7:00 – 2:30 VTX
- Good discussion with Wayne yesterday about getting lost in a car with a passenger.
- The equivalent of a trapper situated in an environment who may not know where he is but is not lost is analogous to people exchanging information where the context is well understood, but new information is being created in that context. Think of sports enthusiasts or researchers. More discussion will happen about the actions in the game than the stadium it was played in. Similarly, the focus of a research paper is the results as opposed to where the authors appear in the document. Events can transpire to change that discussion (The power failure at the 2013 Superbowl, for example) but even then most of the discussion involves how the blackout affected gameplay.
- Trustworthy does not mean infallible. GPS gets things wrong, but we still depend on it. It has very high system trust. Interestingly, a Google Search of ‘GPS Conspiracy’ returns no hits about how GPS is being manipulated, while ‘Google Search Conspiracy’ returns quite a few appropriate hits.
- GPS can also be considered a potential analogy to how our information gathering behaviors will evolve. Where current search engines index and rank existing content, a GPS synthesises a dynamic route based on an ever-increasing set of constraints (road type, tolls, traffic, weather, etc). Similarly, computational content generation (of which computational journalism is just one of the early trailblazers) will also generate content that is appropriate for the current situation (in 500 feet turn right). Imagine a system that can take a goal “I want to go to the moon” and creates an assistant that constantly evaluates the information landscape to create a near optimal path to that goal with turn-by-turn directions.
- Studying how to create Trustworthy Anonymous Citizen Journalism is important then for:
- Recognising individuals for who they are rather than who they say they are
- Synthesizing trustworthy (quality?) content from the patterns of information as much as the content (Sweden = boring commute, Egypt = one lost, 2016 Republican Primaries = lost and frustrated direction asking, etc). The dog that doesn’t bark is important.
- Determining the kind of user interfaces that create useful trustworthy information on the part of the citizen reporters and the interfaces and processes that organize, synthesise, curate and rank the content to the news consumer.
- Providing a framework and perspective to provide insight into how computational content generation potentially reshapes Information Retrieval as it transitions to Information Goal Setting and Navigation.
- Continuing A Survey on Assessment and Ranking Methodologies for User-Generated Content on the Web.
- Reasonable progress. Found an interesting paper on how people on a data visualization blog spend a lot of time talking about the content, not the visualization.
- Got to End-User-Based Framework section
- Finish tests – Done. Found a bug!
- Submit paperwork for Wall trip in Feb. Done
- Get back to JPA
- Set up new DB.
- Did the initial populate. Now I need to add in all the new data bits.
- Margarita sent over a test json file. Verified that it worked and gave her kudos.
viztales 