posts tagged ‘research methodology’

Languages and social network behaviors: Top 10 languages on Twitter

26 April 2011 | Lichan Hong

There's a tendency on the part of designers, researchers, and others to assume that English-language users' behaviors in social networks generalize to that of other language users. But in a recent study where we examined 62 million tweets collected over a four-week period, we found significant differences in how people of different language backgrounds used features such as URLs, hashtags, mentions, replies, and retweets. But first: how did we examine this large-scale data set?

Ethnography in Industry: Methods for distributed & large data sets (part two)

30 August 2010 | Nick Yee

We believe that virtual worlds and similar Web 2.0 spaces hint at an emerging mixed or "hybrid" ethnographic methodology that depends on agile collaborations between quantitative researchers, qualitative researchers, and software engineers. This is not just an academic enterprise. The ability to glean this data has many implications for designing and scaffolding online communities, learning new aspects of personality and social behavior in online worlds, and mapping digital personas to physical needs. The ability to leverage this architecture for more tailored marketing is one commercial opportunity. In addition to inferring basic demographics, personality inferences may lead to more nuanced methods of targeted advertising. And the ability to infer demographics based on online interaction metrics helps fill in the gaps left from zip code segmentation alone -- after all, not everyone who lives in your neighborhood (or in your home!) is exactly like you...

Experimenting on Mechanical Turk: 5 How Tos

21 July 2009 | Markus Jakobsson

Performing human-subjects experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk offers many benefits, including very low experiment costs, quick turn-around rates, and relatively simple approvals from human subjects boards. But you have to be careful to avoid bias and error...

The future of pervasive marketing: Scenarios

30 June 2009 | Bo Begole

"Responsive Media" applications are one of the most exciting areas of current research in human-computer interaction. Based on technologies that can detect human response using cameras and other sensors to glean demographic data (gender, race, age) and physiological states (eye gaze, orientation, pupil dilation, skin temp, expression), these applications can be used for human-robot interaction, marketing, gaming, digital concierge avatars, and more.