We are still here . . .

So it has been brought to our attention that we have neglected this blog a little but I promise it is because we are working hard. Anyway a quick update on what I have been doing . . .

I have been reading a lot around online forums for a paper about Zooniverse. I have been working on my Mechanical Turk study. I have researched elements of Gamification and Motivation.

This is a brilliant video about Motivation by Daniel Pink:

I would highly recommend this book for a clear explanation of Gamification and game features:

As usual there are different approaches, definitions and explanations of gamification elements and features. Deterding et al explain that some researchers intentionally do not define gamification as it is an evolving area and a constraining definition could cause ambiguity and vagueness as the scope changes.

Click to access MindTrek_Gamification_PrinterReady_110806_SDE_accepted_LEN_changes_1.pdf

I have created several mock ups for this new Mechanical Turk interface and I’m currently in the process of building these pages.

I really like this tool which allows you to build attractive interface designs quickly:

https://moqups.com/

So I had better get back to fIghting with CSS and my screen layout. We will try and update you soon.

Have I bitten off more than I can chew?

Sorry for the slight delay posting, this week has been a little crazy with graduation. So my latest news . . .

So to further my role as the usability/design guru I have been allocated a new project. I am exploring what effect the user interface has on Turkers (paid participants on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project) in relation to accuracy and efficiency of results. This sounds like a fantastic opportunity to further investigate the impact of design. The idea is to “gamify” the interface to add extra motivation incentives.

I have spent the last two days reading papers about crowdsourcing and the recent papers on mechanical turk. Even in this early stage of research I am surprised by several of the paper’s finding, including the fact that the combined efforts of non-experts can be just as good as experts in accurately completing tasks (http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W10/W10-0701.pdf). I also hadn’t considered the different ways that users can be exploited (possibly a strong word) to complete tasks which computers currently cannot do. Several of these tasks invovled pairing up with a random stranger online and trying to guess the same labels for a photo or guess the word that the other is trying to describe. For a full explanation on these gamification models see Designing with a Purpose (http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1378704.1378719). So before I go on for pages, repeating all my reading I should probably say what else I have been getting up to.

I have signed on to CodeSchool to try and familiarise myself with angular.js, more jQuery, backbone.js (just to name a few). I would highly recommend it (apart from the fact that you have to pay). However, for a quick month of intensive learning it seems pretty worth it (http://www.codeschool.com/). I would also recommend having a look at Codecademy which is free and I think a fantastic tool. Unfortunately it didn’t have the range of courses that I required but for the well known languages, definitely worth a look (http://www.codecademy.com/).

I have also started . . .

It is really easy to read but I have to admit I’m not as far as I would like as I have been reading all this other material as well :p.

There is more to say but even more to do so I should probably get back to it. In my next post I will let you know how I am finding Mechanical Turk and whether the implementation of this user interface is quite as traumatic as I am starting to fear it might be.

P.S. If anyone has any useful tips about implementing dynamic pages on Mechanical Turk feel free to comment below =)

We have survived one week!

So we have all now introduced ourselves. I think it is fair to say we are settling in and starting to get to grips with what we have to do. Now that I have a computer which will happily let me use Excel and NodeXL I now feel like I am finally getting somewhere. Thursday I hit a brick wall and spent the whole day playing with VirtualBox and Linux but thankfully by the end of the day it seemed to have been sorted.

NodeXL is a fantastic tool which allows you to pull in data from twitter or other social networks. It generates network graphs which you can manipulate to understand the internal relationships or the selected users. It automatically generates in-degree, out-degree, betweenness centrality and clustering coefficients to name just a few of the outputs. If you are planning to do any analysis on social machines it is definitely worth a look

http://nodexl.codeplex.com/

I would say that yesterday was my favourite day so far. It feels like I am being paid to research and do things that I find really interested, what more could you ask for from a job? Max, a member of the SOCIAM group (he will probably be mentioned quite a lot as the interns desks surround his) has asked me to be the “usability/design czar”. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this wording but I am happy to take on the role. I have started to collect several books on my desk which I need to start working through. Tufte seems to be a must according to Max! This is a great sub-project for me as I researched usability and user interface for my third year project.

To live up to this new “usability/design” title I will need to update/improve my programming skills. I have been directed to the ultimate book on JavaScript (by Max) – Javascript: The Good Parts, which I have started to work through.

http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/JavaScript.html?id=PXa2bby0oQ0C&redir_esc=y

I will keep you updated on my reading progress and any tricks and shortcuts that I have learnt through my self-taught programming sessions.

Anna

We have arrived!

As this is the first post I should probably give a quick introduction. I am Anna, one of the interns working with the SOCIAM project this summer. Joining me are three other University of Southampton students: Gustavo, Yuki and Neal. We all have different skills and talents to bring to the projects and we are going to use this blog to share anything which we like, find interesting or think needs to be out there on the web.

Yesterday we got our bearings, ate pastries, and met Sir Nigel Shadbolt. We also played around with some fitness apps and gadgets. I have already spent £1.49 on a new heart rate monitoring app. This could become an expensive summer but I am excited about what we could all contribute to this project.

Pastry + Scales = Slightly Ironic