Abstract
In this paper, we focus on the informational and user experience benefits of user-driven topic exploration in microblog communities, such as Twitter, in an inspectable, controllable and personalized manner. To this end, we introduce “HopTopics” – a novel interactive tool for exploring content that is popular just beyond a user’s typical information horizon in a microblog, as defined by the network of individuals that they are connected to. We present results of a user study (N=122) to evaluate HopTopics with varying complexity against a typical microblog feed in both personalized and non-personalized conditions. Results show that the HopTopics system, leveraging content from both the direct and extended network of a user, succeeds in giving users a better sense of control and transparency. Moreover, participants had a poor mental model for the degree of novel content discovered when presented with non-personalized data in the Inspectable interface.
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Notes
- 1.
https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/rate-limiting, retrieved July 2016.
- 2.
In an ideal scenario, the HopTopics system would be connected via a firehose, https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/firehose (retrieved July 2016), connection where complex queries would not pose quite as much of a constraint. However, given limited bandwidth for our real-time experimental setup, node selections had to be restricted.
- 3.
https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/rate-limiting,retrieved July 2016.
- 4.
- 5.
Post-survey 1, https://ucsbltsc.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_8kvPK1O6qGiW2Z7.
- 6.
https://support.twitter.com/articles/164083, retrieved July 2016.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory under Cooperative Agreement No. W911NF-09-2-0053; The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of ARL, NSF, or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation here on.
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Kang, B., Tintarev, N., Höllerer, T., O’Donovan, J. (2016). What am I not Seeing? An Interactive Approach to Social Content Discovery in Microblogs. In: Spiro, E., Ahn, YY. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10047. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47874-6_20
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