Monthly Archives: April 2007

Rating, Voting & Ranking: Designing for Collaboration & Consensus at CHI 2007

I’m in San Jose, California presenting a Works-in-Progress paper at the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Computer-Human Interface (CHI) 2007 conference. I’m showing off some of the interface design issues related to encouraging valid, fluid participation for a community-based internet content filter we’re developing at the University of Texas at Austin called OpenChoice.

Here’s the abstract for the paper:

The OpenChoice system, currently in development, is an open source, open access community rating and filtering service that would improve upon the utility of currently available Web content filters. The goal of OpenChoice is to encourage community involvement in making filtering classification more accurate and to increase awareness in the current approaches to content filtering. The design challenge for OpenChoice is to find the best interfaces for encouraging easy participation amongst a community of users, be it for voting, rating or discussing Web page content. This work in progress reviews some initial designs while reviewing best practices and designs from popular Web portals and community sites.

I’m also making it available to download: Turnbull, Don (2007) Rating, Voting & Ranking: Designing for Collaboration & Consensus. Works-in-Progress Paper presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference. San Jose, CA. May 2, 2007.

Listening Post exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art

Yesterday I saw an interesting exhibit called Listening Post at the San Jose Museum of Art about understanding, or maybe just observing, internet-based communications.

Here’s the blurb from the project’s Web page:

“What would 100,000 people chatting on the Internet sound and look like?”… Listening Post analyzes all the text—typed just moments ago—by tens of thousands of people in Internet chat rooms around the world. It presents them as six different “movements,” combining musical tones, sound effects, synthesized voice, and scrolling text. For example, in the first movement, Listening Post monitors and displays a randomly typed text beginning with “I am.” It then searches the Internet for related phrases, creating a simultaneously funny, sad, nonsensical, pathetic, yearning, quotidian, and ultimately mesmerizing tonal poem of identity in the Internet age.

For centuries, the soaring buttresses, vaulted ceilings, and luminous stained glass of cathedrals, along with hymns and chants, have transmitted that which is beyond expression. Using algorithms, software, and data mining, Listening Post generates a similar experience around what sometimes seems beyond comprehension.

It’s quite an experience with seven “movements” that range from ideas like Wave Cycle, Topic Cluster and I Am (I Like/I Love) where text from the messages floats, drifts or cycles across the many small LED screens in sync with some Philip Glass-like music.

Listening Post

The exhibit runs Saturday, June 3, 2006 through Sunday, May 20, 2007, so hurry up and take a look while it’s still there.

Keep Austin Weird: A Guide to the Odd Side of Town

By now you’ve heard the saying “Keep Austin Weird”. What you might not have known is who coined the phrase and how it just might actually relate to Austin, Texas.

All those questions (and more) can now be (mostly) answered by the man himself, Red Wassenich, who did in fact come up with the saying as an offhand remark when he called in to a local radio station.

Now Red has a book chock full of Austin and Weirdness: Keep Austin Weird: A Guide to the Odd Side of Town, by Schiffer Publishing.

Keep Austin Weird: A Guide to the Odd Side of Town

Some friends had a signing party for Red’s book and I got to attend. Here’s a picture of Red in action:

Red Wassenrich signing his book

Nature says Happy (300th) Birthday to Linnaeus

The journal/magazine Nature has a special issue to celebrate the birthday of Linnaeus, who most think of as originating the idea of large-scale classification to understand the world and normalize scientific research.

Carl Linnaeus introduced the systematic classification upon which all subsequent natural history has been built. This Nature web focus brings together a range of material celebrating the tercentenary of his birth in 1707, including features on how the explosion of genetic data changes the way we look at taxonomy, and the conflict between professionals and amateurs when naming species. There are also commentaries by leading taxonomists on the future of their field, articles on Linnaeus’s global network of contacts and even his lost and lamented pet raccoon, original research on the origin of flowering plants and a review on speciation – the first of several such articles to be published this year, which will be added to the web focus over time along with other coverage.

The issue is behind a paywall. How would Linnaeus classify that?

Michigan iSchool creates Social Computing Graduate Program

Now this looks really interesting:

SI MSI Degree: Social Computing Graduate Program:

Social Computing (SC) Specialization

Social computing, including online communities, social networking, and user contributed content, has been the darling of Silicon Valley for the past several years. It has also gained currency in library circles, as venues such as library Web sites incorporate blogging features and sites such as LibraryThing bring recommender technologies to personal book collections.

SI faculty have been leaders in inventing and analyzing many of the underlying techniques that have powered the rise of social computing:

  • Recommender systems
  • Reputation systems
  • Prediction markets
  • Social network analysis
  • Online communities
  • Computer-supported cooperative work

Students pursuing a specialization in Social Computing learn to analyze online social interactions, both in online communities and in more diffuse social networks. They learn about features of social computing technologies so they can recognize opportunities to put them to use in new settings and make good choices about alternative implementations.

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