Paper about software for observational web data collection available
(Update: revised paper) A paper I wrote with Chris Karr of Audacious Software called “Researching real-world Web use with Roxy: Collecting observational Web data with informed consent” is now available online. It was first presented as part of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics annual conference.
Abstract:
Outside of a lab environment, it has been difficult for researchers to collect both behavioral and self-reported Web-use data from the same participants. To address this challenge we created Roxy, open source software that collects real-world Web-use data with participants’ informed consent. Roxy gathers Web log data as well as the text and HTML code of each page visited by participants. We describe Roxy’s data gathering capabilities and search functions and then illustrate how we used the software in a multi-method study. The use case examines selective exposure to political communication during the November 2010 U.S. general election campaign.
I’m very please to announce this online publication of the conference paper. A revised version will be submitted for publication in the JITP itself as a workbench note shortly. The website for the software is roxyproxy.org.
Chronicle of Higher Education article about my research
Greetings to those of you who may have found my website via the Chronicle of Higher Education’s recent story about my recently published research paper with Eszter Hargittai called “Wikipedia’s Editing Process Still a Mystery to Students.” Overall I’m happy with the post in the Chronicle, I just want to make a clarification. It says “Of the students in the study, 77 percent had used Wikipedia at some point in their research” — That’s just during the web browsing we observed in the study itself.
I’ve been remiss in posting to this blog recently for a variety of reasons, chiefly because I’m analyzing the (massive amounts of) data I collected for my dissertation about the role of technology in citizens’ selection of political news and information during the November mid-term election campaign. Also, I’m working on documenting the software I created with the help of Audacious Software to collect real-world web data for my dissertation, which is called Roxy.
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