• Question: What sort of communities have you worked with?

    Asked by Dobby to Jodi on 18 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Jodi Schneider

      Jodi Schneider answered on 18 Nov 2014:


      Twitter and Wikipedia are two of the online communities that I’ve studied. I *participate* in the communities as part of my research. Like when I was trying to understand how new articles get created in Wikipedia — I became one of the Wikipedian reviewers, to decide whether or not to publish an article. We combined that with some computerised summaries–like how long it’s taking to publish Wikipedia articles, when new authors get feedback, and so on. We gave gave a talk in Berlin about that project, and gave feedback to the Wikimedia Foundation that supports Wikipedia.

      Another community I’m studying now is pharmacists. Every two weeks, since March, I have a phone call with 5 people who are studying medication safety. I try to understand what kind of evidence they care about so that we can make better computer models. So far we’ve been working on this for about 9 months — it will be a 4-year project, making software that helps analyse drug-drug interactions, so that doctors don’t make deadly mistakes in prescribing bad combinations of medication.

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