Abstract:

In this article, I address the ways in which 'discount' qualitative methods can fail to deliver results. I advocate for well-conducted, carefully designed research with qualitative and quantitative data collection. I argue that there is no hard and fast distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods, but there are different ‘ways of looking’ that are appropriate for different projects and different questions. Carefully designed and executed research that delivers both academic and business value inevitably involves numbers, descriptions, stories and qualitative judgment-calls on the part of analysts.

Abstract:

In this article, I address challenges for Internet-based information seeking and searching. Using everyday examples of seeking locations and products online, I illustrate how language differences make keyword selection and therefore search very difficult, and also at the ways in which social search through applications and services like Flickr, Twitter and Facebook are combined with traditional keyword search to create a temporally extended set of actions that are all part of the ecology of information seeking, searching, finding, noting, bookmarking and sharing.

Abstract:

A voting system is a set of rules that a community adopts to take collective decisions. In this paper we study voting systems for a particular kind of community: electronically mediated social networks. In particular, we focus on delegative democracy (a.k.a. proxy voting) that has recently received increased interest for its ability to combine the benefits of direct and representative systems, and that seems also perfectly suited for electronically mediated social networks. In such a context, we consider a voting system in which users can only express their preference for one among the people they are explicitly connected with, and this preference can be propagated transitively, using an attenuation factor. We present this system and we study its properties. We also take into consideration the problem of missing votes, which is particularly relevant in online networks, as some recent case shows. Our experiments on real-world networks provide interesting insight into the significance and stability of the results obtained with the suggested voting system.

Abstract:

A recent query-log mining approach for query recommendation is based on Query Flow Graphs (QFG). In this paper we propose an evaluation of the effects of time on this query recommendation model. As users interests change over time, the knowledge extracted from query logs may suffer an aging effect as new interesting topics appear. In order to validate experimentally this hypothesis, we build different query flow graphs from the queries belonging to a large query log of a real-world search engine. Each query flow graph is built on distinct query log segments. Then, we generate recommendations on different sets of queries. Results are assessed both by means of human judgments and by using an automatic evaluator showing that the models inexorably age.