Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Purdue University Fall 2017 Meeting time: Tuesday – Thursday, 12 – 1:20 PM, BRNG 2275 Office hours: BRNG 2140, 2:15 – 4 PM T-Th and by appointment Instructor: Sorin Adam Matei, smatei at purdue edu According to the site Alexa.com, which tracks…
View image | gettyimages.com Spontaneous production groups are thought to be less effective at larger scales. Lacking formal organization, larger groups spend too much time on communication. Vital resources are spent on keeping the group together, rather than on production. This becomes…
An awesome collection of “technology demystified” videos from the digital living magazine, Wired… Emphasis on special effects…
? Google and NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab – YouTube. What is Quantum Computing? According to this Google Video Clip, it is computing that relies on the idea that there are multiple universes in which things can exist simultaneously, thus, we can…
Not a billionaire, yet enjoying the limelight… Married for the third time, now to a Londoner, Jimmy Wales enjoys life among the glitterati of the world. A very entertaining and at times informative profile in the New York Times… High-minded or not,…
Several Western workers were taken hostage in Algeria by Islamists, at the Tigantourine gas plant facility raising the specter of the a regional war with Al-Qaeda in Maghred, which seems to be behind the attack. The leader of the movement is Mokhtar Belmokhtar,…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Can social media increase the effect of undesirable social communication processes, such as the echo chamber or spiral of silence?…
A notable paper about Wikipedia versions and interactions across linguistic boundaries Wikipedia has become one of the primary encyclopaedic in- formation repositories on the World Wide Web. It started in 2001 with a single edition in the English language and has since…
It’s official: The National Science Foundation hereby awards a grant of $179,594 to Purdue University for support of the project “KredibleNet – Building a research community and proposing a research agenda for the study and modeling of reputation and authority across informal…
A wonderful list of Twitter Sentiment Analysis Tools collated by Twittersentiment.appspot.com… Twitter Analysis Tools look at the meaning of the tweets and divides them into negative and positive communication items. Since the original list missed some sites, feel free to add yours…
April 15 is the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on its maiden voyage in 1912. The wreck of the ship was found in two pieces, the bow and the stern, by Ballard in 1985, who released the precise coordinates of…
Description The course is a guide to the emerging field of educational and scholarly theories and practices that use networked computational resources and platforms to promote learning and research. It will investigate how technologies and the practices associated with them might generate…
This is the title of the opening theoretical chapter of Francesca Comunello’s edited book “Networked Sociability and Individualism: Technology for Personal and Professional Relationships“. The chapter is the product of my collaboration with my former PhD student, Robert Bruno, now Assistant Professor…
Image via CrunchBase The first historiography of a Wikipedia entry…. James Bridle founded a Web site called Booktwo in September 2006 to “investigate, analyze, catalog and debate the future of literature and the publishing industry.” Over the years the site has been…
Nothing seems more random to the naked eye than the babble of online exchanges. Are the posting patterns on Wikipedia user pages or the answers offered to Q&A sites ruled by any discernible configurations? Do users engage in predictable posting/answering behaviors? More…
Academic researchers have deployed in the last decade several innovative approaches to studying social networking and via graph and complexity analysis. Here is a sampler of most intriguing papers: 1. Critical mass and willingness to pay for social networks 2.NodeXL: Network Overview,…
Wikipedia, had in July 2010 over 12 million users and 3.5 million articles ( see latest Wikipedia Stats) and was the 4th most visited website on the planet (see latest data from Google’s AdPlanner). It is at the same time a prototypical…
This piece, which is available online, has become an instant classic… Billions of people participate in online social activities. Most users participate as readers of discussion boards, searchers of blog posts, or viewers of photos. A fraction of users become contributors of…
Image via Wikipedia Lifehacker picks this little tid-bit of insight from Inc: You might think that involving a bunch of people in every company meeting and email keeps everyone on the same page. In reality, it's a productivity killer that hinders rather…
Image via Wikipedia The inside view of how Wikipedia works This article presents an interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko. All three are leading Wikipedia practitioners in the English, German, and Japanese Wikipedias and related projects. The interview focuses…
Image via Wikipedia Wikipedia articles that are controlled by a small group of editors that coordinate their work closely seem to be of higher quality. This is one of the main suggestions made by Kraut an Kittur, whose work was previously featured…
NYT makes “deletionst”–as in “someone who deletes Wikipedia article on a daily basis”-a notable phrase… In the Wall Street Journal, Julia Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler reported on a dramatic decline in the number of Wikipedia editors (down by more than 49,000…
Editing interface on Wikipedia via Wikipedia An interesting paper on the minimalist approach to editing interfaces on Wikipedia. Networked environments, such as wikis, are commonly used to support work, including the collaborative authoring of information and “fact-building.” In networked environments, the activity…
Interesting paper on the social construction of facts on Wikipedia. For years Wikipedia has come to symbolize the potential of Web 2.0 for harnessing the power of mass collaboration and collective intelligence. As wikis continue to develop and move into streams of…
Image via Wikipedia Three Very interesting papers by an interesting team at University of Washington that has done great work in analyzing Wikipedia’s policies. Formalization and Community Investment in Wikipedia’s Regulating Texts: The Role of Essays We presented this poster at the…
Wikipedia has become an increasingly organized bureacracy, with rules and norms that are more complex and performance according to studies presented in the last year by Robert Kraut and his students (Taking up the mop, Identifying Future Wikipedian Administrators and Don’t look…
On Wikipedia it matters who you are and how you did it, not what you did. How does large-scale social production coordinate individual behavior to produce public goods? Hardin (1968) denied that the creation of public goods absent markets or the State…
Wikimedia maintains this extensive and valuable list of academic papers dedicated to academic research that focuses on Wikipedia (such as our own Ambiguity and conflict in the Wikipedian knowledge production system Wikipedia:Wikipedia in academic studies – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
At Wikimania I sat on a panel with Ruidiger Glott who presented a paper on the first multilingual survey of Wikipedia contributors which had the full support of Wikimedia, the Foundation that finances Wikipedia. 65% of respondents self-described as readers, and 35%…
Fabulous resource for analyzing Wikipedia data. See what they did with in this paper by Ortega on Wikipedia inequality of contribution.
Aniket Kittur is the author of several very interesting papers about inequality of contribution on Wikipedia. His website hosts a comprehensive list of papers, including one on the rise of bourgeoisie on Wikipedia, which we have used in a number of our…
Despite the fact that diverse and equal participation of members is considered to be the essence of true online communities, no compelling index has been proposed to measure the degree of diversity in terms of contributions of content to online social environments.…
Wikipedia has more than 200 versions (including one in Klingon). Looking at the top 500 pages, can we find any similarities? Are there any differences? How can these differences be explained? Domas Mituzas has published some server log data provided by Wikipedia…
My attempts to reject Wikipedia have failed just as this clip from All That Jazz predicted. [youtube]HbLSGYd-Ohc[/youtube] Anger Denial Bargain Depression Acceptance The conclusion of my travails is summarized in this Wikiway document.
Circularity on defining truth and verifiability on Wikipedia discussed on Technology Review: So what is Truth? According to Wikipedia’s entry on the subject, “the term has no single definition about which the majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree.” But in practice,…
How do you convert a MediaWiki xml dump (using Special:Export) into a human readable file? First, I expected to find a simple, Microsoft Word import filter. What I initially found, namely Wandora, was interesting enough, but it only gave me repeated headaches,…
What does CIA call Wikipedia? Intellipedia. What does CIA call MySpace? ASpace. What does CIA call delicious? We don’t know yet, but it exists. For sure. CIA has embraced social techologies in a big way, says Financial Times ”Earlier this year, the CIA…
Andrew Keen, in his The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, uses as evidence for the fact that the “democratic”, “flat” Internet is run by a kabbalah of insiders the article The Wizards of Buzz, published by…
A Content-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia We present a content-driven reputation system for Wikipedia authors. In our system, authors gain reputation when the edits they perform to Wikipedia articles are preserved by subsequent authors, and they lose reputation when their edits…
One important innovation in information and communication technology developed over the past decade was organizational rather than merely technological. Open source production is remarkable because it converts a private commodity (typically software) into a public good. A number of studies examine the…
Investigations into Trust for Collaborative Information Repositories: A Wikipedia Case Study Investigations into Trust for Collaborative Information Repositories: A Wikipedia Case Study Authors: Deborah L. McGuinness, Honglei Zeng, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Li Ding, Dhyanesh Narayanan, and Mayukh Bhaowal Book Title: Proceedings…
I got a friendly email reminding me that there is (intelligent) life in the wiki universe…. Top 7 Alternatives to Wikipedia | OEDb Touting itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”, its no wonder that Wikipedia has garnered so much…
Very perceptive analysis and an elegant (albeit not very counterintuitive, right?) solution to Wikipedia’s woes: jettison it’s egalitarianism… The thermodynamics of Wikipedia || kuro5hin.org I thought about Wikipedia as a thermodynamic system. Some conclusions based on this trivial investment in the model:…
The Pew Internet and American Life poll on Wikipedia use highlights the obvious: Wikipedia is the most consulted reference website. It dwarfs everthing else. It even took over NY TIMES, as per this HITWISE CHART. It is at the same time driven…
Citizendium, and a subsidiary initiative which I cooked for it, Eduzendium, got Wired’s eye. The article gives Citizendium a mixed review, thumbs up, thumbs down, but overall positive… On a funny note, the article was produced by Assignment Zero, an initiative I…
An educator’s perspective Students love Wikipedia. Convenience and deadlines remembered at the last minute conspire with immense success in making undergraduate students avid consumers of web content. Professors fight their pupils’ addiction with stern grading policies bolded, underlined or italicized in the…
Turns out one of Wikipedia’s editors is a major fraud. So major that the New Yorker had to make a correction. Read all about it in the New York Times.
Expert: Wikipedia wont go away, so learn how to use it WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The popularity of Wikipedia makes it important that users learn to use the online collaborative encyclopedia as a starting point for their research rather than as the…
An update to the most accessed pages on Wikipedia. Adolf Hitler is now running head to head with Lisa Nowak, the astronaut in dipers, and the eternal adolescent fascination with self-satisfaction… At the top dominates Anna Nicole Smith (aka Vicki Lynn Hogan),…