CHS: Small: Making sense of information in online discussion boards with novel social computing platforms

CHS：小型：利用新颖的社交计算平台理解在线讨论区中的信息

• 批准号: 1422381
• 负责人: Lena Mamykina
• 金额: $ 49.99万
• 依托单位: Columbia University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-09-01 至 2017-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1422381&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CHS; Small; Making; sense; information

This project will analyze how individuals make sense of information collected within online health forums and how existing computing platforms facilitate or inhibit this process. Increasingly, individuals of all walks of life go online to collect and share information, collectively make sense of it and negotiate its meaning, reach a consensus, or agree to disagree, and, thus, generate a repository of collective wisdom that can be shared and reused. These social behaviors, often referred to as "sensemaking," are particularly consequential in health and wellness management, as increasing numbers of individuals join online health support communities and rely on their peers for help and advice. Despite the ongoing research on social computing platforms and on attitudes, perceptions and behaviors of their users, the dynamics of computer-mediated sensemaking remain poorly understood. Moreover, most of the information collected within these forums continues to exist in the form of discussion threads that provide little guidance as to the main topics discussed, the relationships between posts within the thread, different attitudes towards the topics of interest, and the overall dynamics of the discussions. The overarching goal of this research is to develop novel summarization, visualization, and interaction mechanisms to help individuals make sense of information and opinions collected in online forums. Specifically, the research will seek to understand how sensemaking unfolds within discussion threads, describe it through a set of formalizations, or semantic discussion typologies, and identify ways to study it computationally. Participatory design methods will then be used to develop novel visualization and interaction mechanisms for facilitating individual and collective sensemaking within online forums. A combination of computational data analysis and visualization techniques will automatically generate visual summaries of discussions threads that can help users to understand the evolution of meaning in discussions. This research will build upon previous work in natural language processing and data mining, to represent salient properties of the discussion threads, such as discussion topics and their transformation overtime, and the various attitudes towards the topics among the users. Finally, the discussion visualization tools will be evaluated on their impact on individual and collective sensemaking in controlled experiments and in a deployment study within an existing online health community oriented toward the difficult health issues associated with diabetes.

这个项目将分析个人如何理解在线健康论坛中收集的信息，以及现有的计算平台如何促进或抑制这一过程。各行各业的个人越来越多地上网收集和共享信息，集体理解信息并就其含义进行谈判，达成共识或同意不同意见，从而产生可共享和重复使用的集体智慧宝库。随着越来越多的人加入在线健康支持社区，并依赖同龄人的帮助和建议，这些通常被称为“制造感觉”的社交行为在健康和健康管理中尤其重要。尽管对社交计算平台及其用户的态度、感知和行为的研究正在进行中，但计算机中介的轰动效应仍然知之甚少。此外，在这些论坛内收集的大多数信息仍然以讨论线索的形式存在，对于讨论的主要议题、线索中的帖子之间的关系、对感兴趣的专题的不同态度以及讨论的总体动态几乎没有提供指导。这项研究的总体目标是开发新的摘要、可视化和交互机制，以帮助个人理解在线论坛中收集的信息和意见。具体地说，这项研究将试图了解如何在讨论线索中产生轰动效应，通过一套形式化或语义讨论类型来描述它，并确定通过计算来研究它的方法。然后将使用参与性设计方法来开发新的可视化和互动机制，以促进在线论坛内的个人和集体的轰动。计算数据分析和可视化技术的组合将自动生成讨论线索的可视摘要，这可以帮助用户了解讨论中含义的演变。这项研究将建立在自然语言处理和数据挖掘的先前工作的基础上，以表示讨论主题的显著属性，例如讨论主题及其转换超时，以及用户对主题的不同态度。最后，将在对照实验中以及在现有在线健康社区内针对与糖尿病相关的困难健康问题的部署研究中，评估讨论可视化工具对个人和集体感觉产生的影响。