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Cognition in Structured Electronic Environments: references
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CiteULike: dartar's web_epistemology
- Credibility Assessments of Online Health Information: The Effects of Source Expertise and Knowledge of Content
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 6, No. 4. (2001), pp. 0-0.
Millions of Americans use the Internet as a resource for information, with a large proportion seeking health information. Research indicates that medical professionals do not author an extensive amount of health information available on the Internet. This creates a possibility for false information, thereby potentially leading ill people away from proper care. One way to begin addressing this problem is to assess perceptions of credibility about information found online. A between-groups, 2 (message type) × 3 (source type) factorial design was tested by manipulating source expertise (high, medium, low) and content knowledge (known and unknown). While findings did not indicate a significant interaction between source and content type, they did indicate an overall tendency to rate all information as relatively credible. In addition, results indicate that both knowledge of content and source expertise affect perceptions of online health information.
Matthew Eastin
- The MAIN Model: A Heuristic Approach to Understanding Technology Effects on Credibility
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, Vol. - (1 December 2007), pp. 73-100.
Historically, credibility assessments assume a relatively explicit, effortful evaluation of message source and content, but this chapter argues that four technological features—modality, agency, interactivity, and navigability—can profoundly influence credibility judgments that are made more subtly and automatically while accessing information. Based on research evidence that suggests today's youth pay more attention to these technological aspects than to source and content aspects, this chapter examines the ways in which they may shape credibility perceptions during digital media use. These features are conceptualized as “affordances” (or action possibilities) that suggest certain functions and/or transmit certain cues that trigger cognitive heuristics (or mental shortcuts) leading people to their impressions of the quality and credibility of the underlying information.
Shyam Sundar
- Social and Heuristic Approaches to Credibility Evaluation Online
Journal of Communication, Vol. 60, No. 3. (September 2010), pp. 413-439.
The tremendous amount of information available online has resulted in considerable research on information and source credibility. The vast majority of scholars, however, assume that individuals work in isolation to form credibility opinions and that people must assess information credibility in an effortful and time-consuming manner. Focus group data from 109 participants were used to examine these assumptions. Results show that most users rely on others to make credibility assessments, often through the use of group-based tools. Results also indicate that rather than systematically processing information, participants routinely invoked cognitive heuristics to evaluate the credibility of information and sources online. These findings are leveraged to suggest a number of avenues for further credibility theorizing, research, and practice.
Miriam Metzger, Andrew Flanagin, Ryan Medders
- The collaborative construction of "fact" on Wikipedia
In SIGDOC '09: Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on Design of communication (2009), pp. 281-288.
For years Wikipedia has come to symbolize the potential of Web 2.0 for harnessing the power of mass collaboration and collective intelligence. As wikis continue to develop and move into streams of cultural, social, academic, and enterprise work activity, it is appropriate to consider how collective intelligence emerges from mass collaboration. Collective intelligence can take many forms - this paper examines one, the emergence of stable facts on Wikipedia. More specifically, this paper examines ways of participating that lead to the creation of facts. This research will show how we can be more effective consumers, producers, and managers of wiki information by understanding how collaboration shapes facts.
Jason Swarts
- Heurísticas sencillas para la evaluación de autoridad
In La cognición como proceso cultural (2009)
Dario Taraborelli
- The impact of cognitive machines on complex decisions and organizational change
AI & Society, Vol. 24, No. 4. (1 November 2009), pp. 365-381.
Abstract Humans and organizations have limitations of computational capacity and information management. Such constraints are synonymous with bounded rationality. Therefore, in order to extend the human and organizational boundaries to more advanced models of cognition, this research proposes concepts of cognitive machines in organizations. From a micro point of view, what makes this research distinct is that, beyond people, it includes in the list of participants of the organization the cognitive machines. From a macro point of view, this paper relies on the premise that cognitive machines can improve the cognitive abilities of the organization. From such perspectives, it presents rationale and principles of a class of cognitive machines with capabilities to carry out complex cognitive tasks in organizations. It also introduces analyses of the cognitive machines in organizations through theories of bounded rationality, economic decision-making, and conflict resolution. The analyses indicate that these machines can solve or reduce intra-individual and group dysfunctional conflicts which arise from decision-making processes in the organization, and thus they can improve the degree of organizational cognition. From all these backgrounds, this research outlines implications of cognitive machines for organizations.
Farley Nobre, Andrew Tobias, David Walker
- The Democratizing Effects of Search Engine Use: On Chance Exposures and Organizational Hubs
Web Search (2008), pp. 135-149.
In this paper I highlight two implications of the widespread use of search engines, which are often overlooked by commentators. In the first part of the paper I argue that search engines are conducive to unplanned exposures to diverse and even opposing views. In the second part I argue that search engines indirectly contribute to emergent political organization, since they allow large numbers of people to locate and access organizational hubs of collective action. I conclude by pointing to the democratic significance of these properties.
A Lev-On
- Do people trust their eyes more than ears?: media bias in detecting cues of expertise
In CHI '05: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (2005), pp. 1745-1748.
Enabling users to identify trustworthy actors is a key design concern in online systems and expertise is a core dimension of trustworthiness. In this paper, we investigate (1) users' ability to identify expertise in advice and (2) effects of media bias in different representations. In a laboratory study, we presented 160 participants with two advisors -- one represented by text-only; the other represented by one of four alternate formats: video, audio, avatar, or photo+text . Unknown to the participants, one was an expert (i.e. trained) and the other was a non-expert (i.e. untrained). We observed participants' advice seeking behavior under financial risk as an indicator of their trust in the advisor. For all rich media representations, participants were able to identify the expert, but we also found a tendency for seeking video and audio advice, irrespective of expertise. Avatar advice, in contrast, was rarely sought, but -- like the other rich media representations -- was seen as more enjoyable and friendly than text-only advice. In a future step we plan to analyze our data for effects on advice uptake.
Jens Riegelsberger, Angela Sasse, John Mccarthy
- How opinions are received by online communities: a case study on amazon.com helpfulness votes
In WWW (2009), pp. 141-150.
There are many on-line settings in which users publicly express opinions. A number of these offer mechanisms for other users to evaluate these opinions; a canonical example is Amazon.com, where reviews come with annotations like "26 of 32 people found the following review helpful." Opinion evaluation appears in many off-line settings as well, including market research and political campaigns. Reasoning about the evaluation of an opinion is fundamentally different from reasoning about the opinion itself: rather than asking, "What did Y think of X?", we are asking, "What did Z think of Y's opinion of X?" Here we develop a framework for analyzing and modeling opinion evaluation, using a large-scale collection of Amazon book reviews as a dataset. We find that the perceived helpfulness of a review depends not just on its content but also but also in subtle ways on how the expressed evaluation relates to other evaluations of the same product. As part of our approach, we develop novel methods that take advantage of the phenomenon of review "plagiarism" to control for the effects of text in opinion evaluation, and we provide a simple and natural mathematical model consistent with our findings. Our analysis also allows us to distinguish among the predictions of competing theories from sociology and social psychology, and to discover unexpected differences in the collective opinion-evaluation behavior of user populations from ifferent countries.
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Gueorgi Kossinets, Jon Kleinberg, Lillian Lee
- Indicators of accuracy of consumer health information on the Internet: a study of indicators relating to information for managing fever in children in the home.
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA, Vol. 9, No. 1. (b 2002), pp. 73-79.
OBJECTIVES: To identify indicators of accuracy for consumer health information on the Internet. The results will help lay people distinguish accurate from inaccurate health information on the Internet. DESIGN: Several popular search engines (Yahoo, AltaVista, and Google) were used to find Web pages on the treatment of fever in children. The accuracy and completeness of these Web pages was determined by comparing their content with that of an instrument developed from authoritative sources on treating fever in children. The presence on these Web pages of a number of proposed indicators of accuracy, taken from published guidelines for evaluating the quality of health information on the Internet, was noted. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Correlation between the accuracy of Web pages on treating fever in children and the presence of proposed indicators of accuracy on these pages. Likelihood ratios for the presence (and absence) of these proposed indicators. RESULTS: One hundred Web pages were identified and characterized as "more accurate" or "less accurate." Three indicators correlated with accuracy: displaying the HONcode logo, having an organization domain, and displaying a copyright. Many proposed indicators taken from published guidelines did not correlate with accuracy (e.g., the author being identified and the author having medical credentials) or inaccuracy (e.g., lack of currency and advertising). CONCLUSIONS: This method provides a systematic way of identifying indicators that are correlated with the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of health information on the Internet. Three such indicators have been identified in this study. Identifying such indicators and informing the providers and consumers of health information about them would be valuable for public health care.
D Fallis, M Frické
- Toward an epistemology of Wikipedia
J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol., Vol. 59, No. 10. (2008), pp. 1582-1597.
Wikipedia (the “free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit”) is having a huge impact on how a great many people gather information about the world. So, it is important for epistemologists and information scientists to ask whether people are likely to acquire knowledge as a result of having access to this information source. In other words, is Wikipedia having good epistemic consequences? After surveying the various concerns that have been raised about the reliability of Wikipedia, this article argues that the epistemic consequences of people using Wikipedia as a source of information are likely to be quite good. According to several empirical studies, the reliability of Wikipedia compares favorably to the reliability of traditional encyclopedias. Furthermore, the reliability of Wikipedia compares even more favorably to the reliability of those information sources that people would be likely to use if Wikipedia did not exist (viz., Web sites that are as freely and easily accessible as Wikipedia). In addition, Wikipedia has a number of other epistemic virtues (e.g., power, speed, and fecundity) that arguably outweigh any deficiency in terms of reliability. Even so, epistemologists and information scientists should certainly be trying to identify changes (or alternatives) to Wikipedia that will bring about even better epistemic consequences. This article suggests that to improve Wikipedia, we need to clarify what our epistemic values are and to better understand why Wikipedia works as well as it does.
Don Fallis
- WIKIPEDIA and the Epistemology of Testimony
Episteme, Vol. 6, No. 1. (2009), pp. 8-24.
Deborah Tollefsen
- Web 2.0 vs. the Semantic Web: A Philosophical Assessment
Episteme, Vol. 6, No. 1. (2009), pp. 25-37.
Luciano Floridi
- The Fate of Expertise after WIKIPEDIA
Episteme, Vol. 6, No. 1. (2009), pp. 52-73.
Lawrence Sanger
- The Epistemic Cultures of Science and WIKIPEDIA: A Comparison
Episteme, Vol. 6, No. 1. (2009), pp. 38-51.
Brad Wray
- Prediction Markets: The Practical and Normative Possibilities for the Social Production of Knowledge
Episteme, Vol. 6, No. 1. (2009), pp. 91-106.
George Bragues
- On Trusting WIKIPEDIA
Episteme, Vol. 6, No. 1. (2009), pp. 74-90.
PD Magnus
- Introduction: The Epistemology of Mass Collaboration
Episteme, Vol. 6, No. 1. (2009), pp. 1-7.
Don Fallis
- Toward an Epistemology of Wikipedia
Social Science Research Network Working Paper Series (06 September 2008)
Wikipedia (the "free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit") is having a huge impact on how a great many people gather information about the world. So, it is important for epistemologists and information scientists to ask whether or not people are likely to acquire knowledge as a result of having access to this information source. In other words, is Wikipedia having good epistemic consequences? After surveying the various concerns that have been raised about the reliability of Wikipedia, this paper argues that the epistemic consequences of people using Wikipedia as a source of information are likely to be quite good. According to several empirical studies, the reliability of Wikipedia compares favorably to the reliability of traditional encyclopedias. Furthermore, the reliability of Wikipedia compares even more favorably to the reliability of those information sources that people would be likely to use if Wikipedia did not exist (viz., websites that are as freely and easily accessible as Wikipedia). In addition, Wikipedia has a number of other epistemic virtues (e.g., power, speed, and fecundity) that arguably outweigh any deficiency in terms of reliability. Even so, epistemologists and information scientists should certainly be trying to identify changes (or alternatives) to Wikipedia that will bring about even better epistemic consequences. This paper suggests that, in order to improve Wikipedia, we need to clarify what our epistemic values are and we need a better understanding of why Wikipedia works as well as it does.
Don Fallis
- Information quality work organization in wikipedia
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 59, No. 6. (April 2008), pp. 983-1001.
The classic problem within the information quality (IQ) research and practice community has been the problem of defining IQ. It has been found repeatedly that IQ is context sensitive and cannot be described, measured, and assured with a single model. There is a need for empirical case studies of IQ work in different systems to develop a systematic knowledge that can then inform and guide the construction of context-specific IQ models. This article analyzes the organization of IQ assurance work in a large-scale, open, collaborative encyclopedia-Wikipedia. What is special about Wikipedia as a resource is that the quality discussions and processes are strongly connected to the data itself and are accessible to the general public. This openness makes it particularly easy for researchers to study a particular kind of collaborative work that is highly distributed and that has a particularly substantial focus, not just on error detection but also on error correction. We believe that the study of those evolving debates and processes and of the IQ assurance model as a whole has useful implications for the improvement of quality in other more conventional databases.
Besiki Stvilia, Michael Twidale, Linda Smith, Les Gasser
- Trust on the world wide web: a survey
Found. Trends Web Sci., Vol. 1, No. 2. (2006), pp. 131-197.
The success of the Web is based largely on its open, decentralized nature; at the same time, that allows for a wide range of perspectives and intentions. Trust is required to foster successful interactions and to filter the abundance of information. In this review, we present a comprehensive survey of trust on the Web in all its contexts. Three main targets of trust are identified: content, services, and people. Trust in the content on the Web, including webpages, websites, and Semantic Web data is addressed first. Then, we move on to look at services including peer-to-peer environments and Web services. This includes a discussion of Web policy frameworks for access control. People are the final group, where we look at the role of trust in web-based social networks and algorithms for inferring trust relationships. Finally, we review applications that rely on trust and address how they utilize trust to improve functionality and interface.
Jennifer Golbeck
- A Framework for Web Science
Foundations and Trends® in Web Science, Vol. 1, No. 1. (January 2006), pp. 1-130.
This text sets out a series of approaches to the analysis and synthesis of the World Wide Web, and other web-like information structures. A comprehensive set of research questions is outlined, together with a sub-disciplinary breakdown, emphasising the multi-faceted nature of the Web, and the multi-disciplinary nature of its study and development. These questions and approaches together set out an agenda for Web Science, the science of decentralised information systems. Web Science is required both as a way to understand the Web, and as a way to focus its development on key communicational and representational requirements. The text surveys central engineering issues, such as the development of the Semantic Web, Web services and P2P. Analytic approaches to discover the Web's topology, or its graph-like structures, are examined. Finally, the Web as a technology is essentially socially embedded; therefore various issues and requirements for Web use and governance are also reviewed.
Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, James Hendler, Kieron O'Hara, Nigel Shadbolt, Daniel Weitzner
- Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity
The tragedy of the digital commons does not prevent the copious voluntary production of content that one witnesses in the web. We show through an analysis of a massive data set from YouTube that the productivity exhibited in crowdsourcing exhibits a strong positive dependence on attention, measured by the number of downloads. Conversely, a lack of attention leads to a decrease in the number of videos uploaded and the consequent drop in productivity, which in many cases asymptotes to no uploads whatsoever. Moreover, uploaders compare themselves to others when having low productivity and to themselves when exceeding a threshold.
Bernardo Huberman, Daniel Romero, Fang Wu
- How the Web is changing the way we trust
In Current Issues in Computing and Philosophy (2008)
Several studies have addressed the issue of what makes information on the World Wide Web credible. Understanding how we select reliable sources of information and how we estimate their credibility has been drawing an increasing interest in the literature on the Web. In this paper I argue that the study of information search behavior can provide to social and cognitive scientists an extraordinary insight into the processes mediating knowledge acquisition by epistemic deference. I review some of the major methodological proposals to study how users judge the reliability of a source of information in the World Wide Web and I propose an alternative framework inspired by the idea that–as cognitively evolved organisms–we adopt to this aim strategies that are as effortless as possible. I argue in particular that Web users engaging in information search are likely to develop simple heuristics to select in a computationally viable way trustworthy sources of information and I discuss the consequences of this hypothesis and related research directions.
Dario Taraborelli
- Empirical research in on-line trust: a review and critical assessment
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol. 58, No. 6. (June 2003), pp. 783-812.
Lack of trust is one of the most frequently cited reasons for consumers not purchasing from Internet vendors. During the last four years a number of empirical studies have investigated the role of trust in the specific context of e-commerce, focusing on different aspects of this multi-dimensional construct. However, empirical research in this area is beset by conflicting conceptualizations of the trust construct, inadequate understanding of the relationships between trust, its antecedents and consequents, and the frequent use of trust scales that are neither theoretically derived nor rigorously validated. The major objective of this paper is to provide an integrative review of the empirical literature on trust in e-commerce in order to allow cumulative analysis of results. The interpretation and comparison of different empirical studies on on-line trust first requires conceptual clarification. A set of trust constructs is proposed that reflects both institutional phenomena (system trust) and personal and interpersonal forms of trust (dispositional trust, trusting beliefs, trusting intentions and trust-related behaviours), thus facilitating a multi-level and multi-dimensional analysis of research problems related to trust in e-commerce.
Sonja Grabner-Kräuter, Ewald Kaluscha
- Web search engines and distributed assessment systems
Pragmatics & Cognition, Vol. 14, No. 2. (2006), pp. 387-409.
I analyse the impact of search engines on our cognitive and epistemic practices. For that purpose, I describe the processes of assessment of documents on the Web as relying on distributed cognition. Search engines together with Web users, are distributed assessment systems whose task is to enable efficient allocation of cognitive resources of those who use search engines. Specifying the cognitive function of search engines within these distributed assessment systems allows interpreting anew the changes that have been caused by search engine technologies. I describe search engines as implementing reputation systems and point out the similarities with other reputation systems. I thus call attention to the continuity in the distributed cognitive processes that determine the allocation of cognitive resources for information gathering from others.
Christophe Heintz
- Extracting Trust from Domain Analysis: A Case Study on the Wikipedia Project
Autonomic and Trusted Computing In Autonomic and Trusted Computing, Vol. 4158 (2006), pp. 362-373-373.
The problem of identifying trustworthy information on the World Wide Web is becoming increasingly acute as new tools such as wikis and blogs simplify and democratize publications. Wikipedia is the most extraordinary example of this phenomenon and, although a few mechanisms have been put in place to improve contributions quality, trust in Wikipedia content quality has been seriously questioned. We thought that a deeper understanding of what in general defines high-standard and expertise in domains related to Wikipedia â i.e. content quality in a collaborative environment â mapped onto Wikipedia elements would lead to a complete set of mechanisms to sustain trust in Wikipedia context. Our evaluation, conducted on about 8,000 articles representing 65% of the overall Wikipedia editing activity, shows that the new trust evidence that we extracted from Wikipedia allows us to transparently and automatically compute trust values to isolate articles of great or low quality.
Pierpaolo Dondio, Stephen Barrett, Stefan Weber, Jean Seigneur
- Social Networks and Trust (Theory and Decision Library C)
(31 March 2002)
<STRONG>Social Networks and Trust</STRONG> discusses two possible explanations for the emergence of trust via social networks. If network members can sanction untrustworthiness of actors, these actors may refrain from acting in an untrustworthy manner. Moreover, if actors are informed regularly about trustworthy behavior of others, trust will grow among these actors.<BR>A unique combination of formal model building and empirical methodology is used to derive and test hypotheses about the effects of networks on trust. The models combine elements from game theory, which is mainly used in economics, and social network analysis, which is mainly used in sociology.<BR>The hypotheses are tested (1) by analyzing contracts in information technology transactions from a survey on small and medium-sized enterprises and (2) by studying judgments of subjects in a vignette experiment related to hypothetical transactions with a used-car dealer.
Vincent Buskens
- Reputation in Artificial Societies: Social Beliefs for Social Order (Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations)
(31 October 2002)
<STRONG>Reputation In Artificial Societies</STRONG> discusses the role of reputation in the achievement of social order. The book proposes that reputation is an agent property that results from transmission of beliefs about how the agents are evaluated with regard to a socially desirable conduct. This desirable conduct represents one or another of the solutions to the problem of social order and may consist of cooperation or altruism, reciprocity, or norm obedience. <BR><STRONG>Reputation In Artificial Societies</STRONG> distinguishes between image (direct evaluation of others) and reputation (propagating metabelief, indirectly acquired) and investigates their effects with regard to both natural and electronic societies. The interplay between image and reputation, the processes leading to them and the set of decisions that agents make on their basis are demonstrated with supporting data from agentbased simulations.
Rosaria Conte, Mario Paolucci
- Are people biased in their use of search engines?
Commun. ACM, Vol. 51, No. 2. (February 2008), pp. 49-52.
Search-engines are among the most used resources on the Internet. Google [2], for example, now hosts over eight billion items and returns answers to queries in a fraction of a second; thus realising some of the more far-fetched predictions envisioned by the pioneers of the World Web Web [1]. In the present study, we assess whether people are biased in their use of a search-engine; specifically we assess whether people tend to click on those items that are presented as being the most relevant in the search engine’s result list (i.e., those items listed at the top of the result list). To test this bias hypothesis, we simulated the Google environment systematically reversing Google’s normal relevance-ordering of the items presented to users. Our results show that people do manifest some bias, favouring items at the top of result lists, though they also seek out high-relevance items listed further down a list. Later, we discuss whether this bias arises from people’s implicit trust in search engines such as Google, or some other effect.
Mark Keane, Maeve O'Brien, Barry Smyth