I need to take my own advice, and decide how I am going to scope this research area I’m interested in. I’ve captured it in my research statement in my CV:
Understanding how groups collaborate to organize, label and share information online, in order to design tools that will make finding and accessing user-contributed content easier.
Sounds pretty good, on the surface, but it is rather broad, and doesn’t address the methods I’ll be using to approach the problem. I once suggested to somebody else that there are three things s/he needed to figure out before proceeding:
- The problem I want to solve (or understand better), and why
- The framework I’m using to think about the problem
- My research question(s) and the data I’ll need to answer it(them)
Well, I have ideas about all three, but NOW is the time to get concrete.
The Problem, in a nutshell, is this: there’s all this user-generated content out there, creating new opportunities and difficulties for people seeking information. I’m not going to call it a revolution, it’s just that the tools and the infrastructure both exist that enable information producers to generate information and make it available to anybody with a network connection. The barriers to entry are a lot lower, and so there’s a lot more information out there (this blog included — I mean, I installed this WordPress server by clicking a button). Tools exist in the world already that connect information consumers with the information they need, like library catalogs, yellow pages, human intermediaries, etc. However, these tools all imply a central authority of some kind. The amount of centralized control in user-contributed content systems varies, but generally isn’t a lot. And as I’ve said before, the dynamic and collaborative nature of the content available online today is a new twist on how people have used technology to share information in the past. The technology is new, and the tools are evolving — people are just starting to figure out how it works and how they can make it work for them.
The high-level Framework: the thing about user-generated content, is it seems to be an inherently social endeavor (like a lot of things people do with the Internet). People are sharing information like crazy, through many different kinds of online tools set up for this sort of thing: blogs (360.yahoo.com), photos (flickr.com) and videos (video.yahoo.com), questions and answers (answers.yahoo.com), social bookmarking (del.icio.us). And those are just the sites owned by Yahoo! People call it “social computing”, but what does that really mean? One way to look at it is that it all boils down to communication through language. Some people are creating, structuring, and organizing the information for others to access. I believe that this exchange can be though of as a kind of communication, and it can be analyzed as a form of discourse. There are, of course, some interesting similarities and differences to more synchronous, iterative forms of communication, which I will go into in a different post. But in short, I believe a “social language use” perspective on the structuring and organizing of user-contributed content can help us to better understand people’s behavior today, and design the next generation of tools.
Some Research Questions: I am the least sure about this part at the moment, mostly because I have so many questions and potential studies circulating around in my head, and I’m still working on scoping a reasonable dissertation. Again, at a high level, there are a few things I want to figure out. How do social language processes shape the structure and organization of information in social computing systems, and how people are able to find and access the information they seek? I will use both lab studies and fieldwork in answering these questions. Now I just need to break it down a bit further and be more specific.
