I’m having a great time at CHI (including my first time two-stepping today) but I strongly believe, as Jonathan Grudin asserted today, that we can make use of data to improve the conference. I’ve already analyzed historical data that demonstrates that we can substantially reduce reviewer workload. We’ve also created a way you can use [...]
Would you like some feedback on your CHI paper? We’ve set up a site to let people read and comment on it. On Wednesday at CHI, we’ll be presenting our paper on nb, a discussion forum situated in the margins of documents being discussed. Its original intended usage was for discussion of classroom lecture notes, [...]
This year at CHI we’ll be presenting a paper on nb, a tool that lets students have forum-style threaded discussions in the margins of pdf documents. We’ve posted it in advance at the link above in hopes of getting some comments on it that can help us prepare our presentation. We’re also making nb available [...]
Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve been looking at the way people ask and answer questions on Facebook. Much of this work happened with the phenomenal Merrie Morris and Jaime Teevan (haystack alum!) at Microsoft Research. I’ve been interested in the ad hoc way people ask questions as their status messages [...]
When someone describes a person as a “messy” or “tidy”, we can instantly guess something about their appearance, their personality, and the way they organize their physical and digital artifacts – around the house, office, or on their computer(s). There is little disagreement around these definitions, and many stereotypes (both positive and negative) are commonly [...]
Inspired by danah boyd, I decided to create a crib of my talk at HarambeeNet 2010. It discusses the boundaries between data and people, as well as our recent work on the Soylent project. Please let me know any feedback you have! HarambeeNet: Data by the people, for the people View more presentations from mbernst. [...]
even though it feels like years ago, when we went to chi in atlanta last april, we saw a lot of good talks. here’s one from jilin chen at the university of minnesota, who presented on ”the effects of diversity on group productivity and member withdrawal in online volunteer groups.” if we think about any of [...]
At last week’s CSCW conference, two papers were connected by a theme I find quite interesting—the question of establishing efficient information “markets” that direct the production and consumption of information to where it has the greatest utility. “Inspired by the Audience — A Topic Suggestion System for Blog Writers and Readers“, by Geyer and Dugan, [...]
I just got back from my first attendance at (half of) CSCW. It was an enjoyable and enlightening conference. Overall, my favorite session was the first one I attended—four quite interesting papers studying the use of Wikipedia were presented. The first, Socialization Tactics in Wikipedia and their Effects, by Choi, Alexander, Kraut and Levine, studied [...]
I blogged CSCW for the CACM. This is the first of three cross-blog posts on the two keynotes and a very interesting panel. MSN usability researchers were stumped. Their usability lab had tested just about every aspect of its MSN portal and had been pleased to find that it consistently scored higher than its competitors. [...]