Fwd: [cooperation] Measuring Cosmopolitanism on Twitter & Wikipedia

[Brian Keegan]

Should be a fun talk!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: J. Nathan Matias <natem...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 7:24 PM
Subject: [cooperation] Measuring Cosmopolitanism on Twitter & Wikipedia
To: "coope...@eon.law.harvard.edu" <coope...@eon.law.harvard.edu>

Hi everyone,

This week at 10am on Tuesday in MIT's E14-393, the MIT Center for Civic Media and Cooperation Working Group at Berkman are going to host a talk by Scott Hale of the Oxford Internet Institute. Scott and I met at CHI, where he presented some of his amazing PhD work:

Design and Multilingual Users on Twitter and Wikipedia

Over the past years, several user-generated content sites have emerged as truly global platforms with users from many different regions speaking many different languages.

In this talk I analyze the global connectivity of the retweet and mentions network on Twitter as well as edits to the top 46 language editions of Wikipedia in order to understand the extent to which language structures information and communication patterns on these two large user-generated content platforms. I examine the levels of cross-language activity and the roles of multilingual users (users engaging with content in multiple languages) as possible information brokers moving information between clusters of monolingual users.

Several commonalities as well as several differences emerge between the two platforms, from which I draw platform design (HCI) insights as well as broader societal insights. Overall, the research demonstrates the importance of considering language in designing user-generated content platforms

J. Nathan Matias : MIT Media Lab : Berkman Center : (001)857 277 3397 : @natematias