Showing papers by "David R. Karger published in 2018"
23 Apr 2018
TL;DR: An initial set of indicators for article credibility defined by a diverse coalition of experts, which originate from both within an article's text as well as from external sources or article metadata are presented.
Abstract: The proliferation of misinformation in online news and its amplification by platforms are a growing concern, leading to numerous efforts to improve the detection of and response to misinformation. Given the variety of approaches, collective agreement on the indicators that signify credible content could allow for greater collaboration and data-sharing across initiatives. In this paper, we present an initial set of indicators for article credibility defined by a diverse coalition of experts. These indicators originate from both within an article's text as well as from external sources or article metadata. As a proof-of-concept, we present a dataset of 40 articles of varying credibility annotated with our indicators by 6 trained annotators using specialized platforms. We discuss future steps including expanding annotation, broadening the set of indicators, and considering their use by platforms and the public, towards the development of interoperable standards for content credibility.
102 citations
20 Apr 2018
TL;DR: Squadbox, a tool to help recipients of email harassment coordinate a "squad" of friend moderators to shield and support them during attacks, is presented.
Abstract: Communication platforms have struggled to provide effective tools for people facing harassment online. We conducted interviews with 18 recipients of online harassment to understand their strategies for coping, finding that they often resorted to asking friends for help. Inspired by these findings, we explore the feasibility of friendsourced moderation as a technique for combating online harassment. We present Squadbox, a tool to help recipients of email harassment coordinate a "squad" of friend moderators to shield and support them during attacks. Friend moderators intercept email from strangers and can reject, organize, and redirect emails, as well as collaborate on filters. Squadbox is designed to let its users implement highly customized workflows, as we found in interviews that harassment and preferences for mitigating it vary widely. We evaluated Squadbox on five pairs of friends in a field study, finding that participants could comfortably navigate around privacy and personalization concerns.
34 citations
01 Nov 2018
TL;DR: An analysis of Requests for Comments (RfCs), one of the main vehicles on Wikipedia for formally resolving a policy or content dispute, and a model that predicts whether an RfC will go stale with 75.3% accuracy is developed.
Abstract: Resolving disputes in a timely manner is crucial for any online production group. We present an analysis of Requests for Comments (RfCs), one of the main vehicles on Wikipedia for formally resolving a policy or content dispute. We collected an exhaustive dataset of 7,316 RfCs on English Wikipedia over the course of 7 years and conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis into what issues affect the RfC process. Our analysis was informed by 10 interviews with frequent RfC closers. We found that a major issue affecting the RfC process is the prevalence of RfCs that could have benefited from formal closure but that linger indefinitely without one, with factors including participants' interest and expertise impacting the likelihood of resolution. From these findings, we developed a model that predicts whether an RfC will go stale with 75.3% accuracy, a level that is approached as early as one week after dispute initiation.
16 citations
11 Oct 2018
TL;DR: A tool is prototyped to link online discussion of code directly to the code it discusses, which creates post-literate programs that convey information to future developers.
Abstract: The literate programming paradigm presents a program interleaved with natural language text explaining the code's rationale and logic. While this is great for program readers, the labor of creating literate programs deters most program authors from providing this text at authoring time. Instead, as we determine through interviews, developers provide their design rationales after the fact, in discussions with collaborators. We propose to capture these discussions and incorporate them into the code. We have prototyped a tool to link online discussion of code directly to the code it discusses. Incorporating these discussions incrementally creates post-literate programs that convey information to future developers.
11 citations
26 Jun 2018
TL;DR: It is shown that a combination of automatic classification and visualization of cognitive engagement anchored in the text can give teachers valuable insight into their students' thinking, suggesting ways to modify their lectures and their course readings to improve learning.
Abstract: Reading material has been part of course teaching for centuries, but until recently students' engagement with that reading, and its effect on their learning, has been difficult for teachers to assess. In this article, we explore the idea of examining cognitive engagement---a measure of how deeply a student is thinking about course material, which has been shown to correlate with learning gains---as it varies over different sections of the course reading material. We show that a combination of automatic classification and visualization of cognitive engagement anchored in the text can give teachers---and not only researchers---valuable insight into their students' thinking, suggesting ways to modify their lectures and their course readings to improve learning. We demonstrate this approach with analyzing students' comments in two different courses (Physics and Biology) using the Nota Bene annotation platform.
9 citations
11 Oct 2018
TL;DR: This work explores an extension to the Mavo language that enables non-programmers to author these richer data update actions and shows that it lets authors create a more powerful set of applications than they could previously, while adding little additional complexity to the authoring process.
Abstract: Mavo is a small extension to the HTML language that empowers non-programmers to create simple web applications. Authors can mark up any normal HTML document with attributes that specify data elements that Mavo makes editable and persists. But while applications authored with Mavo allow users to edit individual data items, they do not offer any programmatic data actions that can act in customizable ways on large collections of data simultaneously or that modify data according to a computation. We explore an extension to the Mavo language that enables non-programmers to author these richer data update actions. We show that it lets authors create a more powerful set of applications than they could previously, while adding little additional complexity to the authoring process. Through user evaluations, we assess how closely our data update syntax matches how novice authors would instinctively express such actions, and how well they are able to use the syntax we provided.
6 citations