CHS: Small: A Genealogical Framework to Understand the Emergence of Online Groups

该项目将研究在线群体的出现，通过检查他们与现有群体之间被忽视但重要的联系。新的在线组不会自发出现，而是由参与现有在线组的用户创建的。一个新群体的早期成员都有自己的活动历史，这揭示了他们过去的群体成员以及现有群体与这个新群体之间的关系。在用户创建新群组之前追踪用户行为的能力提供了一个独特的机会来理解新群组是如何出现的，社会规范是如何在新群组中出现的，以及哪些因素促成了新群组的成功。本研究将通过追踪“儿童”群体的社会技术谱系，通过他们的早期成员之前参与“父母”群体，定量地模拟在线群体之间的家谱关系。平台管理员或组管理员可以使用谱系方法来采用其他组中的现有规范，向用户推荐新组，并确定创建新组的机会。谱系学的观点也可以解释群体成功的可变性，以及规范如何在网络群体中传播。这项工作将通过重新设计其平台或实施新的社区政策，使在线社区发生变革性变化。该项目借鉴了有关网络社区形成、组织生态学和亲属关系的理论，探索一个群体在系谱图中的位置如何影响该群体的身份、规范和成功。这项研究将分析来自Reddit和Wikipedia的用户行为日志数据。将多个群体的社会技术谱系聚合在一起，可以生成一个谱系图，记录新群体如何从旧群体中出现。这些谱系将在平台、用户和时间上进行评估。该项目将通过采用定性方法（如访谈和焦点小组）来推进以人为中心的数据科学方法，以验证拟议的家谱图，这将为从大规模日志数据集构建家谱图并分析其结构和动态的定量方法提供信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The project will study the emergence of online groups by examining their overlooked but important connections to existing groups. New online groups do not appear spontaneously, but are created by users who participated in existing online groups. A new group's early members carry their own activity history, which reveals their past group memberships as well as the relations between existing groups and this new group. The ability to trace the behavior of users before they start new groups presents a unique opportunity to understand how new groups emerge, how social norms arise in new groups, and what factors contribute to the success of new groups. This research will quantitatively model the genealogical relationships between online groups by tracing the sociotechnical lineage of "child" groups through their early members' previous participation in "parent" groups. Platform administrators or group moderators can use genealogical approaches for adopting existing norms in other groups, recommending new groups to users, and identifying opportunities to create new groups. A genealogical perspective can also explain the variability in group success as well as how norms spread throughout online groups. This work will enable transformative changes in online communities, either via redesign of their platforms or through implementation of new community policies.The project draws on theories about formation of online communities, organizational ecology, and kinship to explore how a group's position within a genealogical graph influences the group's identity, norms, and success. This research will analyze log data about user behavior over time from Reddit and Wikipedia. Aggregating the socio-technical lineages of multiple groups together generates a genealogical graph documenting how new groups emerge from the old. These genealogies will be evaluated across platforms, users, and time. The project will advance human-centered data science methods by employing qualitative methods, such as interviews and focus groups, to validate the proposed genealogical graphs, which will inform quantitative methods for building genealogy graphs from large-scale log data sets and analyzing their structure and dynamics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.