In my dissertation experiment, I asked ~60 people from two different graduate schools (or “communities”) on campus to label and organize a set of short documents into a hierarchy (tree structure). They used a web-based interface created specifically for the experiment, that closely resembled the file-and-folder metaphor everybody is used to in Microsoft Windows and [...]
Posts under ‘common ground’
more fun with MDS (and R)
i’ve spent the past few hours futzing (yes, futzing) with some more MDS plots of the document (file) grouping data from my dissertation experiment, visualized this time by document rather than by person. each participant in the experiment organized the same 33 documents into a file-and-folder hierarchy. i chose the documents (document excerpts, really) from [...]
what makes for a “useful” tag?
I was reading an article in The New Yorker, titled The Science of Success by James Surowiecki, about prediction markets. A paragraph at the end of the article caught my attention: The collective intelligence of consumers isn’t perfect—it’s just better than other forecasting tools. The catch is that to get good answers from consumers you [...]
more Taboo hilarity
here’s another priceless gem from my Taboo data (if only all data analysis in my future could be this entertaining!) participant B is trying to get participant A to say the word “pole”. for those of you who have been paying attention, this was a pair of guys who knew each other already. B:u have [...]
more taboo
I can’t help it, I am having a ridiculous amount of fun cleaning this data. Case in point: person B is trying to get person A to say “baboon” without saying “monkey”,”africa”,”jungle”,”ape”, or “primate”. Remember that according to the rules, it is OK for B, who is giving the clues, to say a forbidden word [...]
