Please join us at the CIS 720 Seminar this Monday, November 2 (4:30p-5:30p HST) for Dr. Lala Hajibayova‘s presentation — “From a research question to a research agenda: Investigation of individuals’ shared perceptions and engagements with the cultural objects in digital network environment.”
Title:
From a research question to a research agenda: Investigation of individuals’ shared perceptions and engagements with the cultural objects in digital network environment.
Abstract:
This talk presents an overview of series of studies examining patterns of user-generated content to understand whether – and if so how – user-generated content facilitates information representation, organization and discovery. Applying combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods to large-scale social network platforms data, this research provides insights into psychological aspects of user-generated reviews as well as sheds light on how the language that individuals utilize in crowd-generated reviews, coupled with the system affordances and underlying algorithms of social network systems, affects perceptions, consumption, and overall cultural production. For example, analysis of nearly half a million Goodreads user-generated reviews revealed the high rate of function words and positive emotion words, suggesting that reviewers tend to convey their opinions in order to influence other individuals’ reading choices. Overall, individuals’ cultural engagements displayed a low cultural capital and symbolic mastery (such as discussion of aesthetic criteria and knowledge of the artists and/or writer), emphasizing embodied experiences more than high aesthetic discourse in evaluation of cultural experiences. As user-generated contents have become part of individuals’ daily interactions with information systems, this research raises concerns about an algorithmically reinforced sales model on cultural products as well as the cultural prestige of reviews.
Bio:
Lala Hajibayova is associate professor in the School of Information at the Kent State University. Lala’s research examines interplay between individuals’ contextualized experiences of engaging with objects and potential of individuals’ collective actions to enrich systems of representation, organization, and discovery as well as to facilitate design of human centered systems that embrace multiplicity of views and comply with ethical norms. Her research has appeared in highly regarded information science academic journals, such as Information Processing & Management, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Information Science and Journal of Documentation.