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Forums - General - Third and Last Public Call: VGChartz Users Wanted as Volunteers for a Research Study!

DarkTemplar on 28 July 2013

Hi vgchartz members, I am recruiting volunteers for an academic experiment which is related to my PhD Thesis at the University of São Paulo.

If you are over the age of 18 and have a profile at http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com I would love if you could help me in this experiment.

The experiment takes around 10 minutes to finish, all you have to do is to select a game and then judge the relevance of 10 randomly selected opinions about it (you do not need to have played the game before choosing it, you might just want to know more about it).

I would appreciate if you could do the experiment more than one time (selecting a new game or even the game you selected previously).

Here is the formal invitation:

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Dear vgchartz users:

You are invited to participate to a web based research study to investigate what make an opinion relevant to an online social network member. In this experiment you must judge the relevance of opinions from reviews written by other member of this site in the past. In order to respect and protect your anonymity this experiment was evaluated and approved by an Ethical Committee in Research at the University of São Paulo. The experiment was also discussed with two moderators of the forums to avoid any problems.

To participate on this research visit the link: http://allanlima.pcs.usp.br/vgpoll/terms/pollTerms.php

Thank you for considering this request.
Sincerely,
Allan Lima - PhD Student at the University of São Paulo.
P.S. If you wrote a public review on the vgchartz but do not want to have none of your opinions judged by other users in this experiment visit the link: http://allanlima.pcs.usp.br/vgpoll/blacklist/userBlacklistForm.php


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happydolphin on 28 July 2013

I think there should be more info as to what the exact topic is. As long as something was talking about Mario Galaxy, it was relevant. It would also be more interesting to ask whether I agreed with it or not or whether I thought the post was interesting or uninteresting.

Fun project, all the best with it.



DarkTemplar on 28 July 2013
happydolphin said:
I think there should be more info as to what the exact topic is. As long as something was talking about Mario Galaxy, it was relevant. It would also be more interesting to ask whether I agreed with it or not or whether I thought the post was interesting or uninteresting.

Fun project, all the best with it.

Thanks for your sugguestions, happydolphin.

I will take them into consideration in future experiments.

The concept of relevance if very subjective and varies from people to people, this is why I'm studying it.

For instance, in your case you may want to judge an opinion as relevant or not if it was interesting or not for you or even if you agree or don't with it.



happydolphin on 28 July 2013
DarkTemplar said:
happydolphin said:
I think there should be more info as to what the exact topic is. As long as something was talking about Mario Galaxy, it was relevant. It would also be more interesting to ask whether I agreed with it or not or whether I thought the post was interesting or uninteresting.

Fun project, all the best with it.

Thanks for your sugguestions, happydolphin.

I will take them into consideration in future experiments.

The concept of relevance if very subjective and varies from people to people, this is why I'm studying it.

For instance, in your case you may want to judge an opinion as relevant or not if it was interesting or not for you or even if you agree or don't with it.

Not completely. I see where you're coming from, but relevance is really how accurately is the post close to the topic at hand. Without a topical reference point, we can't judge relevance (a game title is much too vague in the context of vgchartz discussion topics).

However, I'll admit and agree with you that people will judge relevance based on a personal system which doesn't match the definition of what "Relevance" means, and so you may be right that relevance ends up being judged with criteria such as level of interesing or information provided.



Soleron on 28 July 2013

The university are OK with you implying they endorse the study?

If yes, do they have such low standards for substantial original work that they consider surveying a gaming forum to be PhD worthy?



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DarkTemplar on 28 July 2013
Soleron said:

The university are OK with you implying they endorse the study?

Yes they are, my work was not only evaluated by a ethical committee, but also by 3 other professors (PhDs, one of them from another University) as well.

The data I'm gathering here is going to be used as input to a multi disciplinary Relevance Model related to research fields like Information Retrieval, Artificial Intelligence, Personality Models, Memes, Opinion Mining, Social Search, etc.

This type of experiment is widely used to evaluate information retrieval models. If I had the resources I would love index data from a general propose social network (like the facebook, but that would take months or even years). Then I have to work with domains like games, books, movies, animes, etc. where the amount of data to index is relativelly small.

During my PhD I intend run this experiment in two different domains, the next one is probably going to be books or animes.

If yes, do they have such low standards for substantial original work that they consider surveying a gaming forum to be PhD worthy?

There is nothing wrong with forum (in this case, also social network) users. If we look at the internet it is easy to find out researchers from other universities conducting experiments with the same type of people. Recently researchers have been working with users from social networks in many different projects. It's becoming a trend.

I hope I've properly answered your questions.

=)

Edit: typos.



Soleron on 28 July 2013
DarkTemplar said:
Soleron said:

The university are OK with you implying they endorse the study?

Yes they are, my work was not only evaluated by a ethical committee, but also by 3 other professors (PhDs, one of them from another University) as well.

The data I'm gathering here is going to be used as input to a multi disciplinary Relevance Model related to research fields like Information Retrieval, Artificial Intelligence, Personality Models, Memes, Opinion Mining, Social Search, etc.

This type of experiment is widely used to evaluate information retrieval models. If I had the resources I would love index data from a general propose social network (like the facebook, but that would take months or even years). Then I have to work with domains like games, books, movies, animes, etc. where the amount of data to index is relativelly small.

During my PhD I intend run this experiment in two different domains, the next one is probably going to be books or animes.

If yes, do they have such low standards for substantial original work that they consider surveying a gaming forum to be PhD worthy?

There is nothing wrong with forum (in this case, also social network) users. If we look at the internet it is easy to find out researchers from other universities conducting experiments with the same type of people. Recently researchers have been working with users from social networks in many different projects. It's becoming a trend.

I hope I've properly answered your questions.

=)

Edit: typos.

Yeah I'm pretty impressed with your justification and actual citations here. You'll fit right into academia.



Moren on 28 July 2013

I would, but unfortunately I'm not eligible.



DarkTemplar on 28 July 2013
Soleron said:
DarkTemplar said:
Soleron said:

The university are OK with you implying they endorse the study?

Yes they are, my work was not only evaluated by a ethical committee, but also by 3 other professors (PhDs, one of them from another University) as well.

The data I'm gathering here is going to be used as input to a multi disciplinary Relevance Model related to research fields like Information Retrieval, Artificial Intelligence, Personality Models, Memes, Opinion Mining, Social Search, etc.

This type of experiment is widely used to evaluate information retrieval models. If I had the resources I would love index data from a general propose social network (like the facebook, but that would take months or even years). Then I have to work with domains like games, books, movies, animes, etc. where the amount of data to index is relativelly small.

During my PhD I intend run this experiment in two different domains, the next one is probably going to be books or animes.

If yes, do they have such low standards for substantial original work that they consider surveying a gaming forum to be PhD worthy?

There is nothing wrong with forum (in this case, also social network) users. If we look at the internet it is easy to find out researchers from other universities conducting experiments with the same type of people. Recently researchers have been working with users from social networks in many different projects. It's becoming a trend.

I hope I've properly answered your questions.

=)

Edit: typos.

Yeah I'm pretty impressed with your justification and actual citations here. You'll fit right into academia.

Thanks for your comprehension, sometimes it is hard to justify and to explain what is behind a PhD Thesis.



miz1q2w3e on 28 July 2013

Sure I'll help.

I was about to go to bed, so I'm just tagging this for later.