comp.social papers

Social Software as Social Science

Eric Gilbert | Digital Confidential (forthcoming, MIT Press)

In this chapter, we explore building social software to answer social science questions, covering issues like getting users and responding to the demands of the internet.

Have You Heard?: How Gossip Flows Through Workplace Email

Tanu Mitra & Eric Gilbert | ICWSM 2012

Gossip is fundamental to social life. Here, we present the first large-scale study of it in cmc, looking at email where someone is mentioned in the message body but not included on the recipient list.

Designing Social Translucence Over Social Networks

Eric Gilbert | CHI 2012

best paper honorable mention

Social translucence is a landmark theory in social computing. However, we argue that it breaks down over modern social network sites and build a theory relating network structure to design.

Phrases That Signal Workplace Hierarchy

Eric Gilbert | CSCW 2012

Hierarchy fundamentally shapes how we act at work. In this paper, we explore the relationship between the words people write in workplace email and the rank of the email's recipient.

Predicting Tie Strength in a New Medium

Eric Gilbert | CSCW 2012

best paper honorable mention

The term tie strength denotes the differential closeness with the people in our lives. In this paper, we explore how well a tie strength model developed for one social medium adapts to another.

Computing Tie Strength

Eric Gilbert | UIUC PhD dissertation, 2010

Relationships make social media social. But, not all relationships are created equal. This dissertation addresses this problem, merging the theories behind tie strength with the data from social media.

Widespread Worry and the Stock Market

Eric Gilbert & Karrie Karahalios | ICWSM 2010

Our emotional state influences our choices. Here, we demonstrate that estimating emotions from blogs provides new information about future stock market prices.

Understanding Deja Reviewers

Eric Gilbert & Karrie Karahalios | CSCW 2010

awarded best paper

People who review products on the web invest considerable time and energy in them. So why would someone write a review that restates earlier reviews? We look to answer this question.

Predicting Tie Strength With Social Media

Eric Gilbert & Karrie Karahalios | CHI 2009

awarded best paper

Social media treats all users the same: trusted friend or total stranger, with little or nothing in between. In this paper, we present a predictive model that maps social media data to tie strength.

Blogs Are Echo Chambers: Blogs Are Echo Chambers

Eric Gilbert, Tony Bergstrom & Karrie Karahalios | HICSS 2009

Many commentators and researchers speculate that blogs isolate readers in echo chambers, cutting them off from dissenting opinions. Our empirical paper tests this hypothesis.

The Network in the Garden: Designing Social Media for Rural Life

Eric Gilbert, Karrie Karahalios & Christian Sandvig | ABS 2009

We know little about how rural communities use modern technologies. Using social capital theory, we predict differences between rural and urban users and find strong evidence supporting our hypotheses.

The Network in the Garden

Eric Gilbert, Karrie Karahalios & Christian Sandvig | CHI 2008

awarded best paper

We know little about how rural communities use modern technologies. To address this gap, we explore behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users.

Using Social Visualization to Motivate Social Production

Eric Gilbert & Karrie Karahalios | IEEE MM 2008

In this article we argue that social visualization can motivate contributors to social production projects, such as Wikipedia and open source development.

A Social Visualization of Distributed Software Development

Eric Gilbert & Karrie Karahalios | Interact 2007

We present CodeSaw, a social visualization of distributed software development. It visualizes a distributed software community from two perspectives: code repositories and project communication.

The QuarkNet/Grid Collaborative Learning e-Lab

Marge Bardeen, Eric Gilbert, et al. | Journal of Grid Computing 2005

We describe a case study that uses grid computing techniques to support the collaborative learning of high school students investigating cosmic rays.