Consumption of Content on the Web: An Ecologically Inspired Perspective

Abstract

How do people search for and organize informational resources on the web? This dissertation explores this question in the context of music tagging and listening, incorporating web data mining and machine learning methods with theory from cognitive science. In particular, I draw inspiration from information foraging theory (and the earlier work on animal foraging on which it is based) and the ecological rationality research program. The three principal research questions my thesis addresses are the following: RQ1: Can we apply an ecological perspective to online music listening, and what novel insights does such a perspective offer? (Chapter 2) RQ2: How and why do people tag content in social Web environments? Specifically, I explore motivational factors around the highly variable levels of contribution to collaborative tagging systems, and present models of tagging built upon simple imitation heuristics. (Chapter 3) RQ3: How do patterns of content consumption and classification interact? As a case study of the interplay between tagging and consumption, I test whether tagging serves as an aid for future retrieval of content. (Chapter 4) Taken together, these research questions represent an integrative view of how humans interact with digital resources on the web, specifically with respect to music. There already exists a substantial literature on the two types of data I focus on here (music tagging and listening), but this dissertation makes a significant new contribution by framing both my research questions and analytic approaches in a psychologically and ecologically grounded manner. This link is most obvious in Chapter 2, where I offer a foraging-inspired perspective on music consumption, but is present throughout all my work, such as examining ecologically-based mechanisms of imitation in tagging behavior (Chapter 3) or exploring whether proposed motivational mechanisms behind tagging are consistent with observed interactions between tagging and listening (Chapter 4).