Social Traces: sociological topographies for enhancing search, community and social science

Social Traces: sociological topographies for enhancing search, community and social science
Marc Smith a sociologist from Microsoft Research

The overwhelming majority of data objects are, in nature, relational. They are often from one person to another. As they travel from place to place, these digital messages leave traces. Like footprints on an ocean beach, these traces tell stories about people. Given these traces, Marc is interested in collecting these traces and discerning those stories/patterns/etc…

Today, Marc gave a grabbag talk about all of this and some more, too:

Facilitating User-System Coordination by Exploring Linguistic Evidence, Community Membership Information, and Perceptual Evidence

Hongyan Ma presented her dissertation work today.  Her research involves testing the power of “coordination theory” to improve search (Information Retrieval or “IR”). She developed a model and tested it through a proof-of-concept system. Her talk prompted the audience to speculate about the role of user-generated information and IR. In simple terms, a major discussion question was: “How much should we depend on user-generated content to improve search?”