I have finally settled on an overall research question: How does social language use affect information sharing in user-contributed content repositories? I’ve been going back and forth on whether I want to say information seeking or information sharing, and I think I’ve finally settled on sharing. I feel like seeking implies a focus on things [...]
Posts under ‘research questions’
questions, part 3
In a previous post, I arrived at three high-level research questions for my proposal (below; changed somewhat, again, from earlier posts). I’ve posted about why I believe focusing on language is important, but I still need to write a similar “motivating post” about my focus on information structure and organization. Slowly but surely, I’m chipping [...]
questions, part 2
In a previous post, I described my approach to studying social computing systems, and mentioned three high-level research questions. I’ve wordsmithed the questions somewhat, and now I need to think about what I’m really asking and how I can go about answering the questions. 1. How do information structure and language use shape the evolution [...]
questions, part 1
Quote from Schober & Brennan (2003): Unlike people engaged in monologue or in reading or writing text, conversationalists have the opportunity to rely on their partners in ways that structure the discourse itself (p123). This sentence captures the most obvious difference between spoken and written discourse. People who are speaking with one another in person [...]
the foundation
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 [...]
