CS 4472: Design of Online Communities

• Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital by Robert Putnam
• Persistent and Pervasive Community: New Communication Technologies and the Future of Community by Keith Hampton

• Meetup

• The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, chapters one and two. (in book store)
• The Heart of the Well in The Virtual Community, by Howard Rheingold.
• Video: How to Live in a City - 1964 by William Whyte (18 minutes)

• Reddit, especially smaller subreddits like the Georgia Tech subreddit

• Short paper on best and worst experiences

• Interviewing as Qualitative Research, by IE Seidman, chapters 1, 4, and 6
• Just Awful Enough: the functional dysfunction of the something awful forums by Pater et al, proceedings of CHI 2014 (revised version of community study paper for this class)

• Methodology Matters by Joseph E. McGrath

• Club Penguin

• Post an idea for an online site that you think is worth discussing in class on the T-square wiki. Describe why briefly (a sentence or a short paragraph).

• Interviewing as Qualitative Research, by IE Seidman, chapter 5
• Teaching Students to Study Online Communities Ethically by Amy Bruckman. Journal of Information Ethics 15:2, 82-98, fall 2006.
• Ethics for community study projects summary
• "DeviantArt: A Constructionist Community of Practice for Artists" by Barbara J. Ericson and Umashanthi Pavalanathan (shared as a resource on T-Square)

• The Belmont Report
• US Title 45 Regulations
• "Go Away":Participants Objections to Being Studied and the Ethics of Chatroom Research by Jim Hudson and Amy Bruckman. The Information Society, 20:127-139, 2004

• Georgia Tech IRB training
• Snopes

• Obtain ethics certification via the online basic course, if you do not already have certification. (Group 2 Social / Behavioral Research Investigators and Key Personnel - Basic Course)

• Studying the Amateur Artist by Amy Bruckman
• Georgia Tech's IRB information (browse)
• "Interviewing Members of Online Communities: a Practical Guide to Recruiting Participants" by Amy Bruckman (draft is a resource on t-square, bruckman-recruiting-may18-2010.doc)

• fmlife

• Finding One's Own Space in Cyberspace, by Amy Bruckman
• Communicative Subtlety in Multimedia Chat by John Suler
• Design Principles for Online Communities by Peter Kollock
• Nine Principles of Community Design by Amy Jo Kim
• Understanding the Internet's Present, and Values-Based Design of its Future by Amy Bruckman

• Project proposals

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman. Pages 1-58, intro & most of chapter 1.

• Wakie (mobile app)

• Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community by Judith Donath
• Separting Fact From Fiction: An Examination of Deceptive Self-Presentation in Online Dating Profiles by Catalina Toma, Jeffrey Hancock, and Nicole Ellison

• HW: Interview with a classmate

• The Strange Case of the Lectronic Lover by Lindsay Van Gelder
• Gender Swapping on the Internet by Amy Bruckman

• Rookie Mag
• You Be Mom

• We need online alter egos now more than ever by Judith Donath, Wired Magazine
• 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community by Michael Bernstein, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, et. al.

• The Politics of 'Real Names': Power, Context, and Controling Networked Publics by danah boyd

• Whisper

• HW: Field notes

• Do Artifacts Have Politics? (Use library web localizer to get free access). by Langdon Winner. (in The Whale and The Reactor)
• Code v2.0 by Lawrence Lessig. Chapters 3& 7. (Available free online, but you may wish to buy it anyway.)

• Kiva

• "Roles: from Newcomer to Old-Timer," Chapters 4 in Community Building on the Web by Amy Jo Kim (electronic reserve)
• Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs by Richard Bartle

• HW: First interview transcript

• A Rape in Cyberspace by Julian Dibbell
• Regulating Behavior in Online Communities by Sara Kiesler, Robert Kraut, Paul Resnick, & Aniket Kittur
• Ask Not For Whom the Bell Trolls, This American Life Podcast (21 minutes) (Warning: strong language. Bleeped version available.)

• Approaches to Managing Deviant Behavior in Virtual Communities, panel, CHI 94, by Amy Bruckman, Pavel Curtis, Cliff Figallo, and Brenda Laurel
• Managing Deviant Behavior in Online Communities., panel, CHI 2006. Amy Bruckman, Catalina Danis, Cliff Lampe, Janet Sternberg, and Chris Waldron.
• "The Purple Guest" (Chapter 3) in "My Tiny Life" by Julian Dibbell
• "Banished!" and "Who Let the Nazi In?" (chapters 7 and 8) in Cyberville by Stacy Horn, pp. 157-220.

• LambdaMOO, following these instructions.
• Project Misery (just read web page)
• Cave Your Trolls (just read web page)

• Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation by King, et al.
• Algorithmically Bypassing Censorship on Sina Weibo with Nondeterministic Homophone Substitutions
  by Hiruncharoenvate, et al.

• HW: Second interview transcript

• The Secret Rules of the Internet, The murky history of moderation and how it's shaping the future of free speech by Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly

• HW: Third interview transcript

• "Lurker demographics: counting the silent" by Blair Nonnecke and Jenny Preece. Proceedings of CHI 2000, April 1 - 6, 2000, The Hague, Netherlands, pp. 73-80. (ACM DL)
• Understandng Deja Reviewers by Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios

Optional, for further reading:

• Slash(dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space by Cliff Lampe and Paul Resnick

• Slashdot

• Privacy and human behavior in the age of information, Alessandro Acquisti et al, Science 347, 509 (2015) (use library's web localizer to get free access)
• "Anonymized" data really isn't

• Best Data Practices for Online Service Providers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• "Privacy policies as decision-making tools, an evaluation of online privacy notices." by Carlos Jensen and Colin Potts. Proceedings of CHI 2004. (ACM DL)

• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Privacy (browse)
• Read the privacy policy of one online site you use. List your site on the wiki, making sure no one else in the class has picked your site. Come to class prepared to discuss the policy.

• Puppy Poo Girl
• Behind The Alarming Rise Of The Online Vigilante Detective
• How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life, New York Times, February 2015

• Wikipedia article on Internet Vigilantism

• "Battle Lessons: What the Generals Don't Know" by Dan Baum in The New Yorker Magazine - Jan 17, 2005, pg 42-48
• The Polymath Project: Lessons from a Successful Online Collaboration in Mathematics by Justin Cranshaw and Aniket Kittur

• Cyberspace is Not Disneyland
• Hanny's Voorwerp
• Listen: Dutch Teacher Stumbles Upon A Space 'Ghost' (NPR). Interview with Hanny van Arkel
• Algorithm discovery by protein folding game players by Khatib, Cooper et al
• Fold It (Download and play.)

• Scratch
• Zooniverse (Pick a project (like Galaxy Zoo) and label at least two items).

• Community Study Papers

• Locating the Internet in the Parks of Havana by Michaelanne Dye et. al.

• Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia. by Susan Bryant, Andrea Forte, and Amy Bruckman. Proceedings of Group 2005.
• Can History be Open Source? by Roy Rosenzweig

• Everything2 (Pick an article and compare it to Wikipedia on the same topic.)

• Design Papers

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond
• Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm by Yochai Benkler
(Read the introduction carefully. Rest of the text is recommended but optional. Footnotes are optional.)

• GitHub
• Creative Commons