This document discusses Ben Shneiderman's research on facilitating social participation through information visualization and social media. It outlines his vision to increase social participation in areas like e-commerce, health, education and government through developing theories of how social media networks evolve and increasing participation. It also discusses providing scalable technology infrastructure that protects privacy and security while enabling social participation. The document provides examples of Shneiderman's research projects on visualizing social networks and increasing participation through tools like NodeXL and strategies for community managers.

1. Methods and Tools for
Facilitating Social Participation
Ben Shneiderman ben@cs.umd.edu
Founding Director (1983-2000), Human-Computer Interaction Lab
Professor, Department of Computer Science
Member, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

2. Interdisciplinary research community
- Computer Science & Info Studies
- Psych, Socio, Poli Sci & MITH
(www.cs.umd.edu/hcil)

3. Information Visualization
• Visual bandwidth is enormous
• Remarkable perceptual skills
• Extensive cognitive facilitation
• Discovery
• Trend, cluster, gap, outlier...
• Comparisons
• Presentation
• Comprehensible
• Memorable

4. Treemap: Smartmoney MarketMap
www.smartmoney.com/marketmap

5. Smartmoney.com MarketMap:
Steep fall Feb 27, 2007, with one exception
smartmoney.com/marketmap

6. Treemap: Newsmap (Marcos Weskamp)
newsmap.jp

7. Treemap: Supply Chain
www.hivegroup.com

8. Spotfire: Sales Analysis
www.spotfire.com

9. Spotfire: Treemap Bond Portfolio Analysis
www.spotfire.com

11. 10M - 100M pixels
Large displays
for single or multiple users

12. 100M-pixels & more

13. Design Issues
• Input devices & strategies
• Keyboards, pointing devices, voice
• Direct manipulation
• Menus, forms, commands
• Output devices & formats
• Screens, windows, color, sound
• Text, tables, graphics
• Instructions, messages, help
• Collaboration & Social Media www.awl.com/DTUI
Fifth Edition: 2010
• Help, tutorials, training
• Search • Visualization

14. Vision: Social Participation
1) E-commerce & National Priorities
• Customer loyalty, community formation
• Health, energy, education, e-government
2) Develop Theories of Social Participation
• How do social media networks evolve?
• How can participation be increased?
3) Provide Technology Infrastructure
• Scalable, reliable, universal, manageable
• Protect privacy, stop attacks, resolve conflicts

15. Early Steps
Informal Gathering
College Park, MD, April 2009
Article: Science March 2009
BEN SHNEIDERMAN
http://iparticipate.wikispaces.com

16. NSF Workshops: Palo Alto & DC
www.tmsp.umd.edu

17. International Efforts
Community Informatics
Research Network
intlsocialparticipation.net

18. E-Commerce Social Media

19. Vision: Social Participation
1) E-commerce & National Priorities
• Customer loyalty, community formation
• Health, energy, education, e-government
2) Develop Theories of Social Participation
• How do social media networks evolve?
• How can participation be increased?
3) Provide Technology Infrastructure
• Scalable, reliable, universal, manageable
• Protect privacy, stop attacks, resolve conflicts

20. Network Theories: Evolution models
• Random, preferential attachment,…
• Monotonic, bursty,…
• Power law for degree (hubs & indexes)
• Small-world property
• Forest fire, spreading activation,…
• Matures, decays, fragments, …
Watts & Strogatz, Nature 1998; Barabasi, Science 1999, 2009;
Newman, Phys. Rev. Letters 2002
Kumar, Novak & Tomkins, KDD2006
Leskovec, Faloutsos & Kleinberg, TKDD2007

21. Network Theories: Social science
• Relationships & roles
• Strong & weak ties
• Motivations: fear, tragedy, guilt,…
• Motivations: egoism, altruism, collectivism,
principlism
• Collective intelligence
• Collective action & governance
• Social information foraging
Moreno, 1938; Granovetter, 1971; Burt, 1987; Ostrom, 1992;
Wellman, 1993; Batson, Ahmad & Tseng, 2002;
Malone, Laubaucher & Dellarocas, 2009; Pirolli, 2009

22. Network Theories: Stages of participation
Wikipedia, Discussion & Reporting
• Reader
• First-time Contributor
(Legitimate Peripheral Participation)
• Returning Contributor
• Frequent Contributor
Preece, Nonnecke & Andrews, CHB2004
Forte & Bruckman, SIGGROUP2005; Hanson, 2008
Porter: Designing for the Social Web, 2008
Vassileva, 2002, 2005; Ling et al., JCMC 2005; Rashid et al., CHI2006

23. From Reader to Leader:
Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation
Collaborator
All
Users Reader Contributor ` Leader
Preece & Shneiderman, AIS Trans. Human-Computer Interaction1 (1), 2009
aisel.aisnet.org/thci/vol1/iss1/5/

24. Strategies for managers
Charismatic leader & bottom-up initiatives
• Personal contact, viral marketing, 1-to-1
• Appeal to special skills & uniqueness
• Engage existing groups
• Seed activities to get started

25. Footprints of Human Activity
• Footprints in sand as Caesarea

26. State-of-the-art network visualization

27. SocialAction
• Integrates statistics
& visualization
• 4 case studies, 4-8 weeks
(journalist, bibliometrician, terrorist analyst,
organizational analyst)
• Identified desired features, gave strong positive
feedback about benefits of integration
www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/socialaction
Perer & Shneiderman, CHI2008, IEEE CG&A 2009

28. NodeXL:
Network Overview for Discovery & Exploration in Excel
www.codeplex.com/nodexl
casci.umd.edu/NodeXL_Teaching

29. NodeXL:
Network Overview for Discovery & Exploration in Excel
www.codeplex.com/nodexl

30. NodeXL:
Network Overview for Discovery & Exploration in Excel
www.codeplex.com/nodexl

31. NodeXL:
Network Overview for Discovery & Exploration in Excel
https://wiki.cs.umd.edu/cmsc734_09/index.php?title=Homework_Number_3

32. Wikipedia Discussion
Red nodes (most confrontational) are involved in the strongest dyadic ties,
and they tend to have the highest out-degree

33. Tweets at #WIN09 Conference: 2 groups

34. Flickr networks

35. Flickr clusters for “mouse”
Computer Mickey
Animal

36. Flickr commenters on Marc Smith’s pix

37. Spotfire Twitter Community
• Size = number of followers
• Edge = follows, mentions, retweets
• Small, weakly connected
• No visible evangelists
www.codeplex.com/nodexl/

38. Tableau Twitter Community
• Size = number of followers
• Edge = follows, mentions, retweets
• Moderate sized community well connected.
www.codeplex.com/nodexl/

39. WWW2010 Twitter Community

40. Kodak Twitter Community
www.codeplex.com/nodexl/

41. Oil Spill Twitter Community
www.codeplex.com/nodexl/

42. Iron Man 2 (Movie) Twitter Community

43. CHI2010 Twitter Community
www.codeplex.com/nodexl/

44. Figure 7.11. : Lobbying Coalition Network connecting organizations (vertices) that have jointly filed
comments on US Federal Communications Commission policies (edges). Vertex Size represents
number of filings and color represents Eigenvector Centrality (pink = higher). Darker edges connect
organizations with many joint filings. Vertices were originally positioned using Fruchterman-
Rheingold and hand-positioned to respect clusters identified by NodeXL’s Find Clusters algorithm.

45. NodeXL: Book & Social Media Research Fnd
Social Media Research
Foundation
smrfoundation.org
We are a group of researchers
who want to create open tools,
generate and host open data,
and support open scholarship
related to social media.

46. NodeXL: Book & Social Media Research Fnd
Social Media Research Foundation
smrfoundation.org
We are a group of researchers who
want to create open tools, generate
and host open data, and support open
scholarship related to social media.
smrfoundation.org

47. Strategy: Take Personal Initiatives
Let’s get to work!

48. Technology Infrastructure
• Mobile, Desktop, Web, Cloud
• 100% uptime, 100% secure
• Giga-collabs, Tera-contribs
• Universal accessibility & usability
• Trust, empathy, responsibility, privacy
• Leaders can manage usage
• Designers can continuously improve