From Usenet to Cowebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces

ISBN-13: 9781852335328 / Angielski / Miękka / 2002 / 276 str.

Christopher Lueg; Danyel Fisher

Opis

Beginning with a brief outline of Usenet's general structure and development over the past few years, the book addresses the problems of exploring virtual communities and distributed information systems in general, and of finding information in electronic information environments. It covers traditional approaches such as information filtering, collaborative filtering and information retrieval, outlining their successes and failures, and discusses the prospects of novel approaches such as visualisations of social processes and social navigation.

Recenzje

From the reviews:

"Lueg and Fisher have put together a strong collection of papers, some new, some previously published, about Usenet and related technologies. The strength of this book is its multiple perspectives on Usenet newsgroups, covering topics such as its political history, analyses of its social structure, and methods for extracting information from it."

This review is by MIT's Judith Donath and can be found in New Media & Society, Volume 6, Issue 3, June 2004.

"Lueg and Fisher have put together a strong collection of papers ... about Usenet and related technologies. The strength of this book is its multiple perspectives on Usenet newsgroups, covering topics such as its political history, analyses of its social structure, and methods for extracting information from it. ... is most successful as a techno-social volume about Usenet and similar discussion lists. ... This volume ... will be of special interest to interface designers and researchers studying online social behaviour." (Judith Donath, New Media & Society, Vol. 6 (3), 2004)

"The book is really about something much more engaging that the title implies, and academics, researchers and teachers ... will find much of what is written here of value. ... It is about social spaces and social interactions on the Internet. ... this book is a valuable read and I'd recommend it to anyone with a practical or research driven interest in the design, development and implementation of online spaces for social interactions." (Martyn Wild, Educational Technology and Society, Vol. 6 (4), 2003)  

Spis treści

I Introduction to Online Studies and Usenet.- 1 Studying Social Information Spaces.- 1.1 Social Spaces: Online and Offline Conversations.- 1.2 Asynchronous Online Social Information Spaces.- 1.3 Important Attributes of Spaces.- 1.4 Conclusion.- Acknowledgements.- References.- 2 “A Standing Wave in the Web of Our Communications”: Usenet and the Socio-Technical Construction of Cyberspace Values.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 Usenet Origins.- 2.3 The Poor Man’s ARPANET.- 2.4 “Usenet Is Dying”.- 2.5 The “Backbone Cabal”.- 2.6 The “Great Renaming”.- 2.7 “Usenet Is Not a Democracy”.- 2.8 A Democratic Network.- 2.9 Rise of the Cancelbots.- 2.10 The Scientology War.- 2.11 “The First Internet War”.- 2.12 “Usenet Cannot Be Regulated”.- 2.13 The Breidbart Index.- 2.14 Conclusion: Assessing Usenet.- References.- II Studying Spaces.- 3 Measures and Maps of Usenet.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 Usenet Has Many Dimensions and Can Be Seen at Multiple Scales.- 3.3 Web Interfaces for Social Cyberspaces.- 3.4 Network Analysis of Usenet Cross-posting Patterns.- 3.5 Conclusion: The Benefits of Awareness of Social Context and History.- Acknowledgements.- References.- 4 The Dynamics of Mass Interaction.- 4.1 Introduction.- 4.2 Usenet Organization, Distribution, and Interaction.- 4.3 Data Collection and Sampling.- 4.4 Descriptive Results.- 4.5 Testing the Common Ground Model.- 4.6 Conclusions.- Acknowledgements.- References.- 5 Conversation Map: A Content-based Usenet Newsgroup Browser.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.2 The Graphical Interface.- 5.3 The Text Analysis Procedure.- 5.4 Related Work.- 5.5 Conclusions.- References.- 6 Silent Participants: Getting to Know Lurkers Better.- 6.1 Introduction.- 6.2 Rethinking Lurking.- 6.3 Lurkers in Discussion Lists.- 6.4 Interviews and Initial Discoveries.- 6.5 Why Lurkers Lurk.- 6.6 What Lurkers Do.- 6.7 Lurkers as Participants.- 6.8 Lurkers with a Sense of Community.- 6.9 Summary.- References.- III Enhancing Spaces.- 7 Computer Mediated Communication Among Teams: What are “Teams” and How are They “Virtual”?.- 7.1 Introduction.- 7.2 Small-group Research: History and Definitions.- 7.3 Cohesion in Groups.- 7.4 Computer-mediated Communication and Virtual Teams.- 7.5 Summary.- References.- 8 Co Web — Experiences with Collaborative Web Spaces.- 8.1 Introduction.- 8.2 History of the Swiki and the Co Web.- 8.3 Content Creation on the Co Web.- 8.4 Typical Uses of Co Webs.- 8.5 Emerging Roles in CoWebs.- 8.6 The Future of the Co Web.- 8.7 Summary.- References.- 9 From PHOAKS to TopicShop: Experiments in Social Data Mining.- 9.1 Introduction.- 9.2 Previous and Related Work.- 9.3 PHOAKS.- 9.4 TopicShop.- 9.5 Research Question I: Can We Predict Human Quality Judgements?.- 9.6 Research Question II: Can We Improve User Task Performance?.- 9.7 Future Work.- 9.8 Summary.- References.- 10 GroupLens for Usenet: Experiences in Applying Collaborative Filtering to a Social Information System.- 10.1 Introduction.- 10.2 The Evolution of Usenet.- 10.3 Filtering on Usenet.- 10.4 GroupLens Architecture.- 10.5 User Behaviour.- 10.6 Experimental Design.- 10.7 Algorithmic Performance.- 10.8 What Did We Learn? Where Has the Research Gone?.- 10.9 Conclusion.- References.- 11 Exploring Interaction and Participation to Support Information Seeking in a Social Information Space.- 11.1 Introduction.- 11.2 A Situated Perspective on Information Seeking.- 11.3 Related Work on Information-seeking Support.- 11.4 Specific Characteristics of Usenet.- 11.5 Exploring Situated Aspects of Information Seeking in Usenet Newsgroups.- 11.6 Summary and Conclusions.- Acknowledgements.- References.- Appendix: Studying Online Newsgroups.- A.1 Introduction.- A.2 Posting to Usenet.- A.3 Usenet Propagation.- A.4 The Birth and Death of Newsgroups.- A.5 How Messages Look.- A.6 How Usenet Is Accessed.- A.7 Invisible Layers of Usenet.- A.8 Dealing with Usenet Data.- A.9 Conclusion.