Christopher M. Mascaro

Group Informatics: A Methodological Approach and Ontology for Sociotechnical Group Research

We present a methodological approach, called Group Informatics, for understanding the social connections that are created between members of technologically mediated groups. Our methodological approach supports focused thinking about how online groups differ from each other, and diverge from their face-to-face counterparts. Group Informatics is grounded in 5 years of empirical studies of technologically mediated groups in online learning, software engineering, online political discourse, crisis informatics, and other domains. We describe the Group Informatics model and the related, 2-phase methodological approach in detail. Phase one of the methodological approach centers on a set of guiding research questions aimed at directing the application of Group Informatics to new corpora of integrated electronic trace data and qualitative research data. Phase 2 of the methodological approach is a systematic set of steps for transforming electronic trace data into weighted social networks.

Twitter zombie: architecture for capturing, socially transforming and analyzing the twittersphere

Social computational systems emerge in the wild on popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, but there remains confusion about the relationship between social interactions and the technical traces of interaction left behind through use. Twitter interactions and social experience are particularly challenging to make sense of because of the wide range of tools used to access Twitter (text message, website, iPhone, TweetDeck and others), and the emergent set of practices for annotating message context (hashtags, reply tos and direct messaging). Further, Twitter is used as a back channel of communication in a wide range of contexts, ranging from disaster relief to watching television. Our study examines Twitter as a transport protocol that is used differently in different socio-technical contexts, and presents an analysis of how researchers might begin to approach studies of Twitter interactions with a more reflexive stance toward the application programming interfaces (APIs) Twitter provides. We conduct a careful review of existing literature examining socio-technical phenomena on Twitter, revealing a collective inconsistency in the description of data gathering and analysis methods. In this paper, we present a candidate architecture and methodological approach for examining specific parts of the Twittersphere. Our contribution begins a discussion among social media researchers on the topic of how to systematically and consistently make sense of the social phenomena that emerge through Twitter. This work supports the comparative analysis of Twitter studies and the development of social media theories.

Tweet recall: examining real-time civic discourse on twitter

We present a preliminary analysis of #widebate, a hashtag to identify discourse related to two debates in the June 2012, Wisconsin Gubernatorial recall election. Our analysis identifies the differences in discourse between the two debates. We find that only 14% of individuals participate in discourse surrounding both of the debates. Further, we identify differences in the way that the most active individuals in the discourse utilize syntactical features. Our findings contribute to the limited literature examining technologically-mediated discourse related to political debates.

The Daily Brew: The Structural Evolution of the Coffee Party on Facebook During the 2010 United States Midterm Election Season

ABSTRACT The activity of the Facebook Group, “Join the Coffee Party Movement” (Coffee Party), is studied during a seven-month period leading up to and following the 2010 United States Midterm election. During this time period, the Coffee Party Facebook Group Administrator account posted 872 parent posts, which received 152,762 comments from participants. We examine the resulting electronic trace data utilizing a method for analyzing weighted social networks of discourse (Mascaro & Goggins, 2011). Our findings explore the network centralization and total post activity across three units of analysis: (a) time, (b) parent post category, and (c) specific parent posts. We report three key findings. First, the structure, centralization, and leadership within the network differ in four key time periods: the time preceding the midterm election, the week of the midterm election, the time following the midterm election, and the time period when the new Congress was sworn in. Second, the Coffee Party Administrators act as agenda-setters with the parent posts, but are also significant contributors to the discourse. Third, participants in the discourse alter their roles depending on the specific parent post and category. Our findings have implications for issue groups and candidates who utilize social media tools to mobilize support and engage with supporters, and also provide a methodological contribution for computational social scientists who examine these groups.

Shepherding and Censorship: Discourse Management in the Tea Party Patriots Facebook Group

Political groups on social networking sites enable a new type of collaborative, political discourse among citizens. In this study, we show how political discourse in social media is distinct from prior studies of political groups on the Internet. Specifically, we use network analysis in combination with communication theory to examine conversational social networks that emerge from direct addressals between participants in 10 discussions on the Tea Party Patriots Face book page associated with the shooting of US Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Our findings identify singling out of other participants as a key tactic for clarifying and questioning inaccurate information, apply social network analysis to identify different behaviors between networks and describe the elimination of dissent from the Tea Party Patriots Face book page over time. Important questions of how users experience political discourse online, including the impact of the traceless removal of discourse by group administrators are framed in the conclusion.

Creating a model of the dynamics of socio-technical groups

Individuals participating in technologically mediated forms of organization often have difficulty recognizing when groups emerge, and how the groups they take part in evolve. This paper contributes an analytical framework that improves awareness of these virtual group dynamics through analysis of electronic trace data from tasks and interactions carried out by individuals in systems not explicitly designed for context adaptivity, user modeling or user personalization. We discuss two distinct cases to which we have applied our analytical framework. These two cases provide a useful contrast of two prevalent ways for analyzing social relations starting from electronic trace data: either artifact-mediated or direct person-to-person interactions. Our case study integrates electronic trace data analysis with analysis of other, triangulating data specific to each application. We show how our techniques fit in a general model of group informatics, which can serve to construct group context, and be leveraged by future tool development aimed at augmenting context adaptivity with group context and a social dimension. We describe our methods, data management strategies and technical architecture to support the analysis of individual user task context, increased awareness of group membership, and an integrated view of social, information and coordination contexts.

Context Matters: The Experience of Physical, Informational, and Cultural Distance in a Rural IT Firm

We synthesize social informatics and regional studies literature to frame an examination of the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) uptake and use in the social experience of distance in a rural technology firm. Though distance is much talked about and regarded as a critical dimension in distributed work, the distinct ways that distance is experienced within a rural firm influence collaboration between the rural firm and its more urban customers and are little explored. This case-study town sheds light on how ICT use influences the experience of distance and collaboration in a remote location. In the first part of our results, we provide a descriptive account of the unique geographical, technical, and collaboration practice characteristics of the rural technology firm. In the second part of our results, we identify three experiences of distance: physical, cultural, and informational. We then synthesize our findings to reconstruct the role of distance and our understanding of the social experience of ICT uptake and use, in how workers experience distance. These findings have implications for regional studies scholars, and suggest that understanding how specific firms succeed will increase the effectiveness of public policy directed at regional development. They also provide for the further development of the social informatics approach, and contribute to a new perspective on distance to the literature on collaboration.

Technologically Mediated Political Discourse During a Nationally Televised GOP Primary Debate

ABSTRACT Social media creates a geographically independent commons that transforms citizen participation in political discourse. In our study, we examine 185,420 publicly available Twitter messages during a Republican primary debate in November 2011, hosted by CNN and viewed by over 3.5 million individuals in the United States. We identify how activity differs at various phases of a televised debate and who the subjects of this discourse are through analysis of how individuals use the syntactical features of Twitter such as at-mentions, at-replies, and URLs. Understanding how individuals engage with each other in an open forum has broad implications for understanding social media’s effect on civic engagement and information diffusion among elected officials, candidates, and citizens. Our findings suggest that a significant number of the syntactical features specific to Twitter are used to relay information, engage in discourse, and create new threads of discourse related to issues that are brought up during the debate. Although syntactical features signaling conversation are used, actual engagement is limited.

Movember: Twitter Conversations of a Hairy Social Movement

Movember is an annual “month-long celebration of the moustache” where men grow a mustache and raise money in the largest philanthropic endeavor for men’s health. Movember is predominantly an online campaign, and consequently, participants have actively embraced social media; this is evidenced in the 1,879,994 tweets collected during Movember 2012 in this research project. This article presents an analysis of Movember that examines how individuals use the numerous syntactical features of Twitter to engage in conversation and share information in order to develop a nuanced understanding of how people are utilizing social media as part of the social movement. While Movember has been successful in gaining traction on social media, the Twitter data point to surprising conclusions that have implications for understanding non-profits and social movements online. The following study provides two main contributions to existing sociotechnical social movement literature using a mixed-methods approach. First, the findings suggest that there is limited true conversation taking place although the stated purpose of the campaign is to facilitate conversation. Second, the findings identify that participants are more engaged with Movember as a branded movement than engaged in health promotion. While the tweets are conversational in form, they are largely not conversational in function, which points to Twitter being used as a broadcast tool in this context. These findings have broad implications for understanding how social media is used to engage individuals in social campaigns and engage with each other and share information.

Not just a wink and smile: an analysis of user-defined success in online dating

This study examines the publically available stories of self-identified successful couples that met using the online dating services Match.com, eHarmony, or OkCupid. We enumerate four main findings; 1) the distribution of relationship status (Dating, Engaged, Married) varies among websites, 2) approximately half of all stories explicitly thank the service they used, 3) the locations of successful couples from Match.com and eHarmony are not statistically different when analyzed at a regional level, and 4) while the distribution of these couples follows general population trends, there are low population density islands where many self-identified successful couples live. These findings, coupled with a review of the existing literature, establish the context for future research into the technological and societal contexts in which online dating exists. This research has broad impacts of informing the design and development of online dating websites and other information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as social networking sites.