Social context of content-Ashwini Iyer and Kieran Lal

Drupal’s motto is community plumbing. The goal of this project is to enable the social context of content, which has been shown to improve the bonds between community members, add emotional significance to communication, and improve the ease of use of organizing content.

User questions this is trying to answer:

• Who is the person everybody reads?
• Who was there when the subject of the content happened?
• What are your friends reading?
• What is relevant for your next social meeting?
• What it is the social relevancy of media such as pictures or video?
• Do I trust this content more if I know the social context?

The goal of this project is to improve the ease of use of describing content in a social context and to automatically discover the social context of content. The first phase will be to create a standard set of social tags for describing individuals, their relationships, and their activities. These descriptions will be done using the taxonomic tagging module in Drupal and it's forthcoming customer relationship management module. The automated discovery of the social context of content will be the second phase. This will allow Drupal to leverage social interactions taking place. The social context will be derived from information that is available but not coordinated. This will include user page views, authorship, number of reads, response rate weighting, interaction of buddy list contacts, social weight of readers, responders social weight , events, locative information, volunteer, and invitation information which are all currently available in Drupal modules.

Why this is innovative?

Human communications is a highly complex process engaged in for multiple purposes. In this “ Technological Age”, a huge amount of interactions is controlled by the internet and other communication methods. These technologies have enhanced the human ability to interact over space and time but have limited the contextual actions involved in these interactions.

E-mail, Blogs are the most common and easiest way of interaction today. Email, Blogs is often content without context as there are rarely any rules for building the context of the information exchange. Some interactions are highly “contextual” and require a good deal of unspoken communication for the content of the message to be understood like background, social setting and so on. Here the social context of the message is highly acknowledged rather than the content of the message.

Content management has currently focused on supporting varieties of content, transcoding content, and integration of content with other systems but has done little to state why it is socially relevant to people. This project aims to enable producers, consumers, and managers of content to describe content in a socially relevant manner. It also aims to discover how users want to describe the social context of content and how they prefer to consume that information. Drupal's well defined schema allows for discovery of social context in structured data that is presented to users in an unstructured way.

Deliverables

1. Social context tagging
   • An open standard for referencing individuals, their relationships, and their activities. This will be an open standard for Community Relationship Management based on the CiviCRM open standard, SugarCRM, foaf, xfn, rojo (proprietary), aura (codecon 2005), and SalesForce for non-profits.
   • A database file with this standard taxonomy, and possible folksonomy extensions.
   • An interface for the module which allows social context tags to be effectively displayed with content.
   • An interface for allowing users to add social context tags or extend their own tags.
2. Automatic discovery of social context.
   A module that drills across content management tables for social context information and creates a table with the total social context of content nodes. This will be done in off-line batch modes as a series of data warehousing style queries. This will be architected to include queries to other data marts.

Interested Googlers who would benefit from this open source project

Danah Boyd from Blogger and Ellen Spertus from Orkut would be able to benefit from research into social context prototypes.

Academic references

This project was inspired at the Computer Human Interaction conference 2005.

1. Inner Circle – People Centered Email Client: Andrzej Turski, Debbie Warnack, Lili Cheng, Shelly Farnham, Susan Yee. "We present an automatic people-centered organization of the email message store, where all the information is organized by the association with the message sender or recipients." Contact authors for the paper.
2. The Uses of Personal Networked Digital Imaging: An Empirical Study of Cameraphone Photos and Sharing. Users[ed] "innovative communicative uses of imaging are understandable in terms of the social uses identified from prior photographic activity; new functional uses are developing as well". In this presentation the author described how a photo of young people in a car on a trip could be socially relevant because it could have been the author's nephew who died on a similar car trip. This illustrates the power of social context of content.
3. Assessing Differential Usage of Usenet Social Accounting Meta. "Researchers at Microsoft found our most frequent users focused on information related to individual authors far more than any other information provided. social context of Usenet newsgroups."

Student skills for this project

This project will be submitted by Ashwini Iyer. The primary skillset will be user experience skills and database skills. For phase I, user experience skills in information architecture, interaction design, usability design would be strong assets. A familiarity with tagging and social software could be considered an asset. This project does not require PHP skills but previous experience with programming languages and a willingness to learn quickly would be beneficial. For phase II, course work in databases, data visualization, data mining, data warehousing at a graduate level would be beneficial.