College of Information Studies

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1631

The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

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    Enticing Community Members to Explore and Enhance Local Green Spaces through Technology
    (2014-05) Boston, Carol; Chetty, Marshini; Golbeck, Jen
    Understanding how individuals document and interpret their encounters with the natural world can aid citizen science researchers and project managers as they consider issues of volunteer engagement and use of information and communications technology in urban settings.This Capstone project provides an analysis of 275+ plant and animal observations contributed to a community website (Friends of Sligo Creek) by nearly 100 volunteers over a 3-year period from 2011 to 2013 to address questions such as, Who were the most frequent contributors? When did they conduct their observations? What categories of flora and fauna did they observe most frequently? How did they document their sightings? What appeared to be the rationale for their selections? How do these data change over the three-year period under study? Based on content analysis, contributors used their observations to describe behaviors, acknowledge the web of life, describe sounds, make identifications, observe frequencies, observe quantities, observe something rare or unusual, anthropomorphize, express appreciation/wonder/awe, and reinforce social ties. In addition, transcripts from 9 expert interviews were analyzed, yielding insight into subthemes of hyperlocality, sustainability practices, teaching and learning about nature—who and how, technology used or proposed at various times and contexts, and values associated with the technology—positive, neutral, negative. Technology recommendations were then provided to address logistical, content, and social issues that grew out of the research.
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    Community-as-a-Service: Data Validation in Citizen Science
    (METHOD 2015 workshop, 2015-10-11) He, Yurong; Wiggins, Andrea
    Currently, most citizen science projects that adopt a crowdsourcing model focus primarily on collecting and analyzing data. As yet, few of them leverage community interactions for effective data validation yet, which would have significant impact on improving the quality of the increasing volume of citizen science data. In this paper, we introduce an exploratory pilot study focused on understanding how an established online community can be leveraged to create a “community as a service” structure to support collaborative citizen science data validation.
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    Community-based Data Validation Practices in Citizen Science
    (Association for Computing Machinery, 2016-03-02) Wiggins, Andrea; He, Yurong
    Technology-supported citizen science has created huge volumes of data with increasing potential to facilitate scientific progress, however, verifying data quality is still a substantial hurdle due to the limitations of existing data quality mechanisms. In this study, we adopted a mixed methods approach to investigate community-based data validation practices and the characteristics of records of wildlife species observations that affected the outcomes of collaborative data quality management in an online community where people record what they see in the nature. The findings describe the processes that both relied upon and added to information provenance through information stewardship behaviors, which led to improved reliability and informativity. The likelihood of community-based validation interactions were predicted by several factors, including the types of organisms observed and whether the data were submitted from a mobile device. We conclude with implications for technology design, citizen science practices, and research.