User:Healspersecond: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 19:10, 5 July 2019

About Me[edit]

My name is Charles Kiene, and I study online communities and moderation teams with the Community Data Science Collective at the University of Washington. I graduated with a double major in Communications and Social Sciences in 2015 from the University of Washington. I'm currently a first year MA/ PhD student in the Department of Communication under Benjamin Mako [1] as my advisor.

Methodologically, I have a lot of experience using qualitative techniques, like in-depth interviewing and ethnography. As part of my PhD program, I am training in statistical methods to also leverage big social media data in ways to analyze macro level trends of organizational behavior and management strategies of online communities. Below are the past projects I've worked on and the resulting publications.

Research on Reddit[edit]

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2858356

Surviving an "Eternal September": How an Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers - Abstract[edit]

"We present a qualitative analysis of interviews with participants in the NoSleep community within Reddit where millions of fans and writers of horror fiction congregate. We explore how the community handled a massive, sudden, and sustained increase in new members. Although existing theory and stories like Usenet's infamous "Eternal September" suggest that large influxes of newcomers can hurt online communities, our interviews suggest that NoSleep survived without major incident. We propose that three features of NoSleep allowed it to manage the rapid influx of newcomers gracefully: (1) an active and well-coordinated group of administrators, (2) a shared sense of community which facilitated community moderation, and (3) technological systems that mitigated norm violations. We also point to several important trade-offs and limitations."

Research on World of Warcraft[edit]

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3274358

Abstract for Managing Organizational Culture in Online Group Mergers - Abstract[edit]

"Research in social computing has typically conceptualized community growth as a process through which a group welcomes newcomers individually. However, online communities also grow through formal and informal mergers, where groups of newcomers with shared experiences join in batches. To understand this process, we conducted a six month, comparative ethnography of two mergers of World of Warcraft raid guilds. While one merger led to a single, thriving community, the other led to the dissolution of both pre-merger groups. Analysis of our ethnographic data suggests that differences in managing organizational culture (a concept drawn from organization studies) led the successful and failed cases to diverge. The study contributes to our understanding of why some attempts to integrate members of different communities are more successful than others. We outline several ways that community leaders, researchers, and designers can effectively take organizational culture into account."

Research on Discord[edit]

We investigated the experiences of moderation teams that expanded their online communities from one platform Reddit to Discord, as well as the strategies of adapting to the new platform, through a series of interviews with moderators.

Currently under review for publication.

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-[[File:ck1.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Charlie standing in front of a lime factory in San Juan Island, WA.]]
+==About Me==
+My name is Charles Kiene, and I study online communities and moderation teams with the Community Data Science Collective at the University of Washington. I graduated with a double major in Communications and Social Sciences in 2015 from the University of Washington. I'm currently a first year MA/ PhD student in the Department of Communication under Benjamin Mako [https://mako.cc/academic/] as my advisor.
+Methodologically, I have a lot of experience using qualitative techniques, like in-depth interviewing and ethnography. As part of my PhD program, I am training in statistical methods to also leverage big social media data in ways to analyze macro level trends of organizational behavior and management strategies of online communities. Below are the past projects I've worked on and the resulting publications.
-==About Me==
+===Research on Reddit===
-My name is Charles Kiene, and I study online communities with the Community Data Science Collective at the University of Washington. I graduated with a double major in Communications and Social Sciences in 2015 from the University of Washington, and I'm currently in the process of applying to graduate programs in the fields of human-computer interactions and computer-supported cooperative work.
+https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2858356
-===Experience as a researcher===
+====Surviving an "Eternal September": How an Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers - Abstract====
+<blockquote>"We present a qualitative analysis of interviews with participants in the NoSleep community within Reddit where millions of fans and writers of horror fiction congregate. We explore how the community handled a massive, sudden, and sustained increase in new members. Although existing theory and stories like Usenet's infamous "Eternal September" suggest that large influxes of newcomers can hurt online communities, our interviews suggest that NoSleep survived without major incident. We propose that three features of NoSleep allowed it to manage the rapid influx of newcomers gracefully: (1) an active and well-coordinated group of administrators, (2) a shared sense of community which facilitated community moderation, and (3) technological systems that mitigated norm violations. We also point to several important trade-offs and limitations."
+</blockquote>
-In 2015, I led a research project with [https://mako.cc/academic/ Dr. Benjamin Mako Hill] (Assistant Professor) and [http://www.andresmh.com/ Andrés Monroy-Hernández] (Microsoft Researcher) that studied the effects on an online community when it is inundated with a massive influx of newcomers. Our study looked at the experience of Reddit's [https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/ /r/nosleep] community after it became a default subreddit in May, 2014. It's population skyrocketed from ~300,000 to 3,000,000 members in just over a year of it becoming a default subreddit. I recruited participants from the /r/nosleep community and talked with them individually in semi-structured interviews as a part of gathering qualitative data to understand how the community "survived" a massive influx of newcomers without it all falling apart. We published our analysis of the findings to the ACM's [https://chi2016.acm.org/wp/ Human-Computer Interaction Conference] in 2016. If you would like to read more about it, follow this link: [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2858356 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2858356]
+===Research on ''World of Warcraft''===
-===Experience as a gamer===
-If you're reading this, I may have reached out to you about participating in my current study on the phenomenon of guild mergers in ''World of Warcraft''. I started playing ''WoW'' in 2006 when my high school friends bought me a copy of the game just so I could "hang out" with them and play. After that first trek from the verdant, flora-covered island of Teldrassil to the snow covered mountains of Dun Morogh to reach the Dwarven city of Ironforge, I was hooked. Since then, I've been playing off and on with each new expansion. My favorite classes are Warlock and Shaman, and I've raided with both in casual and semi-hardcore progression guilds.
+https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3274358
-Other games I play: ''League of Legends, Overwatch, Hearthstone, FFXIV, Minecraft, Don't Starve''.
+====Abstract for Managing Organizational Culture in Online Group Mergers - Abstract====
+<blockquote>"Research in social computing has typically conceptualized community growth as a process through which a group welcomes newcomers individually. However, online communities also grow through formal and informal mergers, where groups of newcomers with shared experiences join in batches. To understand this process, we conducted a six month, comparative ethnography of two mergers of World of Warcraft raid guilds. While one merger led to a single, thriving community, the other led to the dissolution of both pre-merger groups. Analysis of our ethnographic data suggests that differences in managing organizational culture (a concept drawn from organization studies) led the successful and failed cases to diverge. The study contributes to our understanding of why some attempts to integrate members of different communities are more successful than others. We outline several ways that community leaders, researchers, and designers can effectively take organizational culture into account."</blockquote>
-==Guild Research==
+===Research on Discord===
-Research on guilds in Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) is not exactly new, and the method of ethnography for guild research isn't as strange  as one may think <ref>https://www.press.umich.edu/1597570/my_life_as_a_night_elf_priest</ref><ref>http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2145296</ref><ref>https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/78b8/15b6c980f54d6bf3da8c94d48431dbeb1717.pdf</ref><ref>http://103.28.21.22/Record/IOS10-oai:CiteSeerX.psu:10.1.1.118.4447</ref><ref>http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1460621</ref>. Over the past two decades, social scientists have studied guilds to contribute to the greater body of knowledge in human-computer interactions and computer-supported cooperative work. Guilds in ''World of Warcraft'' have fascinated me by their differences in how they're managed: some guilds are casual, social clubs while others are structured and highly organized.
-Research on guilds in Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) is not exactly new, and the method of ethnography for guild research isn't as strange  as one may think. Over the past two decades, social scientists have studied guilds to contribute to the greater bodies of knowledge in human-computer interactions and computer-supported cooperative work. Guilds in ''World of Warcraft'' have fascinated me by their differences in how they're managed: some guilds are casual, social clubs while others are structured and highly organized.
-This project focuses on the phenomenon of guild mergers, which is the process in which two guilds in an MMOG combine their rosters to form a larger group. Mergers of real world organizations are a natural occurrence, and some often happen when an organization is failing<ref>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1881771</ref>. For this research, my goals are to find guilds interested in merging with another guild, identify the differences in guild leadership, management, and organization, and then analyze the success or failure of the merger after gathering field notes and conducting interviews with guild leaders.
+We investigated the experiences of moderation teams that expanded their online communities from one platform Reddit to Discord, as well as the strategies of adapting to the new platform, through a series of interviews with moderators.
-==References==
+Currently under review for publication.
 <references />