Peter Tolmie | University of Nottingham (original) (raw)

Papers by Peter Tolmie

This paper uses a detailed ethnographic study of the work of bid management to explore the workab... more This paper uses a detailed ethnographic study of the work of bid management to explore the workability of some of the current presumptions regarding 'Collective Intelligence' as an aspect of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. In particular it looks at how bid managers currently orient to web-based resources in the course of their work and the ways in which they currently prefer to share information. On the basis of this exploration some serious issues are found to confront the ways in which CI-based approaches are currently pitched to this kind of domain. Rather than taking these issues as the grounds for rejecting the validity of the approach, however, some tentative ways forward are proposed that might enhance current design endeavours in this area.

Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW '16, 2016

PloS one, 2016

As breaking news unfolds people increasingly rely on social media to stay abreast of the latest u... more As breaking news unfolds people increasingly rely on social media to stay abreast of the latest updates. The use of social media in such situations comes with the caveat that new information being released piecemeal may encourage rumours, many of which remain unverified long after their point of release. Little is known, however, about the dynamics of the life cycle of a social media rumour. In this paper we present a methodology that has enabled us to collect, identify and annotate a dataset of 330 rumour threads (4,842 tweets) associated with 9 newsworthy events. We analyse this dataset to understand how users spread, support, or deny rumours that are later proven true or false, by distinguishing two levels of status in a rumour life cycle i.e., before and after its veracity status is resolved. The identification of rumours associated with each event, as well as the tweet that resolved each rumour as true or false, was performed by journalist members of the research team who track...

Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '15 Companion, 2015

Social media are frequently rife with rumours, and the study of rumour conversational aspects can... more Social media are frequently rife with rumours, and the study of rumour conversational aspects can provide valuable knowledge about how rumours evolve over time and are discussed by others who support or deny them. In this work, we present a new annotation scheme for capturing rumour-bearing conversational threads, as well as the crowdsourcing methodology used to create high quality, human annotated datasets of rumourous conversations from social media. The rumour annotation scheme is validated through comparison between crowdsourced and reference annotations. We also found that only a third of the tweets in rumourous conversations contribute towards determining the veracity of rumours, which reinforces the need for developing methods to extract the relevant pieces of information automatically.

Human–Computer Interaction Series, 2015

The spread of false rumours during emergencies can jeopardise the well-being of citizens as they ... more The spread of false rumours during emergencies can jeopardise the well-being of citizens as they are monitoring the stream of news from social media to stay abreast of the latest updates. In this paper, we describe the methodology we have developed within the PHEME project for the collection and sampling of conversational threads, as well as the tool we have developed to facilitate the annotation of these threads so as to identify rumourous ones. We describe the annotation task conducted on threads collected during the 2014 Ferguson unrest and we present and analyse our findings. Our results show that we can collect effectively social media rumours and identify multiple rumours associated with a range of stories that would have been hard to identify by relying on existing techniques that need manual input of rumour-specific keywords.

Proceedings of the Sigchi Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2009

We review the current status of ethnography in systems design. We focus particularly on new appro... more We review the current status of ethnography in systems design. We focus particularly on new approaches to and understandings of ethnography that have emerged as the computer has moved out of the workplace. These seek to implement a different order of ethnographic study to that which has largely been employed in design to date. In doing so they reconfigure the relationship ethnography has to systems design, replacing detailed empirical studies of situated action with studies that provide cultural interpretations of action and critiques of the design process itself. We hold these new approaches to and understandings of ethnography in design up to scrutiny, with the purpose of enabling designers to appreciate the differences between new and existing approaches to ethnography in systems design and the practical implications this might have for design.

Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference, Jun 11, 2012

ABSTRACT This paper extends the focus of current research into home networks. It represents a shi... more ABSTRACT This paper extends the focus of current research into home networks. It represents a shift in perspective from the home network as something that is essentially understood as a technological object by the inhabitants of the home, to something that is understood by household members as a sociological object wrapped up in the organisation of their everyday lives. This shift in perspective is significant. It moves the focus of design from developing home network technologies that better support users' management of the home network and the devices that hang off it, to developing home network technologies that support household members' management of everyday life and the social activities that compose it. Through a range of ongoing ethnographic studies we elaborate this turn to the social, and a number of sensitising concerns informing the continued development of home network technologies.

Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2005

When working remotely with physical objects obvious problems of reference arise because of the la... more When working remotely with physical objects obvious problems of reference arise because of the lack of a mutually shared object. Systems aiming to support such work tend to be based on understandings of face-to-face interaction and frequently use video. However, video introduces new interactional problems. This paper describes a field study of remote interaction around objects that is telephone-centred, namely in a call centre for troubleshooting office devices. We describe how breakdowns in mutual orientation stem from three main problematics: 1) The inadequate fidelity of operators' support resources; 2) The lack of mutual access to indicative resources; 3) operators' lack of direct access to customers' actions and orientation. From this analysis, we have developed a design proposal for supporting such work. Rather than using video, we propose that utilising a linked problem representation would address these problems. To this end we describe our proposal for a bidirectional remote visualisation of the troubleshooting problem.

The title of this paper comes from comments made by an 'angry' ethnographer during a debriefing s... more The title of this paper comes from comments made by an 'angry' ethnographer during a debriefing session. It reflects his frustration with a certain analytic mentality that would have him justify his observations in terms of the number of times he had witnessed certain occurrences in the field. Concomitant to this was a concern with the amount of time he had spent in the field and the implication that the duration of fieldwork somehow justified the things that he had seen; the implication being that the more time he spent immersed in the study setting the more valid his findings and, conversely, the less time, the less valid they were. For his interlocutors, these issues speak to the grounds upon which we might draw general insights and lessons from ethnographic research regarding the social or collaborative organisation of human activities. However, the strong implication of the angry ethnographer's response is that they are of no importance. This paper seeks to unpack his position and explicate what generalisation turns upon from the ethnographer's perspective. The idea that human activities contain their own means of generalisation that cannot be reduced to extraneous criteria (numbers of observations, duration of fieldwork, sample size, etc.) is key to the exposition.

Acm Sigcomm Computer Communication Review, 2011

Recently, the HCI community has taken a strong interest in problems associated with networking. M... more Recently, the HCI community has taken a strong interest in problems associated with networking. Many of those problems have also been the focus of much recent networking research, e.g., traffic identification, network management, access control. In this paper we consider these two quite different viewpoints of the problems specifically associated with home networking. Focusing on traffic identification as a core capability, required by much recent HCI work, we explore the mismatch between the approaches the two communities have taken, and we suggest some resulting challenges and directions for future work.

In this paper, we aim to move the Ubiquitous Computing agenda forward by focusing on one of its e... more In this paper, we aim to move the Ubiquitous Computing agenda forward by focusing on one of its earliest, but most difficult, ambitions - making technology "invisible in use". We draw on field studies of domestic life as this domain is becoming increasingly important for new technologies and challenges many of the assumptions we take for granted in the design

The Connected Home: The Future of Domestic Life, 2011