Collaborative Research: BCC-SBE: Building Communities for Transforming Social Media Research with SOCRATES: SOcial and CRowdsourced AcTivities Extraction System

该项目将产生一个名为苏格拉底的新系统，通过围绕各种数据密集型研究问题建立一个研究人员和实践者社区，帮助不同领域的学者改变社会媒体研究。全世界数百万人使用的社交媒体服务，如Twitter和Facebook，暴露了大量关于人们信仰、想法、观点、行为和活动的数据。同时，数据的庞大规模和数量使得学者们很难对其进行有效的研究。苏格拉底将通过整合一套社会计算工具来解决这个问题，这些工具将允许来自多个领域的研究人员收集大规模的社交媒体数据；探索和可视化结果内容项，并分析收集到的内容。以社区和人为中心的方法来开发新系统将确保苏格拉底匹配研究人员的工作实践和心理模型，易于使用，并产生对研究人员目标有重大贡献的结果，特别是在解决多学科问题方面。重要的是，苏格拉底系统将采用社会计算方法——众包——来处理社会媒体研究的一些挑战。因此，该项目将利用计算机和人的智能来研究在线社会活动。苏格拉底建议使用人类的劳动来协助收集数据（例如，通过对自动爬虫收集的信息进行提炼和过滤）；帮助探索数据并产生见解（例如，通过允许公众查看和评论所收集数据的可视化）；并分析和注释数据（例如，通过创建一个受控的环境，编码人员可以高可靠性地注释内容项）。因此，苏格拉底将提供一个独一无二的端到端环境，在这个环境中，社会媒体可以被有效地、高有效性地、大规模地研究。

This project will result in a novel system called SOCRATES that will help transform social media research for scholars working in diverse fields by building a community of researchers and practitioners around various issues of data-intensive research. Social media services such as Twitter and Facebook, used by millions of people worldwide, expose vast amounts of data about people's beliefs, ideas, opinions, behaviors, and activities. At the same time, the sheer scale and volume of the data make them extremely difficult for scholars to study effectively. SOCRATES will address this issue by incorporating a set of socio-computational tools that will allow researchers from multiple fields to collect large-scale social media data; explore and visualize the resulting content items, and analyze the collected content. A community- and human-centered approach to developing the new system will ensure that SOCRATES matches researchers' work practices and mental models, is easy to use, and produces outcomes that significantly contribute to the researchers' goals, especially in solving multi-disciplinary problems. Importantly, the SOCRATES system will employ a social-computational approach--crowdsourcing--to handle some of the challenges of social media research. Thus, the project will take advantage of the intelligence of both computers and people to study online social activities. SOCRATES proposes to use the labor of humans to assist in the collection of data (e.g., by refining and filtering information collected by an automatic crawler); to help explore the data and generate insights (e.g., by allowing the public to view and comment on visualizations of the collected data); and to analyze and annotate the data (e.g., by creating a controlled environment where coders can annotate content items with high reliability). As a result, SOCRATES will provide a first-of-its-kind, end-to-end environment where social media can be studied effectively, with high validity, and at immense scale.