Narratives of War: Ukrainian Memetic Warfare on TwitterThe 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen an intensification in the use of social media by governmental actors in cyber warfare. Wartime communication via memes has been a successful strategy used not only by independent accounts such as @uamemesforces, but also---for the first time in a full-scale interstate war---by official Ukrainian government accounts such as @Ukraine and @DefenceU. We study this prominent example of memetic warfare through the lens of its narratives, and find them to be a key component of success: tweets with a 'victim' narrative garner twice as many retweets. However, malevolent narratives focusing on the enemy resonate more than those about heroism or victims with countries providing more assistance to Ukraine. Our findings present a nuanced examination of Ukraine's influence operations and of the worldwide response to it, thus contributing new insights into the evolution of socio-technical systems in times of war.2025YMYelena Mejova et al.Governing Platforms / Technology's Role in GovernanceCSCW
Collaborating with a Text-Based Chatbot: An Exploration of Real-World Collaboration Strategies Enacted during Human-Chatbot InteractionsA central problem for chatbots in the customer care domain revolves around how people collaborate with the agent to achieve their own situated goals. The majority of the previous research, however, relied on experiments within artificial settings, rather than on observation of real-world interactions. Moreover, such research mostly analyzed users’ responses to communication breakdowns, rather than the wider collaboration strategies utilized during a conversation. In this paper, we qualitatively analyzed 12,477 real-world exchanges with a task-based chatbot using a Grounded Theory approach as a rigorous coding method to analyze the data. We identified two main aspects of collaboration, behavioral and conversational, and for each aspect we highlighted the different strategies that users perform to “work together” with the agent. These strategies may be utilized from the very beginning of the conversation or in response to misunderstandings in the course of ongoing interactions and may show different evolving dynamics.2023ARAmon Rapp et al.University of TorinoConversational ChatbotsAgent Personality & AnthropomorphismCHI
Bottom-up Psychosocial Interventions for Interdependent Privacy: Effectiveness Based on Individual and Content Differences Although a great deal of research has examined interventions to help users protect their own information online, less work has examined methods for reducing interdependent privacy (IDP) violations on social media (i.e., sharing of other people’s information). This study tested the effectiveness of concept-based (i.e., general information), fact-based (i.e., statistics), and narrative-based (i.e., stories) educational videos in altering IDP-relevant attitudes and multimedia sharing behaviors. Our study revealed concept and fact videos reduced sharing of social media content that portrayed people negatively. The narrative intervention backfired and increased sharing among participants who did not believe IDP violations to be especially serious; however, the narrative intervention decreased sharing for participants who rated IDP violations as more serious. Notably, our study found participants preferred narrative-based interventions with real world examples, despite other strategies more effectively reducing sharing. Implications for narrative transportation theory and advancing bottom-up (i.e., user-centered) psychosocial interventions are discussed.2023RWRenita Washburn et al.University of Central FloridaPrivacy Perception & Decision-MakingOnline Harassment & Counter-ToolsMisinformation & Fact-CheckingCHI
A Gameful Organizational Assimilation Process: Insights from World of Warcraft for Gamification DesignA central process of virtual organization design relates to how newcomers are assimilated into organizational dynamics. Research on organizational assimilation has traditionally investigated “serious” organizational contexts. Nonetheless, video games can offer insights on how such assimilation can be effectively supported. In this article, I propose to look at World of Warcraft (WoW) to understand how individuals can be successfully integrated into online organizations. Through an ethnographic research, made up of participant observation and 36 semi-structured interviews, I explore the role that specific game design elements have in supporting organizational assimilation into WoW raiding guilds. This role is particularly relevant because it shows how designers can elicit extremely engaging organizational dynamics, which encourage players to identify with their organizations. On the basis of the study findings, I also propose some design considerations, as practical implications of the research, to gamify virtual organizations that may present similarities with WoW raiding guilds.2020ARAmon RappTeams, Groups, and CreativityCSCW
Reflexive Ethnographies in Human-Computer Interaction: Theory and PracticeThis course aims at introducing some key issues in contemporary ethnographic practice, emphasizing the role of the writing style and the epistemic position of the fieldworker in shaping a particular perspective on the observed phenomena. It outlines the theoretical assumptions that lie behind the traditional “realist position” of HCI ethnographies to propose methodological tools for conducting and writing reflexive ethnographies, valuing the role of the ethnographer and her subjective experiences.2018ARAmon RappUniversity of TorinoParticipatory DesignUser Research Methods (Interviews, Surveys, Observation)CHI
The Spirit of the City: Using Social Media to Capture Neighborhood AmbiancePlace ambiance has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Despite its importance, ambiance has been crucially overlooked by urban planners and scientists alike, not least because it is difficult to record and analyze at scale. We explored the possibility of using social media data to reliably map the ambiance of neighborhoods in the entire city of London. To this end, we collected geo-referenced picture tags from Flickr and matched those tags with the words in a newly created ambiance dictionary. In so doing, we made four main contributions: i) map the ambiance of London neighborhoods; ii) ascertain that such a mapping meets residents' expectations, which are derived from a survey we conducted; iii) show that computer vision techniques upon geo-referenced pictures are of predictive power for neighborhood ambiance; and iv) explain each prediction of a neighborhood's ambiance by identifying the picture that best reflects the meaning of that ambiance (e.g., artsy) in that neighborhood (e.g., South Kensington---the richest and most traditional neighborhood---and Shoreditch---among the most progressive and hipster neighborhoods in the city---are both `artsy' but in very different ways). The combination of the predictive power of mapping ambiance from images and the ability to explain those predictions makes it possible to discover hidden gems across the city at an unprecedented scale.2018MRMiriam Redi et al.Social Media in the WildCSCW
Know Thyself: A Theory of the Self for Personal InformaticsAlthough Personal Informatics stresses the importance of “self”-awareness and “self”-knowledge in collecting personal data, a description of the “self,” to which all these knowledge endeavors are addressed, is missing in the current debate. In this article we first review how the different theoretical assumptions that currently inform the design of Personal Informatics tools fail to convey a convincing image of the self, which ought to be quantified by these technologies. We then move on to the outline of a theory of the self that may ground the current discourse in Personal Informatics. Building on this theoretical framework, we propose a set of design guidelines as its implications, which may drive the design of future self-tracking technologies. Finally, we outline a research agenda, organized around such guidelines, in the form of research questions to be addressed in the future.2018ARAmon Rapp et al.University of TorinoUniversal & Inclusive DesignMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesCHI
Gamification for Self-Tracking: From World of Warcraft to the Design of Personal Informatics SystemsWorld of Warcraft (WoW) may be a source of inspiration to enrich the Personal Informatics systems user’s experience and, at the same time, improve gamification design. Through the findings of a four-year reflexive ethnography in WoW, I outline how its game design elements support players in making sense of their own data, emphasizing how “game numbers” are turned into meanings. On the basis of the study results, I propose a series of design considerations to be used in the design of self-tracking systems, which recommend to embody data into digital entities, provide different analytical tools depending on the users’ expertise through a flexible model, and foster the formation of “communities of practice” in order to support learning processes.2018ARAmon RappUniversity of TorinoGamification DesignCHI
Session-based Suggestion of Topics for Exploratory SearchExploratory information search can challenge users in the formulation of efficacious search queries to find the data they are interested in. Moreover, complex information spaces can disorient people, making it difficult to explore all the types of information relevant to their activities. In order address these issues, we propose a session-based concept suggestion model that, given the observed search queries, proposes context-dependent query expansions as a {\em ``you might also be interested in''} function. Our model can be applied to incrementally generate suggestions during the search sessions. This can be employed for query expansion, and in general to guide users in the exploration of the possibly complex space of information categories managed by an information system. Our model is based on the generation of a concept co-occurrence graph that describes how frequently concepts are searched together in sessions. Starting from an ontological domain representation, we generated the graph by analyzing the query log of a major search engine. Moreover, we identified clusters of ontology concepts which frequently co-occur in users' searches via community detection on the graph. An experiment carried out using the log provided satisfactory accuracy results.2018NMNoemi Mauro et al.Recommender System UXIUI