No abstract

No abstract

Abstract-In this paper, we investigate a method for constructing cascades of information co-occurrence, which is suitable to trace emergent structures in information in scenarios where rich contextual features are unavailable. Our method relies only on the temporal order of content-sharing activities, and intrinsic properties of the shared content itself. We apply this method to analyse information dissemination patterns across the active online citizen science project Planet Hunters, a part of the Zooniverse platform. Our results lend insight into both structural and informational properties of different types of identifiers that can be used and combined to construct cascades. In particular, significant differences are found in the structural properties of information cascades when hashtags as used as cascade identifiers, compared with other content features. We also explain apparent local information losses in cascades in terms of information obsolescence and cascade divergence; e.g., when a cascade branches into multiple, divergent cascades with combined capacity equal to the original.

The role that technologies have historically played in producing and reproducing global inequalities is well documented. Although technological innovation is associated with progress that does not mean that it necessarily narrows the gap between rich and poor, instead technological inequalities tend to exacerbate other inequalities. This applies also to information and communication technologies (ICT) and Big Data, which play an increasingly important role in humanitarianism. In this article, we address the socio-technical work that is necessary to acquire, process, store and use data and study the power relations that are embedded in these processes. We focus in particular on the use of Big Data in digital humanitarianism and argue that at each stage of the digital data life-cycle (data acquisition, data processing, data storage, and data usage and decision making) different resources are required. These include not only access to hardware, software and connectivity but also the ability to make use of the affordances of digital technologies. We posit that in the context of humanitarianism, ICT and Big Data are a particularly intriguing to study due to their ambivalent position of seeking to address inequalities while at the same time perpetuating them.

In this paper, we examine the motivations for participation in Eye-Wire, a Web-based gamified citizen science platform. Our study is based on a large-scale survey to which we conducted a qualitative analysis of survey responses in order to understand what drives individuals to participate. Based on our analysis, we derive 18 motivations related to participation, and group them into 4 motivational themes related to engagement. We contextualize our findings against the broader literature on online communities, and compare our findings with other citizen science platforms, in order to understand the implications of gamification within the context of citizen science.