Mathemagenic

Anjo Anjewierden and Lilia Efimova. Understanding weblog communities through digital traces: a framework, a tool and an example. In Proceedings International Workshop on Community Informatics (COMINF 2006), pp. 279-289, Montpellier, 2006 (November). Springer, LNCS 4277.

Abstract. Often research on online communities could be compared to archaeology (Jones, 1997): researchers look at patterns in digital traces that members leave to characterise the community they belong to. Relatively easy access to those traces and a growing number of methods and tools to collect and analyse them make such analysis increasingly attractive. However, a researcher is faced with difficult tasks of choosing which digital artefacts and which relations between them should be taken into account, and how the finding should be interpreted to say something meaningful about the community based on the traces of its members.

In this paper we present a framework that allows categorising digital traces of an online community along five dimensions (people, documents, terms, links and time) and then describe a tool that supports the analysis of community traces by combining several of them, illustrating the types of analysis possible using a dataset from a weblog community.

I should blog it a while ago :)

Anyway, the paper is good to get an idea of what we (Anjo, me, Rogier Brussee and Robert de Hoog) have been doing behind the scenes in respect to understanding and visualising patterns in weblog communities.

For more:

• Anjo’s posts on the workshop and the framework (and lots of other things in the archives)
• my post on artefacts and practices in weblog research
• “research challenges” section in unpublished paper with Stephanie (published version lost some of the discussion relevant to this post)

Hmm, given how many bits and pieces are already there I should write more on it…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/08.html#a1852; comments are here.

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Some time back I wrote about knowledge which is not part of existing workflows. Now I’m struggling with finding more fine-grained distinctions.

First, a few of related categories:

• Stephen Covey’s classification of tasks into an urgent/important matrix: important things do not have to be time-sensitive in a short-term (=it’s important to do something about one’s professional development, but it’s not necessary to work on it today).
• Hot / warm / cold information in personal information management studies (I remember seeing it in Documents at Hand: Learning from Paper to Improve Digital Technologies, but can’t check right now if the authors referred to another source regarding it). It indicates the degree of need for a piece of information (e.g. document) in relation to a task performed right now.
• Filing and piling strategies (e.g. here) in respect to organising/archiving pieces of information, where piling often means “I may want to access it later, but don’t know where exactly I should put it”.

Now, the dimensions regarding knowledge/information that I consider important:

• Relevancy: it’s relevant - I don’t know - irrelevant
• Time-sensitivity: I need it now - as soon as possible - when I do so and so - one day soon - one day
• Ability to categorise: it’s belongs to a task/project - theme - “I feel it’s important, but I don’t know where it belongs”

Hmm, I thought that by writing it down things will become more clear, but it doesn’t work that way :))). Another try, now in a matrix:

*This comes from a frequent expression of my husband, who would often suggest to buy “I don’t know juice” or to eat in “I don’t know restaurant” when I’m sure that I want something, but not sure what and how…

The reason I want to bring it in is simple:

• it’s things that don’t fit that make knowledge work so complicated and so full of unexpected discoveries
• we often don’t have good tools to deal with things that don’t fit, either because those require definite judgement on how far those are relevant and/or ability to process them in a useful way

Examples of things that do not fit:

• coffee-table rumour from a colleague about management decision that affects the project I work in
• an article which is interesting, but I don’t have a place to cite it right now
• all those enterprise 2.0 blog posts that pop-up in my RSS reader
• an article about new English language standards for the pilots of international flights that gives examples of plane incidents that happened due to lack of shared understanding

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/24.html#a1804; comments are here.

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Via James Robertson - Expertise location without technology by Shawn Callahan. The piece I picked up was on defining expertise:

…expertise is more than simply possessing a skill. Klein describes eight aspects of expertise which I’ve summarised but would recommend you read Klein [Klein, G. 1998. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.].

1. Patterns: with experience experts can discern patterns that are invisible to novices. They have a good sense of what’s typical and can therefore detect the extraordinary.
2. Anomalies: experts are surprised when a key event is absent while novices don’t know what is supposed to happen and therefore don’t pick up on the anomaly.
3. The way things work: experts have mental models of how things work—how teams are supposed to work, equipment is supposed to function, power and politics is normally wielded.
4. Opportunities and improvisations: Experts can imagine possibilities that contradict the prevailing viewpoint and data. They can also apply patterns from one context to a new situation creating new approaches and techniques.
5. Past and future: experts can predict what might happen in the future. Just ask a grade 5 teacher about what the kids will be like at the beginning and the end of the year.
6. Fine discriminations: experts can see differences which remain invisible to novices. Just think of expert wine tasters.
7. Self aware: experts are aware of their own thought processes.
8. Decision makers: experts can make decisions under time pressure.

Which in a funny way connects to my thinking of researcher’s role in research - for example, differences that would emerge if a particular dataset is analysed by novice vs. expert.

And it comes back to my long-time burning question - what is methodologically sound way for recognising patterns, anomalies, opportunities, fine discriminations in an expert way?

If expertise is difficult to articulate, how would you specify (for example) explicit coding criteria to pinpoint patterns? How far the need to make things explicit, to categorise beforehand would ruin the richness of what could be found? How far the decisions on what are the patterns could be logically explained? How easily the process itself could be articulated for an examination by others?

How the world full of complexity and emergent things could be simplified to a clean-and-clear logic of a methodologically sound process?

Thinking of Making a Mess with Method by John Law and wondering why the hell I can’t do something easy - focusing on content instead of methodology… I guess I’m still in search of that particular messy method that fits the way I deal with the world and of a scientific environment where I don’t have to defend it…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/06/30.html#a1791; comments are here.

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Jack Vinson in The value of making things explicit

But in other situations, getting things out in the open or down on paper are just as valuable as direct tacit knowledge transfer via conversation. Jerry Ash of AOK just told this entertaining story about a state senator:

Jerry recounted this story in response to my saying that I wouldn’t bother writing this blog if I didn’t think anyone was reading.

In this sense, it is the very act of writing (or speaking) that is the knowledge opportunity. Writing and drawing are geared around organizing my thoughts and getting them out into the world, so that I can “see” what I am thinking. This can be in the form of text, mind maps, cocktail napkin drawings, or speaking to a crowd of one. How many ideas do I have bouncing around in my head that never see the light of day because I don’t articulate them in some way?

Which reminds me of a quote that I had saved in my “to blog” folder a year ago and recently rediscovered (Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation by Andy Clark):

If a tree is seen growing on an island, which do you suppose came first? It is natural (and usually correct) to assume that the island provided the fertile soil in which a lucky seed came to rest. Mangrove forests,{5} however, constitute a revealing exception to this general rule. The Mangrove grows from a floating seed which establishes itself in the water, rooting in shallow mud flats. The seedling sends complex vertical roots through the surface of the water, culminating in what looks to all intents and purposes like a small tree posing on stilts. The complex system of aerial roots, however, soon traps floating soil, weed and debris. After a time, the accumulation of trapped matter forms a small island. As more time passes, the island grows larger and larger. A growing mass of such islands can eventually merge, effectively extending the shoreline out to the trees! Throughout this process, and despite our prior intuitions, it is the land which is progressively built by the trees.

Something like the Mangrove effect, I suspect, is operative in some species of human thought. It is natural to suppose that words are always rooted in the fertile soil of pre-existing thoughts. But sometimes, at least, the influence seems to run in the other direction. A simple example is poetry. In constructing a poem, we do not simply use words to express thoughts. Rather, it is often the properties which of the words (their structure and cadence) which determine the thoughts that the poem comes to express. A similar partial reversal can occur during the construction of complex texts and arguments. By writing down our ideas we generate a trace in a format which opens up a range of new possibilities. We can then inspect and re-inspect the same ideas, coming at them from many different angles and in many different frames of mind. We can hold the original ideas steady so that we may judge them, and safely experiment with subtle alterations. We can store them in ways which allow us to compare and combine them with other complexes of ideas in ways which would quickly defeat the un-augmented imagination. In these ways, and as remarked in the previous section, the real properties of physical text transform the space of possible thoughts.

Don’t know how it works for you, but in my case I really become to know what I want to say in a paper only once I sit and struggle on writing - even when I have a detailed outline before starting, writing is always discovering something that was hiding in half-baked thoughts before.

For more on that check Research on how artefacts support thinking and knowledge creation, How artefacts support thinking and knowledge creation (2) and comments to the second one.

And, something else (from August 2002 :) - Uncovering the implicit, on how blogging seem to fit well professions that involve turning implicit into explicit. What is funny, is that then I write about the mangrove effect of blogging, not knowing that it would actually turn into a line of theoretical inquiry later on:

For me, blog is something for articulating ideas. They get some shape once they get out of my brain, and it becomes easier to deal with them. Blog is something for catching those difficult to catch things…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/06/21.html#a1784; comments are here.

The senator stood and orated for an hour to an empty chamber. When asked why he bothered, he responded, “I didn’t know what I thought about the issue until I heard what I had to say.”

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My last post made me thinking on (actually drawing :) the distinctions between artefacts and practices in a context of weblog research (not theorethical at all):

• Blogging artefacts are “things” that could be seen: weblog posts, links, comments, blogrolls, RSS subscriptions, etc. Some of them are hidden (e.g. draft posts), but most could be easily observed online. That make studying weblogs fun (if you don’t bump into teasing data).
• Blogging practices is about what bloggers do with their blogs, as well as why and how of it. Blogging practices are often invisible and (sub)culture-specific. Artefacts represent practices and play all other roles (e.g. they could be products or tools).

So, what would be a way to study blogging practices? I have a few pictures. The first two represent what I call archeology and ethnography (the person with “flower” is actually a researcher with “looking glass” :).

‘Archeology’ is about studying artefacts in order to say something about artefacts or practices. In the first case, I don’t have any problem: study artefacts -> say something about them.

The second case could be more complicated. Artefacts only represent practices, so if you want to study artefacts and then say something about practices you need to understand how those two connected. One way to do so is by having a good theory (existing knowledge of connections between artefacts and practices): if you have it then claims about practices based on artefacts could be pretty much true.

The point is that in most cases we do not have good existing knowledge about blogging practices, so I tend to be quite critical on blog research that concludes something about blogging practices by studying only artefacts. For example.

Ethnography would be an alternative: studying practices by living the “life of the tribe”. In this case you are more likely to provide a better picture of specific practices, but those would be limited to subcultures you studied. However, it’s also pretty time-consuming.

I also learnt from Andrea that ethnographers do not necessarily have interest in artefacts or skills to study them the way “archeologists” would do. Which would be a pity in a case of weblogs, since blogging artefacts can say a lot, especially if “triangulated” based on knowledge about practices.

It also doesn’t mean that you really have to be “inside” to learn about practices. Another way would be to ask people to tell stories about practices (e.g. in interviews or, in a very shortened form, in surveys). However, blogs provide an additional way: one can study meta-blogging (blog posts reflecting on all kinds of issues around blogging).

Meta-blogging posts would provide at least some idea on blogging practices without directly asking bloggers. Of course, they are likely to bias the results in the direction of bloggers who tend to reflect more or do not censor these posts based on whatever reason.

***

Hmm… not that scientific, but at least something. In case you wonder where are my own preferences: they are about triangulating :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/12.html#a1763; comments are here.

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Anjo, in What is a topic?

The most mysterious term that I encountered a lot recently is topic. I have no idea how to define it and, neither seem the weblog research proposals that suggest finding the topic of a post is something worth doing. Being on holiday currently, and given it was raining and snowing outside, I tried to apply the notion of “topic finding” to weblog conversations (see also: here, and here).

Anjo goes on, providing an example of “unique” terms extracted from three weblog conversations (more details in the post). Although those provide a good picture of what conversations are about, they do not really answer the question of what is a topic of each of them.

Which makes me thinking of my own experiences around the issue…

One of the things we planned to do this year, but didn’t get to do, was looking at personal categorisations. To be more specific the idea was to compare categories (~tags, ~topics) that a blogger assigns to her posts and the results of the text analysis of those posts to see if there is any correlation between the language used and conceptual categories. [I still think it's an experiment worth doing, but not sure I personally can devote serious time to it. Anyone interested?]

Thinking of my own weblog I can imagine that for some topics (I call them topics ;) that I use for my own weblog the correlation should be present (e.g. posts related to events are likely to be labelled with it and mention it in the text).

However there are others, those where I assign topic to organise my ideas on ill-structured themes (=I feel that those posts belong together, but I don’t know why yet, or I don’t have a good label for it). The examples of the second type are posts on life, knowledge mapping or transparency.

Which brings me to the reason I started to write this post. I think that topics are conceptual categories used to characterise a group of connected pieces (conversations with others, conversations with self, or something in between) and to give it a nametag. The common name makes sense - it makes it easier to remember those pieces belong together, to retrive, to communicate about.

The problem is that conceptual categories are subjective. They depend on a person, group or even groupthink (as with pressure to use certain tags to appear at right places in Technorati and not because they make more sense than others). So I suspect that once we define a topic of a conversation there will be someone who would say that it’s about something else (referring to Anjo’s examples - it could be “not about Skype, but about presence”).

That’s said I still think that defining a topic of a conversation makes sense. Personally, I’d prefer to have a Sigmund picture (~frequent terms and relations between them) for a conversation, as some kind of ontological fingerprint of what the conversation is about. Or there is a number of ways to select one of the terms from the “unique term list” for a conversation:

• by further selecting “least unique” from the subset (i.e. terms used by highest number of participants of the conversation)
• by selecting terms that match categories some of participants assign to posts
• by selecting terms that match predefined ontology/folksonomy/keyword list
• by selecting terms most of the participants are likely to agree (don’t ask me how to do that :)
• by selecting terms most closely resembling those of an external “customer” for the analysis or those that non-participant is likely to understand

Or we just have to find a way of matching personal caterogisations. Given there the tools are going this shouldn’t be that far…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/12/20.html#a1717; comments are here.

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While looking for CFP for persistent conversations at HICSS 2006 I came across a draft chapter from Tom Erickson: Five Lenses: Towards a Toolkit for Interaction Design, which lays out five different perspectives to look at interaction (mind, proxemics, artifacts, the social, the ecological) and discusses multi-perspective approach in design.

It’s thoughtful and easy read, so you should do it yourself. The rest are my pickings:

On artifacts (for those who want more references on artefacts and thinking :)

Next we shift our view to the artifacts in the picture [Tom uses a photo of chessplay in a city squareto discuss five lenses]. We see a chessboard arrayed with white and black pieces; off to one side we see a cluster of captured black pieces, and off to the other a pair of chess clocks. These artifacts play a variety of roles, interacting with the views from other lenses. One role of artifacts, that Norman explores in Things that Make Us Smart (1993), is to ease the cognitive load: the board and the pattern of pieces on it serve to preserve the state of the game, enabling players to focus on planning their next moves. Another role of artifacts is their status as objects that are manipulated by the participants. While the manipulation of chess pieces is a relatively simple matter, ethnomethodologists like David Sudnow demonstrate that the ways in which people physically interact with objects is incredibly subtle. In his book, Ways of the Hand, Sudnow (2001) gives an exquisitely detailed account of the process of learning improvise jazz on the piano, and the ways in which his hands (not his mind) learned to traverse the keys. A third role of artifacts is depicted by Ed Hutchins in Cognition in the Wild (1995), in which he explores the view that cognition is not just a property of minds, but can be seen as a global property of systems of people and artifacts. A fourth role of artifacts is a social one, in that the pair of clocks substitute for a human time keeper. This view is explored by Bruno Latour (1992), who eloquently makes the case for a sociology of artifacts, suggesting that it is artifacts which stabilize and extend human interaction patterns. This lens–with the glimpses it gives of artifacts and their varied roles–is important for those who design material artifacts, as well as for those who aim to replace material objects with digital ‘equivalents.’

On the role of theory:

[...] two roles of theory stand in tension to one another: the utility of a theory for promoting debate and further articulation of itself within a field may actually interfere with its utility in communicating beyond the field. The requirements for promoting articulation within a field involve supporting the creation of distinctions and nuances that can serve as the ground upon positions can be established, whereas the requirements for communicating beyond a field require the ability to depict the conceptual framework in a few bold and broad strokes of the brush. While the ability of a framework to support the finely detailed nuance is not necessarily at odds with the ability to also serve as a simplifying framework, it often is.

This is pretty much the dilemma I have with my PKM model: I envision it as a tool for communication “between fields” and “beyond the field” which call for simplicity, but I’m not sure that this is something that would be “good enough” for the PhD.

And, finally, the paper is one more sign that I should look at pattern language.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/15.html#a1521; comments are here.

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From today’s workshop on information overload:

• my presenation (on two things: (1) connecting PKM and information overload, (2) some relevant input from personal information management research)
• Information strategies: exposure, channels, tools
• Information “properties”

• knowledge (value/relevance/etc.) - information (artefacts) - “meta-data” - “meta-meta-data” (Ton’s forest)
• categorised/not
• useful/not
• hot - warm - cold

[I wanted to add more things, it's not working that way, so just posting from drafts]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/03.html#a1513; comments are here.

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Just a quote, to continue on research on how artefacts support thinking and knowledge creation

As I construct this chapter [...] I am continually creating, putting aside, and re-organizing chunks of text. I have a file which contains all kinds of hints and fragments, stored up over a long period of time, which may be germane to the discussion. I have source texts and papers full of notes and annotations. As I (literally, physically) move these things about, interacting first with one, then another, making new notes, annotations and plans, so the intellectual shape of the chapter grows and solidifies. It is a shape which does not spring fully developed from inner cogitations. Instead, it is the product of a sustained and iterated sequence of interactions between my brain and a variety of external props. In these cases, I am willing to say, a good deal of actual thinking involves loops and circuits which run outside the head and through the local environment. Extended intellectual arguments and theses are almost always the product of brains acting in concert with multiple external resources. These resources enable us to pursue manipulations and juxtapositions of ideas and data which would quickly baffle the un-augmented brain. […] In all such cases, the real environment of printed words and symbols allows us to search, store, sequence and reorganize data in ways alien to the on-board repertoire of the biological brain.

Clark, A. (1998). Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation (.pdf). P. Carruthers and J. Boucher (Eds) Language And Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1998, pp. 62-183.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/02/24.html#a1506; comments are here.

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Following yesterday’s post Piers started knowledgenetworker wiki page to think about PKM handbook:

The idea behind the knowledgenetworker handbook is to try to define the routines and practices that help people successfully ‘manage’ both their knowledge and their network, and which work best.

It gets into the hart of my current PhD struggle. After countless drawings and discussions it’s probably a good time to blog it. It’s not going to be easy, since thinking is not ready to be turned into a coherent text yet, but hopefully making an effort will help moving forward.

The core of my PhD struggle is thinking about conceptual language to talk about PKM. So far I talk about goals, practices, activities, methods, tools, artefacts, awareness… Those are things mixed in PKM model (in both versions) and I need to tear them apart, to come up with good names for conceptual categories and to get a bit more clear about their relations in order to have a conceptual frame to put in examples and instances that come from my research.

I’ll start from separating purpose and practice:

• Purpose: What and why?
• Practice: How?
  • methods
  • tools
  • artefacts
  • process
  • awareness (to be fair I’m not sure where it belongs, but it’s important, so it’s here :)

Purpose is about what and why - e.g. capturing ideas, so they do not fly away and are available later. Practice is about how - e.g. writing ideas down as weblog posts or creating concept maps.

Practice needs further elaboration - I have some categories in mind, but they do not fit together well.

I’m thinking of methods and tools (methods more about strategy and tools are needed to execute it). For example, for documenting ideas a strategy would be to catch bits of ideas separately and to establish their relations to each other. This could be done by many tools, e.g. by writing in a weblog and linking posts with categories or links, by creating a concept map, by writing ideas on pieces of paper and then sorting them in groups… Tools that we have at our disposal and are capable of using influence our choices of strategies, but strategies invoke search for better tools…

Process is about steps - what to do when (e.g. get an idea, tink of blogging it, find time to blog, start writing, think of relations, find other relevant posts and add links, finish, click submit button).

Artefacts are “things” used or produces in a process: weblog posts, concept maps, paper cards with ideas…

Awareness is a strange thing… I can’t define it properly, don’t know where it belongs, but know that it belongs to the picture.

There are a few issues around purposes and practices:

• PKM purposes are often implicit, so choices of corresponding practices (=implicit and may be not optimal)
• Practices are often invisible (=not accounted for)
• Practices are interrelated: we use similar strategies or same tools for different purposes, we multitask on processes and have to fit them into definite time and artefacts could play different roles (e.g. as input, output or tool) (=all these things collide in time and space, leading to interruptions, dublication, conflicts and other non-productive things).

Coming back to the PKM handbook: I don’t think we can talk about “good practices” without understanding purposes. Not only from the scientific interest, but simply because choices of how? depend on what? and why?. And, since, practices are interrelated, choice of how? in a specific case depends on all other cases of what?, why? and how? currently active in the picture.

And, to connect it to my PhD: I try to come up with model describing PKM purposes. Since often purposes are implicit, I look at practices and explore motivations behind them (intentional purposes) and effects (implicit or not anticipated purposes).

At the moment I try to put all these things together, but still searching for good conceptual language to talk about it… Please, let me know if you have any associations or answers (and especially if I reinvent an exiting theory :)

And - there are many people who contributed and still do to my thinking on this issue, but special thanks goes to Aldo de Moor for inspiration over good food after discussing papers in the Zoo :)

See also: PKM purposes and practices in knowledgenetworker wiki

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/02/23.html#a1503; comments are here.

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