially nervous (you could see him reviewing his music list to see if there was anything incriminating in there) but then enjoyed talking about it.
Because I depend on people I think have good taste to discover new music, I had a lot of interest in Spotify. I’ve been enjoying listening to the music of friends, both those from my research community (Nancy Baym rocks of course) and from my personal friends. It’s fun, and I’ve been introduced to some new music that can become part of my limited musical scope.
However, with the latest change in the Facebook interface, and my somewhat rash decision to link Spotify and Facebook, each song I was listening to started to be shown in my Friends’ feeds. Some friends posted to my wall with a bit of sarcasm to let me know they didn’t care to see my musical choices that evening. I was nervous about what I was listening to, whether it betrayed the fact that I’m a supremely uncool listener of music. In self defense, I started to seek songs from Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus and the cast of Glee to turn the whole thing into a joke. Plus I really do like “The Climb”.
Who sees what on Facebook is tough to figure out. It’s a function in the algorithm of how many friends they have, how “close” we are as measured by multiple possible interactions, and what choices I’ve made in applications. However, plenty of research has shown that people engage in very carefully considered self-presentation strategies in their social network sites profiles. Most people want to be authentic in their profiles, but “Sunday” authentic where they are presenting a somewhat cleaned up version of themselves.
The unholy combination of Spotify and Facebook take some of the control and transparency out of my self-presentation. I’m willing to tell folks I have terrible musical taste, but I want to be the one to tell them.
by admin
Writing for CHI
September 21, 2011 in Uncategorized by admin
It’s that time of year where I’m working feverishly on CHI papers. Thanks to my collaborators near and far for their hard work on these little gems.
