David Laniado

Eurecat · Digital Humanities

Background Despite the undisputed role of emotions in teamwork, not much is known about the make-up of emotions in online collaboration. Publicly available repositories of collaboration data, such as Wikipedia editor discussions, now enable the large-scale study of affect and dialogue in peer production. Methods We investigate the established Wiki...

Gender homophily, or the preference for interaction with individuals of the same gender, has been observed in many contexts, especially during childhood and adolescence. In this study we investigate such phenomenon by analyzing the interactions of the ∼10 million users of Tuenti, a Spanish social networking service popular among teenagers. In dyadi...

Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history and discussion section for every article,...

Background In their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase ‘divided they blog’, referring to a trend of cyberbalkanization in the political blogosphere, with liberal and conservative blogs tending to link to other blogs with a similar political slant, and not to one another. As political discussion and activity increasingly moves...

Barcelona en Com\'u, an emerging grassroots movement-party, won the 2015 Barcelona City Council election. This candidacy was devised by activists involved in the 15M movement in order to turn citizen outrage into political change. On the one hand, the 15M movement is based on a decentralized structure. On the other hand, political science literatur...

Wikipedia is an undeniably successful project, with unprecedented numbers of online volunteer contributors. After 2007, researchers started to observe that the number of active editors for the largest Wikipedias declined after rapid initial growth. Years after those announcements, researchers and community activists still need to understand how to...

In this paper, we present the Wikipedia Diversity Observatory, a project aimed to increase diversity within Wikipedia content. The project provides dashboards with visualizations and tools which show content gaps in terms of imbalances in the coverage of topics, and of concepts that are not shared across Wikipedia language editions. The dashboards...

Social media has become a key mechanism for the organization of grassroots movements. In the 2015 Barcelona City Council election, Barcelona en Comú, an emerging grassroots party, was the most voted one. This candidacy was devised by activists involved in the Spanish 15M movement in order to turn citizen outrage into political change. On the one ha...

Event detection in social media usually exploits information from social-networking platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook. However, previous research has suggested that Wikipedia constitutes a valuable source of information for the task of detecting breaking news. In this work we adapt a graph-based algorithm to the Wikipedia context, and compare...

When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version of an article. However, in its back-end there is much more: associated to each article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thousands of contributions, and it is not trivial to m...

Talk pages play a fundamental role in Wikipedia as the place for discussion and communication. In this work we use the comments on these pages to extract and study three networks, corresponding to different kinds of interactions. We find evidence of a specific assortativity profile which differentiates article discussions from personal conversation...

We present a comparative analysis of three tools for visually exploring the revision history of a Wikipedia article. We do so on the use case of "Gamergate Controversy", an article that has been the setting of a major editor dispute in the last half of 2014 and early 2015, resulting in multiple editor bans and gathering news media attention. We sho...

In this paper, we describe the motivations for the organization of the SISoM-workshop on Social Innovation and Social Media, to be held in the context of the ICWSM 2011. We argue that social innovation and social media, two trends, that have started independently, are bound to increasingly overlap. Social innovators, as well as the growing number o...

About a quarter of each Wikipedia language edition is dedicated to representing “local content”, i.e. the corresponding cultural context (geographical places, historical events, political figures, among others). To investigate the relevance of such content for users and communities, we present an analysis of reader and editor engagement in terms of...

Within the objectives of the H2020 DIAMOND project, the paper investigates women’s needs and expectations as users of the bike-sharing service managed by Syndicat Mixte Autolib et Velib Métropole in the territory of Paris Region-Petite Couronne (France). The paper presents a thematic literature review focused on gender inclusion in bike-sharing sch...

The chapter presents a data-driven approach based on the use of Geographic Information Systems and data analytics for assessing the level of accessibility for the women passengers of the railway network service managed by FGC—the Railway Agency in Catalunya (Spain). A series of geolocated open and proprietary datasets related to the land and sociod...

Surfing the links between Wikipedia articles constitutes a valuable way to acquire new knowledge related to a topic by exploring its connections to other pages. In this sense, Personalized PageRank is a well-known option to make sense of the graph of links between pages and identify the most relevant articles with respect to a given one; its perfor...

Increasing concerns over widespread manipulation have led to an examination of how the direct promotion of content affects user behavior. Several studies have hypothesized that promotions exert their effects through a combination of social influence and attention redirection that are presently not well understood. The particulars of the promotion m...

Wikipedia articles contain multiple links connecting a subject to other pages of the encyclopedia. In Wikipedia parlance, these links are called internal links or wikilinks. We present a complete dataset of the network of internal Wikipedia links for the 9 largest language editions. The dataset contains yearly snapshots of the network and spans 17...

In this paper we present the Wikipedia Cultural Diversity dataset. For each existing Wikipedia language edition, the dataset contains a classification of the articles that represent its associated cultural context, i.e. all concepts and entities related to the language and to the territories where it is spoken. We describe the methodology we employ...

In this paper we present the Wikipedia Cultural Diversity dataset. For each existing Wikipedia language edition, the dataset contains a classification of the articles that represent its associated cultural context, i.e. all concepts and entities related to the language and to the territories where it is spoken. We describe the methodology we employ...

Wikipedia articles contain multiple links connecting a subject to other pages of the encyclopedia. In Wikipedia parlance, these links are called internal links or wikilinks. We present a complete dataset of the network of internal Wikipedia links for the $9$ largest language editions. The dataset contains yearly snapshots of the network and spans $...

In this paper we present the Wikipedia Cultural Diversity dataset. For each existing Wikipedia language edition, the dataset contains a classification of the articles that represent its associated cultural context, i.e. all concepts and entities related to the language and to the territories where it is spoken. We describe the methodology we employ...

Online social networking services entice millions of users to spend hours every day interacting with each other. The focus of this work is to explain the effect that geographic distance has on online social interactions and, simultaneously, to understand the interplay between the social characteristics of friendship ties and their spatial propertie...

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the largest general information repository created through collaborative efforts from all over the globe. Despite the project's goal being to achieve the sum of human knowledge, there are strong content imbalances across the language editions. In order to quantify and investigate these imbalances, we study the i...

The massive amount and variety of city-related data raise equally big challenges to enable citizens to make sense of such data for improving their daily life and fostering collective decision making. The existing dashboards include limited pre-defined use cases which can only address the most common needs of citizens, but do not allow for personali...

The advent of massively interconnected technologies over cities raises equally big challenges regarding interfaces to enable citizens to make sense of urban data for improving their daily life and for fostering online participation. The existing dashboards include only pre-defined and limited use cases which can only address the most common needs o...

DECODE – DEcentralised Citizens Owned Data Ecosystem – aims to develop practical tools to protect people’s data and digital sovereignty. The project is building towards a data-centric digital economy where citizen data, generated by the Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor networks, is available for broader communal use, with appropriate privacy pro...

Online social networking services entice millions of users to spend hours every day interacting with each other. The focus of this work is to explain the effect that geographic distance has on online social interactions and, simultaneously, to understand the interplay between the social characteristics of friendship ties and their spatial propertie...

The emerging grassroots party Barcelona en Comú won the 2015 Barcelona City Council election. This candidacy was devised by activists involved in the Spanish 15M movement to transform citizen outrage into political change. On the one hand, the 15M movement was based on a decentralized structure. On the other hand, political science literature postu...

In the 2010 decade, Spanish politics have transitioned from bipartidism to multipartidism. This change led to an unstable situation which eventually led to the rare scenario of two general elections within six months. The two elections had a mayor difference: two important left-wing parties formed a coalition in the second election while they had r...

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is both a cultural reference to store, refer to, and organize digitized and digital information as well as a key contemporary digital heritage endeavor in itself. Capitalizing on this dual nature of the project, this article introduces Wikipedia as a digital gateway to and site of active engagement with cultural he...

Geoengineering is typically defined as a techno-scientific response to climate change that differs from mitigation and adaptation, and that includes diverse individual technologies, which can be classified as either solar radiation management or carbon dioxide removal. We analyse the representation of geoengineering on Wikipedia as a way of opening...

In this paper we study identity-based motivation in Wikipedia as a drive for editors to act congruently with their cultural identity values by contributing with content related to them. To assess its influence, we developed a computational method to identify articles related to the cultural identities associated to a language and applied it to 40 W...

Despite being freely accessible, open online community data can be difficult to use effectively. To access and analyze large amounts of data, researchers must become familiar with the meaning of data values. Then they must also find a way to obtain and process the datasets to extract their desired vectors of behavior and content. This process is fr...

Event detection in social media usually exploits information from social-networking platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook. However, previous research has suggested that Wikipedia constitutes a valuable source of information for the task of detecting breaking news. In this work we adapt a graph-based algorithm to the Wikipedia context, and compare...

When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version of an article. However, in its back-end there is much more: associated to each article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thousands of contributions, and it is not trivial to m...

We present a comparative analysis of three tools for visually exploring the revision history of a Wikipedia article. We do so on the use case of "Gamergate Controversy", an article that has been the setting of a major editor dispute in the last half of 2014 and early 2015, resulting in multiple editor bans and gathering news media attention. We sho...

Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history and discussion section for every article,...

Climaps.eu is an online atlas providing data, visualizations and commentaries about climate adaptation debate. It contains 33 issue-maps and 5 issue-stories. Each of the maps focuses on one issue in the adaptation debate and provides.The atlas is addressed to climate experts (negotiators, NGOs and companies concerned by global warming, journalistsl...

Climaps.eu is an online atlas providing data, visualizations and commentaries about climate adaptation debate. It contains 33 issue-maps and 5 issue-stories. Each of the maps focuses on one issue in the adaptation debate and provides.The atlas is addressed to climate experts (negotiators, NGOs and companies concerned by global warming, journalistsl...

User behavior in online social media is not static, it evolves through the years. In Twitter, we have witnessed a maturation of its platform and its users due to endogenous and exogenous reasons. While the research using Twitter data has expanded rapidly, little work has studied the change/evolution in the Twitter ecosystem itself. In this paper, w...

Gender differences in human social and communication behavior have long been observed in various contexts. This study investigates such differences in the case of online social networking. We find a general tendency towards gender homophily, more marked for women, however users having a large circle of friends tend to have more connections with use...

Wikipedia is a collaboratively-edited online encyclopaedia that relies on thousands of editors to both contribute articles and maintain their quality. Over the last years, research has extensively investigated this group of users while another group of Wikipedia users, the readers, their preferences and their behavior have not been much studied. Th...

Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. In Wikipedia, one of the most prominent examples of collaboration online, conflict is mediated by both policy and software, and conflicts often reflect larger societal debates. Contropedia is a platform for the analysis and visualization of...

Wikipedia is a huge global repository of human knowledge, that can be leveraged to investigate interwinements between cultures. With this aim we apply two methods, Markov chains and Google matrix, for the analysis of the hyperlink networks of 24 Wikipedia language editions, and rank all their articles by PageRank, 2DRank, and CheiRank algorithms. U...

Definitions and classifications of geoengineering are fluid and contested. Wikipedia offers an opportunity to study how people negotiate and construct these definitions. Geoengineering related Wikipedia articles were identified in an overall dataset of climate change related articles, with data on both article inter-linkage and the commenting activ...

The irruption of social media in the political sphere is generating repositories of “Big Data,” which can be mined to gain insights into communication dynamics. The research reported here relies on a large data set from Twitter to examine the activity, emotional content, and interactions of political parties and politicians during the campaign for...

This work analyses the practice of sister city pairing. We investigate structural properties of the resulting city and country networks and present rankings of the most central nodes in these networks. We identify different country clusters and find that the practice of sister city pairing is not influenced by geographical proximity but results in...

We introduce a model for predicting page-view dynamics of promoted content. The regularity of the content promotion process on Wikipedia provides excellent experimental conditions which favour detailed modelling. We show that the popularity of an article featured on Wikipedia's main page decays exponentially in time if the circadian cycles of the u...

This paper presents a large-scale analysis of emotions in conversations among Wikipedia editors. Our focus is on the emotions expressed by editors in talk pages, measured by using the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW). We find evidence that to a large extent women tend to participate in discussions with a more positive tone, and that admini...

Online friendship connections are often not representative of social relationships or shared interest between users, but merely provide a public display of personal identity. A better picture of online social behaviour can be achieved by taking into account the intensity of communication levels between users, yielding useful insights for service pr...

The popularity of the Web has allowed individuals to commu-nicate and interact with each other on a global scale: people connect both to close friends and acquaintances, creating ties that can bridge otherwise separated groups of people. Recent evidence suggests that spatial distance is still affecting social links established on online platforms,...

It is arguable whether history is made by great men and women or vice versa, but undoubtably social connections shape history. Analysing Wikipedia, a global collective memory place, we aim to understand how social links are recorded across cultures. Starting with the set of biographies in the English Wikipedia we focus on the networks of links betw...

Wikipedia articles are by definition never finished: at any moment their content can be edited, or discussed in the associated talk pages. In this study we analyse the evolution of these discussions to unveil patterns of collective participation along the temporal dimension, and to shed light on the process of content creation on different topics....

The study of collaboration patterns in wikis can help shed light on the process of content creation by online communities. To turn a wiki's revision history into a collaboration network, we propose an algorithm that identifies as authors of a page the users who provided the most of its relevant content, measured in terms of quantity and of acceptan...

In this paper, we describe the motivations for the organization of the SISoM-workshop on Social Innovation and Social Media, held in the context of the ICWSM 2011. We argue that social innovation and social media, two trends, that have started independently, are bound to increasingly overlap. Social innovators, as well as the growing number of publ...