CONSUMPTION OF CONTENT ON THE WEB: AN ECOLOGICALLY INSPIRED PERSPECTIVE

Jared Lorince, Peter Todd, Filippo, Edward J Castronova, Robert Goldstone, Tim Rubin, Chris Harshaw, Simon Dedeo, Johan Bollen, David Crandall, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Radicchi (+6 others)
2016 unpublished
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iv To my father, Jay Lorince. I made it, Dad. v Acknowledgements The six years it has taken me to complete my PhD have been eventful, to say the least. It seems I have compressed many of life's major events, both good and bad, into this span of time, and as such I find myself particularly grateful to the various people who have supported me through the process. My various co-authors and collaborators must be mentioned, as they have directly contributed to elements of the
more » ... presented in this thesis. In particular, I thank Kenny Joseph, Sam Zorowitz, and Jaimie Murdock for their help on papers that now form part of this thesis, and Saurabh Malviya, who helped show me the ropes of database design and other technical issues when I was still a novice programmer. Debora Donato is another co-author, but much more than that. As my supervisor at two internships (first at Yahoo! Labs, then at StumbleUpon) she has opened up opportunities to me for which I am deeply grateful, and has offered invaluable academic, intellectual, and professional guidance over the years. Indiana University has provided a stimulating and welcoming environment for my research and academic training, and I can't begin to count the number of conversations I've had with faculty, graduate students, and post-docs -both within and outside of my home department -that have contributed to the work in this thesis and my general academic development. I count myself lucky to have studied at a university with such a strong culture of collaboration and openness. While I am surely unfairly forgetting some people, I extend my thanks (in no particular order), to , and the various members of the Concepts and Percepts Lab. My vi committee members Ted Castronova, Fil Menczer, and Rob Goldstone have been mentors of particular value. Special thanks go to my colleagues in the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition Lab. To Sam Cohen and Sam Nordli in particular, I couldn't have asked for better labmates, or friends. I of course should mention the funding sources that have permitted to me focus on my research over the years. Most recently I was supported by the "What drives human cognitive evolution" grant provided by the John Templeton Foundation, and for my first three years of graduate study I was funded as an NSF IGERT research fellow. I thank my parents, Jan and Jay, without whose love and support I never would have made it this far. My father, who passed away during the course of my studies, isn't here to see me graduate, but I know how important it was to him and how proud he would be to read these words. My wife, Elena, has been a pillar of love and support that I have leaned upon more times than I care to admit. She has been my friend, confidant, motivator, and nurse (though mountain bike accidents, nasal surgery, and more). She has given me the confidence to keep moving forward when I have doubted myself. She has been the embodiment of love, safety, and family for me. And together we brought our son Ivar into this world, one accomplishment I am more proud of than my PhD. I love them both more than words can say. Finally, I must thank my advisor, Peter Todd. A PhD student's advisor of course always plays an important role, but Peter is special. He has been a role model to me in every sense of the word, and has guided me through the PhD process while simultaneously encouraging me to develop my own academic identity. He has been such vii an integral and positive part of my graduate experience that I can honestly not imagine what grad school would have been without him. Peter, I am deeply and sincerely honored to call you my boss, my colleague, and my friend. viii Jared Lorince CONSUMPTION OF CONTENT ON THE WEB: AN ECOLOGICALLY INSPIRED PERSPECTIVE How do people search for and organize informational resources on the web? This dissertation explores this question in the context of music tagging and listening, incorporating web data mining and machine learning methods with theory from cognitive science. In particular, I draw inspiration from information foraging theory (and the earlier work on animal foraging on which it is based) and the ecological rationality research program. The three principal research questions my thesis addresses are the following: RQ1: Can we apply an ecological perspective to online music listening, and what novel insights does such a perspective offer? (Chapter 2) RQ2: How and why do people tag content in social Web environments? Specifically, I explore motivational factors around the highly variable levels of contribution to collaborative tagging systems, and present models of tagging built upon simple imitation heuristics. (Chapter 3) RQ3: How do patterns of content consumption and classification interact? As a case study of the interplay between tagging and consumption, I test whether tagging serves as an aid for future retrieval of content. (Chapter 4) Taken together, these research questions represent an integrative view of how humans interact with digital resources on the web, specifically with respect to music. There already exists a substantial literature on the two types of data I focus on here ix (music tagging and listening), but this dissertation makes a significant new contribution by framing both my research questions and analytic approaches in a psychologically and ecologically grounded manner. This link is most obvious in Chapter 2, where I offer a foraging-inspired perspective on music consumption, but is present throughout all my work, such as examining ecologically-based mechanisms of imitation in tagging behavior (Chapter 3) or exploring whether proposed motivational mechanisms behind tagging are consistent with observed interactions between tagging and listening (Chapter 4).
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