What do you think?: a case study of benefit, expectation, and interaction in a large online critique community

Critique is an indispensible part of creative work and many online communities have formed for this shared purpose. As design choices within the communities can impact the effectiveness of the critiques produced, it is important to study these communities and offer guidance for decisions. In this paper, we report the results of a case study exploring one large online community dedicated to critique in the domain of digital photography. We analyzed a large corpus of interaction data to understand the benefit of participation, the response dynamics, factors predicting critique ratings, and patterns of reciprocal interaction. Interviews with users were also conducted to uncover motives for participation and expectations of the critiques within the community. The results and insights gained from this work were distilled into recommendations for improving the design of systems that support community-based critique of creative artifacts.

[1]  Terry Barrett,et al.  A Comparison of The Goals of Studio Professors Conducting Critiques and Art Education Goals for Teaching Criticism , 1988 .

[2]  Howard Risatti.  Art Criticism in Discipline-Based Art Education. , 1987 .

[3]  Alcides Velasquez,et al.  Motivations to participate in online communities , 2010, CHI.

[4]  Volker Wulf,et al.  Engaging with practices: design case studies as a research framework in CSCW , 2011, CSCW.

[5]  Abigail Sellen,et al.  Getting the right design and the design right , 2006, CHI.

[6]  M. McPherson,et al.  Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks , 2001 .

[7]  Mark S. Ackerman,et al.  Contribution, commercialization & audience: understanding participation in an online creative community , 2009, GROUP.

[8]  Alison Williams,et al.  Collaborative creativity: a complex systems model with distributed affect , 2011, CHI.

[9]  S. Kiesler,et al.  Community Effort in Online Groups: Who Does the Work and Why? , 2007 .

[10]  Mark S. Ackerman,et al.  Expertise networks in online communities: structure and algorithms , 2007, WWW '07.

[11]  Oded Nov,et al.  What motivates Wikipedians? , 2007, CACM.

[12]  Kristi Lundstrom,et al.  To give is better than to receive: The benefits of peer review to the reviewer's own writing , 2009 .

[13]  Thomas A. Dutton.  Design and Studio Pedagogy , 1987 .

[14]  Loren G. Terveen,et al.  Two peers are better than one: aggregating peer reviews for computing assignments is surprisingly accurate , 2009, GROUP.

[15]  Lada A. Adamic,et al.  Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something , 2008, WWW.

[16]  D. Barash.  The Biology of Moral Systems, Richard D. Alexander. Aldine, Hawthorne, New York (1987), xx, +301. Price $34.95 hardback, $16.95 paperback , 1987 .

[17]  John Riedl,et al.  SuggestBot: using intelligent task routing to help people find work in wikipedia , 2007, IUI '07.

[18]  R. Kraut,et al.  Membership Claims and Requests: Conversation-Level Newcomer Socialization Strategies in Online Groups , 2010 .

[19]  Koji Yatani,et al.  Review spotlight: a user interface for summarizing user-generated reviews using adjective-noun word pairs , 2011, CHI.

[20]  James W. Pennebaker,et al.  Predicting the perceived quality of online mathematics contributions from users' reputations , 2011, CHI.

[21]  Jahna Otterbacher,et al.  'Helpfulness' in online communities: a measure of message quality , 2009, CHI.

[22]  Amy Bruckman,et al.  Why it works (when it works): success factors in online creative collaboration , 2010, GROUP.

[23]  Diego Garlaschelli,et al.  Patterns of link reciprocity in directed networks. , 2004, Physical review letters.

[24]  Sheizaf Rafaeli,et al.  Predictors of answer quality in online Q&A sites , 2008, CHI.

[25]  Lena Mamykina,et al.  Design lessons from the fastest q&a site in the west , 2011, CHI.

[26]  Elisabeth Sylvan.  Predicting influence in an online community of creators , 2010, CHI.

[27]  Yochai Benkler,et al.  The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom , 2006 .

[28]  Eric Gilbert,et al.  Understanding deja reviewers , 2010, CSCW '10.

[29]  Brian P. Bailey,et al.  TEAM STORM: demonstrating an interaction model for working with multiple ideas during creative group work , 2007, C&C '07.

[30]  A. Strauss,et al.  The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research aldine de gruyter , 1968 .

[31]  Jeffrey Heer,et al.  CommentSpace: structured support for collaborative visual analysis , 2011, CHI.

[32]  Gunnar Stevens,et al.  CHIC - a pluggable solution for community help in context , 2006, NordiCHI '06.

[33]  Mor Naaman,et al.  Towards quality discourse in online news comments , 2011, CSCW.

[34]  Robert E. Kraut,et al.  Socialization tactics in wikipedia and their effects , 2010, CSCW '10.

[35]  F. Maxwell Harper,et al.  Facts or friends?: distinguishing informational and conversational questions in social Q&A sites , 2009, CHI.

[36]  A. Berleant.  Varieties of Visual Experience: Art as Image and Idea by Edmund Burke Feldman (review) , 1974 .