Digital Content Communities Research

Activity stream

• Matti's et al. work "Social Media Is Polarized: Towards a New Design Agenda for Mitigating Polarization" has been accepted for Designing Interactive Systems 2018 2018-06-09 Read more
• Matti and Teemu Leinonen present their work on teachers' Facebook community of practice in ITK 2018-04-12
• Matti defended his thesis on Hybrid Interaction 2018-01-09 Read more
• Proposal with the University of Tampere on the circulation in the news media 2017-12-10
• Jesse's, Juho's, Matti's and Airi Lampinen's proposal "Algorithmic systems, power and interaction" was funded by Kone Foundation 2017-12-08

The Digital Content Communities studies the intersection of groups, technology and society. This includes research aimed to produce novel technical tools for group interaction as well as more social science oriented examination on the implications new communication technology may have to groups and society.

Our academic background ranges from arts and social science to technology and we believe such interdiciplinary approach is nececcarly to solve the problems we're working on.

Currently our research is focused on following areas

Personal data and MyData

MyData is model for a human-centric approach to the managing and processing of personal information. The approach is based on the right of individuals to access the data collected about them. The core idea is that individuals should be in control of their own data. The MyData approach aims at strengthening digital human rights while opening new opportunities for businesses to develop innovative personal data based services built on mutual trust. Researchers in our group both participate in the development of MyData, and consider the movement gathering around the human-centric concept as an object of research.

Our focus in this area has been..

• Technical architectures, storage systems, and platforms for personal data management
• Personal data economy & markets modeling
• Societal and policy implications of data management models
• Relation of MyData to data subjectivities & citizenship

In addition to academic output such as research papers, some of our outputs in this area have been

• Digital Me (DiMe) collects your personal data from various loggers into a central place that you control
• An architecture to liberate the potential of personal data and to facilitate its controlled flow from multiple data sources to applications and services..
• MyData whitepaper
• National industry facilitation through the Finnish MyData alliance
• Facilitation of thought exchange in MyData conferences, community meetings and the MyData global network.

Understading participation

We have studied participation in mediated environments, such as political discourse during elections, anti-migration discussions in Finland and elementary children using their mobile devices to dicuss during classes. While these cases may seem far fetch, they demonstrate how computing technology changes how participation takes place.

Our core focus in this area has been to develop designs and practices which support high-quality participation. To do this, we examine how the communication technologies are used today and when possible, produce an intervention to these practices.

Some of the core outputs in this area have been

• A work outlining how to augment events with audience–performer interaction systems, or live participation.
• A commercial spinoff to produce live participation to events, Screen.io, with whom we still collaborate.
• Proposal how to bring contectual information to analysis of participation at scale using big-data-augmented online ethnography.