News Story

Best paper award at SocialCom

Harith Alani, Saturday 8 Sep 2012

And the best paper award of the ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing goes to …….

Claudia Wagner, Matthew Rowe, Markus Strohmaier and Harith Alani: "Ignorance isn’t Bliss: An Empirical Analysis of Attention Patterns in Online Communities"

This paper presents work that identiﬁes attention patterns in community forums and shows how such patterns differ between communities of different types. The exploration was facilitated through a two-stage approach that provided novel features able to capture the community and focus information pertaining to the creators of community content.

Results showed that the attention patterns of different communities are impacted by different factors and therefore suggest that these patterns may only be valid in a certain context and that the existence of generic attention patterns in social media forums is highly questionable.

We concluded that ignorance isn’t a bliss since understanding the idiosyncrasies of individual communities seem to be crucial for predicting which post will catch the attention of a community and manages to stimulate lengthy discussions in a forum

The work was the fruit of a collaboration between KMi and Graz University, initiated by Claudia’s internship in KMi in 2011.