A personal perspective on the WebSci summer school

You can probably tell from my previous burst of blogging that the recent WebSci summer school in Galway enthused me. As I believe I mentioned before, I wasn’t totally certain of what to expect or if the week would be worthwhile, but it absolutely was.

I had two minor niggles: firstly, 90 minutes is a very long slot even for speakers of keynote quality. Secondly, I couldn’t tell the difference between ‘talks’ and ‘tutorials’ (I expected the latter to be more interactive, and to include exercises). Overall, however, it it was an extremely well-executed week with a great range of speakers and topics… for instance, see my write-ups of talks from Wendy Hall, Bernie Hogan and Marc Smith, not to mention my rants about data and social networks.

For me personally, I especially valued three aspects:

1. I met some new and wonderful (not to mention enthusiastic!) people
2. I got to broaden myself, learning some new stuff around natural language processing and network analysis (a change, given my UX/HCI background!)
3. I had some thoughts about a nice piece of Web Science-y work I’d like to do in advance of WebSci’12

Yes, we were enthusiastic...

It was a valuable week: if future WebSci summer schools run in a similar vein, I’d certainly recommend them.

A tentative return to Facebook

(My prior posts on this topic: initial departure, reflections one week in, realising I miss close friends)

A couple of weeks have passed since I courted controversy by leaving Facebook. After some reflection, I’ve decided to return. Here’s why:

The big reason I left was the overhead of managing multiple types of contact across a single network. As I bemoaned in my initial post on this topic, I have 295 ‘friends’ from all walks of life, and no idea what value (if any!) the majority place upon our online connection.

What have I learned?

• It is not necessary to religiously read people’s updates each day. I haven’t missed the activity itself, or (to my knowledge!) missed any critical news. A few close friends have had big news and they got in touch to let me know: Facebook was never the only mechanism for staying in touch.
• I thought I’d miss material from close friends, status updates in general, and event invites. I was mostly wrong: I did miss material from close friends (more than I expected)… however, the latter two aspects didn’t affect me.
• I didn’t expect to miss photo sharing, but I did. It’s not just having a platform to share my photos, but being able to see the photos of others… for instance, I graduated on Monday, and I’m going to a wedding tomorrow: it’s nice to see other people’s images from those events.

Before I left, I was reading text updates from everyone and rich updates from close friends. I was broadcasting my own updates to all, which I found problematic.

(An aside: the broadcasting issue may seem a touch paradoxical to those who follow me on Twitter, where I broadcast publicly! However, I’ve always used Twitter as a work tool, and Facebook as a personal tool. I’m comfortable on Twitter because I know what audience I am addressing, and because of the asymmetry of relationships on Twitter: people follow me if they wish, and don’t otherwise. Unlike Facebook, I don’t feel an obligation to tailor my content to ‘suit’ the people who choose to follow me.)

I’m going to restrict my Facebook updates to a subset of my current contacts. I’m not sure how difficult I’ll find it to identify that subset, but I hope it’ll be worth the effort. I’m also going to stop feeling I ‘ought’ to skim updates from everyone!

The IPR and data mining issues remain, and are clearly a negative facet. But Facebook’s usefulness to me seems to outweigh that for now.

Addendum: the account is fully wiped now, which handily removes the issue of “How shall I handle this big old set of contacts?” (It also means all those pictures I was tagged in are scattered to the wind… facial recognition software aside.) I think on balance I’m pleased with this situation, but if I change my mind I’ll let you know!

Digital.Humanities@Oxford Summer School 2011

After visiting Dave de Roure for the afternoon yesterday, I found myself with the chance to attend the final talk of the day at the Digital Humanities Summer School. Ray and Lynne Siemens were speaking on “The Uneasy Pursuit of the Future of the Book” and “Building and Maintaining a Team Approach in a Rapidly-Advancing Area of Research and Development”.

I found Ray’s talk a nice alternative perspective on how we (do not) understand the properties of books as traditional artefacts, let alone electronic books or iPads and similar. I googled the speakers to try and see whether they’ve taken any work to the Hypertext conference as yet, but they have not: perhaps this is some fresh digital humanities blood to recruit

Ray also asked some very ‘Web Science’ questions, including a pondering about measuring the impact of the web is on how we read and experience information. I asked how he’d document the features of textual forms: he spoke about the ‘architecture’ of the book, and the meaning of aspects such as indexes and page numbers… lots of interesting subjective things going on here.

Meanwhile, Lynne spoke about mechanisms to conduct multidisciplinary work. Like Dave, for me the main takeaway was “Wow, I’m really privileged that such work is a relatively normal affair to me” — it was a good reminder that such work is not necessarily everyday, and that approaches to it are not obvious to everyone.

WebSci’11 videos online

The good organisers of WebSci’11 recorded the talks, which are now available online. (videolectures.net is new to me: quite a slick site.)

My talk on Teasing Apart with Meta Analysis, an approach for understanding user experiences online, is here. Meanwhile, this past post describes the gist of it, and links to the paper and slides.

Facebook: for staying in touch with, er, my next-door neighbour

A further thought on my leaving Facebook: I remarked yesterday that as an expat, Facebook was useful for seeing updates from UK friends. I realised last night, however, that I actually really miss interactions with my next-door neighbour here in Eindhoven!

This reminds me of Barry Wellman’s WebSci’11 keynote on ‘networked individualism’ and how the internet has changed the way we live our lives. One comment was that a large proportion of online interactions are between neighbours (i.e. people who live within 5km of one another). (His paper Does Distance Still Matter in the Age of the Internet? looks at the impact of distance on the frequency of email, phone and face-to-face contact… I’m not certain if there was a publication on distance and social networking specifically: anyone?)

I find it intriguing that one of the links I miss most from the online world of Facebook is in fact someone I see in person all the time. Strong and weak ties, people, strong and weak ties.

Life without Facebook: one week in

It’s already over a week since I deleted my Facebook account: that went fast! Some reflections:

The good

Mostly, I’m not feeling its absence. I used to read Facebook over breakfast each morning, but I still have two other social networks (Twitter, LiveJournal), the news and many RSS feeds to keep up with… I’m hardly stuck for reading material.

I’m really enjoying the freedom of not needing to update Facebook. As per my previous post, the overhead of writing updates for such a confused/diverse audience was getting silly: it’s a real relief to not feel obliged to post updates while worrying about if they’re ‘correct’ in some way.

I received lengthy emails from a couple of friends who shared their feelings about whether they should be on Facebook, privacy concerns and the difficulty of updating for mixed audiences: it’s not just me then! I’m glad I was able to start a conversation about it.

I do miss seeing updates from close (and not-so-close) friends: as an expat, I’m geographically far from many of the people I care about, and Facebook was a good mechanism for closing that gap in a superficial way. But superficial is the key word: reading the odd sentence from someone you care about may make you feel more connected, but I’m unconvinced it makes a real difference… so, maybe this isn’t so bad as it seems. (People are still remarking to me: “Wait, you left Facebook?” Clearly, Facebook connections are not so valuable that their absence is instantly noticed.)

The bad

I’m feeling a bit of a gap regarding photos. Facebook was my repository for photos, and I liked tagging images with me and friends. I’m currently pondering what to do instead (assuming, of course, that I don’t return to FB!): options include using Google (but they have so much data on everyone already…); Flickr; or self-hosting. I don’t know. (Comments welcome!)

By deleting my Facebook account, I deleted the associated updates… including the annoucement that I was going to leave! I left relatively fast, so the status update and link to the explanatory blog post was only up for an afternoon. This means that a bunch of those 295 people still don’t know I’ve left: many of them won’t care (rightly so!) but it’s still a somewhat confusing scenario.

I can only think of one connection I really regret losing, because it was someone meaningful for whom I have no email or phone details. I deleted relatively fast, and it was after deletion I realised my error. Still, I can get in touch via a mutual contact, so although it’s inconvenient, it’s fixable.

Mike Jewell wrote some thoughtful comments about the nature of shared/community resources: in summary, when I left Facebook, so did a good chunk of ‘his’ photos. With retrospect, I’d liked to have taken the opportunity to say to people who are tagged in photos “Hey, would you like a copy of this before I leave?” (Of course, I’m relatively easy to find online, so I hope anyone who does want such a thing will get in touch.)

So with retrospect, maybe I should have taken it more slowly: perhaps waited a week with the status update, explanation and offer of copies of material to those who want it. That would have solved three of the above four issues!

The ugly

I wasn’t the only WebSci summer school participant to leave Facebook, and I was happy to retweet the comment of a companion who had also left:

Freedom from Facebook!

It was a fun tweet, and it was nice not to feel obliged to look through statuses. But later on, a close friend got in touch to ask if I really felt that checking Facebook was an uninteresting waste of time, if I felt that way about what she had to say on there. Of course, the answer was no: her activities are interesting and important to me. So — it’s important to be clear about where the feeling of relief is coming from: for me, this is about freedom from feeling obliged to read updates from everyone, from not really knowing how or when to post updates, and from the privacy/copyright concerns.

Summing up

I find it weird how hard I found it to step away from Facebook given my research interests in the area and my awareness of the privacy issues: then again, it is of course an emotional as well as a logical decision.

Right now, I’m still feeling pretty happy off-Facebook. I’m not sure what to do about photo-sharing, but that’s not the biggest deal in the world. I may yet return to the network, but if I did I feel I’d need to manage my connections differently, and that sounds like a very big job.

One final thing: to my knowledge, I haven’t yet missed any invitations to hip and happening parties…

Methodology in Web Science

I’ve been brewing a bit of a rant about methodology and WebSci. Here we go:

Experiences and subjectivity

Experiences are important, and the study of web-mediated experiences is an important part of Web Science. For example, consider questions about how people use the mobile or social web, or evaluating web design processes. Such areas are, of course, deeply subjective…

This picture could show a happy memory, an arduous trek or just a helpful example of subjectivity...

My doctorate was very much in this area. Coming in as a Computer Scientist, with knowledge of quantitative but not qualitative methods, I found it pretty tough going for a while — I’m happy to say that I got there in the end.

“How did you get there in the end, Clare?”

I’m so pleased you asked. Mixed methods, of course!

Mixed methods

Traditionally, the phrase ‘mixed methods’ refers to the use of both qualitative and quantitative approaches, and I certainly did that. I also used ‘mixed methods’ in the sense of running studies in the lab and in the field. I found both types of ‘mixing’ (changing the type of the data, changing the context of study) to be very valuable: I was better able to ‘trangulate’ my results, corroborating what I already had and being able to investigate intriguing questions from alternative perspectives.

Methodology

So: mixed methods open up richer insights. It’s essential, however, to understand methodology as well as method — that is, how methods are used together. For example, statistical analysis and qualitative coding can help corroborate findings; expert reviews help you ascertain deeper insight into prior results; case studies let you build on lab data while answering ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions.

Mixed methods isn’t as hard as it sounds! It enables multiple perspectives in on data, so you can corroborate results and further investigate the facets of interest. However, it’s essential to understand methodology as well as methods.

Where’s the rant, Clare?

First, two concerns about methods in WebSci:

1. There is a perceived ‘pressure’ in some fields to seek quantitative results, and to assume the presence of some stats means the work is rigorous. We should be careful, here.
2. Are we doing stats right? (There’s a debate about this in HCI: see this CACM article.)

The ‘rant’:

I came into the Web Science arena as a Computer Scientist, equipped with maybe half of the ‘WebSci and methods’ equation. I am not an outlier: most people coming into WebSci from a traditional discipline will face similar barriers.

It’s really important that we as a community talk about education: if Web Science is the overlap of multiple disciplines to study society and the web, what tools are we using? WebSci courses are being launched all over the place at the moment — which is wonderful! — but are students being equipped with suitable methods?

Further reading

On mixed methods:

• Shneiderman, B., Plaisant, C. 2006. Strategies for Evaluating Information Visualization Tools: Multi-dimensional In-depth Long-term Case Studies. BELIV 2006. Venice, Italy:
• Isomursu, M., Tahti, M., Vainamo, S., Kuutti, K. 2007. Experimental evaluation of five methods for collecting emotions in field settings with mobile applications. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 65, 404-418.

The pressure for quantitative results

• Shneiderman, B. 2007. Creativity Support Tools: Accelerating Discovery and Innovation. Communications of the ACM, 50, 20-32.

Rigour in quantitative and qualitative methods

• Fallman, D., Stolterman, E. 2010. Establishing Criteria of Rigor and Relevance in Interaction Design Research. create10. Edinburgh, UK.

Mixed methods in WebSci

• Hooper, C.J. 2010. Towards Designing More Effective Systems by Understanding User Experiences. Doctor in Engineering, University of Southampton.

Enric Plaza at the WebSci summer school

The talk was entitled ‘The Web of Human Experience’: I spent a lot of my doctorate looking at User Experience issues, so this was always going to interest me

Enric was interested in the reuse of other people’s experiences in the context of ‘case-based reasoning’ (learning from experience). Examples of relevant experiences include: a restaurant review; a music playlist; a ‘how to’ guide. The web is a good platform for sharing this kind of content, of course, but he felt that despite the a wealth of experience online, it isn’t modelled explicitly on the web. Additionally, we don’t necessarily understand how people browse, filter and use results.

Queries are, of course, deeply context-dependent: the answer to the question “Which are Barcelona’s airports?” depends on your purpose and community of practice — do you want to know about the tiny budget airport that’s miles out of town?

Similarly, queries such as “Which hotels in London have a room on these dates?” need different results depending on context: a business traveller is probably interested in the availability of wifi, while a family planning their vacation may be more interested in proximity to attractions and friendliness of staff. (I was a little surprised he didn’t touch on software agents as a possible approach here.)

He also spoke about implicit knowledge, which caught my attention as it links with my previous work. I think his meaning was different to my own, though: I  believe that by ‘implicit knowledge’ he meant knowledge embedded within a community, knowledge that only becomes explicit when multiple people share their indvidual insights.

So, if people constantly trawl the web in search of people’s experiences solving given problems, how can we represent, organise and reuse such content? I don’t think this is a universal problem: for instance, sites such as Tripadvisor provide pretty decent structures as a starting point when planning one’s travels. On the other hand, there really is a lot of unstructured information out there… maybe I need a software agent after all.

Leaving Facebook

I’ve had mixed feelings about Facebook for some time. Some talks at the WebSci summer school — and discussions with Rene Pickhardt — have helped me crystallise my thoughts: my previous post describes just how tough it is to understand one’s online audiences, and I’ve definitely struggled with that at times, thinking “Who will read this?” when I write a status update, wondering whether the tone is right, how it will be read. (Yes: I overthink things.)

And that’s the thing: I have 295 ‘friends’ on Facebook at the time of writing this, and I have no idea how many read my feed, what updates are interesting or dull to them, how they perceive our relationship. (Well: obviously I have knowledge about some, of course. But in general…)

I find it hard to handle that network of contacts online. The overhead is high. Some of my contacts on there are the old school friends I’ve lost touch with, or people I met once at a conference. Which is fine, but… what is the purpose of such connections on Facebook? What, if anything, do they want to get out of being connected with me there?

Are you ensnared in the Facebook web?

It’s about more than that, though.

I have been aware of Facebook’s horrific stance on copyright and IPR for pretty much as long as I’ve been on the site. People are notoriously bad at handling areas such as copyright, and the apathy I (and every other active Facebook user!) have felt in this area is symptomatic of that.

I’m also concerned about data mining. It’s at least a few years since I first heard about work showing you can predict people’s sexual orientation, religious and political views from their networks, and such work continues apace. It doesn’t matter what I share on Facebook, my network of contacts implicitly reveals a lot about me.

Of course, my network of contacts also explicitly reveals a lot about me — am I the only person in the world to find being tagged in photos a little weird?

Also, I just don’t trust Facebook.

Responses

I was surprised by the extent of people’s responses on Twitter when I idly tweeted my plan:

I instantly got a wave of replies, including:

• :O no more Clare on FB?! :O
• What will happen to your events on there?
• Why would you do such a thing??!!

Facebook is clearly an accepted part of how we live our online lives!

How I use Facebook and what I am leaving behind

I will be leaving behind 295 connections, and although I have mixed feelings about the Facebook platform, the people are important.

Here’s how I use Facebook:

I read status updates from the full set of connections, minus people that frequently post updates that aren’t interesting to me. However — here’s a secret, internet — I have a ‘close friends’ list too. I want to see those people’s updates in detail, to see their photos and exchanges and activity beyond status updates.

This is the bit where I talk about strong ties and weak ties. Facebook supports weak ties: is that worth the compromises with privacy, self-presentation and so forth?

I don’t know. That’s why I’m leaving. I’m not comitting to leaving Facebook forever. I’m leaving to try out life away from Facebook, to see whether the benefits really do outweigh the downsides. It’s a hard question to answer, and a very personal one, too.

Things I’ll miss:

• seeing the rich material from my ‘close friends’ lists
• the odd important (or amusing) status updates from people in general
• event invitations!

I won’t miss being tagged, or overthinking my updates, or feeling uncomfortable about my privacy and my data.

I’ll keep you posted.

Addendum: a few people have asked if I’ll move to Google+. I might: I’m on there, although I’m not fully engaged with it, and meanwhile I’ll continue using my Twitter and LiveJournal accounts. My focus is not “leaving Facebook for X social network” but “leaving Facebook”.

The multiplicity of human relations, and how online social networks don’t support that

The following came up during Bernie Hogan’s talk at the WebSci summer school. I touch on other aspects of the talk here, but this topic deserves a post of its own.

This got a touch long: there’s a summary paragraph at the bottom if you’re in a hurry!

How we (don’t) understand our own networks

Hogan reports that when people are asked about clusters in their online networks, they are very able to articulate them — for instance, “friends from Oxford”, “colleagues from my last job”, “university buddies”. However, they find it very, very hard to see how those clusters overlap, imagining that they are non-overlapping worlds when that is not true.

Interesting issues arise from this: how do we present ourselves to networks which contain multiple clusters? If we present to the “lowest common denominator” (the people we trust the least), we rapidly find that all we can really share are baby and holiday photos (not even those if we’re pulling a sickie!). (This paper elaborates.)

So, we can’t share sensitive information with our networks… except we do, don’t we?

And we often just post publicly, not realising (or caring about) the visibility of our updates — not realising (or caring) that they are persistent and linked. For instance, here are searches of Twitter and Facebook for updates with the words “I hate my boss.”

We lose context in online spaces

One tweet during Hogan’s talk remarked “sometimes it’s valid to have multiple social identities, which we don’t want to disclose.”

I disagree: it’s always valid to have multiple social identities (and why shouldn’t they be private?). It’s what it means to be human: no one presents the same behaviour to their parents, their colleagues, their buddies and their kids.

We have no good mechanisms for managing our clusters of contacts... running to new, sparsely populated networks doesn't count!

This is a problem on Facebook, of course: you are ‘friends’ with people from multiple arenas, so how do you handle it? Some attendees described deleting their Facebook accounts because the overhead of handling different clusters of people was just too high.

So, we have issues with broadcasting inappropriate information. The flip side of the problem is receiving it: we see baby pictures from work colleagues, updates about wild nights out from family members, meaningless work-related statuses from friends. Privacy is about more than keeping secrets, it’s about managing information and making it contextually appropriate.

Restoring our context online (I don’t see a lot)

Google+ begins to try and address this with Circles (see my initial impressions), but I’m unconvinced Circles will work. We have many, many people in our networks: aside from the fact that human relationships cannot be easily dropped into buckets, people often aren’t good at categorisation, and maintaining Circles will be a real pain. (A partial solution would be to let people create publicly-available Circles, for example a “WebSci summer school” circle… that would help, but I don’t know if it would be enough.)

Google+ tells us which circles we’re posting to, but Hogan thinks it isn’t made crystal clear. Offline, of course, we have a wealth of cues for understanding our current context. Still, as mentioned by Marc Smith, things are changing: the role of ‘speaker’ and ‘audience’ is crystal clear during talks at this summer school, but the talks are broadcast online, tweeted and blogged. How well do we adjust to that?

In summary

So, we struggle to understand our own social networks, and we fail to share appropriate information with clusters within those networks. People are talking about the problem, and social network providers are attempting to respond… but the people who’re talking are an academic/technical minority, and the responses are very ‘engineered’, failing to acknowledge the complexity of human relations. I don’t have any silver bullets, but this is a tough problem and I think we need to work together as a community — academics and industry, sociologists and engineers — to address this.

Will we see progress in the area come WebSci’12? I hope so.