4th - 10th March

I played with the Tell Me Scotland SPARQL endpoint to put Scottish public notices on an OpenStreetMap: http://rhiaro.co.uk/publicnotices/map.php.  It works intermittently, as the TMS endpoint is a 'proof of concept'.  Okay, that's not PhD related, but it's still interesting.

I went to the 5th OKFN Edinburgh meetup at Napier.  Look, evidence, I'm in the picture!

Dave Robertson asked me hard questions about how I'll turn my vague research interests and intentions to make something useful into a PhD with genuine contributions to knowledge and I floundered a bit, but he agreed to be my second supervisor nonetheless.  I hadn't properly thought about it in those terms, and I'm still figuring it out with like, words.  (As opposed to a gut feeling).  I'd always planned to plough ahead enthusiastically and hope for the best.  That's how I approach everything, actually.

I started reading Community-Based Annotation for the Semantic Web by Matthew Rowe (2007); I think it was a first-year PhD review, and I was primarily reference-harvesting.  More on that next week.

I attended a Social Informatics Cluster meeting, and heard about the Smart Society project; very much in its figuring out stages, but worth following as it appears to have many diverse goals, and various crowd-computation related outcomes might be relevant to what I'm doing.

I went to an ESALA lunchtime talk entitled 'Data Objects', by Ian Gwilt of Sheffield Hallam.  I have to admit, I was expecting something more technical and internet-of-things-y.  Actually data objects are primarily tangible visualisaitons; 3D printed, carved out of wood or sculpted from bronze.  The research was about how people reacted to and understood data differently when it was presented in different forms.  Interesting, and they got some very pretty artefacts out of it, but not directly relevant so I don't have room in my head to store it unfortunately.

I attended the new Social Computing interest group kick-off meeting, coordinated by Dave Murray-Rust.  Everyone introduced themselves, and we arranged a time slot for future meetings.  It looks like I'll be presenting there at some point in the probably not-so-distant future (it was decided that everyone should).  There were a very diverse bunch of people there, and 'social computing' hasn't been defined officially for the group yet.  Quite a few people are attending to essentially see what all the fuss is about.  I'm hopeful that there will be a hardcore technical leaning, because that's where most of the gaps in my knowledge are.  Well, I'm more gaps than knowledge about everything, but that's where I feel particularly vulnerable.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Computer Mediated Social Sense-Making workshop, conveniently situated on the ground floor of the building I work in, on the 14th of February.

Whilst more technical than the Digital Methods conference I went to in December, the talks and panel sessions served to build upon things I started to think about then.  Namely, beginning to situate my research interests amongst many concepts from the currently quite alien fields of sociology and anthropology.

The talks were varied, and key themes that emerged were the collection/use of data for social improvement (health and wellbeing, teaching and learning, disaster recovery), and the importance of context in making collected data genuinely useful.  A notable challenge is that one piece of data might have a thousand different contexts from the perspectives of a thousand different human beings.  So how to communicate these variations to software that processes this data, and perhaps makes decisions using it?

Perhaps not to worry too much about that at all.  Process things locally instead of globally, using local contexts and understandings, but make sure everything is annotated such that information can still be exchanged across the whole network, and differences in understanding can be accounted for or reasoned out if a need occurs.

For the record, I'm looking at how Semantic Web technologies could be used to better connect human and machine in the context of amateur digital content creation (movies, comics, music, art), including how semantically annotating creative (often collaborative) processes as well as the end products of these processes and the engagement of an audience with these products, could improve the overall experience of creating content (along a number of dimensions).  A massive part of this will be creating tools that actually collect the necessary data from users.  Ultimately, these tools will need to be invisible, ie. easily integrated into existing online routines, with no effort required to use them for the non-technically minded so that a network effect can take place.

Incentives for crowdsourcing came up during CMSSM, and someone pointed out that by gamifying data collection for research projects, incentives become the same as ones offered by gambling companies; something competitive and potentially addictive.  I think things like global systems of reputation and trust are useful on a network where people are to share data about their own work (or opinions of the work of others) and may be nurturing a desire for popularity or exposure on the network (a network where the people are central, because the data could not exist without them, but where the users and the data are simultaneously co-dependant).

Anyway, I'm still brainstorming.