BayCHI: Research related to the social web February 13, 2007

The program will feature two talks discussing research projects related to the social web.

He Says, She Says: Conflict and Coordination in Wikipedia
Ed Chi, PARC

Digitizing Friendship: Learning From and About Massive On-Line Social Networks
Scott Golder, Hewlett Packard

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He Says, She Says: Conflict and Coordination in Wikipedia
Ed Chi, PARC

Wikipedia has become one of the most successful experiments in collaborative knowledge building on the Internet. As Wikipedia continues to grow, additional users, pages, and information increase the possibility of conflict as well as raising the need for consensus building and coordination.

In this talk, we will characterize conflicts and coordination costs in Wikipedia in three different ways: (1) increasing coordination cost at the global level; (2) parameters that predict high conflict topic areas; (3) analysis methods for understanding conflict between users. These characterizations have led to development of tools to increase efficiency and effect social change in Wikipedia, and to inform the design of new collaborative knowledge systems.

Ed H. Chi is a senior research scientist at Palo Alto Research Center's User Interface Research Group.
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Digitizing Friendship: Learning From and About Massive On-Line Social Networks
Scott Golder, Hewlett Packard

Studying an online community may seem easy; plentiful server logs and databases make collecting their data almost simple. However, it's not so clear as that; these digital footprints represent only a thin slice of users' lives, making contextualizing and interpreting such data subtly challenging. In this talk, I present results from a study of the behavior of over 4 million users of the Facebook, a popular online social network. The results include interesting temporal patterns and insight into college students' lives, and raise questions about what it means to be a friend in a world where digital tools are woven into the fabric of our social lives. Generalizing from this study, I explore the value and tradeoffs of quantitatively analyzing online communities, and consider ways to more richly characterize individuals' and groups' online social lives.

Scott Golder is a researcher in the Information Dynamics Lab at HP Labs.

Official Website: http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20070213/