User-generated Information Research Articles

Social Media and the City: Rethinking Urban Socio-Spatial Inequality Using User-Generated Geographic Information

Big data is increasingly seen as a way of providing a more 'scientific' approach to the understanding and management of cities. But most geographic analyses of geotagged social media data have failed to mobilize a sufficiently complex understanding of socio-spatial relations. By combining the conceptual approach of relational socio-spatial theory with the methods of critical GIScience, this paper explores the spatial imaginaries and processes of segregation and mobility at play in the notion of the '9th Street Divide' in Louisville, Kentucky. Through a more context-sensitive analysis of this data, this paper argues against this popular spatial imaginary and the notion that the Louisville's West End is somehow separate and apart from the rest of the city. By analyzing the everyday activity spaces of different groups of Louisvillians through geotagged Twitter data, we instead argue for an understanding of these neighborhoods as fluid, porous and actively produced, rather than as rigid, static or fixed. Ultimately, this paper is meant to provide a conceptual and methodological framework for the analysis of social media data that is more attentive to the multiplicity of socio-spatial relations embodied in such data.

How People Evaluate Online Reviews

The ability viewers have to contribute information to websites (i.e., user-generated content) is a defining feature of the participatory web. Building on warranting theory, this study examined how viewers’ evaluations of a target are more or less likely to be influenced by user-generated content. The results indicate that the more a target is perceived to be able to control the dissemination of user-generated reviews online, the less credence people place in those reviews when forming impressions of the target. In addition, the less people are confident that user-generated reviews are truly produced by third-party reviewers, the less people trust those reviews. The results provide novel support for warranting theory by illustrating how the warranting value of user-generated information can vary and thus differentially affect viewers’ evaluations of a target. The implications of the study’s results for warranting theory, online impression management, e-commerce, and future research are discussed.

Atmospheric Environment and Quality of Life Information Extraction from Twitter with the Use of Self-Organizing Maps

The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has changed dramatically not only the way users perceive the Internet and interact on it but also the way they influence a community and act in real life aspects. With the rapid rise in use and popularity of social media, people tend to share opinions and observations for almost any subject or event in their everyday life. Consequently, microblogging websites have become a rich data source for user-generated information. The leading opportunity is to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd and to benefit from collective intelligence in any applicable domain. Towards this direction, we focus on the problem of mining and extracting knowledge from unstructured textual content, for the atmospheric environment domain and its effect to quality of life. As the main contribution, we propose a combined methodology of unsupervised learning methods for analyzing posts from Twitter and clustering textual data into concepts with semantically similar context. By applying Self-Organizing Maps and k-means clustering, we identify possible inter-relationships and patterns of words used in tweets that can form upper concepts of atmospheric and health related topics of discussion. We achieve to group together tweets, from more generic to more specific description levels of their content, according to the selected number of clusters. Strong clusters with significant semantic relatedness among their content are revealed, and hidden relations between concepts and their related semantics are acquired. The results highlight the potential use of social media text streams as a highly-valued supplement source of environmental information and situation awareness.

Valuable Tourism Information via Mobile Application

The travel and tourism industry is one of the main sources of income in Thailand. People choose to travel around the world, as a way to relax and enjoy their time. Users search information from many resources before and during their travel. We grouped the mobile tourism applications into two main groups in order to analyse the nature of information in the tourism applications. Social network provides rich collaborative user-generated information. We found that most tourism applications require personal information and pre-existing association in order to get information. We argue that, in tourism, a user requires instant and easy access to information. So the social network might not be an appropriate option. Therefore we propose a simple collaborative user-generated content application, which has a location awareness chat system. We aim to provide an application with self-sufficient information that allows the user to instantly share, search, and comment on information at anytime and anywhere. Moreover, the location awareness chat system is introduced to provide instant firsthand information to the users as well.

Crowdsourcing Knowledge Interdiscursive Flows from Wikipedia into Scholarly Research

Information increasingly flows from smart online knowledge systems, based on ‘collective intelligence’, and to the more traditional form of knowledge production that takes place within academia. Looking specifically at the case of Wikipedia, and at how it is employed in scholarly research, this study contributes new knowledge about the potential role of user-generated information in science and innovation. This is done using a dataset collected from the Scopus research database, which is processed with a combination of bibliometric techniques and qualitative analysis. Results show that there has been a significant increase in the use of Wikipedia as a reference within all areas of science and scholarship. Wikipedia is used to a larger extent within areas like Computer Science, Mathematics, Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities, than in Natural Sciences, Medicine and Psychology. Wikipedia is used as a source for a variety of knowledge and information as a replacement for traditional reference works. A thematic qualitative analysis showed that Wikipedia knowledge is recontextualised in different ways when it is incorporated into scholarly discourse. In general, one can identify two forms of framing where one is unmodalised, and the other is modalised. The unmodalised uses include referring to Wikipedia as a complement or example, as a repository, and as an unproblematic source of information. The modalised use is characterised by the invocation of various markers that emphasise – in different ways – that Wikipedia can not be automatically trusted. It has not yet achieved full legitimacy as a source.

Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty

Geographies of codified knowledge have always been characterized by stark core–periphery patterns, with some parts of the world at the center of global voice and representation and many others invisible or unheard. Many have pointed to the potential for radical change, however, as digital divides are bridged and 2.5 billion people are now online. With a focus on Wikipedia, which is one of the world's most visible, most used, and most powerful repositories of user-generated content, we investigate whether we are now seeing fundamentally different patterns of knowledge production. Even though Wikipedia consists of a massive cloud of geographic information about millions of events and places around the globe put together by millions of hours of human labor, the encyclopedia remains characterized by uneven and clustered geographies: There is simply not a lot of content about much of the world. The article then moves to describe the factors that explain these patterns, showing that although just a few conditions can explain much of the variance in geographies of information, some parts of the world remain well below their expected values. These findings indicate that better connectivity is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the presence of volunteered geographic information about a place. We conclude by discussing the remaining social, economic, political, regulatory, and infrastructural barriers that continue to disadvantage many of the world's informational peripheries. The article ultimately shows that, despite many hopes that a democratization of connectivity will spur a concomitant democratization of information production, Internet connectivity is not a panacea and can only ever be one part of a broader strategy to deepen the informational layers of places.

Social Media and Internet‐Based Data in Global Systems for Public Health Surveillance: A Systematic Review

Context: The exchange of health information on the Internet has been heralded as an opportunity to improve public health surveillance. In a field that has traditionally relied on an established system of mandatory and voluntary reporting of known infectious diseases by doctors and laboratories to governmental agencies, innovations in social media and so-called user-generated information could lead to faster recognition of cases of infectious disease. More direct access to such data could enable surveillance epidemiologists to detect potential public health threats such as rare, new diseases or early-level warnings for epidemics. But how useful are data from social media and the Internet, and what is the potential to enhance surveillance? The challenges of using these emerging surveillance systems for infectious disease epidemiology, including the specific resources needed, technical requirements, and acceptability to public health practitioners and policymakers, have wide-reaching implications for public health surveillance in the 21st century.Methods: This article divides public health surveillance into indicator-based surveillance and event-based surveillance and provides an overview of each. We did an exhaustive review of published articles indexed in the databases PubMed, Scopus, and Scirus between 1990 and 2011 covering contemporary event-based systems for infectious disease surveillance.Findings: Our literature review uncovered no event-based surveillance systems currently used in national surveillance programs. While much has been done to develop event-based surveillance, the existing systems have limitations. Accordingly, there is a need for further development of automated technologies that monitor health-related information on the Internet, especially to handle large amounts of data and to prevent information overload. The dissemination to health authorities of new information about health events is not always efficient and could be improved. No comprehensive evaluations show whether event-based surveillance systems have been integrated into actual epidemiological work during real-time health events.Conclusions: The acceptability of data from the Internet and social media as a regular part of public health surveillance programs varies and is related to a circular challenge: the willingness to integrate is rooted in a lack of effectiveness studies, yet such effectiveness can be proved only through a structured evaluation of integrated systems. Issues related to changing technical and social paradigms in both individual perceptions of and interactions with personal health data, as well as social media and other data from the Internet, must be further addressed before such information can be integrated into official surveillance systems.

Identifying interesting Twitter contents using topical analysis

Social media platforms such as Twitter are becoming increasingly mainstream which provides valuable user-generated information by publishing and sharing contents. Identifying interesting and useful contents from large text-streams is a crucial issue in social media because many users struggle with information overload. Retweeting as a forwarding function plays an important role in information propagation where the retweet counts simply reflect a tweet’s popularity. However, the main reason for retweets may be limited to personal interests and satisfactions. In this paper, we use a topic identification as a proxy to understand a large number of tweets and to score the interestingness of an individual tweet based on its latent topics. Our assumption is that fascinating topics generate contents that may be of potential interest to a wide audience. We propose a novel topic model called Trend Sensitive-Latent Dirichlet Allocation (TS-LDA) that can efficiently extract latent topics from contents by modeling temporal trends on Twitter over time. The experimental results on real world data from Twitter demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several other baseline methods.

AN OPINION FEATURE EXTRACTION APPROACH BASED ON A MULTIDIMENSIONAL SENTENCE ANALYSIS MODEL

With Web 2.0 applications being widely used, social networking services, including web blogs, forums, and other online communities, have become informative tools that help individuals to easily gauge the pulse of the electronic consuming market. As a substitute for traditional public media, the related site provides unique mechanisms to instantly reveal the degree of public product acceptance by either statistically aggregating the rating results or archiving opinions shared by experienced customers. However, the growth of user-generated information and its scattered unstructured contents is overwhelming to users, thereby triggering the demand for a more efficient system that can offer concise information. Most existing efforts dedicated to these issues may neglect vital aspects of the sentence-level context. This article aims to explore the critical features hidden in the sentential structure of opinion articles and expects that the detected patterns may contribute to the enhancement of related applications. Accordingly, a multidimensional sentence modeling algorithm (MSMA) is designed to evaluate various sentential characteristics and adopt a genetic algorithm to optimize the weighting scheme while determining feature importance. The study also makes use of the public knowledge resource Wikipedia as a global reference to fine-tune the feature set's effectiveness and enhance the overall performance of this framework. The results of experiments on an electronic product data set demonstrate that the proposed method is promising and provides significant improvement over previous studies.

Trusting expert- versus user-generated ratings online: The role of information volume, valence, and consumer characteristics

The warranting principle, signaling theory, and theories of informational social influence suggest conditions when either user-generated information, or information originating from traditional experts, might be privileged online. A random sample of 1207 U.S.-based adults with Internet access completed an experiment that manipulated the source, volume, and valence of online movie ratings in order to test predictions derived from these perspectives. Results indicated that ratings volume is positively associated with trust of, reliance on, and confidence in user-generated content, as well as the congruence between one’s own and others’ opinions; that ratings source and volume interact to impact credibility perceptions, reliance on user-generated information, and opinion congruence, such that people tend to favor experts when there is low information volume, but favor user-generated information under conditions of high information volume; and that people’s opinions and behavioral intentions converge with the online ratings information to which they are exposed. In addition, these effects apply more strongly to people more conversant with user-generated content. Results indicate important theoretical extensions by demonstrating that social information online may be filtered through signals indicating its veracity, which may not apply equally to all social media users.

Assessing the moderating effect of consumer product knowledge and online shopping experience on using recommendation agents for customer loyalty

Social media technologies have greatly facilitated the creation of many types of user-generated information, e.g., product rating information can be used to generate preference-based recommendation. As a decision support tool, a Recommendation Agent (RA) has been widely adopted by many e-commerce websites. The impact of RAs on online shopping has been extensively examined in the IS literature. However, from Marketing and Social Media perspectives, the widely adopted cognitive–affect–conative–action framework of customer loyalty has not been tested in the presence of RAs. Moreover, there has been little research assessing the impact of increasing consumer knowledge about specific product domains on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Based on these important constructs, this study proposes and empirically tests a parsimonious model assessing the moderating effect of consumer product knowledge and online shopping experience on using RA for customer loyalty. The results show that consumer product knowledge relationship between RA's recommendations negatively impacts the recommendation quality and customer satisfaction, however, consumer online shopping experience does not have a significant effect on the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. The results make a significant contribution to a better understanding of the constructs in our research model and provide evidence useful for the management of websites using RAs for product recommendations.

Library Catalogues of the Future: A Social Space and Collaborative Tool?

Next-generation catalogues are providing opportunities for library professionals and users to interact, collaborate, and enhance core library functions. Technology, innovation, and creativity are all components that are merging to create a localized, online social space that brings our physical library services and experiences into an online environment. While patrons are comfortable creating user-generated information on commercial Web sites and social media Web sites, library professionals should be exploring alternative methods of use for these tools within the library setting. Can the library catalogue promote remote readers' advisory services and act as a localized "Google"? Will patrons or library professionals be the driving force behind user-generated content within our catalogues? How can cataloguers be sure that the integrity of their bibliographic records is protected while inviting additional data sources to display in our catalogues? As library catalogues bring our physical library services into the online environment, catalogues also begin to encroach or "mash-up" with other areas of librarianship that have not been part of a cataloguer's expertise. Using library catalogues beyond their traditional role as tools for discovery and access raises issues surrounding the expertise of library professionals and the benefits of collaboration between frontline and backroom staff.

Teaching students to use social media to do scientific research

Social media are a set of internet applications that create and exchange user‐generated information. They are valuable tools for scientists especially when utilized to create and exchange scientific data, ideas, hypotheses, etc. The objective of this project was to teach Neuroanatomy students to use a WIKI to work collaboratively to perform a research project. Students were shown an experimental protocol and then asked to use the WIKI to to develop a hypothesis and protocol, perform the experiment, develop consensus on the conclusions, and write a lab report. In this way students learned to use social media to disseminate information, advocate positions, contest claims, evaluate the contributions of collaborators, and work collectively on a common goal. The Project assessed the social media skills of the students in 3 conditions: an exchange of information on the WIKI, an evaluation of peer contributions to the WIKI, and ad hoc discussion about the design and performance of the experiment. All students (n=8) posted ideas in the information exchange but only 87.5% evaluated peer contributions. All students contributed postings to the ad hoc discussion board and postings (1–4 per student) appeared as needed for project progress. While 62.5% of the students initiated topics or questions essential to the progress of the project only 25% of the students summarized contributions, or posted a consensus decision.

Virtually a drug scare: Mephedrone and the impact of the Internet on drug news transmission

BackgroundOn the 16th April 2010 the drug mephedrone was outlawed in the UK. This followed news media reports of deaths linked to the drug. In many respects the mephedrone scare represented a familiar pattern of drug framing and legislative reaction. However, the mephedrone scare took place in the era of online news transmission. MethodsTo quantify the mephedrone scare the Google Internet search-engine's Trends and News applications were monitored from when the first death was attributed to the drug until 1 year after it was banned. ResultsWeb interest in buying mephedrone peaked when online news stories reported deaths from the drug. Eighteen alleged mephedrone deaths were identified from online news. The fatalities which received the most Internet traffic subsequently proved false-alarms. Online interactive media widened access to alternative explanations of these alleged mephedrone deaths. ConclusionIt is contended that the advent of the Internet accelerated and inflated the mephedrone scare, but also that online media allowed [web] user-generated information transmission, rather than simple dissemination by news media to audience, fostering competing discourses to stock drug scare themes as they emerged.

Geomedia: on location-based media, the changing status of collective image production and the emergence of social navigation systems

The increased computational power of portable devices such as smart phones and laptops, and their integration with widely available global positioning systems, are opening the way for a new range of location-based applications that integrate and coordinate users' mediated interactions and data exchanges with other users' live geographical positions. This user-generated information, shared on navigable live virtual maps such as Google Latitude, Foursquare and Gowalla, illustrates the increasing use of location-based applications and the Web to create, assemble and disseminate personal information (in the form of images, sounds and text) to enable shared experiences of individually and socially relevant spaces and events. The new virtual maps, in which this information is visually blurred and merged, represent the emergence of a new paradigm in the visualisation of space. The article elaborates on the fundamental social and perceptual shifts that are being operated today by these new technologies and software applications that the author refers to as geomedia. Geomedia are not new media per se, but platforms that merge existing electronic media + the Internet + location-based technologies (or locative media) + AR (Augmented Reality) technologies in a new mode of digital composite imaging, data association and socially maintained data exchange and communication. In the article the author examines the early adoption of such new geolocation-based technologies and develops a theoretical analysis of the ontological and epistemological shifts that characterise their contemporary evolution, patterns of production and exchange, and the unique form of geolocational digital re-aggregation of which digital images are now a part.

UGIS: Understanding the nature of user-generated information systems

People from around the world are bringing together a variety of information technologies—devices, services, applications, networks, and information—to create personal information systems. This emerging phenomenon is enabled by a convergence of inexpensive, powerful, and ubiquitous devices and applications connected through global networks, motivated by an open ideology and enacted by ‘prosuming’ users. This article examines the phenomenon of the user-generated information system (UGIS) to better understand its origins and thereby describe its nature. A formal definition of UGIS is developed, and its components described. A model of the ideological and technical forces that contribute to the changing role of the user as information system creator, and to the emergence of this capability and issues, is introduced. Implications for managers are discussed.

Assessing effectiveness of query reformulations: Analysis of user-generated information retrieval diaries

This ongoing project investigated effectiveness of query reformulations using user-generated information retrieval diaries. This study is one of a few studies that employed a diary method and assessed query reformulation effectiveness directly from users' ratings. In addition, the pilot analysis investigated the effect of multiple factors on search results improvement, including query reformulation types, user domain knowledge, and familiarity with the system. The pilot analysis results reveal that the parallel movement type of query reformulations was the most effective in obtaining improved search results, while users' domain knowledge and familiarity with the system would not be associated with query reformulation effectiveness.

Managing Privacy of User Generated Information in a Web 2.0 World

AbstractWeb 2.0 based social networking services (SNSs) have experienced phenomenal growth in the last several years. The potential economic benefits created by the growth of these SNSs have been accompanied by challenges to managing privacy of user-generated information. As the growth of these SNSs continues organizations struggle to cope with managing privacy of user generated information. This paper identifies three principles that if followed will help an organization ensure that privacy of user generated information on SNSs is managed effectively. Failure to address privacy by SNSs can lead to legal challenges by users, privacy advocacy groups, society and the government. Increased legislation that is harsh and unpopular will limit SNSs from exploiting economic opportunities and users of these applications can end up losing a potential source of sharing data with friends and family.

Disasters2.0: application of web 2.0 technologies in emergency situations

This article presents a social approach for disaster management based on a social portal called Disasters2.0, which provides facilities for integrating and sharing user-generated information about disasters. The architecture of Disasters2.0 is designed following Representational State Transfer (REST) principles and integrates external mashups such as Google Maps. This architecture has been consumed with different clients, including a mobile client, a multiagent system for assisting the decentralised management of disasters and an expert system for automatically assigning resources to disasters. As a result, the platform allows seamless collaboration of humans and intelligent agents, and provides a novel web 2.0 approach for multiagent and disaster management research.

Emergency 2.0 is coming to a website near you

A host of social media websites could spell a sea change for crisis management. How should emergency services make best use of all the user-generated information?