Rendre l'activité des médias sociaux intelligible pour autrui et pour soi : une équipe interdisciplinaire, des méthodes standardisées et un objet frontière

In 2013, I was part of a strategic group in charge of the positioning of our campus (situated in Mons) as regards new challenges related to entrepreneurship and digital economy. We realized that a number of similar labs in universities existed around the world. They were all focused on social media use by individuals (consumers and citizens). We decided to differentiate ourselves by looking to social media use in professional context (www.socialmedialab.be). What we consider as professional use of social media includes corporate social networking, knowledge sharing, social TV broadcasting, crowdsourcing platforms and to a certain extent corporate and professional usage of massive social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). In particular, we work on the intelligibility of social media activity for selves and others in a professional context. There are different reasons that push us in that research direction. The growing use of social media in professional context is generating an exponantial amount of data. As Cardon and Marshall (2015) research on corporate social networking illustrates: “social networking will become the primary communication tool for teams. Based on our survey results combined with results from industry surveys (i.e., AON Consulting, 2009; Azua, 2010; Bughin et al., 2009; Kiett, 2011), we believe that adoption of enterprise SNPs is in the beginning of the early majority stage according to Rogers’ (1962) model of innovation adoption.” Although there are needs to understand the activity in order to evaluate the added value of social media use in professional context, very little or no research exists on the subject. 1. As pointed out by Cardon (2014) and Bowker (2016), these data are highly desired by a number of industrial actors who would dream of predicting users’ behaviour (especially as consumers). The empowerment of users by helping them to understand their role, place, shared interests in the community they belong to can influence the future development of the use of such platforms. We believe it is necessary to work on users social media literacy to help them make sense of their usage. 2. Community managers are ill equiped to develop pro-active governance tactics (e.g; editorial policy based on communities of interests, identification of key actors in the community) (van Osh et al. 2015). Surprisingly, outside the consumer goods realm, the analytics developed as regards the use of social media in professional context are rather simplistic (i.e., descriptive statistics) (Grignon 2015). 3. On one sitde, a quick look at existing research from different fields such as applied mathematics or linguistics highlights that a number of algorithms and statistics can help us to deepen our understanding of social media activity. Yet, researchers in those fields also admit that the inteligibility to the average mortal of « how, what and for what » behind the measure is not a major priority to them. 4. On the other side, data vizualisation and information visualisation research are adressing these issues but these works and results remain confined to the scientific community. In this research project, we intend to work on the intelligibility of social media activity for the animators of communities and for community members. From our point of view, the problem may not be the existence of suitable measures of activities but its intelligibility for community members and animators. Based on current research development in different fields (social graph, linguistics), we identify relevant measures of activities that can help us to make sense of the activity (i.e., online information sharing and collaboration). Then we prototype dashboards with those analytics as follows :. From there, we develop a number of research questions : 1. What are the most suitable visualizations for each metric based on the literature on data visualisations? 2. What is a suitable measure in context ? One that is complex but accurate or one that remains on the surface of the issue ? 3. How do users make sense of these metrics? 4. What role embellishment plays in the understanding of data visualization? 5. How does this ‘sense making’ influence their online behavior? 6. How does the context of usage influence this ‘sense making’? 7. How does the interactivity with the visualization influence this sense making ? As researchers in social sciences, our job is to understand and tentatively explain social phenomenon as they occur in a spectific time-space context (Giddens 1984). The rise of social media use during the last decade and the exponantial growth of data produced, as a consequence, are not without consequences on our job as social scientitists. A number of research (Algopol, twitter and politics, etc.) highlight the necessity to build up interdisciplinary teams in order to be able to tackle such phenomenon. The UCL Social Media Lab is a multidisciplinary team that gathers researchers from communication sciences, applied mathematics, linguistics, and consumer behavior. Inspired by Star and Griesimer’s work (1989) on boundary objects and standardized method, the present communication aims to explain how we are creating, adapting and negociating the current developpement of our dashboard prototype – conceived as a boundary object – « robust enough » in order to reach the common goals and « plastic enough » to suit diversed interests of the different stakeholders of the project. Just as Griesemer admits in his tributes to Leigh Star work (2016), I will also attempt to explain how we try to develop standardized methods in order to ensure that the work of one stakeholder contributes suits ones interests while it also preserve the collective aims. For instance, the dashboard favors access to data which in turn enables new research results. Key to the contiuum of the project is to define clear methods that define the conditions to access data (security and privacy rules), the condition to modify data. More, we have to define standards that help researcher to enrich the prototype with their research results, hence brigding the gap stated earlier. The growing use of social media in professional context is generating an exponential amount of data. Although there are needs to understand the activity in order to evaluate the value of social media use in professional context, very little research exists on the subject. In particular, we believe it is necessary to work on users social media literacy to help them make sense of their usage. The present communication aims to explain the methodology that we are applying in order to bridge the gap between existing scientific measures of social media activity and their intelligibility by community members and animators. Based on current research development in different fields (social graph, linguistics, data visualization), we identify relevant measures of social media activities that can potentially help users to make sense (i.e., what is my community of interest?). Then, we prototype dashboards with those analytics. Those dashboards are then tested with community members and animators. The challenges of the design process of this dashboard (from the selection of measures, the selection of visualisations to its intelligibility to users) will be the central topic of my paper