Online Crowd Research Articles

Crowd Sourcing – A New Management Mantra

“Crowd sourcing” is a brand new concept which has started to make wave in the field of management'. It refers to the process of outsourcing of activities to an online community or crowd in the form of an open call. Any member of the crowd can complete the assignment who will then be paid for his efforts. This phenomenon is increasingly noticed in the field of advertising where companies have started generating ideas and strategies of advertisement from crowd, for a better realistic approach. The process is speedy and is less expensive in terms of time and money. This paper is an attempt to put light on the various nuances of “crowd sourcing”, the methodologies involved and its impacts related to competitive segment of business. The success mantra of crowd sourcing is the power of crowd that drives the future of management.

Turning user generated health-related content into actionable knowledge through text analytics services

In the last years, the habit of discussing healthcare issues with family and friends, even with unknown people, in the context of social networks has increased and processing user generated content has become a new challenge. This can help in on-line crowd surveillance for different applications (pharmacovigilance and filtering health contents in blogs among others) as well as extracting knowledge from unstructured text sources. In this article, a system that monitors health social media streams is described. It is based on several text analytics processes supported, among others, by MeaningCloud, a commercial platform which provides meaning extraction from texts in a Software as a Service mode. In this architecture, several domain resources are integrated to detect drugs and drug effects such as CIMA (official information about authorized drugs in Spain maintained by the Spanish Agency of Medicines and Health Products), MedDRA (Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities) and the SpanishDrugEffectDB database that contains relations between drugs and effects. Different ways of visualizing data considering time lines and aggregated data have been implemented. In order to show performance, an evaluation has been carried out over Named Entities Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) tasks.

Protest avatars as memetic signifiers: political profile pictures and the construction of collective identity on social media in the 2011 protest wave

Protest avatars, digital images that act as collective symbols for protest movements, have been widely used by supporters of the 2011 protest wave, from Egypt to Spain and the United States. From photos of Egyptian martyr Khaled Said, to protest posters and multiple variations of Anonymous' mask, a great variety of images have been adopted as profile pictures by Internet users to express their support for various causes and protest movements and communicate it to all their Internet peers. In this article, I explore protest avatars as forms of identification of protest movements in a digital era. I argue that protest avatars can be described as ‘memetic signifiers’ because (a) they are marked by a vagueness and inclusivity that distinguishes them from traditional protest symbols and (b) lend themselves to be used as memes for viral diffusion on social networks. In adopting these icons, participants experience a collective fusion in an online crowd, whose gathering is manifested in the very ‘masking’ of participants behind protest avatars. These forms of collective identification, while powerful in the short term, can however prove quite volatile, with Internet users often discarding avatars with relative ease, raising the question whether they can provide durable foundational elements of contemporary social movements.

Validation of the Cyberchondria Severity Scale (CSS): Replication and extension with bifactor modeling

Internet help seeking behaviors are increasingly common. Despite the positives associated with technology, cyberchondria, or the process of increased anxiety in response to internet medical information seeking, is on the rise. The Cyberchondria Severity Scale (CSS) was recently developed to provide a valid measure of cyberchondria across multiple dimensions. The current study sought to extend previous work on the CSS factor structure by examining a bifactor model. Participants (N=526) from a community sample completed the CSS via online crowd sourcing. Results revealed that the bifactor model of the CSS provided superior fit to the data, suggesting that it is useful to conceptualize the CSS as containing a General Cyberchondria factor that is orthogonal to its subfactors. Similar to previous work, the CSS Mistrust factor does not appear to be necessary to this construct. Finally, results revealed unique relations between General and Specific Cyberchondria factors with lower-order health anxiety dimensions.

Social Media, Public Participation, and the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

ABSTRACTThis research examines how information about an oil spill, its impacts, and the use of dispersants to treat the oil, moved through social media and the surrounding Internet during the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Using a collection of tweets captured during the spill, we employ a mixed-method approach including an in-depth qualitative analysis to examine the content of Twitter posts, the connections that Twitter users made with each other, and the links between Twitter content and the surrounding Internet. This article offers a range of findings to help practitioners and others understand how social media is used by a variety of different actors during a slow-moving, long-term, environmental disaster. We enumerate some of the most salient themes in the Twitter data, noting that concerns about health impacts were more likely to be communicated in tweets about dispersant use, than in the larger conversation. We describe the accounts and behaviors of highly retweeted Twitter users, noting how locals helped to shape the network and the conversation. Importantly, our results show the online crowd wanting to participate in and contribute to response efforts, a finding with implications for future oil spill response.

Wish: Amplifying Creative Ability with Expert Crowds

We present Wish, a system that uses expert members of an online crowd to amplify a user’s ability to carry out complex creative tasks. When presented with an incomplete or rough draft of creative content (for example, writing, programming, or art), Wish finds and recruits an expert to suggest a possible realization of the user’s vision. Wish contributes a new approach to crowdsourcing complex work. Rather than combining pools of unskilled workers to producing complex output, Wish uses the crowd to identify and recruit a pool of experts, then assigns a single high-quality expert to carry out the task. This approach retains the benefits of using a crowd — scalability, speed, correctness, and responsiveness — while simplifying the process of crowdsourcing complex work. We demonstrate Wish in the context of three prototype tools. Draft enables users to consult a crowd of authors for suggestions on writing. Hack lets developers convert pseudocode into working code by pulling results on demand from a crowd of programmers. Sketch lets individuals convert rough sketches into fully-refined art by consulting artists. We illustrate how novice creators can use Wish to amplify their ability, how expert designers can use Wish to explore design spaces and improve the speed of creation, and how new users can use Wish to gain feedback from experts.

LESSONS LEARNED ABOUT PUBLIC HEALTH FROM ONLINE CROWD SURVEILLANCE.

The Internet has forever changed the way people access information and make decisions about their healthcare needs. Patients now share information about their health at unprecedented rates on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook and on medical discussion boards. In addition to explicitly shared information about health conditions through posts, patients reveal data on their inner fears and desires about health when searching for health-related keywords on search engines. Data are also generated by the use of mobile phone applications that track users' health behaviors (e.g., eating and exercise habits) as well as give medical advice. The data generated through these applications are mined and repackaged by surveillance systems developed by academics, companies, and governments alike to provide insight to patients and healthcare providers for medical decisions. Until recently, most Internet research in public health has been surveillance focused or monitoring health behaviors. Only recently have researchers used and interacted with the crowd to ask questions and collect health-related data. In the future, we expect to move from this surveillance focus to the "ideal" of Internet-based patient-level interventions where healthcare providers help patients change their health behaviors. In this article, we highlight the results of our prior research on crowd surveillance and make suggestions for the future.

The online crowd: a contradiction in terms? On the potentials of Gustave Le Bon's crowd psychology in an analysis of affective blogging

The aim of the article is to investigate whether the concept of the ‘crowd’ as developed by Gustave Le Bon can help us understand the new types of affectively charged collectivities created via spontaneous interaction on various social media platforms. To do this I analyze the case of Eva Dien Brine Markvoort's blog, 65 Red Roses, through the lens of crowd psychology. Initially I make a theoretical distinction between three different types of crowds that prioritize the role of physical co-presence in different ways: the traditional body-to-body crowd based on physical co-presence; the mediated crowd, which has a strong offline dimension but uses media technologies as tools or communication environments; and the online crowd, which I define as the affective unification and relative synchronization of a public in relation to a specific online site. Overall I argue that Eva Markvoort enables collective affective processes that can be identified in the responses on the blog, and that she functions as a crowd facilitator, motivating both linguistic and bodily imitation due to her personal prestige and her image-producing embodiment of an abstract disease and problem. On a theoretical level, I conclude that Le Bon's description of the crowd is productive when trying to transpose insights from crowd psychology into a cultural situation characterized by spontaneous and affective relations online.

Home Bias in Online Investments: An Empirical Study of an Online Crowd Funding Market

An extensive literature in economics and finance has documented “home bias,” the tendency that transactions are more likely to occur between parties in the same geographical area, rather than outside. Using data from a large online crowdfunding marketplace and employing a quasi-experimental design, we find evidence that home bias still exists in this virtual marketplace for financial products. Furthermore, through a series of empirical tests, we show that rationality-based explanations cannot fully explain such behavior, and that behavioral reasons at least partially drive this remarkable phenomenon. As crowdfunding becomes an alternative and increasingly appealing channel for financing, a better understanding of home bias in this new context provides important managerial, practical, and policy implications.

Democratic Process in Online Crowds and Communities

This paper explores the underlying structures that support participation and reputation in online crowd and community-based peer productions. Building on writings on open source, peer production, participatory culture, and social networks, the paper describes crowd and community structures as two ends of a continuum of collective action - from lightweight to heavyweight - differentiated by the extent of connectivity and engagement between contributions and among contributors. This is followed by an examination of the recognition, reputation and reward systems that support these collectives, and how these affect who controls and who contributes information. The aim of this exploration is to gain insight for understanding motivations and structures for e-participation in these different, potentially democratic, forums.

Clustering Online Crowd Interests: A Network-based Approach

Clustering Online Crowd Interests: A Network-based Approach

Continuous Archiving of Group Digital Photograph Collections with a MPEG-7 Based Crowd Sourcing Annotation Methodology

Following the increased convenience and availability of personal recording devices, the number of photographs and video clips one possesses can be multiplied at an accelerated speed. As a result of owning such a huge amount of digital data, one may encounter the difficulty of locating a specific photograph or video. Reformatting of the computer system or damaging on the hard disk also cause a potential risk of losing valuable personal data.Kuo, Aoki and Yasuda proposed an experiment personal archiving and retrieving image system called PARIS (Personal Archiving and Retrieving Image System) [2]. In PARIS, A MPEG-7 based multimedia description schema with extended spatial and temporal attributes is proposed to annotate personal multimedia data. While PARIS, the proposed experiment system, is designed and implemented specially towards the trend of continuous capture and storage for personal experience; it did not manage to utilize annotations that might come from recent emerging social networking enabled services.As a continuing project of PARIS, we initiated an experiment platform with thirty smart phone users. At the first stage, which last around six months, we encourage users to capture life events with smart phone cameras and to accumulate related photographs and video clips into our experiment database. In addition, we plan to extend this experiment with another 60 participants, which equipped with personal recording devices such as consumer digital cameras or digital video cameras in the near future.In this experiment database, we encourage users to upload their media files and provide related annotations. While we provide annotation options with previous proposed MPEG-7 based multimedia description schema, the new system generates annotation suggestions semi-automatically according to various on-line photograph-hosting services.Known as social-tagging, our proposed system allows users and visitors to create tags based on our previous proposed MPEG-7 structure and utilize pre-defined spatial and temporal ontology as well as resources provided via various on-line crowd generated resources. Users are allowed to create free personal tags and utilize our system generated suggestions in order to create relevant annotations which can lead to increased retrieval precision.

Managing the Online Crowd: Motivations for Engagement in User-Generated Content

This article addresses the question of why Internet users participate in and actively generate content for online communities. We asked users who actively produce online content and those who are passive recipients of mainstream community Web sites that feature user-generated content about their behavior and motivations. We aimed to identify the differences between active and passive users and the motivations behind content production. Using a structural equation modeling approach, our results indicate that social status is the main motivational driver of time exposure, while involvement in the community is driven by stimulus avoidance, social relations, and social identity.