Timothy Cribbin

Brunel University London · Department of Computer Science

Author profiling, or classifying user generated content based on demographic or other personal attributes, is a key task in social media-based research. Whilst high-accuracy has been achieved on many attributes, most studies tend to train and test models on a single domain only, ignoring cross-domain performance and research shows that models often...

Social media interactions are popularly implicated in psychological changes like radicalization. However, there are currently no viable methods to assess whether social media interactions actually lead to such changes. The purpose of the current research was to develop a methodological paradigm that can assess such longitudinal change in individual...

In the few years since the advent of 'Big Data' research, social media analytics has begun to accumulate studies drawing on social media as a resource and tool for research work. Yet, there has been relatively little attention paid to the development of methodologies for handling this kind of data. The few works that exist in this area often reflec...

Thanks to an influx of data collection and analytic software, harvesting and visualizing ‘big’ social media data1 is becoming increasingly feasible as a method for social science researchers. Yet while there is an emerging body of work utilizing social media as a data resource, there are a number of computational issues affecting data collection. T...

Twitter data offers an unprecedented opportunity to study demographic differences in public opinion across a virtually unlimited range of subjects. Whilst demographic attributes are often implied within user data, they are not always easily identified using computational methods. In this paper, we present a semi-automatic solution that combines aut...

Twitter data offers an unprecedented opportunity to study demographic differences in public opinion across a virtually unlimited range of subjects. Whilst demographic attributes are often implied within user data, they are not always easily identified using computational methods. In this paper, we present a semi-automatic solution that combines aut...

This paper presents Voyster, an experimental system that combines citation chain aggregation (CCA) and spatial-semantic maps to support citation search. CCA uses a three-list view to represent the citation network surrounding a 'pearl' of known relevant articles, whereby cited and citing articles are ranked according to number of pearl relations. A...

The power and promise of social media as a resource and tool for doing social research is widely recognised and much vaunted. Social media data is becoming an increasingly attractive resource for social scientists, but the question remains as to what exactly we might want to do with data like this. The present study describes a small-scale interdis...

This paper shows how model simplification, by replacing iterative steps with unitary predictive equations, can enable dynamic interaction with a complex simulation process. Model previews extend the techniques of dynamic querying and query previews into the context of ad hoc simulation model exploration. A case study is presented within the domain...

Citation chaining is a powerful means of exploring the academic literature. Starting from just one or two known relevant items, a naïve researcher can cycle backwards and forwards through the citation graph to generate a rich overview of key works, authors and journals relating to their topic. Whilst online citation indexes greatly facilitate this...

Computing document similarity directly from a “bag of words” vector space model can be problematic because term independence causes the relationships between synonymous terms and the contextual influences that determine the sense of polysemous terms to be ignored. This study compares two methods that potentially address these problems by deriving t...

Two studies are reported that examined the reliability of human assessments of document similarity and the association between human ratings and the results of n-gram automatic text analysis (ATA). Human interassessor reliability (IAR) was moderate to poor. However, correlations between average human ratings and n-gram solutions were strong. The av...

Previous work has shown that distance-similarity visualisation or ‘spatialisation’ can provide a potentially useful context in which to browse the results of a query search, enabling the user to adopt a simple local foraging or ‘cluster growing’ strategy to navigate through the retrieved document set. However, faithfully mapping feature-space model...

This paper reports a study of information retrieval performance using an interface in which documents were represented by objects in a virtual environment. Spatial location was determined by semantic content, with inter-object distance representing semantic similarity of documents. The quality of spatial-semantic mapping was manipulated as was the...

Visual depth cues are combined to produce the essential depth and dimensionality of Desktop Virtual Environments (DVEs). This study discusses DVEs in terms of the visual depth cues that create and support perception of frames of references and accomplishment of visual search tasks. This paper presents the results of an investigation that identifies...

In this article we demonstrate the use of an integrative approach to visualizing and tracking the development of scientific paradigms. This approach is designed to reveal the long-term process of competing scientific paradigms. We assume that a cluster of highly cited and cocited scientific publications in a cocitation network represents the core o...

Social navigation exploits the knowledge and experience of peer users of information resources. A wide variety of visual–spatial approaches become increasingly popular as a means to optimize information access as well as to foster and sustain a virtual community among geographically distributed users. An information landscape is among the most appe...

This paper reports a study of information search in a three-dimensional virtual information space. A comparison was made of performance with and without head tracking, as provided by a virtual reality headset. Twenty-five percent of participants in a head tracking condition experienced feelings of nausea, and efficiency of navigation was poorer in...

Scatter graphs (e.g. SPIRE Galaxies, Bead, VR-VIBE) are a popular medium for visualising spatial-semantic structures derived from abstract information spaces. For small spaces (i.e. less than one hundred nodes), such graphs can be an effective means of reducing high-dimensional information into two or three spatial dimensions. As dimensionality inc...

: A study was conducted that compared user performance across a range of search tasks supported by both a textual and a visual information retrieval interface (VIRI). Test scores representing seven distinct cognitive abilities were examined in relation to user performance. Results indicate that, when using VIRIs, visual-perceptual abilities account...

Visualisations of abstract data are believed to assist the searcher by providing an overview of the semantic structure of a document collection whereby semantically similar items tend to cluster in space. Cribbin and Chen (2001) found that similarity data represented using minimum spanning tree (MST) graphs provided greater levels of support to use...

This paper reports two studies investigating the computer-based representation of the semantic information content of databases using object location in two- and three-dimensional virtual space. In the first study, the cognitive demands associated with performing an information search task were examined under conditions where the “goodness of fit”...

This paper is concerned with the use of virtual environments as a means of conveying semantic information relating to the contents of computerised textual databases. two empirical studies are reported that investigated the influence of individual differences in cognitive ability on search task performance. In the first experiment, objects (each rep...

This paper reports an experimental study of individual differences in the performance of computer-stimulated and 'real world' versions of an interactive depth perception task. The availability of depth cues (disparity, accommodation, luminance, and texture) was manipulated. Results indicate that ability to perceive depth using binocular cues is not...

In this dissertation we propose, test and develop a novel search interaction model to address two key problems associated with conducting an open-ended search task within a classical information retrieval system: (i) the need to reformulate the query within the context of a shifting conception of the problem and (ii) the need to integrate relevant...

Optimal information foraging provides a potentially useful framework for modelling, analysing, and interpreting search strategies of users through a spatial-semantic interface. Improving the understanding of behavioural patterns of users in such environments has implications for the design and refinement of a range of user interfaces. In this artic...