[Bigbang-dev] Clarifying theoretical commitments going into IETF 116

[Sebastian Benthall]

>
> From a computational perspective, in my opinion from what you are saying,
> doing CI would mean I just look at the flow of dialogues, i.e., turn by
> turn or order of the messages (posts and comments) that one and others have
> posted, but in a graph theory sense, I can ignore the temporal aspect and
> treat all the conversation together. Technically, this may avoid getting
> into issues of short text, noisy text that some statistical NLP methods
> become difficult due to short context. This may also be less complex
> computationally.
>

Aha. I see what you mean. This does seem computationally tractable.
It reminds me of some of the earliest work I did with BigBang.

What comes to mind is that different working groups might be different
'contexts' and so have different patterns to how the discourse unfolds.

To be honest, this is a bit of a stretch for CI as envisioned by Helen
Nissenbaum. But when I originally approached Helen after working on
BigBang, I also was thinking about mailings lists as contexts and messages
sent as information flows. I suppose making this connection in a
publication would be worthwhile :)

To really make it work with CI, we would need to also track personal
identifiers within email bodies. I.e not only replies to people, but also
references to people. (Maybe this would potentially include legal persons,
such as company names.) So entity recognition would be great for this, if
it was working.

What kind of graph metrics would you find worth tracking?


> If the WN world view is so fine-grained that we need to look at timestamps
> and model in continuous time domain, then for me I think that is too
> challenging, albeit interesting. If WN is just major events and thus we can
> split our data into windows or chunks manually, then we avoid the problem.
>

I need to dig deeper to recall exactly how the computational sociology
components of WN work.
But my sense is that the qualitative theory in WN is much richer than its
technical operationalization.
That leaves a big gap that we can start trying to fill.

I don't think continuous time analysis will be necessary; windows or chunks
should be fine.

- S
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