
Tanja AitamurtoUniversity of Illinois Chicago | UIC
Tanja Aitamurto
Doctor of Social Sciences
About
49
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 2019 - present
September 2016 - present
June 2014 - September 2016
Publications
Publications (49)
This article analyzes the impact of crowdfunding on journalism. Crowdfunding is defined as a way to harness collective intelligence for journalism, as readers’ donations accumulate into judgments about the issues that need to be covered. The article is based on a case study about Spot.Us, a platform pioneering community-funded reporting. The study...
This paper shows how the two virtues of collective intelligence – cognitive diversity and large crowds – turn into perils in crowdsourced policymaking. That is because of a conflict between the logic of the crowds and the logic of policymaking. The crowd's logic differs from that of traditional policymaking in several aspects. To mention some of th...
This article examines crowdsourcing as a knowledge-search method and an open journalistic practice in digital journalism. The study draws on data from four cases in which professional journalists used crowdsourcing in their investigations. Crowdsourcing resulted in an efficient knowledge discovery and a continuous flow of tips to journalists and th...
This article examines the relative value of open innovation principles for digital media, exemplified by the emergence of Open Application Programming Interfaces (Open APIs) at four news organizations: The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today and NPR. The use of Open APIs represents a shift toward an open innovation paradigm that may help addres...
This article examines participants’ motivation factors to contribute to crowdsourced journalism. Drawing on interviews from cases in which professional journalists used crowdsourcing as a knowledge-search method, the article shows the primary motivation factors are intrinsic, altruistic, and ideological. By sharing information, the crowd wants to c...
immersive viewing experiences. However, as users watch one part
of the 360° view, they will necessarily miss out on events happening
in other parts of the sphere. Consequently, fear of missing out
(FOMO) is unavoidable. However, users can also experience the joy
of missing out (JOMO). In a repeated measures, mixed methods
design, we examined the fe...
This article examines the impact of augmented reality (AR) visualizations on users’ sense of physical presence, knowledge gain, and perceptions of the authenticity of journalistic visuals. In a mixed experimental design, 79 participants were randomly assigned to view three The New York Times articles on a mobile phone featuring one of three viewing...
We address the question of aggregating the preferences of voters in the context of participatory budgeting. We scrutinize the voting method currently used in practice, underline its drawbacks, and introduce a novel scheme tailored to this setting, which we call "Knapsack Voting". We study its strategic properties - we show that it is strategy-proof...
While crowds online are increasingly used for data gathering and problem solving, the relationships and structures within these processes remain largely unexamined. For understanding the usage of crowdsourcing and to design appropriate technologies and processes, it is important to understand how different tools support relationships in these conte...
We address the question of aggregating the preferences of voters in the context of participatory budgeting. We scrutinize the voting method currently used in practice, underline its drawbacks, and introduce a novel scheme tailored to this setting, which we call “Knapsack Voting.” We study its strategic properties—we show that it is strategy-proof u...
In crowdfunded journalism, individual journalists or news organizations gather funding from online crowds on digital platforms. Journalists pitch their stories to online crowds, who are asked to donate to the story process. The power of crowdfunding is created by a large amount of small donations. In recent years, crowdfunding has become an importa...
While new media technologies hold the potential to serve journalism's dual goals of informing and engaging the public, these technologies also challenge the journalistic norms of accuracy, impartiality and transparency. The key question in this workshop is: How can HCI support accurate, impartial and transparent journalism? This question is ever mo...
In visual journalism, the adoption of new technologies often leads to renegotiation of normative boundaries, and the case of 360° video is no exception. Two normative paradoxes emerge in journalists’ attempts to deploy 360° video to provide emotionally engaging and factually relevant content. The first paradox is that the 360° view is considered to...
While crowdsourcing is an increasingly common method of open-government practices to strengthen participatory democracy, its impact on governance is unclear. Using data from a crowdsourced city-plan update by the City of Palo Alto, California, this paper examines the impact of a crowd’s input on policy changes. We used an enacted policy change to q...
This paper examines the impact of an augmented reality (AR) tour guide on users’ art engagement. In a between-subjects experiment in an art museum, users’ art engagement with a novel video see-through augmented reality guide was examined against user behavior with a book guide. The AR users’ liking of art increased more than the book users’, wherea...
This paper examines the normative role of constructive journalism—also called “solutions journalism”—by analyzing metajournalistic discourse about solutions-focused journalism. The findings show that constructive and solutions journalism are defined similarly: they profess traditional Anglo-Saxon journalistic norms and practices, even as they shift...
This paper examines the sense of presence, attitude change, perspective-taking, and usability of a split-sphere, first-person perspective 360 degree video about gender inequality, in which people can choose to watch the narrative from the male or female character's perspective. Sixty-seven participants were randomly assigned to watch (1) the video...
In this paper, we examine the changes in motivation factors in crowdsourced policymaking. By drawing on longitudinal data from a crowdsourced law reform, we show that people participated because they wanted to improve the law, learn, and solve problems. When crowdsourcing reached a saturation point, the motivation factors weakened and the crowd dis...
We examine deliberative quality of crowdsourced deliberation in this paper. Analyzing data from two crowdsourced policy-making processes, we found a good quality deliberation with respect, reciprocity, and storytelling according to the standards in the theory of deliberative democracy. We identified a group of super-deliberators, whose deliberation...
While national and local governments increasingly deploy crowdsourcing in lawmaking as an open government practice, it remains unclear how crowdsourcing creates value when it is applied in policymaking. Therefore, in this article, we examine value creation in crowdsourcing for public policymaking. We introduce a framework for analysing value creati...
This paper examines the impact of crowdsourcing on a policymaking process by using a novel data analytics tool called Civic CrowdAnalytics, applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods such as concept extraction, word association and sentiment analysis. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced urban planning process in the City of Palo Alto in...
This article examines the demographic characteristics, motivations, and expectations of participants in a crowdsourced off-road traffic law reform in Finland. We found that the participants were mainly educated, full-time working professional males with a strong interest in off-road traffic. Though a minority, the women participating in the process...
Unfair reputation systems, slow payments, lack of transparency, and socio-spatial inequalities are only some of the many reasons for conflicts in crowdsourcing. The divisive logic of the system and the sharing processes in the peer-community create interesting dynamics and new foci on old conflicts. In this workshop we explore the reasons, processe...
This article examines the emergence of democratic deliberation in a crowdsourced law reform process. The empirical context of the study is a crowdsourced legislative reform in Finland, initiated by the Finnish government. The findings suggest that online exchanges in the crowdsourced process qualify as democratic deliberation according to the class...
This workshop aims to examine and categorize types of participation within crowd work in areas such as crowdsourced policymaking, crisis management, citizen science and paid crowd work. In our previous workshops we have looked into the essence of crowds, including the crowd members’ identities, their roles and motivations. One of the motivating fac...
The shift from closed to open paradigms in new product develop-
ment is seen as an emergence of new forms of production, innova-
tion, and design. Innovation processes are shifting from open
source software to open source hardware design. Emulating open
source software, design information for open source hardware is
shared publicly to enhance th...
This paper examines participants' motivation factors and identity in crowdsourced policy-making, in which citizens collaboratively participate in online ideation and knowledge creation for policy reforms. Drawing on data from a crowdsourced law reform in Finland, this paper examines the drivers of the participants and their demographic profile. The...
This article reports a pioneering case study of a crowdsourced law-reform process in Finland. In the crowdsourcing experiment, the public was invited to contribute to the law-reform process by sharing their knowledge and ideas for a better policy. This article introduces a normative design framework of five principles for crowdsourced policymaking:...
This paper examines the tension between the norm of equal representation in democracy and the ideals of crowdsourcing, which strive for a large undefined, self-selected crowd. We argue that crowdsourcing, when used in democratic processes, can never meet the standard for statistical representativeness, which is the often-strived standard in democra...
We present theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of
voting rules for participatory democracies. We first give algorithms which
efficiently elicit \epsilon-approximations to two prominent voting rules: the
Borda rule and the Condorcet winner. This result circumvents previous
prohibitive lower bounds and is surprisingly stron...
This paper reports on a pioneering case study of a
legislative process open to the direct online participation of
the public. The empirical context of the study is a
crowdsourced off-road traffic law in Finland. On the basis
of our analysis of the user content generated to date and a
series of interviews with key participants, we argue that the
pro...
This study examines the impact of co-creation on magazine journalism by drawing on data from a structured, sequenced online co-creation process in an established consumer magazine. Co-creation is examined as a method for open journalism. Co-creation surprises and even shocks journalists, as they face the “real” reader, in intensive online reader en...
This article examines the open paradigm in design research and introduces a new conceptualization for 'open design' and a three-layer framework to demonstrate the degrees of openness in design practices. The conceptualization comprises all stages in the design process, ranging from need-finding to the openness of the design documents and the data g...
This study examines the impact of co-creation on magazine journalism by drawing on data from a structured, sequenced online co-creation process in an established consumer magazine. Co-creation is examined as a method for open journalism. Co-creation surprises and even shocks journalists, as they face the “real” reader, in intensive online reader en...
Idea crowdsourcing has become a hype term associated with unrealistic expectations for innovation and unclear understanding of its requirements and challenges. This paper intends to bring together and evaluate the key insights that shed light on the phenomenon
conceptually or empirically and help us qualify and attenuate the expectations. What do w...
Hyvien perheiden pojat murhasivat kylmästi –miksi?” (Ilta-Sanomat 30.8.2001, vinkki etusivulla.) Kysymys voisi kuulua näinkin: Tavalliset nuoret, jotka ovat pahoja – miksi? Kysymykseen tiivistyy nelisen vuotta sitten tapahtuneen Heinojen surman herättämä reaktio medias-sa. Vastauksen etsintä luo jännitteen surman julkiseen käsittelyyn. Henkirikosta...