Browsing by Subject "crowdsourcing"
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Item The Austin Fanzine Project: Phase Two(2013-03-21) Hecker, Jennifer; Powell, Kevin; University of Texas at AustinA fanzine is a "nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) for the pleasure of others who share their interest” (Wikipedia). You can think of them as pre-internet blogs. Fanzines are lately gaining popularity in college classrooms, as professors in journalism, anthropology, art, and literature incorporate them into their curricula, and librarians and archivists all over the world are finding ways to increase access to and preservation of these ephemeral, sometimes unique objects of human expression. Archivist Jennifer Hecker founded Austin Fanzine Project in the summer of 2012 as a way to increase access to the fanzines that document Austin's 1990s underground music scene by crowd sourcing their digitization, transcription and indexing. The project also functions as an ad-hoc learning lab for issues around digitization, transcription, linked data, digital preservation, privacy and copyright, and archival collaboration and innovation. Phase One of the project was a self-contained test run focusing on only one document. Phase Two has already begun and will feature more material, more complex issues, and more collaboration. Ms. Hecker will introduce the project and describe progress made to date, while UT iSchool master's degree candidate, Kevin Powell, will discuss the policy and workflow issues he addressed during his Spring 2013 Capstone work on the project.Item Combating Crowdsourced Manipulation of Social Media(2013-08-01) Tamilarasan, PrithiviCrowdsourcing systems - like Ushahidi (for crisis mapping), Foldit (for protein folding) and Duolingo (for foreign language learning and translation) - have shown the effectiveness of intelligently organizing large numbers of people to solve traditionally vexing problems. Unfortunately, new crowdsourcing platforms are emerging to support the coordinated dissemination of spam, misinformation, and propaganda. These ?crowdturfing? systems are a sinister counterpart to the enormous positive opportunities of crowdsourcing; they combine the organizational capabilities of crowdsourcing with the ability to widely spread artificial grass root support (so called ?astroturfing?). This thesis begins a study of crowdturfing that targets social media and proposes a framework for ?pulling back the curtain? on crowdturfers to reveal their underlying ecosystem. Concretely, this thesis (i) analyzes the types of campaigns hosted on multiple crowdsourcing sites; (ii) links campaigns and their workers on crowdsourcing sites to social media; (iii) analyzes the relationship structure connecting these workers, their profile, activity, and linguistic characteristics, in comparison with a random sample of regular social media users; and (iv) proposes and develops statistical user models to automatically identify crowdturfers in social media. Since many crowdturfing campaigns are hidden, it is important to understand the potential of learning models from known campaigns to detect these unknown campaigns. Our experimental results show that the statistical user models built can predict crowdturfers with very high accuracy.Item Streaming Texas - A Case Study of the Texas Archive of the Moving Imager(2012-05-25) Peck, Megan; Texas Archive of the Moving ImageIn an online environment proliferated by video, but in which few organizations are independently streaming their own content, the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI) has rapidly developed as a leader in the field. TAMI is an independent 501(c)3 organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of and access to Texas’ moving image heritage. The organization’s focus is to digitize and provide easy access to these materials via the web, communicating Texas history across the state, nation, and world. Since kick off of their main program, The Texas Film Round Up in 2008, the archive has digitized nearly 14,000 moving image items, of which over 1,500 have been described and uploaded for free public access in the Online Video Library. Elizabeth Hansen, Director of Outreach and Education, and Megan Peck, Digital Librarian, will present a case study of TAMI’s approach to connecting with communities, both online and real world. The discussion will address a number of considerations used to develop a holistic strategy for connecting with users. This strategy incorporates social media and other tools used to invite the public to the library, as well as measures to shape the library user’s experience, such as the building and curation of relevant collections, and the providing of a crowd sourcing tool to foster user participation and contribution. The panel will report on successes achieved and challenges faced in its implementation and management of this strategy, and show off some selections from the collection.Item Visible and Valuable Writing: A Case for Inviting Web Writing Histories into Composition Courses(2017-06-30) Conner, Savanna; Nardone, Carroll F.This research takes as its premise a pair of accepted and connected truths in composition studies. First, mediation of student writing practices—the central action of any composition classroom—is accomplished only through engagement. Second, those practices, however abstruse, do not exist in isolation: they are the products of writers, who are the products of the environments from which they emerge. This thesis seeks to employ one of those environments, one in which 21st century students are entrenched, as a means to accomplish that necessary engagement with student writing processes: the web. The stages of the writing process are indistinct and discursive, and they are approached differently by the scholars of each equally nebulous movement in composition studies. This study systematically delineates the tenets of those movements, introduces hallmark features of the present-day web, and asserts the merits of using Activity Theory and Actor Network theory as lenses for foregrounding the importance of writing technologies as detailed and unique mediators of writing actions. It suggests, then, relocating stages of the writing process to online spaces. Next, the results of discourse analysis performed on student activity in a First Year Composition course, in which online discussion boards were constructed as informal writing spaces, are presented. The results validate the conviction that transferable writing skills are successfully fostered when writing spaces are not foreign, but are instead carefully designed to acknowledge the characteristics of the web environment comfortably inhabited by 21st century students; finally, examples of the benefits of such design are demonstrated in discussions of the Web 2.0 hallmarks of perpetual beta, crowdsourcing, and folksonomies.Item Zine Party! Collaborating across UT Libraries to Experiment with Methods, Workflows & Tools, Build Awareness of a Collection, and Teach Metadata Literacy(2015-04-28) Hecker, Jennifer; Pad, Rebecca; Choate, Aaron; Cofield, Melanie; Schwartz, Laura; Marchock, Ann; University of Texas at AustinRecent donations of two large collections of zines* to UT’s Fine Arts Library have highlighted the need to improve access to the zines and, at the same time, staff across the Libraries have become more and more interested in exploring new ways to think about describing resources, crowdsourcing, metadata literacy, community engagement, software development, and gamification. Identifying an opportunity to build awareness of the zine collection, and deepen student and community engagement with the Libraries, we created an event that would allow us to explore these topics, while also doing some PR for the zine collection. The resulting Zine Party! event kicked off with an overview of the world of zines, zine collections and zine librarianship around the country, and a primer on how UT Libraries catalogs zines, then introduced attendees to the xZINECOREx metadata schema and invited them to input catalog metadata using a gamified interface we adapted for local use. The diverse goals of the various collaborators came together in this event: the event provided an opportunity to ask questions related to public relations, community outreach and engagement, the Libraries’ desire to increase engagement with community software development models, and the incorporation of crowdsourcing into some of our metadata workflows. The profession as a whole has been abuzz with talk of educating the public about what we do as a path to building greater support for the missions of libraries, archives and museums, and we hope we have made a dent in this larger goal as well. Our panel will include representatives from each of the involved departments who will share their work on the project, and discuss their motivations and takeaways. *magazines made for love, not money