Pnina Fichman

A comparative assessment of answer quality on four question answering sites

Question answering (Q&A) sites, where communities of volunteers answer questions, may provide faster, cheaper, and better services than traditional institutions. However, like other Web 2.0 platforms, user-created content raises concerns about information quality. At the same time, Q&A sites may provide answers of different quality because they have different communities and technological platforms. This paper compares answer quality on four Q&A sites: Askville, WikiAnswers, Wikipedia Reference Desk, and Yahoo! Answers. Findings indicate that: (1) similar collaborative processes on these sites result in a wide range of outcomes, and significant differences in answer accuracy, completeness, and verifiability were evident; (2) answer multiplication does not always result in better information; it yields more complete and verifiable answers but does not result in higher accuracy levels; and (3) a Q&A site’s popularity does not correlate with its answer quality, on all three measures.

The Bad Boys and Girls of Cyberspace: How Gender and Context Impact Perception of and Reaction to Trolling

A significant feature of virtual interactions involve online deviance and trolling; these include behaviors that range from mild mischief, to offensive language, to hacking and trolling, and to expression of complex social problem, such as by revolutionaries, freedom fighters, or pedophiles. Yet little research has examined online trolling in general or the impact of gender and context on these behaviors in particular. By focusing on the effects of gender and context on perceptions of and reactions to online trolling, this article enhances Suler and Phillips’ framework for online deviance. Results indicate that men and women react differently to online trolling, and their perceptions of the impact of trolling on online communities vary; men and women identify different motivations for similar behaviors in different communities, and they both perceive that men and women trolls differ in their behavior and motivation. The study concludes with suggestions for future research.

Managing Online Trolling: From Deviant to Social and Political Trolls

Trolling behaviors are extremely diverse, varying by context, tactics, motivations, and impact. Definitions, perceptions of, and reactions to online trolling behaviors vary. Since not all trolling is equal or deviant, managing these behaviors requires context sensitive strategies. This paper describes appropriate responses to various acts of trolling in context, based on perceptions of college students in North America. In addition to strategies for dealing with deviant trolling, this paper illustrates the complexity of dealing with socially and politically motivated trolling.

Introduction to Collective Intelligence and Crowds Minitrack

We live surrounded by socially constructed identities that are constituted through a complex interplay of interactions, a kind of distributed cognition. To allow for these collectives to evolve, it is necessary to have not only a representation in an individual’s mind but also the knowledge that similar representations exist in the minds of others. The way we can create shared representations have changed with the proliferation of a wide range of Internet platforms. These Internet platforms allow people to aggregate knowledge from socially distant areas. They also allow diverse groups of people – and maybe machines in the form of artificial intelligences – to negotiate identities. With these socio-technical configurations we can build collective intelligences that themselves will steer the quest for knowledge. These collectives can be selfcatalyzing, deciding individually or collaboratively what to do next, out of which novel and practical ideas emerge. While these open design collectives rely on organic growth and slow embedding of members in the network, alternative structures based on crowds can be assembled more rapidly. Between the two extremes are a host of different organizational and social structures, in which committed members of a community create, improve, and share ideas. The output of these socio-technical systems often takes the form of digital media, and their traces are varied, ranging from ephemeral short messages to curated collaborative knowledge repositories. Askay proposes a conceptual framework for investigating organizational control and resistance in crowd-based platforms, providing a research agenda for crowd behavior research by drawing from the organizational control literature. This framework can help scholars more fully articulate the full range of control mechanisms operating in crowd-based platforms. The framework contextualizes these mechanisms into the context of crowd-based platforms, challenges existing rational assumptions about incentive systems, and clarifies theoretical constructs of organizational control to foster stronger integration between information systems research and organizational and management science. Literat focuses on the effectiveness of key incentives in fostering creative crowdsourcing, trying to better understand the conditions that most effectively stimulate creative participation online. An experimental research design tested the impact of specific incentive structures on the outcomes of creative participation on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The study found that extrinsic rewards are effective in encouraging participants to accept the creative task, whereas the strategies that boost the creativity of the submissions are: offering a bonus, mentioning a charitable purpose, and giving contributors authorship credit. By illuminating the factors that have the greatest impact on the quality and quantity of online creative participation, the study contributes to our understanding of digital creativity. Du and his colleagues propose a new crowd opinion aggregation model, CrowdIQ, that has a differential weighting mechanism and accounts for individual dependence. CrowdIQ was empirically evaluated in comparison to four baseline methods using real data collected from StockTwits. The results show that, CrowdIQ significantly outperforms all baseline methods in terms of both a quadratic prediction scoring measure and simulated investment returns. Kelman and his colleagues, illustrate how unusual spatial patterns of industrial firm locations uncover their social interactions. In this paper they report evidence from the Italian industrial sectors whereby firms that buy and sell are spatially distributed with a pattern that reflects the microeconomic powers at play. The main finding is that firms are neither clustered around population centers nor are they situated at random. Although geography has an important role in shaping the population map of Italy, the reasons for the positional pattern of buyers and sellers appear to be social. Geographic proximity between sellers and their buyers is supported by the excess in short-distance social ties. The analysis of sociotechnical relations ties the papers together, and provide a current snapshot into research on collective intelligence, new sociotechnical configuration of knowledge creation, and crowdsourcing.

Introduction to Crowdsourcing Content Production and Online Knowledge Repositories Minitrack

As various forms of collaboration are enabled (and constrained) by the affordances available in social media, researchers are investigating a range of issues including: 1) the diverse ways in which people collaborate to create, manage, curate and manipulate online content and how these activities affect digital repositories, 2) how those who manage these repositories are responding to the co-creation of online content 3) the dynamics of crowd sourced online collaborations and online communities of practice, and 4) the ways in which we can best describe the socio-technical interaction networks that facilitate and inhibit mass knowledge production. This minitrack focuses on online interactions for knowledge production on crowd sourced sites.

Social informatics and social media: Theoretical reflections

Early social informatics research focused primarily on ethnographic and site-specific observations or was based on limited discourse analysis involving smaller case studies. However, in the last decade, the rise of social media has provided access to large-scale data and made the observation of interaction between people and technologies easier. This trend has informed social informatics perspectives for examining the roles and impacts of social media in our work and social lives. For a number of years now, researchers in social informatics have been concerned about expanding the theoretical depth and richness of the discipline (Sanfilippo and Fichman, 2014; Sawyer and Tyworth, 2006). As studies of social media continue to gain in popularity and move from descriptive to more analytical approaches, researchers are likely to begin to critically reflect on what they are doing and finding and to therefore provide insights into theoretical aspects of social informatics research.

Bridging Social Informatics and Sociotechnical Research: In Honor of Rob Kling

2013 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Rob Kling, one of the founders of social informatics in North America. This session for interaction and engagement will provide researchers in the field an opportunity to reflect on his legacy, to discuss the current state of the social study of technology, focusing on building bridges between social informatics and sociotechnical research, and looking to the future of the overlaps between these fields. This session is intended for doctoral students, early career and established researchers interested in social informatics and/or sociotechnical research and, more broadly, in the social study of computing

Multiculturalism and Information and Communication Technology

Research on multiculturalism and information and communication technology (ICT) has been important to understanding recent history, planning for future large-scale initiatives, and understanding unrealized expectations for social and technological change. This interdisciplinary area of research has examined interactions between ICT and culture at the group and society levels. However, there is debate within the literature as to the nature of the relationship between culture and technology. In this synthesis, we suggest that the tensions result from the competing ideologies that drive researchers, allowing us to conceptualize the relationship between culture and ICT under three primary models, each with its own assumptions: 1) Social informatics, 2) Social determinism, and 3) Technological determinism. Social informatics views the relationship to be one of sociotechnical interaction, in which culture and ICTs affect each other mutually and iteratively, rather than linearly; the vast majority of the literature approach the relationships between ICT and culture under the assumptions of social informatics. From a socially deterministic perspective, ICTs are viewed as the dependent variable in the equation, whereas, from a technologically deterministic perspective, ICTs are an independent variable. The issues of multiculturalism and ICTs attracted much scholarly attention and have been explored under a myriad of contexts, with substantial literature on global development, social and political issues, business and public administration as well as education and scholarly collaboration. We synthesize here research in the areas of global development, social and political issues, and business collaboration. Finally we conclude by proposing under-explored areas for future research directions. Table of Contents: Introduction / Social Informatics Approach to Multiculturalism and ICT: Bidirectional Impacts / Social (Cultural) Deterministic Approach to Multiculturalism and ICTs: ICT as the Dependent Variable / Technological Deterministic Approach to Multiculturalism and ICT: ICT as the Independent Variable / Conclusions / Author Biographies