Thanks, and keep in touch!

Thanks so much to everyone for your interest, enthusiasm, and participation. Many people at the conference mentioned that the workshop was interesting and helpful, and that's entirely a result of the great content presented by the panelists, and the great questions and comments provided by the other participants.

The workshop is over, but we're not done here! Stay tuned to this space for links to slide decks from our presenters, and links to YouTube/Google Video uploads of all the presentations and discussion sessions. It will take us some time to get the videos from the folks who recorded everything for us, and after that we'll have to edit them and post them, but we'll be doing that just as fast as we can.

We'd also like to offer thanks, and regrets, to those who wished to attend but were unable to make it due to travel difficulties or scheduling conflicts. We're sorry we missed you, and we hope you'll stay in touch!

Panelists and Presentations

Here is the list of panelists along with selected titles and related publications. We've got a great lineup of panelists, and we think they'll do a fantastic job of getting the workshop discussions going.

Juan Carlos Barahona
Massachussetts Institute of Technology

Brian Butler
University of Pittsburgh
Modeling and Analyzing Systems of Communities

Dan Cosley
Cornell University
Conducting Field Experiments in Online Communities

Harold D. Green, Jr.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Modeling the Dynamics of Group Formation in Virtual Worlds: Hypotheses and Methodologies

Susan C. Herring
Indiana University
Analyzing Textual Interaction in Convergent Media: Orkut scraps and iTV SMS

Matthew Hurst
Microsoft Live Labs
Comprehensive industrial social media analytics systems for mining weblogs, message boards and usenet for brand and product information.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/729198.html

Daniel P. Huttenlocher
Cornell University
Studying Groups in Large Online Communities.
L. Backstrom, D. Huttenlocher, J. Kleinberg and X. Lan. "Group Formation in Large Social Networks: Membership, Growth, and Evolution", Proceedings of KDD 2006.

Robert Kraut
Carnegie Mellon University

Cliff Lampe
Michigan State University
Joys and Sorrows of Collecting Data Directly from Online Community Servers

Cameron Marlow
Yahoo! Research
Researchable Online Communities

Paul Resnick
University of Michigan School of Information
Vector Operations and Units of Analysis for Usage Log Data
http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/ec05/
http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/chi04/index.html

Presentation Information

Communities and Technologies 2007 is rapidly approaching, and we're excited by the level of interest shown in our workshop and the impressive lineup of panelists who have agreed to speak. We hope you will all get a chance to engage these panelists in conversation, and to share your own experience and expertise in this rapidly expanding area of research.

In order to get things going in each portion of the workshop, panelists will be asked to give a brief presentation. Here's a general outline of what to expect. A list of panelists, and selected abstracts of the talks, will be posted sometime next week.

Panelists will each give a 10-15 minute presentation which focuses on one or more of the following stages of data processing and analysis:

1. Data collection: scraping and saving raw data from online communities
2. Data management: parsing the data into a format that can be queried effectively
3. Dataset and sample construction: extracting subsets of the data which can be processed by analytical tools
4. Analysis: analyzing the data and producing results

Many of our panelists have chosen to present previously published work, where they focus in more detail on their methodological approaches.

Workshop logistics

Date: June 28th
Time: 1-5 PM
Place: Michigamme room, on the lower level of the Kellogg Center.

The room is equipped with Internet access, as well as wireless access.

We hope people will participate online as well as in person at the workshop, so this blog will be updated in real time, and participants - both those present and those who cannot attend - are invited to leave comments in the relevant sections.

Call for Participants Addendum

We just added the following to the post titled "Call for Participants Flyer."

Participants with experience in this area of research are encouraged to discuss their own work - either challenges they have overcome which might help other participants, or challenges that they are facing and would like to discuss. We would like this workshop to help researchers at all levels get a sense of how to apply the tools and techniques available for analyzing this type of data to their own research.

Those who are just getting started are asked to bring their questions. Panelists and other participants will have a variety of good answers!

We want to make it clear that we do not want this workshop to follow a simple tutorial format. We would like to encourage as much interaction between participants and panelists as possible, as we all have a lot to learn from each other. We're excited at the interest people have shown in our workshop thus far. Please come out and share your ideas, experiences, and questions!

Participant sign-up information

If you are interested in participating in this workshop, you MUST register for the conference and sign up through the conference registration site. We cannot guarantee you that we will have enough room otherwise.

Please note that originally we expected to handle all workshop sign-ups, but a number of people have signed up through the conference site and it will be far too confusing to run two separate systems. Note also that we have removed the "participant deadlines" from the deadlines section on the right. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

Call for Papers Removed

We had a call for panelists posted in this space earlier, but we have been blessed with an early response to our initial requests, so we have closed our public CFP. The important dates on the sidebar have been updated accordingly.

We expect to have an exciting and thought-provoking panel on large-scale online social research. If you are still interested in attending, please do sign up for the workshop directly.

We will post the names of the panelists as soon as we get full confirmation that they will be attending.

Call for Participants flyer!

Here's the text from a flyer we'll be emailing out to various lists over the next several days. Please feel free to forward it to anyone you think might be interested in attending the workshop, but do include a link to the blog as more information will be forthcoming.


Interaction in Online Communities - From Data Collection to Research Results
A workshop at the Third Annual Communities and Technologies Conference

Workshop weblog: http://interactionworkshop2007.blogspot.com
Conference web site: https://ebusiness.tc.msu.edu/cct2007/

The scope and complexity of the data from online communities provides unprecedented insight into how social interaction unfolds in real groups. Rich longitudinal data on the content and structure of social interaction is now available—but only if researchers can extract, organize and make sense of it. This workshop will focus on methods, tools, and techniques for overcoming the challenges associated with each stage of processing large scale interaction data from online communities. Processing includes:

• Data collection: scraping and saving raw data from online communities
• Data management: parsing the data into a format that can be queried effectively
• Dataset and sample construction: extracting subsets of the data which can be processed by analytical tools
• Analysis: analyzing the data and producing results

Panelists will describe and demonstrate some or all of these methods in the context of their research. The workshop will emphasize generally applicable techniques that participants could apply to other projects. The workshop will include discussions on:

1. Methods employed to overcome specific issues with the data during a particular project, which other researchers might be able to use in their own work.

2. General approaches to parsing, managing, and analyzing large-scale data, which the presenter has found useful in a variety of settings or for a general class of data.

Participants with experience in this area of research are encouraged to discuss their own work - either challenges they have overcome which might help other participants, or challenges that they are facing and would like to discuss. We would like this workshop to help researchers at all levels get a sense of how to apply the tools and techniques available for analyzing this type of data to their own research.

Those who are just getting started are asked to bring their questions. Panelists and other participants will have a variety of good answers!

Workshop Details

Workshop information has been posted to the Communities and Technologies Conference site. The call for papers will be posted here in a week or two.

Here's some more detailed workshop info. All deadlines will be posted and updated in the sidebar on the right.

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

Online communities provide researchers with social network data of unprecedented scope and quality. This data makes it possible for researchers to answer core questions of social behavior (e.g. How do norms emerge? What makes some groups succeed and thrive while others wither?), but answers to these questions are only available if the trails of online interactions are collected, organized, and arranged for analysis. This involves several stages of processing: scraping and saving raw data from online communities; parsing the data into a format that can be queried effectively; extracting subsets of the data which can be processed by analytical tools; and finally analyzing the data and producing results. This workshop will focus on methods, tools, and techniques for overcoming the challenges associated with each stage of this process. Researchers will present work detailing their approaches and the results they have achieved, and will discuss new approaches and consider their application.

WORKSHOP DETAILS

Overview:

Systems for computer mediated social interaction provide unprecedented research opportunities and new challenges for social scientists. The challenges stem from the scale, complexity, and structure of the data, raising issues of data management, manipulation, aggregation and analysis. We propose a workshop where researchers discuss their approaches to overcoming these challenges, and share the results of their research. The workshop will focus on research methods and results related to analysis of social network data extracted from online communities.

Peoples' use of online resources is becoming increasingly social, collaborative and complex. Whether they are posting messages, editing files, sharing comments, or writing code, users of online communities leave traces of their behavior and the structure of their interaction. These traces are like footprints in the sand, but they are not wiped away by the tide; instead they accrete leaving incredibly detailed records of social interaction. These social accretions present researchers with an opportunity to study, at an unprecedented scale and scope, the dynamics, structure, and results of social interaction. These records also promise to provide insight into the fundamental questions of social interaction (how do norms emerge? what makes some groups succeed and thrive while others wither?), but those answers are only available if the artifacts of interactions are collected, organized and arranged for analysis.

Like seawater, internet mediated data can be abundant but frustratingly difficult to consume. Simply collecting internet data at large scales can be a challenge without sophisticated technical skills and potentially significant infrastructure. Nonetheless, these challenges are being reduced through the spread of standardized techniques and dropping costs of equipment. Additionally, many internet based social phenomena occur at tractable scales and can be analyzed with desktop or laptop class equipment, using readily available software and data already present.

Analyzing this data involves several stages of processing: scraping information from available online data sources and saving that data in its raw form; parsing it into a data format that can be queried effectively, such as a relational database; extracting meaningful subsets of the data into a data format which can be easily processed by analytical tools; and finally analyzing the data and producing results. This workshop will focus on methods, tools, and techniques for overcoming the challenges associated with each stage of the process. We invite researchers to present work detailing their approaches and the results they have achieved, and to discuss new approaches and consider their application in their own work.

Workshop details:

Maximum 10 presenters, plus 20-30 non-presenting participants. We will make a call for papers and will actively encourage participation from leading researchers who work with large datasets derived from systems of online interaction. We will organize the session around themes, where each theme includes a set of brief presentations with at least half of the time devoted to discussion. The goal of this workshop will be for these researchers to exchange ideas and methodological approaches, and to improve upon the current research methodologies employed in this field. We will hold an open enrollment for non-presenters interested in playing an active role in the discussion. We will combine the workshop with a collaborative weblog in order to retain and extend aspects of the conversation.

Deadlines:

Deadline for paper submissions will be April 30th, 2007. Notification and reviewer comments will be returned to authors by May 18th, 2007. We will screen submissions for quality and relevance to the workshop. Additional workshop participants will be accepted on a rolling basis until May 18th, or until all available slots have been filled

Welcome!

Welcome to the official weblog of the Communities and Technologies 2007 workshop on Studying Interaction in Online Communities: From Data Sources to Research Results.

This workshop is part of the 3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies.

We will be posting more information here as it becomes available. The full workshop description will be up shortly. This mirrors the workshop description available at the workshop page of the conference web site. The call for papers will follow in due time.

Thanks for your interest in our workshop. Stay tuned for more information!