ASC presents 8 papers related to Web2.0 and Social Web Research

The entire ASC group is in Boston this week to present 8 papers at the ACM SIGCHI annual conference. The CHI conference is a well-known academic conference that is considered to be the most prestigious platform for presenting Human-Computer Interaction research. Attended by around 2000 researchers, the acceptance rate for papers are generally in the 14-20%, and thus highly competitive.

Our group is presenting the following papers during the following sessions:

Information Foraging: Tuesday, 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM

• An Elementary Social Information Foraging Model, Peter Pirolli
  
• Remembrance of Things Tagged: How Tagging Effort Affects Tag Production and Human Memory, Raluca Budiu, Peter Pirolli, Lichan Hong
  
• Signpost from the Masses: Learning Effects in an Exploratory Social Tag Search Browser, Yvonne Kammerer, Rowan Nairn, Peter Pirolli, Ed H. Chi
  

Studying Wikipedia: Wednesday, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM

• So You Know You’re Getting the Best Possible Information: A Tool that Increases Wikipedia Credibility, Peter Pirolli, Evelin Wollny, Bongwon Suh
  
• What's in Wikipedia? Mapping Topics and Conflict Using Socially Annotated Category Structure, Aniket Kittur, Ed H. Chi, Bongwon Suh
  

Social Search and Sensemaking: Wednesday, 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

• Annotate Once, Appear Anywhere: Collective Foraging for Snippets of Interest Using Paragraph Fingerprinting, Lichan Hong, Ed H. Chi
  
• With a Little Help from My Friends: Examining the Impact of Social Annotations in Sensemaking Tasks, Les Nelson, Christoph Held, Peter Pirolli, Lichan Hong, Diane Schiano, Ed H. Chi
  

Computer Mediated Communication 2: Thursday, 2.30pm - 4:00 PM

• Gregorio is also presenting this paper on work he did while at Penn State:
  Supporting Content and Process Common Ground in Computer-Supported Teamwork
  

If you're at the conference, please come see us!

How social tagging appears to affect human memory?

Three weeks ago, I was at the ASIST 2007 Annual conference in Milwaukee, which had a special theme on Social Computing and Information Science. During one of the panels on Social Tagging, a question was raised on how tagging really affects memory and retrieval. I mentioned that the ASC group here at PARC has been doing some experiments on this, and briefly talked about the results, and many attendees at the conference (over 10 people) had asked for the pre-print, so here I'm blogging about it.

Raluca Budiu, who is a post-doc working in our group, has conducted some very interesting research with us on how tagging appears to affect human information processing. She studied two techniques for producing tags: (1) the traditional type-to-tag interface of typing keywords into a free-form textbox after reading a passage or article; (2) a PARC-developed click2tag interface that allows users to click on keywords in the paragraph to tag the content.

The experiment consisted of 20 subjects and 24 passages in a within-subject design. Participants had to first study passages and tag them, and then they performed memory tests on what they had actually read and tagged. The memory tasks were that, after tagging the content, they have to either (a) freely recall and type as many facts from the passages as possible; or (b) answer 6 true/false sentences in a recognition task.

As reported in the paper, the results suggest that:

• In the type-to-tag condition, users appears to elaborate what they have just read, and re-encoded the knowledge with keywords that might be helpful for later use. This appears to help the free-recall task (a) above. In other words, users seem to end up with a top-down process and induces them to schematize what they have learned.



• While in the click2tag condition, users appears to re-read the passages to pick out keywords from the sentences, and this appears to help them in their recognition tasks (b) above. In other words, users seem to use a bottom-up process that simply picked out the most important keywords from the passage.

Click here to download the technical report and pre-print (the highlights in the paper are mine).

Social Search and Social Information Foraging

I just returned from Beijing where I attended the HCI International conference. I presented a paper that outlines some of the background and thinking that has gone into the formation of Augmented Social Cognition Group here at PARC. Specifically the paper focused on how understanding of social capital, social information foraging, coordination, information flow in social networks, structural holes, and overlap in social navigation are shaped by various research going on in various fields. Here is the
paper on Social Information Foraging and Social Search (joint work with Peter Pirolli, Shyong (Tony) Lam.)

As a side note, we also presented
an eyetracking paper that showing the effect of highlighted text in reading tasks (joint work with Lichan Hong, Michelle Gumbrecht).