Kyungsik Han

Generation Like: Comparative Characteristics in Instagram

The emergence of social media has had a significant impact on how people communicate and socialize. Teens use social media to make and maintain social connections with friends and build their reputation. However, the way of analyzing the characteristics of teens in social media has mostly relied on ethnographic accounts or quantitative analyses with small datasets. This paper shows the possibility of detecting age information in user profiles by using a combination of textual and facial recognition methods and presents a comparative study of 27K teens and adults in Instagram. Our analysis highlights that (1) teens tend to post fewer photos but highly engage in adding more tags to their own photos and receiving more Likes and comments about their photos from others, and (2) to post more selfies and express themselves more than adults, showing a higher sense of self-representation. We demonstrate the application of our novel method that shows clear trends of age differences as well as substantiates previous insights in social media.

Enhancing community awareness of and participation in local heritage with a mobile application

One goal of local communities is to create and reinforce community identity by connecting residents to their local heritage. Technologies have enabled and facilitated the creation and consumption of digitized history content provided by official history institutions as well as individuals. Although much research has been conducted to understand technical and social aspects of digital cultural heritage, little empirical research has investigated how people perceive, experience, and interact with community content that is socially generated and tied to locations, particularly with respect to building community heritage. To address this, we developed a mobile application called Lost State College (LSC) and conducted a user study with 34 local residents. The study results indicate that meaningful historic places evoked special attention from the participants, and that those who have lived in the community longer tended to contribute more to the community heritage effort. Participants utilized social features as a way of learning local history, reflecting personal experiences and stories, and co-creating rich layers of local history information from their perspectives.

Random acts of kindness: The intelligent and context-aware future of reciprocal altruism and community collaboration

In todays world of increasing scarcity of resources and economic stagnation, we still see rapid developments in computer science and user experience towards increasingly mobile, intelligent and context-aware computing systems. These innovations represent a new frontier for transformative innovation on a societal level. They hold the promise of breakthroughs in how people can collaborate through dynamically coordinated, efficient and reciprocal service transactions to improve the quality of life for all. I fix your car, you do a neighbors taxes, she designs my new kitchen, and so on. Existing organizations, which are already pursuing the goal of leveraging untapped community potential, do exist. These are known as as timebanks and community exchanges and have been around and increasing in number for quite some time, but they have grown only slowly in relation to the need for their services. This is partly due to a lack of adequate resources devoted towards setting up and running them and also to constraints in the design of the systems that they rely on to coordinate the transactions between community participants. This paper highlights the possibilities for todays researchers and innovators to turbocharge community collaboration by developing the required technologies. It is based on past research and our own ongoing research conducted towards building a mobile app for timebanking. The guiding vision is to develop more intelligent and context-aware systems to support on-the-fly service brokering that will greatly increase the scope and efficiency of acts of reciprocal altruism.

Local News Chatter: Augmenting Community News by Aggregating Hyperlocal Microblog Content in a Tag Cloud

Being aware of local community information is critical to maintaining civic engagement and participation. The use of online news and microblog content to create and disseminate community information has long been studied. However, interactions in the online spaces dedicated to local communities tend to only garner very limited usage, and people often do not consider microblog content as a meaningful source of local community information. Local News Chatter (LNC) was designed to address these challenges by augmenting local news feeds with microblog content and presenting them in a tag cloud that displays news topics of varying popularity with different tag sizes. Our study with 30 local residents highlights that LNC increases the visibility of hyperlocal community news information and successfully utilizes microblog as an additional information layer. LNC also increases one’s community awareness and shows the potential for leveraging community knowledge as a deliberation platform for local topics.

Exploring Tag-based Like Networks

The emergence of social media has had a significant impact on how people communicate, interact, and socialize. People engage in social media in different ways by not only adding content such as photos, texts, and videos, but also adding tags, Likes, comments, and following others. Through these activities, people form and develop social connections and networks. In this paper, we present a two-dimensional Like network formed and developed by people who have a same tag in their photos. Based on the dataset consisting of 51K photos posted by 36K users in Instagram, we present the structural and relational aspects of tag-based Like networks. Our study results highlight that Like networks have different sizes and degrees of network components depending on a tag type. We also found that a large portion of Likes came from random users for all networks.

Understanding Local Community Attachment, Engagement and Social Support Networks Mediated by Mobile Technology

Understanding the impacts and consequences of information and communications technology in local communities through theoretical and practical approaches has long been studied. Among different types of technologies, mobile technology suggests new opportunities for community informatics because a growing number of people across different age groups have adopted smartphones, which have become an indispensable part of people’s daily lives. Because mobile technology transcends the limitations of time and place, it expands the ways of accessing and interacting with local community information and lowers the barrier to participation. In this paper, we present our ongoing initiatives in community informatics including digital cultural heritage and local volunteer efforts mediated by mobile technology. We highlight how mobile technology, together with increased mobility, immediacy and social presence, shows a significant influence on local communities with respect to community identity, awareness and participation and also social support networks.

Reviving community networks: hyperlocality and suprathresholding in Web 2.0 designs

Abstract Social scientists have identified a crisis of community in modern society, for example, Putnam’s (Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community. Simon and Schuster, New York, 2000) study of a 40-year decline of community in American society. We argue that the design palette of Web 2.0 offers critical affordances for community information and interaction that enable hyperlocality and suprathresholding. We describe a community-based participatory design research project through which we investigated the design characteristics of hyperlocality and suprathresholding. We speculate on the possibility of a new design model for community networks.

Using Social Multimedia Content to Inform Emergency Planning of Recurring and Cyclical Events in Local Communities

Abstract Social media has been widely adopted for assisting the efforts in emergency response and recovery, but it has been underutilized for emergency planning purposes. Emergency planning in a local community context must leverage accessible and free resources such as social media, because it is largely a volunteer enterprise. We describe our fieldwork with local annual festival emergency planning teams that led to the design of the Community Incident Report (CIR). CIR is a novel emergency planning system that externalizes community knowledge on persisting issues and common mitigation strategies by integrating police reports, local crisis information, and social multimedia content to foster citizens’ awareness of local emergency information and to assist emergency planners in planning for recurring and cyclical events. We provide a use case analysis of CIR and its evaluation with 20 local residents, and discuss how it could be extended to inform emergency planning for other community events and local municipalities that share similar characteristics.

Community Incident Chatter: Informing Local Incidents by Aggregating Local News and Social Media Content

The emergence of social media provides an additional channel for broadcasting information to the public and support two-way communication between governmental stakeholders and the public during crisis. Research has focused on large-scale events, and few have investigated how social media can contribute to civic awareness and participation of small-scale incidents in a community-oriented context. Moreover, social media have been criticized because it is overabundant with noisy, inaccurate, and unprofessional information that are often misleading. This presents a serious challenge for community members to identify information that are relevant to a local incident. We introduce Community Incident Chatter (CIC), a smartphone application that is designed to aggregate information reported by formal news agencies and social media surrounding local incidents. Participants in a preliminary user study indicate that the community-oriented information presented in CIC is informative, relevant to the community, and has the potential of empowering community residents for responding to and managing local incidents.

Teens are from mars, adults are from venus: analyzing and predicting age groups with behavioral characteristics in instagram

We present behavioral characteristics of teens and adults in Instagram and prediction of them from their behaviors. Based on two independently created datasets from user profiles and tags, we identify teens and adults, and carry out comparative analyses on their online behaviors. Our study reveals: (1) significant behavioral differences between two age groups; (2) the empirical evidence of classifying teens and adults with up to 82% accuracy, using traditional predictive models, while two baseline methods achieve 68% at best; and (3) the robustness of our models by achieving 76%---81% when tested against an independent dataset obtained without using user profiles or tags. Our datasets are available at: https://goo.gl/LqTYNv