Seeking Advice…

As part of preparations for our upcoming midterm presentations on Monday March 8, we were instructed to speak to three people who were knowledgeable in our subject area.  I had already spoken to Clay a few weeks ago in detail to discuss the outline of the project.  Last weekend I ran Tom Glaiyser at the Digital Media and Policy conference at Columbia’s School of Public Policy.  Tom is a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation with expertise in media policy reform.  We met when I first presented Noisy Idiots at NYU’s Participation Camp at ITP last summer.

I asked him about:

a) people/papers on analysis of group conversations; and

b) possible research methodologies I should be implementing to investigate Noisy Idiot behavior on the 10 websites I am studying.

Tom came back with a raft of great resources to look at including:

• Marc Smith (newsgroup analysis) – specifically, I’m getting hold of his Communities in Cyberspace book.
• Warren Sack (known for his work on the analysis of very large scale conversations (VLCS), I’m going to begin with his paper on discussions in an Open Source Software community)
• Martin Wattenberg (Visual Communication Lab at IBM Research) and Fernanda Viegas’ work on Wikipedia

In addition Tom gave some helpful suggestions on how to analyze behavior in online conversations, he also mentioned already existing tools such as DISQUS and INTENSE DEBATE, and that the slashdot/DailyKos style of moderation is more widely available.

Thanks Tom!