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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    “I run the world’s largest historical outreach project and it’s on a cesspool of a website.” Moderating a public scholarship site on Reddit: A case study of r/AskHistorians
    (2020) Gilbert, Sarah
    Online communities provide important functions in their participants’ lives, from providing spaces to discuss topics of interest to supporting the development of close, personal relationships. Volunteer moderators play key roles in maintaining these spaces, such as creating and enforcing rules and modeling normative behavior. While these users play important governance roles in online spaces, less is known about how the work they do is impacted by platform design and culture. r/AskHistorians, a Reddit-based question and answer forum dedicated to providing users with academic-level answers to questions about history provides an interesting case study on the impact of design and culture because of its unique rules and their strict enforcement by moderators. In this article I use interviews with r/AskHistorians moderators and community members, observation, and the full comment log of a highly upvoted thread to describe the impact of Reddit’s design and culture on moderation work. Results show that visible moderation work that is often interpreted as censorship, and the default masculine whiteness of Reddit, create challenges for moderators who use the subreddit as a public history site. Nonetheless, r/AskHistorians moderators have carved a space on Reddit where, through their public scholarship work, the community serves as a model for combating misinformation by building trust in academic processes.
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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.