CIS Student Publications
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ItemCommunity Design of a Knowledge Graph to Support Interdisciplinary PhD Students( 2023-03-14)How do PhD students discover the resources and relationships conducive to satisfaction and success in their degree programs? This study proposes a community-grounded, extensible knowledge graph to make explicit and tacit information intuitively discoverable, by capturing and visualizing relationships between people based on their activities and relations to information resources in a particular domain. Students in an interdisciplinary PhD program were engaged through three workshops to provide insights into the dynamics of interactions with others and relevant data categories to be included in the graph data model. Based on these insights we propose a model, serving as a testbed for exploring multiplex graph visualizations and a potential basis of the information system to facilitate information discovery and decision-making. We discovered that some of the tacit knowledge can be explicitly encoded, while the rest of it must stay within the community. The graph-based visualization of the social and knowledge networks can serve as a pointer toward the people having the relevant information, one can reach out to, online or in person.
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ItemA Novel Tool for Online Community Moderator Evaluation(International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 2020-10-01)This study introduces a new instrument for leadership evaluation in online forums and other online communities which was developed using a grounded approach. Questions that emerged from the literature were then evaluated to create hypotheses that guided the development of an instrument for moderator evaluation. The Moderator Evaluation Contingency Scale (MECS) is modified from Fiedler’s contingency model to determine if a moderator is more task- or relationship-oriented in his or her approach to moderation and interactions with other members of a community. The MECS was developed and tested on Reddit in 2013–2014 using random sampling for Forum selection, moderator selection, and interactions with users. A content analysis using the MECS to evaluate posts was found to be a viable measure of a moderator’s ability to perform tasks like removing content as well as his or her ability to interact with users. Bots were analyzed using the MECS as well to determine bias. Next steps include making the instrument available for use by social media and niche community sites, administrators, and other moderators.
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ItemDigital Humanities for Communicative and Cultural Memory: A Case for a Digital Humanities Repository at Universities in Rural Settings(University of Hawaii at Hilo, 2020-12)Cultural memory is tied to material objectivations. Thus, cultural memory is consciously established and ceremonialized (Assmann, 2011). While communicative memory "is tied to the temporal dimension of everyday life" (Erll, 2011a, p. 53), cultural memory creates a mnemonic canon that is passed down through generations using various media as a mode of transmission of events, figures of importance, paradigms, and events. These media are then maintained, interpreted, and evaluated by trained professionals. However, between the time remembered in the framework of the communicative memory and that remembered in the cultural memory, there is a shifting “floating gap” that moves along with the passage of time (Erll, 2010, p. 311). This paper examines the role of digital humanities in preserving information that is communicative memory but may become cultural memory and explores different avenues for digital humanities to be used as archives in the modern university classroom.
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ItemThe Message is Unclear: Interpreting Selected Information Shared in Ex-Vaxxer and Anti-Vaxxer Communities(Springer, 2021-11-06)Vaccine hesitancy and speculation are persistent throughout the history of health care. This study employs situated awareness to evaluated the impact information has on decision-making. A set of frequently circulated documents called Vaccine Guide presents information from vaccine inserts, court cases, and other documents. This Guide is widely circulated in anti-vaccine communities on Facebook. A survey was conducted among university college students in order to evaluate claims about vaccine schedules and examine highlighted passages in this collection of documents and to determine how these passages impact information interpretation and personal health literacy from a situated awareness theory perspective.
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ItemSearching for Community and Safety: Evaluating Common Information Shared in Online Ex-Vaxxer Communities(Springer, 2019-06-01)This study examines a collection of artifacts passed on from some closed Facebook groups of anti-vaxxers. The study conducted a thematic analysis to determine whether or not the group is a community of practice, evaluate and categorize the types of information shared in these groups, and determine the sources of over 1,100 links across two compiled documents to address a series of questions related to claims of ex-vaxxers when compared to anti-vaxxers and the types of data commonly referenced. Findings indicated that ex-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers have separate and distinct claims, abstracts are the most commonly shared scholarly document, and select information is most often taken out of context. This data set can be analyzed for valence and language use in future studies. The purpose of this study is to evaluate information shared in among anti- and ex-vaxxer parents. This study does not seek to validate a specific position or point of view, nor does the researcher want to explore or determine correctness of beliefs.
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ItemUser Driven Efforts in Creating Knowledge Graph Information System(Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020-04-18)Purpose: This paper presents the results of a qualitative study that involved students of an interdisciplinary PhD program. The study objective was to gather requirements to create a knowledge graph information system that will serve this public. The main purpose of the research was to determine information seeking practices and information needs of this community, in order to inform the potential functionalities of a proposed system, intended to help students with relevant resource discovery and decision making. Design: The study design included semi-structured interviews with eight members of the community, followed by a website usability study with the same student participants. Research instruments were informed by the PhD program policy. Findings: Two main information seeking styles are recognized and reported through user personas of International and Domestic (USA) students. The findings show that the useful information resides within the community, and not so much on the program website. Students rely on peer communication, although they report lack of opportunities to create social connections. Students’ information needs and information seeking are dependent on their progress through the program, as well as their motivation and the projected timeline. Practical Implications Considering the current information needs and practices, a knowledge graph hosting both information on social networks and the knowledge produced by the activities of the community members would be useful. By recording data on their own activities (for example, collaboration with professors and coursework), students would reveal further useful system functionalities and allow transfer of tacit knowledge. Originality: Aside from the practical value of this research that is directly influencing the design of a system, it contributes to the body of knowledge on interdisciplinary PhD programs.
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ItemKnowledge Graph for Discovery and Navigation, Case of Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program(CEUR Proceedings, 2018)This research is proposing the development of a methodology for eliciting and formalizing relationships that should be organized in a knowledge graph, intended for improved resource discovery and collaboration opportunities in a Ph.D. program. By taking a case of an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, proposed steps will include participatory design method, text mining, and social network analysis, while reusing available models and vocabularies for the academic domain. The proposed analysis will be based on intellectual outputs, research profiles, information on activities and other relevant data that is produced by the given community. The expected outcome would account for the emphasis of actors’ roles in a community, which should result in enhanced opportunities for quality cooperation.
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ItemDesign Teams as Change Agents: Diplomatic Design in the Open Data Movement(IEEE, 2013)Designers and developers who want to participate in the open data movement should be more than technical experts; they should also be change agents. Realizing open data’s promise of innovation and entrepreneurialism requires the support of diverse stakeholders. Government agencies must release accessible and useful data; developers must use the data to build tools; and citizens must adopt the technology. The interests of one group may come at the expense of another. For this reason, we examine the usefulness of a diplomatic design approach, which focuses on the art and practice of conducting negotiations using specialized techniques. We conducted an exploratory case study on a national nonprofit fellowship program as it worked to design not only technology but also organizational and social change in the context of a digital government engagement.
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ItemCharacterizing Communication Networks Associated with Political Hashtags.(IEEE, 2014)Among the diverse forms of communication and information networks found in the Web 2.0 environment, “social” and “informational” communication networks have been characterized in terms of their network metrics. Although Twitter is partly based on relationships between actors, activity has been shown to reflect characteristics of information networks. This study examines activity in Twitter within spaces defined by hashtags on political topics. We gathered our own data on a hashtag associated with the 2012 Hawaii senatorial race and compared our results to those from other political hashtag networks, and to typical social and information networks as well as random graphs. Results show that hashtag-centered reply and retweet networks in this domain do not fall clearly into the social or informational categories. There appears to be a third kind of network associated with political debate. More generally, it may be productive to conceive of communication networks in terms of multidimensional characteristics rather than categories.
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ItemHybrid media consumption: How tweeting during a televised political debate influences the vote decision(ACM, 2014)An increasing number of people are using microblogs to broadcast their thoughts in real time as they watch televised political events. Microblogging social network sites (SNSs) such as Twitter generate a parallel stream of information and opinion. It is presumed that the additional content enhances the viewing experience, but our experiment explores the validity of this assumption. We studied how tweeting, or passively observing Twitter during a debate, influenced affect, recall and vote decision. For most measures, participants’ average feeling and recall toward the candidates did not depend on Twitter activity, but Twitter activity did matter for vote choice. People who actively tweeted changed their voting choice to reflect the majority sentiment on Twitter. Results are discussed in terms of the possibility that active tweeting leads to greater engagement but that it may also make people more susceptible to social influence.