Petra Saskia Bayerl

Social media and the police: tweeting practices of british police forces during the August 2011 riots

With this paper we take a first step to understand the appropriation of social media by the police. For this purpose we analyzed the Twitter communication by the London Metropolitan Police (MET) and the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) during the riots in August 2011. The systematic comparison of tweets demonstrates that the two forces developed very different practices for using Twitter. While MET followed an instrumental approach in their communication, in which the police aimed to remain in a controlled position and keep a distance to the general public, GMP developed an expressive approach, in which the police actively decreased the distance to the citizens. In workshops and interviews, we asked the police officers about their perspectives, which confirmed the identified practices. Our study discusses benefits and risks of the two approaches and the potential impact of social media on the evolution of the role of police in society.

What determines inter-coder agreement in manual annotations? a meta-analytic investigation

Recent discussions of annotator agreement have mostly centered around its calculation and interpretation, and the correct choice of indices. Although these discussions are important, they only consider the “back-end” of the story, namely, what to do once the data are collected. Just as important in our opinion is to know how agreement is reached in the first place and what factors influence coder agreement as part of the annotation process or setting, as this knowledge can provide concrete guidelines for the planning and set-up of annotation projects. To investigate whether there are factors that consistently impact annotator agreement we conducted a meta-analytic investigation of annotation studies reporting agreement percentages. Our meta-analysis synthesized factors reported in 96 annotation studies from three domains (word-sense disambiguation, prosodic transcriptions, and phonetic transcriptions) and was based on a total of 346 agreement indices. Our analysis identified seven factors that influence reported agreement values: annotation domain, number of categories in a coding scheme, number of annotators in a project, whether annotators received training, the intensity of annotator training, the annotation purpose, and the method used for the calculation of percentage agreements. Based on our results we develop practical recommendations for the assessment, interpretation, calculation, and reporting of coder agreement. We also briefly discuss theoretical implications for the concept of annotation quality.

Text type structure and logical document structure

Most research on automated categorization of documents has concentrated on the assignment of one or many categories to a whole text. However, new applications, e.g. in the area of the Semantic Web, require a richer and more fine-grained annotation of documents, such as detailed thematic information about the parts of a document. Hence we investigate the automatic categorization of text segments of scientific articles with XML markup into 16 topic types from a text type structure schema. A corpus of 47 linguistic articles was provided with XML markup on different annotation layers representing text type structure, logical document structure, and grammatical categories. Six different feature extraction strategies were applied to this corpus and combined in various parametrizations in different classifiers. The aim was to explore the contribution of each type of information, in particular the logical structure features, to the classification accuracy. The results suggest that some of the topic types of our hierarchy are successfully learnable, while the features from the logical structure layer had no particular impact on the results.

Revenge by photoshop: Memefying police acts in the public dialogue about injustice

In this article, we are interested in the role digital memes in the form of pictures play in the framing of public discourses about police injustice and what it is that makes memes successful in this process. For this purpose, we narrate the story of one such meme: the ‘pepper-spray cop’. In our analysis, we link the creation and spread of the meme to the democratization of online activism and the subversive acts of hierarchical sousveillance. Based on our findings, we discuss features of the meme and the process linked to its initiation, rapid spread and disappearance as vital for the success of visual memes in the context of online protests.

Entwicklung und Validierung einer Skala zur Erfassung von Wissensintegrationsproblemen in interdisziplinären Projektteams (WIP)

Zur Bearbeitung komplexer Probleme und zur Entwicklung innovativer Produkte in Industrie und Forschung kommen zunehmend interdisziplinare Projektteams zum Einsatz. Die zum Teil hoch heterogene Zusammensetzung solcher Teams stellt jedoch hohe Anforderungen an alle Beteiligten, die das Erreichen der Projektziele erschweren oder sogar infrage stellen konnen. Insbesondere die Integration separater Wissensbestande bereitet hier haufig Schwierigkeiten. In dieser Arbeit stellen wir die Entwicklung und Validierung einer Skala zur Erfassung von Problemen der Wissensintegration in der interdisziplinaren Projektarbeit vor, mit dem Ziel, ein Instrument zur Diagnose von haufigen Barrieren in interdisziplinaren Kooperationen bereitzustellen. Die Entwicklung erfolgte anhand qualitativer Interviews mit Mitgliedern interdisziplinarer Projektteams. Eine erste Validierung der neu entwickelten Skala erfolgte im Rahmen von funf nachfolgenden Studien (N = 290) und bestatigte Reliabilitat und Validitat der Skala.

Coordinating high-interdependency tasks in asymmetric distributed teams

Teams working on highly interdependent yet geographically distributed tasks need to closely coordinate their activities across distances. This field study in the upstream oil and gas industry illustrates that apart from geographical distribution, the onshore and offshore teams are confronted by considerable challenges due to asymmetries in tasks related, demographic, and cultural attributes. While with the industrywide move towards real-time data and video communication physical distances have become easier to bridge, other asymmetries still require attention. Using semi-structured interviews and observations, coordination requirements between subgroups, interdependencies, and task-specific asymmetries were identified. Implications for media requirements to support distributed asymmetric teams are discussed.

Surveillance and falsification implications for open source intelligence investigations

Legitimacy of surveillance is crucial to safeguarding validity of OSINT data as a tool for law-enforcement agencies.

Identifying Sources of Disagreement: Generalizability Theory in Manual Annotation Studies

Many annotation projects have shown that the quality of manual annotations often is not as good as would be desirable for reliable data analysis. Identifying the main sources responsible for poor annotation quality must thus be a major concern. Generalizability theory is a valuable tool for this purpose, because it allows for the differentiation and detailed analysis of factors that influence annotation quality. In this article we will present basic concepts of Generalizability Theory and give an example for its application based on published data.

Revisiting group-based technology adoption as a dynamic process: The role of changing attitude-rationale configurations

In this study, we set out to better understand the dynamics behind group-based technology adoption by investigating the underlying mechanisms of changes in collective adoption decisions over time. Using a longitudinal multi-case study of production teams in the British oil and gas industry, we outline how internally or externally triggered modifications to the constellation of adoption rationales and attitudes toward a focal technology between subgroups caused changes to adoption decisions within a team. The constellations further seemed to impact usage patterns including conflicts about ICT use and the stability of adoption. Based on these observations, we suggest that group-based adoption can be differentiated in qualitatively different technology adoption states (TAS), which emerge as the result of disparate attitude-rationale configurations across subgroups in a user collective. With this reconceptualization of collective adoption as technology adoption states, our study extends current group-based models by providing a new, qualitative lens to view the creation and stability of adoption patterns in complex user groups. With this, our study offers a process view on the (dis)continuance of information systems and provides a basis for practical guidelines on how to deal with problematic adoption situations when actors from multiple (sub)groups are involved.

ACCOUNTING FOR CULTURAL INFLUENCES IN BIG DATA ANALYTICS

Questions of national security are typically internationally oriented. This implies that Big Datasets often contain traces from multiple cultural contexts, but also that the cultural contexts of data production and interpretation may differ. We argue that this multicultural element produces specific complexities for Big Data analytics. In this chapter we outline the challenges of the cultural dependence of Big Data analytics for the validity of interpretations and national security decisions. In this analysis we differentiate between the supply side and the demand side of Big Data. The former refers to the production of Big Data (e.g., by Internet users) and the latter to the collection and interpretation of traces to support decisions. We discuss six forms of cultural (in)equality and their impact on Big Data characteristics, including volume, variety, velocity, and validity (or veracity), as well as the potential consequences of mismatches between production/producer and interpretation/interpreter contexts. We close with some recommendations for the consideration of cultural dependence in Big Data analytics.