Marc Smith - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Bio
Dr. Marc A. Smith
Marc@connectedaction.net
http://www.connectedaction.net
http://delicious.com/marc\_smith/
Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. He founded and managed the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington and led the development of social media reporting and analysis tools for Telligent Systems. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California.
Smith is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups.
Smith's research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many "groups" in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: http://delicious.com/marc\_smith/Paper). Smith's goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. At Microsoft, he developed the "Netscan" web application and data mining engine that allows researchers studying Usenet newsgroups and related repositories of threaded conversations to get reports on the rates of posting, posters, crossposting, thread length and frequency distributions of activity. Smith applied this work to the development of a generalized community analysis platform for Telligent, providing a web based system for groups of all sizes to discuss and publish their material to the web and analyze the emergent trends that result. He contributes to the open and free NodeXL project (http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl) that adds social network analysis features to the familiar Excel spreadsheet. A tutorial on social network analysis is evolving into a book and is freely available (http://casci.umd.edu/NodeXL\_Teaching). NodeXL enables social network analysis of email, twitter, flickr, and other network data sets.
The Connected Action consulting group (http://www.connectedaction.net) applies social science methods in general and social network analysis techniques in particular to enterprise and internet social media usage. SNA analysis of data from message boards, blogs, wikis, friend networks, and shared file systems can reveal insights into organizations and processes. Community managers can gain actionable insights into the volumes of community content created in their social media repositories. Mobile social software applications can visualize patterns of association that are otherwise invisible.
Smith received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001. He is an affiliate faculty at the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington and the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland.
Supervisors: Peter Kollock
Phone: 425-241-9105
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Papers by Marc Smith
Information is provided about the histories of authors in a computer mediated persistent conversa... more Information is provided about the histories of authors in a computer mediated persistent conversation such as a newsgroup. The information may include any or all of how long an author has been active in the group, in what other newsgroups the author participates, to what other threads of conversation the author contributes, and which other participants the author most often engages in discussion. This information may be obtained as an aggregation of data obtained from the groups or communities automatically. The ...
Afterschool Matters, 2011
Methods and systems for using a foot-based interface to interact with a computer are described. A... more Methods and systems for using a foot-based interface to interact with a computer are described. An application program from a plurality of application programs is executed on an operating system of a personal computer. The application program is configured to receive user input via a foot-based interface. Further, user input is received from the foot-based interface and mapped into a command. Moreover, the command controls an application program function. Also, the command is executed and an output corresponding to the ...
A wireless programmable user interaction system allows a user to interact with networked services... more A wireless programmable user interaction system allows a user to interact with networked services relating to physical objects that have associated machine-readable tags. The system includes a portable interaction device in wireless communication with a local computer network. The portable interaction device includes a portable computing device, such as a hand-held computer, and an associated machine-readable tag reader (eg, a bar code reader). An interaction system catalog in the portable computing device stores tag ...
High-density computer display visualization formats provide improved visualization of large amoun... more High-density computer display visualization formats provide improved visualization of large amounts of threaded information. These visualization formats are suitable for a wide variety of threaded information environments including newsgroups, threaded Web discussions, chats, e-mail inboxes, etc. In one implementation, the threaded message visualization represents each post with a generally one-dimensional or narrow entry line. The entry lines are horizontal and arranged vertically in substantially the same indented threading ...
An interactive collaborative information visualization system provides improved visualizations of... more An interactive collaborative information visualization system provides improved visualizations of relationships or connections in collaborative information relating to network interaction media such as email and email lists, conferencing systems and bulletin boards, chats, multi-user dungeons (MUDs), multi-user games and graphical virtual worlds, etc. In one implementation, network graphs in various display or visualization formats represent the collaborative information as nodes that are connected together by links. With reference to ...
Proceedings of the 15th annual ACM international symposium on Advances in geographic information systems - GIS '07, 2007
We consider trails to be a document type of growing importance, authored in abundance as locative... more We consider trails to be a document type of growing importance, authored in abundance as locative technologies become embedded in mobile devices carried by billions of humans. As these trail documents become annotated by communities of users, the resulting data sets can provide support for a host of services. In this paper we describe our sociotechnical exploration of the devices, scenarios, and end-user interactions that will come into play as these tools become widespread. We couch this work in a discussion of the sociological impact of a shift from hyperlinks to -hyperties‖ -links that bridge the gap between computational media and physical world interactions. We describe a prototype hardware device for location and other sensor data capture. This device links to a complementary website for querying, sharing, and distributing the resulting route datasets. The web application allows users to find related community members via shared attributes of their contributed or annotated routes. These attributes may be generated in part by route analysis performed by systems for activity identification and classification.
CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '05, 2005
Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. Ema... more Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. Email triage can quickly become a serious problem for users as the amount of unhandled email grows. We investigate the problem of email triage by presenting interview and survey results that articulate user needs. The results suggest the need for email user interfaces to provide additional socially salient information in order to bring important emails to the forefront.
2013 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT), 2013
ABSTRACT Marketing campaigns using social media services aim to exploit social connections to pro... more ABSTRACT Marketing campaigns using social media services aim to exploit social connections to propagate messages to potential customers. However, social activities often give rise to multiple network structures and some may be more effective in achieving the communication objectives than others. This led us to investigate a problem: given an observed sequence of messages and a social network that includes individuals involved in messaging, does the network structure 'explain' the observed propagation. To facilitate this investigation, we designed a method for encoding propagation events relative to the structure of a given network. The resulting transmission codes capture both the temporal and the structural characteristics of the propagation. We analyze the codes for maximal repeats and k-common sub strings to uncover dynamic network motifs within the propagation trace. By considering the dynamic motifs and the connected graph components, we can determine how the propagation events relate to the specific network. As a case study, we applied our method to rumor topics in Twitter and analyzed their propagation trails relative to the 'follower' network. The study demonstrates the computational feasibility of our approach and illustrates the use of dynamic motifs to reason about the impact of follower relationship rumor propagation in Twitter.
CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA '06, 2006
While applications are typically optimized for traditional desktop interfaces using a keyboard an... more While applications are typically optimized for traditional desktop interfaces using a keyboard and mouse, there are a variety of compelling reasons to consider alternative input mechanisms that require more physical exertion, including promoting fitness, preventing Repetitive Strain Injuries, and encouraging fun. We chose to explore physical interfaces based on foot motion and have built two applications with Step User Interfaces: StepMail and StepPhoto. Both support working with email and photos using the dance pad made popular by the Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) game. Results of a formative evaluation with ten participants suggest that the interactions are intuitive to learn, somewhat enjoyable, and cause participants to increase their level of exertion over sitting at a desk. Our evaluation also revealed design considerations for
2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, 2009
Community based Question and Answer systems have been promoted as web 2.0 solutions to the proble... more Community based Question and Answer systems have been promoted as web 2.0 solutions to the problem of finding expert knowledge. This promise depends on systems' capacity to attract and sustain experts capable of offering high quality, factual answers. Content analysis of dedicated contributors' messages in the Live QnA system found: (1) few contributors who focused on providing technical answers (2) a preponderance of attention paid to opinion and discussion, especially in non-technical threads. This paucity of experts raises an important general question: how do the social affordances of a site alter the ecology of roles found there? Using insights from recent research in online community, we generate a series of expectations about how social affordances are likely to alter the role ecology of online systems.
Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces - AVI '04, 2004
Stitching is a new interaction technique that allows users to combine pen-operated mobile devices... more Stitching is a new interaction technique that allows users to combine pen-operated mobile devices with wireless networking by using pen gestures that span multiple displays. To stitch, a user starts moving the pen on one screen, crosses over the bezel, and finishes the stroke on the screen of a nearby device. Properties of each portion of the pen stroke are observed by the participating devices, synchronized via wireless network communication, and recognized as a unitary act performed by one user, thus binding together the devices. We identify the general requirements of stitching and describe a prototype photo sharing application that uses stitching to allow users to copy images from one tablet to another that is nearby, expand an image across multiple screens, establish a persistent shared workspace, or use one tablet to present images that a user selects from another tablet. We also discuss design issues that arise from proxemics, that is, the sociological implications of users collaborating in close quarters.
2014 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS), 2014
ABSTRACT As people use social media they form networks that have several basic forms: divided, un... more ABSTRACT As people use social media they form networks that have several basic forms: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and hub and spoke patterns with in and outward facing links. These patterns are associated with different types of topics and discussions: polarized, in-group, brand, community, broadcast, and support. Since each pattern has specific properties in terms of its ability to spread information and form relationships, participants in these networks often find that the pattern they have is not the pattern they want. For example, people may seek to move from a fragmented brand pattern to a denser, more connected clustered community pattern. Network metrics can describe each of these patterns and provide a possible guide to effective methods to shift from one pattern to another. Tracking these metrics can provide practitioners with a method of assessing their efforts to cultivate the most desirable forms of network structures.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2004
Netscan social accounting data is applied both to newsgroups and participants to distinguish betw... more Netscan social accounting data is applied both to newsgroups and participants to distinguish between useful newsgroups and those that are noisy or fractious and between authors who may be regulars or interlopers, nice people or not so nice, and those authors who have quality responses as well as a quantity of responses. Through these and other structural measures newsgroups and their members are typified, categorised and understood from a perspective not possible (or excessively costly to manually construct) ...
Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces - AVI '06, 2006
Over time, many people accumulate extensive email repositories that contain detailed information ... more Over time, many people accumulate extensive email repositories that contain detailed information about their personal communication patterns and relationships. We present three visualizations that capture hierarchical, correlational, and temporal patterns present in user's email repositories. These patterns are difficult to discover using traditional interfaces and are valuable for navigation and reflection on social relationships and communication history. We interviewed users with diverse email habits and found that they were able to interpret these images and could find interesting features that were not evident to them through their standard email interfaces. The images also capture a wide range of variation in email practices. These results suggest that information visualizations of personal communications have value for end-users and analysts alike.
Information is provided about the histories of authors in a computer mediated persistent conversa... more Information is provided about the histories of authors in a computer mediated persistent conversation such as a newsgroup. The information may include any or all of how long an author has been active in the group, in what other newsgroups the author participates, to what other threads of conversation the author contributes, and which other participants the author most often engages in discussion. This information may be obtained as an aggregation of data obtained from the groups or communities automatically. The ...
Afterschool Matters, 2011
Methods and systems for using a foot-based interface to interact with a computer are described. A... more Methods and systems for using a foot-based interface to interact with a computer are described. An application program from a plurality of application programs is executed on an operating system of a personal computer. The application program is configured to receive user input via a foot-based interface. Further, user input is received from the foot-based interface and mapped into a command. Moreover, the command controls an application program function. Also, the command is executed and an output corresponding to the ...
A wireless programmable user interaction system allows a user to interact with networked services... more A wireless programmable user interaction system allows a user to interact with networked services relating to physical objects that have associated machine-readable tags. The system includes a portable interaction device in wireless communication with a local computer network. The portable interaction device includes a portable computing device, such as a hand-held computer, and an associated machine-readable tag reader (eg, a bar code reader). An interaction system catalog in the portable computing device stores tag ...
High-density computer display visualization formats provide improved visualization of large amoun... more High-density computer display visualization formats provide improved visualization of large amounts of threaded information. These visualization formats are suitable for a wide variety of threaded information environments including newsgroups, threaded Web discussions, chats, e-mail inboxes, etc. In one implementation, the threaded message visualization represents each post with a generally one-dimensional or narrow entry line. The entry lines are horizontal and arranged vertically in substantially the same indented threading ...
An interactive collaborative information visualization system provides improved visualizations of... more An interactive collaborative information visualization system provides improved visualizations of relationships or connections in collaborative information relating to network interaction media such as email and email lists, conferencing systems and bulletin boards, chats, multi-user dungeons (MUDs), multi-user games and graphical virtual worlds, etc. In one implementation, network graphs in various display or visualization formats represent the collaborative information as nodes that are connected together by links. With reference to ...
Proceedings of the 15th annual ACM international symposium on Advances in geographic information systems - GIS '07, 2007
We consider trails to be a document type of growing importance, authored in abundance as locative... more We consider trails to be a document type of growing importance, authored in abundance as locative technologies become embedded in mobile devices carried by billions of humans. As these trail documents become annotated by communities of users, the resulting data sets can provide support for a host of services. In this paper we describe our sociotechnical exploration of the devices, scenarios, and end-user interactions that will come into play as these tools become widespread. We couch this work in a discussion of the sociological impact of a shift from hyperlinks to -hyperties‖ -links that bridge the gap between computational media and physical world interactions. We describe a prototype hardware device for location and other sensor data capture. This device links to a complementary website for querying, sharing, and distributing the resulting route datasets. The web application allows users to find related community members via shared attributes of their contributed or annotated routes. These attributes may be generated in part by route analysis performed by systems for activity identification and classification.
CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '05, 2005
Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. Ema... more Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. Email triage can quickly become a serious problem for users as the amount of unhandled email grows. We investigate the problem of email triage by presenting interview and survey results that articulate user needs. The results suggest the need for email user interfaces to provide additional socially salient information in order to bring important emails to the forefront.
2013 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT), 2013
ABSTRACT Marketing campaigns using social media services aim to exploit social connections to pro... more ABSTRACT Marketing campaigns using social media services aim to exploit social connections to propagate messages to potential customers. However, social activities often give rise to multiple network structures and some may be more effective in achieving the communication objectives than others. This led us to investigate a problem: given an observed sequence of messages and a social network that includes individuals involved in messaging, does the network structure 'explain' the observed propagation. To facilitate this investigation, we designed a method for encoding propagation events relative to the structure of a given network. The resulting transmission codes capture both the temporal and the structural characteristics of the propagation. We analyze the codes for maximal repeats and k-common sub strings to uncover dynamic network motifs within the propagation trace. By considering the dynamic motifs and the connected graph components, we can determine how the propagation events relate to the specific network. As a case study, we applied our method to rumor topics in Twitter and analyzed their propagation trails relative to the 'follower' network. The study demonstrates the computational feasibility of our approach and illustrates the use of dynamic motifs to reason about the impact of follower relationship rumor propagation in Twitter.
CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA '06, 2006
While applications are typically optimized for traditional desktop interfaces using a keyboard an... more While applications are typically optimized for traditional desktop interfaces using a keyboard and mouse, there are a variety of compelling reasons to consider alternative input mechanisms that require more physical exertion, including promoting fitness, preventing Repetitive Strain Injuries, and encouraging fun. We chose to explore physical interfaces based on foot motion and have built two applications with Step User Interfaces: StepMail and StepPhoto. Both support working with email and photos using the dance pad made popular by the Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) game. Results of a formative evaluation with ten participants suggest that the interactions are intuitive to learn, somewhat enjoyable, and cause participants to increase their level of exertion over sitting at a desk. Our evaluation also revealed design considerations for
2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, 2009
Community based Question and Answer systems have been promoted as web 2.0 solutions to the proble... more Community based Question and Answer systems have been promoted as web 2.0 solutions to the problem of finding expert knowledge. This promise depends on systems' capacity to attract and sustain experts capable of offering high quality, factual answers. Content analysis of dedicated contributors' messages in the Live QnA system found: (1) few contributors who focused on providing technical answers (2) a preponderance of attention paid to opinion and discussion, especially in non-technical threads. This paucity of experts raises an important general question: how do the social affordances of a site alter the ecology of roles found there? Using insights from recent research in online community, we generate a series of expectations about how social affordances are likely to alter the role ecology of online systems.
Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces - AVI '04, 2004
Stitching is a new interaction technique that allows users to combine pen-operated mobile devices... more Stitching is a new interaction technique that allows users to combine pen-operated mobile devices with wireless networking by using pen gestures that span multiple displays. To stitch, a user starts moving the pen on one screen, crosses over the bezel, and finishes the stroke on the screen of a nearby device. Properties of each portion of the pen stroke are observed by the participating devices, synchronized via wireless network communication, and recognized as a unitary act performed by one user, thus binding together the devices. We identify the general requirements of stitching and describe a prototype photo sharing application that uses stitching to allow users to copy images from one tablet to another that is nearby, expand an image across multiple screens, establish a persistent shared workspace, or use one tablet to present images that a user selects from another tablet. We also discuss design issues that arise from proxemics, that is, the sociological implications of users collaborating in close quarters.
2014 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS), 2014
ABSTRACT As people use social media they form networks that have several basic forms: divided, un... more ABSTRACT As people use social media they form networks that have several basic forms: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and hub and spoke patterns with in and outward facing links. These patterns are associated with different types of topics and discussions: polarized, in-group, brand, community, broadcast, and support. Since each pattern has specific properties in terms of its ability to spread information and form relationships, participants in these networks often find that the pattern they have is not the pattern they want. For example, people may seek to move from a fragmented brand pattern to a denser, more connected clustered community pattern. Network metrics can describe each of these patterns and provide a possible guide to effective methods to shift from one pattern to another. Tracking these metrics can provide practitioners with a method of assessing their efforts to cultivate the most desirable forms of network structures.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2004
Netscan social accounting data is applied both to newsgroups and participants to distinguish betw... more Netscan social accounting data is applied both to newsgroups and participants to distinguish between useful newsgroups and those that are noisy or fractious and between authors who may be regulars or interlopers, nice people or not so nice, and those authors who have quality responses as well as a quantity of responses. Through these and other structural measures newsgroups and their members are typified, categorised and understood from a perspective not possible (or excessively costly to manually construct) ...
Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces - AVI '06, 2006
Over time, many people accumulate extensive email repositories that contain detailed information ... more Over time, many people accumulate extensive email repositories that contain detailed information about their personal communication patterns and relationships. We present three visualizations that capture hierarchical, correlational, and temporal patterns present in user's email repositories. These patterns are difficult to discover using traditional interfaces and are valuable for navigation and reflection on social relationships and communication history. We interviewed users with diverse email habits and found that they were able to interpret these images and could find interesting features that were not evident to them through their standard email interfaces. The images also capture a wide range of variation in email practices. These results suggest that information visualizations of personal communications have value for end-users and analysts alike.
The MediaWiki platform supports popular socio-technical systems such as Wikipedia as well as thou... more The MediaWiki platform supports popular socio-technical systems such as Wikipedia as well as thousands of other wikis. This software encodes and records a variety of relationships about the content, history, and editors of its articles such as hyperlinks between articles, discussions among editors, and editing histories. These relationships can be analyzed using standard techniques from social network analysis, however, extracting relational data from Wikipedia has traditionally required specialized knowledge of its API, information retrieval, network analysis, and data visualization that has inhibited scholarly analysis. We present a software library called the NodeXL MediaWiki Importer that extracts a variety of relationships from the MediaWiki API and integrates with the popular NodeXL network analysis and visualization software. This library allows users to query and extract a variety of multidimensional relationships from any MediaWiki installation with a publicly-accessible API. We present a case study examining the similarities and differences between different relationships for the Wikipedia articles about ``Pope Francis'' and ``Social media.'' We conclude by discussing the implications this library has for both theoretical and methodological research as well as community management and outline future work to expand the capabilities of the library.