Browsing by Author "Dix, Alan"

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    Designing for Schadenfreude (or, how to express well-being and see if youʼre boring people)
    André, Paul; Schraefel, M.C.; Dix, Alan; White, Ryen W.; Bernstein, Michael; Luther, Kurt (ACM, 2010)
    This position paper presents two studies of content not normally expressed in status updates—well-being and status feedback—and considers how they may be processed, valued and used for potential quality-of-life benefits in terms of personal and social reflection and awareness. Do I Tweet Good? (poor grammar intentional) is a site investigating more nuanced forms of status feedback than current microblogging sites allow, towards understanding self-identity, reflection, and online perception. Healthii is a tool for sharing physical and emotional well-being via status updates, investigating concepts of self-reflection and social awareness. Together, these projects consider furthering the value of microblogging on two fronts: 1) refining the online personal/social networking experience, and 2) using the status update for enhancing the personal/social experience in the offline world, and considering how to leverage that online/offline split. We offer results from two different methods of study and target groups—one co-workers in an academic setting, the other followers on Twitter—to consider how microblogging can become more than just a communication medium if it facilitates these types of reflective practice.
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    Reorganize Your Blogs: Supporting Blog Re-visitation with Natural Language Processing and Visualization
    Niu, Shuo; McCrickard, D. Scott; Stelter, Timothy L.; Dix, Alan; Taylor, G. Don (MDPI, 2019-10-07)
    Temporally-connected personal blogs contain voluminous textual content, presenting challenges in re-visiting and reflecting on experiences. Other data repositories have benefited from natural language processing (NLP) and interactive visualizations (VIS) to support exploration, but little is known about how these techniques could be used with blogs to present experiences and support multimodal interaction with blogs, particularly for authors. This paper presents the effect of reorganization—reorganizing the large blog set with NLP and presenting abstract topics with VIS—to support novel re-visitation experiences to blogs. The BlogCloud tool, a blog re-visitation tool that reorganizes blog paragraphs around user-searched keywords, implements reorganization and similarity-based content grouping. Through a public use session with bloggers who wrote about extended hikes, we observed the effect of NLP-based reorganization in delivering novel re-visitation experiences. Findings suggest that the re-presented topics provide new reflection materials and re-visitation paths, enabling interaction with symbolic items in memory.