Ben Shneiderman UPA Israel - 2/6/2010

1. Methods and Tools for
Facilitating Social Participation
Ben Shneiderman ben@cs.umd.edu
Founding Director (1983-2000), Human-Computer Interaction Lab
Professor, Department of Computer Science
Member, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

2. Interdisciplinary research community
- Computer Science & Info Studies
- Psych, Socio, Poli Sci & MITH
(www.cs.umd.edu/hcil)

3. Information Visualization
• Visual bandwidth is enormous
• Remarkable perceptual skills
• Extensive cognitive facilitation
• Discovery
• Trend, cluster, gap, outlier...
• Comparisons
• Presentation
• Comprehensible
• Memorable

4. Treemap: Smartmoney MarketMap
www.smartmoney.com/marketmap

5. Smartmoney.com MarketMap:
Steep fall Feb 27, 2007, with one exception
smartmoney.com/marketmap

6. Treemap: Newsmap (Marcos Weskamp)
newsmap.jp

7. Treemap: Supply Chain
www.hivegroup.com

8. Spotfire: Sales Analysis
www.spotfire.com

9. Spotfire: Treemap Bond Portfolio Analysis
www.spotfire.com

11. 10M - 100M pixels
Large displays
for single or multiple users

12. 100M-pixels & more

13. Design Issues
• Input devices & strategies
• Keyboards, pointing devices, voice
• Direct manipulation
• Menus, forms, commands
• Output devices & formats
• Screens, windows, color, sound
• Text, tables, graphics
• Instructions, messages, help
• Collaboration & Social Media www.awl.com/DTUI
Fifth Edition: 2010
• Help, tutorials, training
• Search • Visualization

14. Vision: Social Participation
1) E-commerce & National Priorities
• Customer loyalty, community formation
• Health, energy, education, e-government
2) Develop Theories of Social Participation
• How do social media networks evolve?
• How can participation be increased?
3) Provide Technology Infrastructure
• Scalable, reliable, universal, manageable
• Protect privacy, stop attacks, resolve conflicts

15. Early Steps
Informal Gathering
College Park, MD, April 2009
Article: Science March 2009
BEN SHNEIDERMAN
http://iparticipate.wikispaces.com

16. NSF Workshops: Palo Alto & DC
www.tmsp.umd.edu

17. International Efforts
Community Informatics
Research Network
intlsocialparticipation.net

18. E-Commerce Social Media

19. Vision: Social Participation
1) E-commerce & National Priorities
• Customer loyalty, community formation
• Health, energy, education, e-government
2) Develop Theories of Social Participation
• How do social media networks evolve?
• How can participation be increased?
3) Provide Technology Infrastructure
• Scalable, reliable, universal, manageable
• Protect privacy, stop attacks, resolve conflicts

20. Network Theories: Evolution models
• Random, preferential attachment,…
• Monotonic, bursty,…
• Power law for degree (hubs & indexes)
• Small-world property
• Forest fire, spreading activation,…
• Matures, decays, fragments, …
Watts & Strogatz, Nature 1998; Barabasi, Science 1999, 2009;
Newman, Phys. Rev. Letters 2002
Kumar, Novak & Tomkins, KDD2006
Leskovec, Faloutsos & Kleinberg, TKDD2007

21. Network Theories: Social science
• Relationships & roles
• Strong & weak ties
• Motivations: fear, tragedy, guilt,…
• Motivations: egoism, altruism, collectivism,
principlism
• Collective intelligence
• Collective action & governance
• Social information foraging
Moreno, 1938; Granovetter, 1971; Burt, 1987; Ostrom, 1992;
Wellman, 1993; Batson, Ahmad & Tseng, 2002;
Malone, Laubaucher & Dellarocas, 2009; Pirolli, 2009

22. Network Theories: Stages of participation
Wikipedia, Discussion & Reporting
• Reader
• First-time Contributor
(Legitimate Peripheral Participation)
• Returning Contributor
• Frequent Contributor
Preece, Nonnecke & Andrews, CHB2004
Forte & Bruckman, SIGGROUP2005; Hanson, 2008
Porter: Designing for the Social Web, 2008
Vassileva, 2002, 2005; Ling et al., JCMC 2005; Rashid et al., CHI2006

23. From Reader to Leader:
Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation
Collaborator
All
Users Reader Contributor ` Leader
Preece & Shneiderman, AIS Trans. Human-Computer Interaction1 (1), 2009
aisel.aisnet.org/thci/vol1/iss1/5/

24. Strategies for managers
Charismatic leader & bottom-up initiatives
• Personal contact, viral marketing, 1-to-1
• Appeal to special skills & uniqueness
• Engage existing groups
• Seed activities to get started

25. Footprints of Human Activity
• Footprints in sand as Caesarea

26. State-of-the-art network visualization

27. SocialAction
• Integrates statistics
& visualization
• 4 case studies, 4-8 weeks
(journalist, bibliometrician, terrorist analyst,
organizational analyst)
• Identified desired features, gave strong positive
feedback about benefits of integration
www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/socialaction
Perer & Shneiderman, CHI2008, IEEE CG&A 2009

28. NodeXL:
Network Overview for Discovery & Exploration in Excel
www.codeplex.com/nodexl
casci.umd.edu/NodeXL_Teaching

29. NodeXL:
Network Overview for Discovery & Exploration in Excel
www.codeplex.com/nodexl

30. NodeXL:
Network Overview for Discovery & Exploration in Excel
www.codeplex.com/nodexl

31. NodeXL:
Network Overview for Discovery & Exploration in Excel
https://wiki.cs.umd.edu/cmsc734_09/index.php?title=Homework_Number_3

32. Wikipedia Discussion
Red nodes (most confrontational) are involved in the strongest dyadic ties,
and they tend to have the highest out-degree

33. Tweets at #WIN09 Conference: 2 groups

34. Flickr networks

35. Flickr clusters for “mouse”
Computer Mickey
Animal

36. Flickr commenters on Marc Smith’s pix

37. Spotfire Twitter Community
• Size = number of followers
• Edge = follows, mentions, retweets
• Small, weakly connected
• No visible evangelists
www.codeplex.com/nodexl/

38. Tableau Twitter Community
• Size = number of followers
• Edge = follows, mentions, retweets
• Moderate sized community well connected.
www.codeplex.com/nodexl/

39. WWW2010 Twitter Community

40. Kodak Twitter Community
www.codeplex.com/nodexl/

41. Oil Spill Twitter Community
www.codeplex.com/nodexl/

42. Iron Man 2 (Movie) Twitter Community

43. CHI2010 Twitter Community
www.codeplex.com/nodexl/

44. Figure 7.11. : Lobbying Coalition Network connecting organizations (vertices) that have jointly filed
comments on US Federal Communications Commission policies (edges). Vertex Size represents
number of filings and color represents Eigenvector Centrality (pink = higher). Darker edges connect
organizations with many joint filings. Vertices were originally positioned using Fruchterman-
Rheingold and hand-positioned to respect clusters identified by NodeXL’s Find Clusters algorithm.

45. NodeXL: Book & Social Media Research Fnd
Social Media Research
Foundation
smrfoundation.org
We are a group of researchers
who want to create open tools,
generate and host open data,
and support open scholarship
related to social media.

46. NodeXL: Book & Social Media Research Fnd
Social Media Research Foundation
smrfoundation.org
We are a group of researchers who
want to create open tools, generate
and host open data, and support open
scholarship related to social media.
smrfoundation.org

47. Strategy: Take Personal Initiatives
Let’s get to work!

48. Technology Infrastructure
• Mobile, Desktop, Web, Cloud
• 100% uptime, 100% secure
• Giga-collabs, Tera-contribs
• Universal accessibility & usability
• Trust, empathy, responsibility, privacy
• Leaders can manage usage
• Designers can continuously improve