Social Media Projects
Social Media: Defining and discovering social context and using it for personal media management.
With computing becoming increasingly mobile in the wake of powerful, portable media devices, the task of defining and extracting *context* has become a hot research topic. No longer can the user be assumed to be in 'the office', their full concentration given to the software of the moment. Research has aimed to make devices more adaptive to their contents, their users, and their environments. As social beings, an important category is social context. For personal media management it could be argued that social context contains the set of conceptions most often brought to bear on their contents: Where was this? Who is that? What activity were we all doing there? Who do I want to share this with? This project aims to use signals obtained from unobtrusive data sources available with today's devices, such as location information (e.g. GPS), to extract socially meaningful indices for personal media. Social spheres are locations of significance, such as Home, Work and Recreational Area. Social networks of social ties capture the dynamic web of relationships in which we are embedded. Social rhythms arise as patterns across these former elements and allow even finer resolution categorization of activities that occur within them in space and time. All of this information can then be used, at the very least, to provide new ways to index and interact with our own, or others', media collections. Initial work in this area focused on discovering the social spheres Work, Home and Other from raw, noisy GPS traces of everyday life, and used this information together with the presence of known persons to provide a novel personal media exploration environment called Socio-Graph. The interface aimed to allow simple search and filtering on the concepts most people innately bring to their personal media: social.
Latest work on the Social Reader
Social Reader is a feed-reader-cum-social-network aggregator that mines comments from social media in order to display a user's relational neighbourhood as a navigable social network. Social Reader's network visualization enhances mutual awareness of blogger communities, facilitates their exploration and growth with a fully drag and drop interface, and provides novel ways to filter and summarize people, groups, blogs and comments.
New mood-based features have been added to Social Reader. Mood is particularly relevant to social media, reflecting the personal nature of the medium.
Mood is indicated in the image above by colour-coded rings which have been mapped on the mood-to-colour map below.
