Paul Anthony George

Statement of Purpose:

One of my earliest memories of learning English was trying to memorise and narrate the story
of The cap seller and the monkeys. The persistent effort of actively consuming and serving
the story, during elocution contests, is probably the reason why I understand the language and
have some ability to speak in a public domain. And this has played a pivotal role in my
education and career.

As a student of mechanical engineering, I spent more energy trying to understand the history
of the theorems and experiments in the course, to understand what the context was, it has
always been difficult to understand abstract notions, without understanding what effect and
implications it had, on people. The context is probably the only reason why I chose to continue
with the program.

I was placed as a Design engineer in Godrej Interio Design, Godrej and Boyce. Here I was
exposed to both, current practices in engineering as well as industrial design, furniture design
in particular. I realised the function of the engineer, traditionally was to make or execute the
making of products and consumables as effectively and efficiently as possible. The designer
was a curious creature, as they spent time focusing solely on the product, designers, I learnt,
have to take into consideration the people, the environment, the product and the way they all
interact with each other. It seemed like designers really valued understanding the context and
the relationship between product and person. At Interio, I also spent time, designing, interfaces
through their BAAN ERP software, which helped connect, 3D CAD models to drawings,
assemblies, bill of materials. This helped connect design, engineering, marketing and quality and
analysis, in the access and communication of furnishing solutions for large SKUs. Learnings
from the project, helped create foundations for understanding the role of empathy across
different job profiles and service flow design. I wanted to learn about other aspects of design,
formally, which is why applied to the Industrial Design Centre for the masters programme.

At the Industrial Design Centre, I was exposed to subjects that helped me understand the
implication of language, form, semantics and semiotics, on perception. IDC is also one of the
best experiences Ive had, in being enabled to work with the prime motive, of social impact.
The nuances of what goes into creating systems, which can help improve the quality of life is
one of the greatest take away from IDC. The projects done at IDC, made me skeptical, leading
me to question constantly, the distance between intent of a project and the ethical
implications, it has, on people. For a field that relies heavily, on understanding people,
designers, seem to make compromises to carry out the design in their/ clients favour.

To understand the context of how design in India is practised, I joined as a project staff at IDC,
working on a project titled, The History of Product Design in India. The intent of the project
was to, capture key moments in Indian Product Design History, through the eyes of designers
and the products they created, from a time span, which extends from pre-independent India
until now. The project consists, largely of audio-visual documentation of conversations and
artefacts (photographs). These are disseminated through DSource, a knowledge dissemination
portal, which has become a library of open sourced design content and coursework. The
project, was an incredible opportunity to diversify and learn about film making and
documentation, it also gave access to talk to some of the early pioneers in the Indian Design
scene. Understanding the conversations, on a one on one basis and the change in dynamics of
conveying it online, is a challenge, I faced during the project, since online spaces have an
audience for content that constantly hooks onto the viewers attention. Content that speaks
about Indian Design history, has takers that only belong to small niche. Trying to understand
the importance of attention and online conversations became crucial, and the lack of
understanding in creating better narrative structures, was felt.

Understanding people and the way we communicate has always been of interest. From cave
paintings as a narrative tool, to paintings and graffiti. The medium of conversation has evolved
over time to accommodate more and more participants. Comic Books, as a narrative structure,
have been one of the more resounding mediums to capture both child and adult audiences, to
have a conversation, regarding a wide range of topics. Whether it be related to flights of
fantasy, super heroes, mundane slices of life. It has eventually become the vox populi for a lot
of writers to convey complex notions regarding politics, humanity and the apparent decadence
of society.

But with the advent of the internet, the participants, along with the conversations have
increased sporadically. The complicated topics that were mentioned above consisted initially of
a few creators and a large number of consumers. Now this has shifted to a large number of
both and the lines between content and creator, are blurring. My interests, in spreadable
media, internet memes, ethnography and the behaviour of trolling have converged to a point
where I use images, text, gifs and videos to communicate experiences rather than just text
laden information. With apps like Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram gaining momentum.
I find this area- where big data, related to cultural contexts, linguistics and human life, being
codified and consumed by a vast majority through humour, incredibly fascinating.

But the dilemma in studying this discourse, is the lack of, either content or access to good
online conversations and spaces for it to occur. Inevitably, understanding the creation of
spreadable media and online discourse, is one thing and knowing how to analyse and create
better spaces for online discourse, requires, a different set of tools. This is where my interest
is, currently.

Understanding the behaviour of people, within a context, in digital environments and creating
spaces, that might sustain better conversations, this requires the amalgamation of many
different schools of thought. This amalgamation is, something that design and designers are
good at. There is hope that the intent of applying for research through design methodologies,
to study, online spaces and the lives of those that sustain it, will make for interesting
opportunities and challenges, as a research topic and further expand knowledge, in the
domains of design and digital humanities.

Research Proposal

Title: Babble Online: Understanding and improving online chatter

Intent of Research: Understanding and designing online spaces for better online discourse.

Aims of intended research: To understand the spoken and unspoken rules that govern
behaviour online and the current state of discussions online. Study existing and new metrics of
what forms good online discourse. Propose, design, visualise and test, plans for new online
spaces, with the intent of creating better dialogue (computer mediated communication).

Current Reality (and supporting literature):

Computer mediated communication (CMC), is defined as the synchronous or asynchronous
electronic mail and computer conferencing, by which senders encode in text messages that are
relayed from senders' computers to receivers (Walther, Interpersonal Effects in Computer-
Mediated Interaction, 1992). CMC has evolved sporadically, since the origin of this definition.
Better connectivity, interfaces and online spaces have been borne with an intent to be
transparent, so that the learner is most conscious of the content of the communication, not the
equipment (Mason & Romiszowski, 1994).

Online spaces, where people spend their virtual lives, is structured around the concept of
socialisation, whereby the child becomes an individual respecting his or her environment laws,
norms and customs. On the internet, this translates to, the process by which newcomers
make the transition from being organizational outsiders to being insiders (Choi, 2012).

Virtual selves are curated versions of existing selves and manifest in various forums, which
highlight the intended versions of people. Curation gives way to homophily (McPherson,
Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001) or syndication, a phenomenon that has been with humanity since,
communal foraging. Syndication, online, manifests in entities such as, groups, communities and
forums, to name a few. These are sites and platforms where discussions on various (group
specific) topics are conducted and mediated (Epstein & Axtell, 1996). Early human syndication
happened in small numbers, with barriers of language and geography, keeping the scale and
frequency of interactions small. Online syndication is boosted, in terms of scale and frequency,
through CMCs. Here person to person interaction surpasses face to face conversations and
dialogue, to what is also known as hyper-personal online interactions (Walther, Computer-
Mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal, and Hyperpersonal Interaction, 2016).

Digital natives, (Shah, 2010) spend their digital lives in a blurred existence where reality
(physical) and virtual reality increasingly fall back on one another. These online spaces are
often asynchronous precincts, for conversations and discussions that range from the most
mundane reportage that consists of day to day activities, stories (Facebook feeds,
Instagram stories, Snapchat feed, Twitter feed, Whatsapp status updates). In content and
form, they may exist as, stream of conscious threads, ennui, conversations regarding the
political, environmental and social aspirations of the digital self. This kind of discourse, that
generates big data, has tremendous implications ( Kwak, Lee, Park, & Moon, 2010). As
contemporary news media, often rely on live tweet feeds, to visualise and display how a
majority opines, over suggested themes, that are being covered by interested channels
(Alejandro, 2010).

Syndication, online, results into groups or bubbles of digital natives, who by principle, subscribe
to similar views and ideologies. Very rarely, do these spaces, entertain alternative views
(Garrett, 2009). Opposing schools of thought, are met with harsh criticism, or is caricatured
through digital artefacts like memes or ridiculed and shamed through the poorly defined
behaviour of trolling.

This has resulted into clusters of virtual spaces, where the digital natives with their cloistered
opinions, carry out discourse that severely lacks an unbiased, objective view, of both the virtual
and the real world. These spaces are often referred to as echo chambers (Boutyline & Willer,
2015). Realisation of echo chambers, has become a potent tool for those who want to
capitalise on the space so to:

-Harness and perpetuate strong views

-Create Political and social unrest
-Polarise factions of society
-Spread fictitious content and rumours
-Ply the masses with sensationalist media items, blind siding them from matters that could or
should have received more space and prominence in online and offline discourse.

A lot of discourse and debate is required in learning environments. MOOCs have evolved into
more flexible and potent learning spaces like Stanfords Coursera, MIT and Harvards edX and
Khan Academy are platforms that disseminate, learning modules and have live feedback and
comment sections. These online spaces make possible, self-directed, self-paced learning
modules. Albeit they are still heavily dependent on incentives like certifications and a gamified
model, so as to nudge the student/ learner to persist with the online courses (Murphy,
Gallagher , Krumm, Mislevy, & Hafter, 2014). Flipped classrooms, pose interesting
opportunities for in-person teaching and learning environments, where the role of the teacher
shifts from broadcast teaching, towards an almost apprenticeship model with more debate and
conversation.

Very few online spaces, by design, nurture discussions that have depth and objectivity. This
leads to forums on popular social networks, harbouring scatter-brained and superficial
discussions. Which further puts into question the ability to learn and discuss successfully, in
depth, online.

It thus becomes important to understand, the dynamics of the lives of digital natives and to
perceive, the incredibly challenging design opportunity, to study the existing architecture and
propose new plans that could shape the future spaces, for, meaningful and accessible online
discourse.

Research Questions:

1) What is the nature of spaces where discussion occurs online?

- What is the depth, richness and quality of participation of discourse in these spaces?
- What are the metrics that help gauge-richness, depth and quality of online conversations?
- Should a human centred method be used for rating and improving meaningful discourse or
should it be a more machine centred method?
- What kind of artefacts perpetuate online or computer mediated communications?

2) How can access be improved, to themes that might sustain rich conversations?
- How can tools like data visualisation enhance participation and access in online spaces?
-Existing platforms have elements that categorise and index content, making information
accessible, however the platforms are not, understanding centric and barely vouches for the
exchange of varying social opinions. How then, can social platforms be designed to improve
the organization of social opinions to improve online discourse?
-What kind of dynamics would be required for better engagement, in terms of representation
of space and hierarchy of information?

3) Can online spaces be designed to achieve a balance between freedom of expression and
sensitivity, without resorting to heavy censorship?
- Is it possible to have good conversations, that leans toward empathy and respect for
alternative points of view?
- Is it possible to prevent disruptive elements like trolls from derailing good conversations?
Intended methods for Research:
1) Benchmarking and literature review:
A part of the research would involve in gathering and categorising information about:
-The architecture and nature of online platforms.
-About usage and behaviour patterns across selected platforms.
-The nature and structure of discourse from a linguistic point of view.
-Key parameters that governs participation online.
-Relationships between content, resource and author.
-Understanding existing paradigms and metrics that define good discourse.

2) Empirical Research

-Using, Ranking and testing, existing platforms:

Based on the literature review, certain experiments can be performed, using existing platforms
and user generated content from it, to gauge whether assumptions and findings, match the
understood notions of what defines good online discourse.
The empirical research will have a lot to do with assessing and ranking of user generated
content (UGC), which is a complex task

Since discourse exists in various application domains (posts in Q & A forums, comments in
spreadable media platforms, product reviews, etc.) to understand, quantitatively the nature of
discourse in various platforms, the existing methodology revolves around extracting and
sorting of values from UGC. Which basically gives us an understanding of, credibility,
helpfulness, diversity, etc. (Momeni, Cardie, & Diakopoulos, 2015).

Existing methods for assessment and ranking involve:

Human centred methods: Where either an end user interacts with a system, which adapts to
the users notions of value or ranking of content, based on his or her preference. Or a group of
end users, interact with the system and based on a set definition of value, rank and assess the
content. And last, the platform designer may specify default rankings.

Machine centred methods: These involve machine learning and computational methods, where
in a designed function for assessment and ranking UGC, learns from assessment patterns from
a crowd of humans or a particular end users preference or as per the platform designers
definition of value.

The preliminary research and literature review brings out the qualitative aspects in the
relationship between, content, resource and author. These can be better understood and
synthesised, with the help of big data, to understand, influential features identified in (Momeni,
Cardie, & Diakopoulos, 2015) that helps in the machine centred approach for assessment and
ranking of UGC.

One way to study UGC and relationship between content, resource and author can be done by
studying discourse thematically across platforms. This can be done through topic modelling,
using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model (Blei, Ng, & Jordan, 2003), the outcome would
enable us to discover clusters of words that are congruent thematically. The key idea of using
this model to study online discourse is that, it helps validating the nature of discourse against
design features of the platform and how users use it, this method can also be used to
understand the tone and sentiment of conversations, in one platform or many platforms.
LDA, requires a lot of pre-processing work, since the text corpus (like Wikipedia to train the
machine) depends on the application domain, the context has to be tailor made, since the
relationships between the words or word clusters that computer generates depends on the
pre-set context. Training or the machine learning aspect involves, knowing the number of
topics, which again depends on how well nuanced the designer is with the domain knowledge
(preliminary research).

As mentioned, the LDA model gives a cluster of words, which allows us to draw out patterns in
words to understand the nature of conversation, thematically and its relationship to the author
and the resources available online.

Design and Testing:

Assessment of online discourse and understanding the nuances of existing platform
architecture, can be used as a benchmark and design decision making tool, while designing and
constructing new online spaces.

The assessment frame work for existing platforms can also be used for testing and refining,
new models and spaces that might help sustain better online discourse.

The actual design and prototyping of new frameworks for online discourse, will involve
elements of web design, user experience design and at its core usability testing. Initial
prototypes might involve implementing the designed interface with feeds from existing
platforms.
External feeds, would be channelized to the designed interface, keeping in mind existing issues
of visibility of theme, mitigating selective exposure and enabling access to personal and
alternate view points within a conversation.

Relevance of research:

- Online spaces are increasingly becoming environments rife with extreme polarised opinions.
There is a requirement for methods, which help curb or at least exhibit the biases, inherent in
the online community.

- Creating better metrics that combine human and machine centred approaches, to rate
content, is something that needs more attention, if we are to mitigate the existing biases that
renders, existing online discourse, useless and distasteful.

-Sentiment analysis models for assessing conversation, have largely been conducted on text
based UGC, however a part of the internet discourse, largely consists of non-textual UGC, for
better or for worse, spreadable media is largely non-textual, there is an opportunity to
understand the contribution of non-textual UGC and how heavily it shapes online discourse.

- Unbiased conversations, means drawing parallels between large volumes of diverse opinions.
This raises incredible challenges and opportunities in terms of data visualisation, to improve
accessibility, interaction and engagement in online conversations.

- Understanding, the nature and dynamics of online discourse, specifically, in the Indian
context, allows to expand existing knowledge, in this domain. A population, that has inherently,
diverse, social, cultural and political opinions and aspirations, make for interesting residents, in
an online space.
Reference:

1. Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., & Moon, S. (2010). What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News
Media?

2. Alejandro, J. (2010). Journalism in the Age of Social media. Reuters Institute Fellowship
Paper.

3. Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Journal of
Machine Learning Research 3.

4. Boutyline , A., & Willer, R. (2015). The Social Structure of Political Echo Chambers:
Variation in Ideological Homophily in Online Networks.

5. Choi, B. R. (2012). Essays on Socialization in Online Groups.

6. Epstein, J. M., & Axtell, R. L. (1996). Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the
Bottom Up.

7. Garrett, R. K. (2009). Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure

among Internet news users. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication.

8. Mason, R., & Romiszowski, A. J. (1994). COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION.

9. McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). BIRDS OF A FEATHER: Homophily
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10. Momeni, E., Cardie, C., & Diakopoulos, N. (2015). A Survey on Assessment and Ranking
Methodologies for User-Generated Content on the Web.

11. Murphy, R., Gallagher , L., Krumm, A. E., Mislevy, J., & Hafter, A. (2014). Research on the
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12. Shah, N. (2010). Knowing a Name: Methodologies and Challenges. Digital Natives with a
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