Brian Keegan’s research while affiliated with University of Colorado Boulder and other places

Despite frequent efforts to combat racism, almost no research has explored how to cultivate positive experiences of thriving Black culture on Reddit. In this case study, we surveyed users of r/BlackPeopleTwitter (BPT)--a large, popular subreddit that showcases screenshots of hilarious or insightful social media posts made by Black people (mainly from Black Twitter). Our research questions seek to understand users' motivations for visiting BPT, how they experience a sense of virtual community (SOVC) and membership in BPT, and how BPT's governance influences these experiences. We find that that users come to BPT primarily for excellent humor and entertainment, sociopolitical context on issues relevant to Black people, and/or partaking in the shared Black experience. Black users are more likely to report higher SOVC and to identify as members, whereas non-Black users are more likely to identify as guests or visitors to the community. To protect Black expression, the BPT moderation team implemented a governance strategy for verifying racial identity and limiting participation to only verified users in certain threads. Our data suggest that this policy is a contentious but influential aspect of SOVC that simultaneously constructs and challenges the sense of the subreddit existing as a safe space for Black people. We synthesize these results by discussing how: differing platform affordances across Twitter and Reddit combine to cultivate a thriving Black community on Reddit; the need for Black authenticity on an otherwise anonymous platform can guide future research in identity verification; and the limitations of this study motivate future work to support all marginalized communities online.

Humans need a sense of community (SOC), and social media platforms afford opportunities to address this need by providing users with a sense of virtual community (SOVC). This paper explores SOVC on Reddit and is motivated by two goals: (1) providing researchers with an excellent resource for methodological decisions in studies of Reddit communities; and (2) creating the foundation for a new class of research methods and community support tools that reflect users' experiences of SOVC. To ensure that methods are respectfully and ethically designed in service and accountability to impacted communities, our work takes a qualitative and community-centered approach by engaging with two key stakeholder groups. First, we interviewed 21 researchers to understand how they study community" on Reddit. Second, we surveyed 12 subreddits to gain insight into user experiences of SOVC. Results show that some research methods can broadly reflect user experiences of SOVC regardless of the topic or type of subreddit. However, user responses also evidenced the existence of five distinct Community Archetypes: Topical Q&A, Learning & Perspective Broadening, Social Support, Content Generation, and Affiliation with an Entity. We offer the Community Archetypes framework to support future work in designing methods that align more closely with user experiences of SOVC and to create community support tools that can meaningfully nourish the human need for SOC/SOVC in our modern world.

Bots are increasingly being used for governance-related purposes in online communities, yet no instrumentation exists for measuring how users assess their beneficial or detrimental impacts. In order to support future human-centered and community-based research, we developed a new scale called GOVernance Bots in Online communiTies (GOV-BOTs) across two rounds of surveys on Reddit (N=820). We applied rigorous psychometric criteria to demonstrate the validity of GOV-BOTs, which contains two subscales: bot governance (4 items) and bot tensions (3 items). Whereas humans have historically expected communities to be composed entirely of humans, the social participation of bots as non-human agents now raises fundamental questions about psychological, philosophical, and ethical implications. Addressing psychological impacts, our data show that perceptions of effective bot governance positively contribute to users' sense of virtual community (SOVC), whereas perceived bot tensions may only impact SOVC if users are more aware of bots. Finally, we show that users tend to experience the greatest SOVC across groups of subreddits, rather than individual subreddits, suggesting that future research should carefully re-consider uses and operationalizations of the term "community."

The legal status of Cannabis is changing, fueling an increasing diversity of Cannabis-derived products. Because Cannabis contains dozens of chemical compounds with potential psychoactive or medicinal effects, understanding this phytochemical diversity is crucial. The legal Cannabis industry heavily markets products to consumers based on widely used labeling systems purported to predict the effects of different “strains.” We analyzed the cannabinoid and terpene content of commercial Cannabis samples across six US states, finding distinct chemical phenotypes (chemotypes) which are reliably present. By comparing the observed phytochemical diversity to the commercial labels commonly attached to Cannabis-derived product samples, we show that commercial labels do not consistently align with the observed chemical diversity. However, certain labels do show a biased association with specific chemotypes. These results have implications for the classification of commercial Cannabis, design of animal and human research, and regulation of consumer marketing—areas which today are often divorced from the chemical reality of the Cannabis-derived material they wish to represent.

We present a first-person, retrospective exploration of two radio sonification pieces that employ narrative scaffolding to teach audiences how to listen to data. To decelerate and articulate design processes that occurred at the rapid pace of radio production, the sound designer and producer wrote retrospective design accounts. We then revisited the radio pieces through principles drawn from guidance design, data storytelling, visualization literacy, and sound studies. Finally, we speculated how these principles might be applied through interactive, voice-based technologies. First-person methods enabled us to access the implicit knowledge embedded in radio production and translate it to technologies of interest to the human–computer-interaction community, such as voice user interfaces that rely on auditory display. Traditionally, sonification practitioners have focused more on generating sounds than on teaching people how to listen; our process, however, treated sound and narrative as a holistic, sonic-narrative experience. Our first-person retrospection illuminated the role of narrative in designing to support people as they learn to listen to data.

The legal status of Cannabis is changing, fueling an increased diversity of Cannabis-derived products. Because Cannabis contains dozens of chemical compounds with potential psychoactive or medicinal effects, understanding its phytochemical diversity is crucial. The legal Cannabis industry heavily markets products to consumers based on widely used labelling systems purported to predict the effects of different Cannabis "strains." We analyzed the cannabinoid and terpene content of tens of thousands of commercial Cannabis samples across six US states, finding distinct chemical phenotypes (chemotypes) which are reliably present. After careful descriptive analysis of the phytochemical diversity and comparison to the commercial labels commonly attached to Cannabis samples, we show that commercial labels do not consistently align with the observed chemical diversity. However, certain labels are statistically overrepresented for specific chemotypes. These results have important implications for the classification of commercial Cannabis, the design of animal and human research, and the regulation of legal Cannabis marketing.

As the COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting life worldwide, related online communities are popping up. In particular, two “new” communities, /r/China flu and /r/Coronavirus, emerged on Reddit and have been dedicated to COVID- related discussions from the very beginning of this pandemic. With /r/Coronavirus promoted as the official community on Reddit, it remains an open question how users choose between these two highly-related communities. In this paper, we characterize user trajectories in these two communities from the beginning of COVID-19 to the end of September 2020. We show that new users of /r/China flu and /r/Coronavirus were similar from January to March. After that, their differences steadily increase, both in language distance and membership prediction, as the pandemic continues to unfold. Furthermore, users who started at /r/China flu from January to March were more likely to leave, while those who started in later months tend to remain highly “loyal”. To understand this difference, we develop a movement analysis framework to understand membership changes in these two communities and identify a significant proportion of /r/China flu members (around 50%) that moved to /r/Coronavirus in February. This movement turns out to be highly predictable based on other subreddits that users were previously active in. Our work demonstrates how two highly-related communities emerge and develop their own identity in a crisis, and highlights the important role of existing communities in understanding such an emergence.

Wikipedia's first twenty years: how what began as an experiment in collaboration became the world's most popular reference work. We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident—a wiki attached to a nascent online encyclopedia—has become the world's most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of “free access to the sum of all human knowledge” when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia's first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal. The contributors consider Wikipedia's history, the richness of the connections that underpin it, and its founding vision. Their essays look at, among other things, the shift from bewilderment to respect in press coverage of Wikipedia; Wikipedia as “the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history”; and the acknowledgment that “free access” includes not just access to the material but freedom to contribute—that the summation of all human knowledge is biased by who documents it. Contributors Phoebe Ayers, Omer Benjakob, Yochai Benkler, William Beutler, Siko Bouterse, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze, Amy Carleton, Robert Cummings, LiAnna L. Davis, Siân Evans, Heather Ford, Stephen Harrison, Heather Hart, Benjamin Mako Hill, Dariusz Jemielniak, Brian Keegan, Jackie Koerner, Alexandria Lockett, Jacqueline Mabey, Katherine Maher, Michael Mandiberg, Stephane Coillet-Matillon, Cecelia A. Musselman, Eliza Myrie, Jake Orlowitz, Ian A. Ramjohn, Joseph Reagle, Anasuya Sengupta, Aaron Shaw, Melissa Tamani, Jina Valentine, Matthew Vetter, Adele Vrana, Denny Vrandečić