Increasingly, online social media are playing a pivotal role in shaping public opinion, but there are few tools available to gauge the reputation of contributors to the informal knowledge marketplace anchored by platforms like Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. This project will develop a broad multi-disciplinary community of experts from the social sciences, computer sciences, and statistics focusing on researching expertise and reputation in social media and develop a data-intensive approach for research in this area (KredibleNet). It will create the community and capacity to design and build large scale data analysis and management infrastructure to engage the challenge of understanding how these new knowledge markets are shaped by social interactions and reputations built around functional roles.
Through a series of workshops and use of an online platform, this nascent community will refine the conceptualization, operationalization and measurement of reputation as a component of online knowledge and create a roadmap for future research directions. The team will also develop and disseminate tools for data management, analysis and visualization of online reputation data and collaboratively design a prototype reputation measurement cyberinfrastructure platform that can be used for experimentation. This platform will include new data management and analysis tools to enable access to live social media data from sources such as Wikipedia, Twitter and YouTube. The resulting tools and dataset will equip the community with the capability to experiment with data-intensive analytic strategies and to better understand the nature of the reputation measurement problem.
The ultimate goal of KredibleNet is to shape the next generation of theoretical and analytic strategies needed for understanding how knowledge markets are influenced by social interactions and reputations. The community discussions will ensure that the infrastructure developed to fill the current conceptualization and measurement gaps, data management capabilities and analytic tools will provide as much benefit as possible to all the related fields in industry and the sciences; they will also likely give rise to new research synergies. The tools that will be developed will render the existing large databases amenable to analysis allowing scholars and practitioners to address a broad set of questions and gain valuable insights. The potential users of these tools, data, and ideas are quite widespread extending to multiple scholarly domains, policy communities, and industry partners. They will be made available publicly, so others may benefit from the results of this project to develop the next generation of "information gauges" that can help tomorrow's information consumers make smarter choices.
The project proposes a broad based, community derived agenda for the study of roles, trust, and credibility in social media knowledge markets, such as Wikipedia, Question and Answer fora, bulletin boards, or more specializes social media. The agenda is encapsulated in the foundational chapters of the edited volumes "Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets: Theory and Methods" and "Transparency in Social Media - Tools, Methods and Algorithms for Mediating Online Interactions," which were produced as a consequence of the two KredibleNet workshops organized with grand support. The chapters suggest that to this point, no collaborative research environment has been remotely effective at allowing scholars interested in researching trust, authority, authorship, and roles on social media knowledge markets to seamlessly transition between engaging other researchers, uploading and analyzing data, and reporting findings for the world to observe. Theories that continue, rather than ignore, social and mass media theory, are yet to be developed. In our increasingly global society, with its growing emphasis on collaborative work, this is a critical gap in the research process. The volumes proposed a carefully designed approach and framework that would more actively listen to the needs of the research community in order to offer the perspective, resources, and tools that would best allow them to address the most important research problems of today and of tomorrow in the fields of authorship, roles, and credibility. In addition, the project has stimulated interactions between the over 30 researchers involved in the workshops and has lead to several collaborative projects. Graduate and undergradaute students were actively involved in the research and educational activities supported by the project. Two master theses and one doctroal dissertation were inspired or supported by the project. A presentation series was initiated at Purdue University and several further grant proposals were generated by the team members.
