•  3
    Opportunities and Challenges of Extracting Values in Autobiographical Narratives
    with Ronald Fischer, Johannes Karl, Velichko Fetvadjiev, and Adam Grener
    Frontiers in Psychology 13. 2022.
    We report three studies in which we applied a value dictionary to narratives. Our objective was to test a theory-driven value dictionary for extracting valuable information from autobiographical and narrative texts. In Studies 1 and 2, participants wrote short autobiographical narratives and in Study 3, participants wrote narratives based on ambiguous stimuli. Participants in all three studies also completed the Portrait Value Questionnaire as a self-report measure of values. Overall, our result…Read more
  •  2
    In this talk I will introduce Transcendental Information Cascades, a method to understand the temporal dynamics of naturally occurring complex systems. The distinctive feature of the approach is that it relies on a specific kind of spatio-temporal network that represents information token recurrence and coincidence. Transcendental Information Cascades make formerly hidden dimensions of sequential data accessible and throw up novel questions about chaos and randomness. I will present various appl…Read more
  •  390
    What an Entangled Web We Weave: An Information-centric Approach to Time-evolving Socio-technical Systems
    with Kieron O’Hara, Jesse David Dinneen, and Ramine Tinati
    Minds and Machines 28 (4): 709-733. 2018.
    A new layer of complexity, constituted of networks of information token recurrence, has been identified in socio-technical systems such as the Wikipedia online community and the Zooniverse citizen science platform. The identification of this complexity reveals that our current understanding of the actual structure of those systems, and consequently the structure of the entire World Wide Web, is incomplete, which raises novel questions for data science research but also from the perspective of so…Read more
  •  343
    Motivated by the significant amount of successful collaborative problem solving activity on the Web, we ask: Can the accumulated information propagation behavior on the Web be conceived as a giant machine, and reasoned about accordingly? In this paper we elaborate a thesis about the computational capability embodied in information sharing activities that happen on the Web, which we term socio-technical computation, reflecting not only explicitly conditional activities but also the organic potent…Read more
  •  32
    A universal socio-technical computing machine
    with Ramine Tinati, Saud Aljaloud, Wendy Hall, and Nigel Shadbolt
    In Markus Luczak-Roesch, Ramine Tinati, Saud Aljaloud, Wendy Hall & Nigel Shadbolt (eds.), International Conference on Web Engineering. 2016.
    This is an attempt to develop a universal socio-technical computing machine that captures and coordinates human input to let collective problem solving activities emerge on the Web without the need for an a priori composition of a dedicated task or human collective.
  •  143
    “Filter bubble”, “echo chambers”, “information diet” – the metaphors to describe today’s information dynamics on social media platforms are fairly diverse. People use them to describe the impact of the viral spread of fake, biased or purposeless content online, as witnessed during the recent race for the US presidency or the latest outbreak of the Ebola virus (in the latter case a tasteless racist meme was drowning out any meaningful content). This unravels the potential envisioned to arise from…Read more
  •  286
    In this paper, we investigate a method for constructing cascades of information co-occurrence, which is suitable to trace emergent structures in information in scenarios where rich contextual features are unavailable. Our method relies only on the temporal order of content-sharing activities, and intrinsic properties of the shared content itself. We apply this method to analyse information dissemination patterns across the active online citizen science project Planet Hunters, a part of the Zooni…Read more
  •  207
    When resources collide: Towards a theory of coincidence in information spaces
    with Ramine Tinati and Nigel Shadbolt
    In Markus Luczak-Roesch, Ramine Tinati & Nigel Shadbolt (eds.), WWW '15 Companion Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web, . pp. 1137-1142. 2015.
    This paper is an attempt to lay out foundations for a general theory of coincidence in information spaces such as the World Wide Web, expanding on existing work on bursty structures in document streams and information cascades. We elaborate on the hypothesis that every resource that is published in an information space, enters a temporary interaction with another resource once a unique explicit or implicit reference between the two is found. This thought is motivated by Erwin Shroedingers notion…Read more