Workshops
As with prior C&T meetings, a series of half-day and full day workshops will occur the day before the conference, June 24, 2009. Workshops are organized around a theme proposed by individuals or groups of researchers and accepted by the program committee. The workshop proposers, with support by the conference co-organizers, run their workshop, distribute a call for participation, and select participants in advance of the conference. Workshops will be held at the conference venue in suitably equipped meeting rooms.
The fees for participating in a workshop are included in the conference registration fee. Each workshop, however, has a procedure in place for soliciting and selecting participants. More information on the workshops planned for C&T 2009 is provided below. Please correspond with the workshop organizers to arrange for your participation in a specific workshop of interest.
Current Workshops
NodeXL: Social Network Analysis and Visualization tools for Social Media
Organizer:
Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist, Telligent Systems - Marc.Smith@telligent.com
Co-organizer:
Professor Derek Hansen, University of Maryland
NodeXL is an add-in for Office 2007 that provides social network diagram and analysis tools in the context of a spreadsheet. Adding the directed graph chart type to Excel opens up many possibilities for easily manipulating networks and controlling their display properties. In this tutorial the steps needed to install and operate NodeXL for Office 2007 are reviewed. The NodeXL add-in provides directed graph charting features within Excel, allowing users to create node-link diagrams with control over each node and edge color, size, transparency and shape. Since NodeXL builds within Excel, all of the controls and programmatic features of Office are available. Additional features of NodeXL generate social networks from social media data sources like personal e-mail (drawing data from the Windows Desktop Search engine) and the Twitter social network micro-blogging system. Arbitrary edge lists (anything that can be pasted into Excel) can be visualized and analyzed in NodeXL. This session will provide a walk through the basic operation of NodeXL. Attendees are encouraged to bring an edge list of interest. Sample data sets will be provided. To download the NodeXL Add-in and slides, go to: http://www.codeplex.com/NodeXL.
Tutorial: Designing from theory: Mining the social sciences as a basis for designing online communities.
Organizers:
Robert Kraut, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University - robert.kraut@cmu.edu
Paul Resnick, School of Information, University of Michigan - presnick@umich.edu
The social sciences tell us a lot about how to make thriving online communities. Economics and various branches of psychology offer theories of individual motivation and of human behavior in social situations. The theories derive from observations of naturally occurring behavior, from controlled experiments, and from abstract mathematical models. Properly interpreted, they can inform choices about how to get a community started, integrate newcomers, encourage commitment, regulate behavior when there are conflicts, motivate contributions, and coordinate those contributions to maximize benefits for the community. This tutorial is organized around these design challenges. It amplifies relevant theories, and translates them into claims about the likely impact of particular design choices for online communities.
The tutorial is based on a draft handbook on using the social science as a guide to designing online communities and includes contributions from experts in the field. We'll distribute drafts of the handbook chapters to participants before the workshop. The tutorial itself would be partly lecture based, to review some of the material in the handbook, and partly discussion based, where we expect participants will compare their experiences designing or observing online communities with the design claims we're making. The tutorial will include several design exercises, challenging students to redesign existing social websites to improve the way they solve problems listed above.
After taking this tutorial, students will have had an introduction to some of the social science literature relevant to designing online communities and a little practice translating this literature into design ideas. This is a half-day workshop that will occur in the afternoon from 1:00 p.m - 5:30 p.m. on June 24.
Digital Cities 6: Concepts, Methods and Systems of Urban Informatics
Organizers:
Marcus Foth, Senior Research Fellow, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia - m.foth@qut.edu.au
Laura Forlano, Kauffman Fellow in Law, Yale Law School, New Haven, USA - laura.forlano@yale.edu
Hiromitsu Hattori Assistant Professor, Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan - hatto@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Web site: http://tinyurl.com/dc6-2009
Transport grids, building complexes, information and communication technology, social networks and people form the bones, organs, muscles, nerves and cell tissue of a city. Studying the organisation and structure of these systems may seem straightforward at first, since there are visible artifacts and tangible objects that we can observe and examine. We can count the number of cars on the road, the number of apartments in a building, the number of emails on our computer screens and the number of profiles on social networking sites. We could also qualify these observations by recording the make and model of cars, the size and price of apartments, the sender and recipient of emails and the content and popularity of online profiles. This approach would potentially produce a large amount of data and render a detailed map of various levels of a city's infrastructure, but a large quantity of detail does not necessarily result in a great quality (and clarity) of meaning. How do we analyse this data to better understand the 'city' as an organism? How do the cells of the city cluster to form tissue and organs, and how do various systems communicate and interact with each other? And, recognising that we ourselves are cells living in cities as active agents, how do we evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes we observe in order to plan, design and develop more livable cities?
A macroscopic perspective of urban anatomy does not easily reveal those meticulous details which are necessary to help us understand and appreciate what Anthony Townsend calls the urban metabolism (Townsend, 2000), that is, the nutrients, capacities, processes and pace which nurture the city to keep it alive. Some of the fascination with human anatomy stems from the fact that a living body is more than the sum of its parts. Similarly, the city is more than the sum of its physical elements. Trying to get to the bottom of a city's existence, urban anatomists have to become dissectors of urban infrastructure by trying to microscopically uncover the connections and interrelationships of city elements. Yet, this is anything but trivial for at least three reasons. First, time is a crucial factor. Many events that trigger urban processes involving multiple systems result in a timely interrelated response. A dissection by isolating one system from another, would cut the communication link between them and jeopardise the study of the wider process. The city comprises many of these real-time systems and requires approaches and tools to conduct real-time examinations. Second, the physical city is increasingly complemented with a virtual layer that digitally augments and enhances urban infrastructures by means of information and communication technology including mobile and wireless networks. This world, which Mitchell (1995) called the 'city of bits,' is invisible to the human eye, and we require instruments for live surgery to render the invisible visible. Third and most importantly, the 'cells' of the urban body, the lifeblood of cities, are the city dwellers who have a life of their own and who introduce human fuzziness and socio-cultural variables to the study of the city. The toolbox of what could be termed anthropological urban anatomy thus calls for research approaches that can differentiate (and break apart) a universally applicable model of 'The City' by being sensitive to individual circumstances, local characteristics and socio-cultural contexts.
Exploring these three challenges, this workshop looks at concepts, research methods and instruments that become the microscope of urban anatomy. We want to discuss urban informatics systems that provide real-time tools for examining the real-time city, to picture the invisible and to zoom into a fine-grained resolution of urban environments that reveal the depth and contextual nuances of urban metabolism processes at work.
Online Social Networks to Support Community Collaboration.
Organizers:
Connie White, Jacksonville State University, USA - connie.m.white@gmail.com
Linda Plotnick, New Jersey Institute of Tech, USA - linda.plotnick@gmail.com
Jane Kushma, Jacksonville State University, USA - jkushma@jsu.edu
Web site: http://sites.google.com/site/comtechworkshop/
The aim of this workshop is to examine the possibilities and potential applications Online Social Networks have for communities in a variety of emergency and complex problem domains. Online Social Networks (OSN) are being created to fulfill a multitude of social communicative needs and are fostering productive group dynamics. Social Networks have existed and been studied for individuals, but how communities can best use OSN is underexplored and is the scope of this workshop. Through this workshop we will discuss how communities are using these networks to replace and augment traditional avenues of communication, the types of communities that may benefit the most and where untapped functionalities may exist. It is these sorts of communities of interest, practice, etc. using Online Social Networks that may benefit the most from such an online group support system.
Online social networks have the potential to aid communities of practice in a variety of domains and promote cross-organizational communication and effectiveness. This is a nascent area of study. A goal of this workshop is to develop an understanding of how these networks can be used, what functionality would be required, and what issues (and how to overcome them) exist that can impede their use. An additional focus is to explore the potential use of Online Social Networks to support more complex entities in the future and forecast what potential they hold for domains and uses not yet envisioned. A few highly creative and insightful papers will be selected for discussion. The session will end with participants engaging in a visioning session using Delphi methods to capture important insights, challenges, and design/development needs.