This paper describes semiotic inspection, a semiotic engineering evaluation method. It briefly identifies the essence of theorybased evaluation methods in HCI. Then it provides a detailed description and illustration of this method, which is based on a semiotic theory of HCI. It discusses its theoretical stance in semiotic engineering compared to the communicability evaluation method, as well as the perceived advantages and disadvantages of semiotic inspection. Finally, it points at the next steps in the semiotic inspection research agenda.
HCI evaluation methods tend to be proposed and used to verify the interactive qualities of specific systems and design strategies. A discussion about the scientific merits of such methods to advance knowledge in HCI as a field is very rare, although much needed. This paper shows that, under certain conditions, inspection methods can be safely used in scientific research in HCI and extend their advantages beyond the territory of professional practice. Taking the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM) as an example, we argue that its interpretive results are objective, can be validated, and produce scientific knowledge comparable to that generated by more widely accepted methods.
A growing number of people are changing the way they consume news, replacing the traditional physical newspapers and magazines by their virtual online versions or/and weblogs. The interactivity and immediacy present in online news are changing the way news are being produced and exposed by media corporations. News websites have to create effective strategies to catch people’s attention and attract their clicks. In this paper we investigate possible strategies used by online news corporations in the design of their news headlines. We analyze the content of 69,907 headlines produced by four major global media corporations during a minimum of eight consecutive months in 2014. In order to discover strategies that could be used to attract clicks, we extracted features from the text of the news headlines related to the sentiment polarity of the headline. We discovered that the sentiment of the headline is strongly related to the popularity of the news and also with the dynamics of the posted comments on that particular news.
In this work we investigate the user practices in Instagram, a social photo sharing service. Some interesting conclusions emerge from our analysis. For instance, users tend to concentrate their posts during the weekend and at the end of the day. Furthermore, people tend to endorse photos with many likes and comments, inducing the rich get richer phenomenon. Our findings can support future research on sociology and cultural analitycs research areas, such as on the proposal of new clustering algorithms based on the user practices in different social media networks.
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