How can our experiences be followed?

Several days ago i read somewhere that experiences influence our emotions. That is a direct alarm for me to summarize that all operations we are performing in our life, at least virtual one, play roles in emotions we are producing. Therefore I can conclude that those two notions, operations (participatory design methods, media processes, user actions - call them as you want) and emotions are connected notions. One can either follow the actions accompanied with emotions like it was done in Situation Modeling and Smart Context Retrieval with Semantic Web Technology and Conflict Resolution or differentiate between those as different actors of a community system (when presented like an actor network model).

Some scholars follow the experiences through ontologies that help to summarize semantics in an ontology object and highlight connections between different entries. The approach applied in PALADIN: A Pattern Based Approach to Knowledge Discovery in Digital Social Networks uses a pattern approach. One can say that patterns can be like ontology objects when those are defined by the semantics and relationships between patterns are specified. Although a higher level of abstaction(for ontologies are concepts) is lacking, it is a moot point. The hierarchy can be specified by relations. Patterns exceed onlologies by a relatively easy language. So that it is natural for a user to construct a semantic knowledge base for his needs.

Emotional Web Intelligence

I was always interested how it is possible to analyse non-cognitive side of human interactions. What i have done in my master thesis was the term frequency of categories words for a thread in a mailing list. The categories was kindly presented from James W. Pennebaker. He and his colleagues did a great job on creating the repositiry of the words that are classified according to the emotions/feelings people try to express in their writing. They use the repository now in their text analysis software.

A community of a mailing list was characterized by an emotional vector as well as by a structural vector. I examined all communities vectors in order to find similar communities. The results for clusters based on structure and clusters based on emotional analysis were different.

Analysing all the results i suppose that the situation we can see in a network structure is not correlating with the emotional preferences. Human interactions depend on many other different factors like prestige (created through a network structure), duties (put by a organizational structure) and many others.

We have to communicate to somebody we don't like to. But will such a communication be successful, efficient and enduring?

The human interactions can be perfectly visualized with the help of graphs:


and can be structurally analysed:


In our example the node 25 and the node 60 are not interacting, though they produce and consume the correlating number of words. However, those words possibly are produced by the node 26 who is between those nodes. Concerning to the other nodes, it is no evident correlation in characteristics was discovered. Anyway, if we switch to the node 36 characteristics we can’t find any value that will correlate with the cognitive characteristics of the nodes. The node 36 has no edges with the others and that might be a reason. Nevertheless, according to numerous experiments we could not prove the assumption that the interacting with each other members possess correlating or non-correlating emotional vectors.

Anyway emotions can be used during graph visualization so that it will be clear who is connected with whom non-cognitively(by colors, or by positions in a graph).

I would like to follow the community evolution and its dependency on emotions. Moreover it is useful to focus and discover other dependencies that influences on sucess or failure of communities.

Media operations

Since i finished my master thesis a lot of questions left opened for me. One of those is the observation of media operations, somebody may call it events, others participatory design methods.

I defined the following table:



according to media centric theory of learning based on the
"The Knowledge-Creating company:How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation" from Nonaka and Takeuchi
and
"Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity" from Wenger.

The theory was utilized in "Do you know a similar project I can learn from?" Self-monitoring of Communities of Practice in the Cultural Sciences by Klamma, Spaniol and Jarke

The engaged actors are those presented on the model:


Today I find very interesting paper in the same direction. The scholars tries to discover communities based on mutual awareness: Blog Community Discovery and Evolution Based on Mutual Awareness Expansion by Lin, Sundaram, Chi, Tatemura and Tseng. I found a minor number of resources to the topic thus each new paper is a treasury.