Meetings as Networks: Applying Social Network Analysis to Team Interaction

In recent decades, social network researchers have focused on analyzing networks of formal relationships (e.g., friendships). However, this work has yet to be applied to distributions of participation in small groups. This article provides an application of social network analysis to small group interaction and illustrates the approach through the analysis of 54 team meetings in two medium-sized German companies from the electrical and automotive supply industries (N?=?332). Within a group interaction process, individual actions affect subsequent behavior, and their interactions shape a network when group members respond to previous actions. Their responses can be understood as network ties. We describe how to calculate centralization for all forms of small group interactions, and contribute to network research by providing insights into the interaction structure of team meetings. Multilevel analyses show that a group-level measure of centralization has a significant negative effect on team performance, whereas individual participation has no such effect. Implications for future research on interaction data via social network analysis are discussed.     

螺旋式与直线式:在线健康医疗平台用户与医生交互模式研究

随着“互联网+健康医疗”的发展,越来越多的患者(或患者的代理人,本文统称为“用户”)寻求通过在线健康医疗平台与医生交互,完成问诊过程。本研究关注在缺乏面对面沟通的网络环境下,如何帮助用户-医生实现虚拟空间的有效交互,针对在线健康医疗平台中的用户-医生交互进行研究,以识别交互的模式和特征。通过爬虫技术获取了“春雨医生”网站1017组用户与医生的交互会话,本研究采用开放编码和会话分析相结合的方法,发现螺旋式和直线式是最主要的交互模式,构建了两种模式的理论模型,并揭示了两种模式的交互特征。此外,发现用户对初始问题描述的清晰和详尽程度是影响交互效率的关键因素。本研究有助于提升用户和医生借助在线健康医疗平台进行的交互效率,优化此类系统或平台的用户交互体验设计,为未来研究不同角色参与的在线智能交互健康医疗平台提供了借鉴意义。     

数字图书馆中的数据压缩及信息共享问题

数据压缩旨在利用图像的冗余度来减少表示图像所需的比特数,从而节省图像存贮容量,提高传输效率。文章归纳了目前一些主要的图像压缩技术并结合数字图书馆信息共享作初步探讨。     

弱势群体网络虚拟社区的社会支持研究——以乙肝论坛“肝胆相照”为例

在和谐社会的背景下,弱势群体得到了越来越多的关注,弱势群体寻求和获得社会支持的途径也趋于多样化。其中,互联网成为一些弱势群体寻求和获得社会支持的主要手段。本文使用定量分析的方法,以乙肝论坛肝胆相照为研究对象,对其社会支持的体系结构进行了分析。研究发现虚拟社区中的社会支持关系网主要是由位于中心处的若干会员支撑起来的,越靠近关系网中心处的成员信息交换越频繁,交换的信息数量也越多;论坛成员获得的社会支持的种类与成员的活跃程度存在着相关关系。因此,个体要想在虚拟社区中获得更多种类的社会支持必须积极参与论坛讨论;论坛也应该采取措施鼓励成员多发帖进行交流,还可以通过外部手段增进成员之间的认同感。本研究为弱势群体提供了如何改进自己在网络社区中寻求社会支持的理论指导,也为肝胆相照之类的弱势群体论坛和网络社区提供了进行改进的理论依据。     

Interpersonal coordination in interactions: Evaluations and social skills

Interactional synchrony and behavior matching is a fundamental, and often taken for granted, aspect of communicative situations. The level of interpersonal coordination exhibited during an interaction can vary depending on who is talking to whom. However, little empirical attention has been devoted to determining how people interpret the degree of coordination during interactions and what skills are associated with interactants who are more or less “in‐sync”; with their interaction partners. Using a sample of conversations between members of the same and different cultures, this preliminary study examined how interpersonal coordination is evaluated and the relationship between interpersonal coordination and social skills. The findings suggest that interpersonal coordination is a desirable and positively evaluated characteristic of interactions. The results further indicate that more socially skilled communicators can help facilitate interpersonal coordination in interactions.     

Word Selection and Social Identities in Talk-in-Interaction

This article examines connections between communication and identity. We present an analysis of actual, recorded social interactions in order to describe intersections between identity and vocabulary selection. We focus on how, in selecting or deselecting particular terms (e.g., cephalic, doula, cooker) speakers can display both their own identities and the identities of others. We show how these identities are constructed in part through speakers' selection and competent deployment of the specialist vocabularies associated with particular territories of expertise, how identities can be challenged when cointeractants presume understanding problems with specialist vocabularies, and how they can be defended (more or less vigorously) against such challenges with claims or displays of understanding. This conversation analytic approach to talk-in-interaction documents how specialist vocabularies can be deployed, in situ, in the construction of social identities. In describing how communication is used in the enactment and construction of identity, our findings contribute to the developing body of research specifying communication practices through which identity is constructed and showing how salient identities are made manifest in interaction.     

Validating simulated interaction for retrieval evaluation

A searcher’s interaction with a retrieval system consists of actions such as query formulation, search result list interaction and document interaction. The simulation of searcher interaction has recently gained momentum in the analysis and evaluation of interactive information retrieval (IIR). However, a key issue that has not yet been adequately addressed is the validity of such IIR simulations and whether they reliably predict the performance obtained by a searcher across the session. The aim of this paper is to determine the validity of the common interaction model (CIM) typically used for simulating multi-query sessions. We focus on search result interactions, i.e., inspecting snippets, examining documents and deciding when to stop examining the results of a single query, or when to stop the whole session. To this end, we run a series of simulations grounded by real world behavioral data to show how accurate and responsive the model is to various experimental conditions under which the data were produced. We then validate on a second real world data set derived under similar experimental conditions. We seek to predict cumulated gain across the session. We find that the interaction model with a query-level stopping strategy based on consecutive non-relevant snippets leads to the highest prediction accuracy, and lowest deviation from ground truth, around 9 to 15% depending on the experimental conditions. To our knowledge, the present study is the first validation effort of the CIM that shows that the model’s acceptance and use is justified within IIR evaluations. We also identify and discuss ways to further improve the CIM and its behavioral parameters for more accurate simulations.     

Dyadic perspectives on advice between friends: Relational influence,advice quality,and conversation satisfaction

Theory on advice currently gives insufficient attention to relational context, the interaction, and the advisor’s perspective. We conceptualize advice interactions as dyadic processes within relationships, and examine how relationship assessments influence perceptions of advice and the interaction. Friends reported on their relationships (152 dyads, N?=?304), had conversations that included advice, and then rated advice quality and conversational satisfaction. An actor–partner interdependence model supported a “mutual influence model:” both advisors and recipients were influenced by their own and their partners’ assessments. For advisors and recipients, higher ratings of partners’ past support increased their own advice quality ratings and conversation satisfaction, and higher advice quality increased conversation satisfaction. Relationship reports from the partner’s perspective impacted individuals’ outcomes in unexpected ways.     

Challenges of Interviewers' Institutional Positionings: Taking Account of Interview Content and the Interaction

Interviewing is a much used methodological tool in communication and other social sciences. For discourse analysts, interviewing is often judged to be both overused and poorly used; to understand communicative life, researchers should be observing interaction rather than asking people to report their stories, experiences, or beliefs. As discourse scholars we agree with many of the criticisms fellow discourse scholars have made, but we disagree that interviewing should be avoided. Our paper has two purposes. The first is to describe an interview design and interpretation issue that needs attention. The issue is the effect of an interviewer's institutional positioning on interview answers, a concern that only becomes visible when we look at actual interview interaction. The second purpose is to sketch out an approach that takes interview interaction and the troubles that arise in it seriously while also addressing the substantive topics/issues that motivated interviewing in the first place. After reviewing the major challenges of research interviewing, we analyze interview excerpts in two different research projects. We show how interviewers' institutional positionings caused misalignment and interactional trouble. In the conclusion we consider how to understand and use these kinds of unavoidable interactional troubles to arrive at interesting and persuasive interpretations of the topical foci of interviews.     

Crisis negotiations: A Preliminary investigation of facework in naturalistic conflict discourse

This article views crisis negotiations from an interaction goal perspective, with facework constituting a significant and heretofore unexplored dimension of interaction. We present a three‐dimensional model of facework used in coding perpetrator and negotiator discourse for face behaviors within three authentic negotiation interactions. Results indicate that Restore Other's Face and Restore Self's Face were the two predominant facework behaviors. While negotiators were the primary users of Restore Other's Face acts, perpetrators used mostly Restore Self's Face behaviors. No Attack Other's Face acts were observed. However, of five Attack Self's Face behaviors enacted, four occurred in a negotiation which ended in the suicide of the perpetrator. Lag sequential analysis revealed a general cycle of perpetrator use of Restore Self's Face and negotiator use of Restore Other's Face. Implications of these findings for future research and for training crisis negotiators are discussed.     

Attention cycles and the H1N1 pandemic: a cross-national study of US and Korean newspaper coverage

This study analyzes US and South Korean news coverage of the H1N1 pandemic to examine cross-cultural variations in attention cycle patterns, cited sources, and news frames. A content analysis was conducted on 630 articles from US and Korean newspapers during the period of April to October 2009. It found that attention cycle patterns, news frames, and sources varied across the two countries according to professional norms, cultural values, social ideologies, and occurrences of relevant events. While US news coverage showed two phases of waxing and waning attention, Korean news coverage showed five phases. The frames used in US news stories placed more emphasis on attribution of responsibility, action, and reassurance. Other framing variations were found as news attention in each country rose and fell. Regarding sources used, Korean news stories relied more on governmental sources, while US news stories used a greater diversity of sources. This study advances research on variations in the attention cycle for transnational issues by specifying how journalists’ framing of social problems can differ according to the following: cultural factors, the shape of the news attention cycle, and the occurrence of events related to the issue at hand.     

数字人文视域下文化遗产图像远读可视化调查与分析

[目的/意义]文化遗产图像是人类文化记忆的重要资源载体和表现形式,是人文学科研究的关键研究材料和重要研究对象.数字人文视域下,对文化遗产图像远读可视化开展系统性调研,将有助于进一步理解远读的概念,推动对海量文化遗产图像的数字人文研究与实践,实现对其价值的挖掘.[方法/过程]首先,从数字人文的远读理念出发分析文化遗产图像...     

An analysis of human factors and label accuracy in crowdsourcing relevance judgments

Crowdsourcing relevance judgments for the evaluation of search engines is used increasingly to overcome the issue of scalability that hinders traditional approaches relying on a fixed group of trusted expert judges. However, the benefits of crowdsourcing come with risks due to the engagement of a self-forming group of individuals—the crowd, motivated by different incentives, who complete the tasks with varying levels of attention and success. This increases the need for a careful design of crowdsourcing tasks that attracts the right crowd for the given task and promotes quality work. In this paper, we describe a series of experiments using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, conducted to explore the ‘human’ characteristics of the crowds involved in a relevance assessment task. In the experiments, we vary the level of pay offered, the effort required to complete a task and the qualifications required of the workers. We observe the effects of these variables on the quality of the resulting relevance labels, measured based on agreement with a gold set, and correlate them with self-reported measures of various human factors. We elicit information from the workers about their motivations, interest and familiarity with the topic, perceived task difficulty, and satisfaction with the offered pay. We investigate how these factors combine with aspects of the task design and how they affect the accuracy of the resulting relevance labels. Based on the analysis of 960 HITs and 2,880 HIT assignments resulting in 19,200 relevance labels, we arrive at insights into the complex interaction of the observed factors and provide practical guidelines to crowdsourcing practitioners. In addition, we highlight challenges in the data analysis that stem from the peculiarity of the crowdsourcing environment where the sample of individuals engaged in specific work conditions are inherently influenced by the conditions themselves.     

Connecting,Coordinating, Cataloguing: Communicative Practices on Mobile Social Networks

This article draws on Georg Simmel's sociological framework for social interaction in public space to situate socially mediated interactions within a historical and theoretical context. Based on 5 case studies of mobile interactions with social networks, this article explores how these mobile interactions with social networks are practiced and experienced in everyday life. Together these case studies suggest 3 kinds of communicative practices associated with mobile social networks: connecting, coordinating, and cataloguing. These practices are associated with the social, physical, and informational aspects of public social interaction respectively. The article concludes with implications of these practices for socially mediated interaction in public space.     

Type,tweet, tap,and pass: How smart city technology is creating a transactional citizen

In the current push for smart city programs around the world, there is a significant focus on enabling transactions between citizen and government. Though traditionally there have always been transactional elements between government and citizen, for example payment of taxes in exchange for services, or voting in exchange for representation, the rise of modern smartphone and smart city technologies have further enabled micro-transactions between citizen, government, and information broker. We conceptualize how the modern smart city, as both envisaged and enacted, incorporates the citizen not necessarily as a whole actor, but as a series of micro-transactions encoded on the real-time landscape of the city. This transactional citizen becomes counted by smart city sensors and integrated into smart city decision-making through the use of certain preferred platforms. To approach this shift from traditional forms of citizen/city interaction towards micro-transactions, we conceptualize four broad modes of transaction; type (intentional contribution), tweet (intermediated by third party), tap (convened or requested transaction), and pass (ambient transaction based on movement). These four modes are used to frame critical questions of how citizens interact with government in the emerging age of the smart city, and how these interactions impact the relationship between citizen and government, introducing new avenues for private sector influence.     

Web使用挖掘下的Web页面层次分类技术研究

Web使用挖掘研究用户访问行为所体现的行为特征,Web站点结构分析对于Web使用挖掘具有重要意义.本文讨论如何结合Web站点内页面间的超链结构和关键页面分析技术实现对Web站点的链接结构分析,得到清晰的站点拓扑结构和页面层次分类,进而以此为Web页面进行层次编码,和Web用户行为向量的建立方法,为准确表述用户的访问行为提供数据支持;用一种新的方式进一步有效的挖掘用户的行为特征.最后,把它同一些重要的页面分类方法,从算法的计算效率和页面分类的准确率上进行了比较,试验数据的分析表明,该方法在效率和准确率上有一定提高.     

机会发现对推荐服务的改进探讨

从推荐服务存在的问题和机会发现在弱信号、隐性知识方面的优势出发,探讨机会发现在拓展数据分析、发现隐性信息和满足用户长尾需求方面的作用。通过对机会和用户的持续关注,准确把握用户需求,提高人机交互在推荐中的关键作用,从而改善推荐服务质量。     

图书馆实施知识管理的两种策略

本文论述了知识管理编码策略和个性化策略，探讨了图书馆如何实施这两种策略，分析了图书馆实施知识管理两种策略应该注意的三个问题：科学实施知识管理策略，积极运用支撑知识管理的信息技术，合理选择知识管理策略。     

Inter-media agenda setting in global news production: examining agenda attributes in newspaper coverage of the MH370 incident in the U.S., China,and Hong Kong

The disappearance of Malaysian Airline Flight MH370 attracted high media attention across countries. To explore how news media outlets influence each other in transnational settings, this study focuses on the coverage of MH370 by three major newspapers in the U.S., China, and Hong Kong, and examines the inter-media agenda-setting effect as an indicator of media’s mutual influence. A content analysis of 255 news articles revealed significant correlations among the issue agendas of the 3 newspapers, suggesting the existence of reciprocal, though asymmetrical, influence among the news media in the U.S., China, and Hong Kong. The findings also suggest that news media differ in power and that news media in high-power countries play a key role in shaping the global news agenda.