Quantitative Study

Exploring Local Information Inequality in South Korea through AI-Enhanced Visualization and Public Library Data

The goal of the project is to understand information inequality across geographical regions in South Korea and visualize them using an AI-backed visualization tool. Our plan, spanning three years, revolves around the development of an intuitive platform for the purpose of visualizing these disparities. During the first year, we aim to construct comprehensive metrics for assessing the level of informational inequality, based on the theory of local information landscapes (LIL theory).

The NYC311 App & Community Engagement in Coproducing Municipal Services

In the public sector, governments and the people they serve increasingly collaborate to coproduce public services. To support the coproduction of municipal services, specifically, local governments have incorporated various digital technologies into their information systems. How do digital technologies affect community residents' engagement in coproducing municipal services?

Two-sided Cultural Niches: Topic Overlap, Geospatial Correlation, and Local Group Activities on Event-based Social Networks

As event-based social networks (EBSNs) such as Meetup.com and Facebook Events gain popularity in managing local events like farmers' markets and social gatherings, they create two-sided cultural niches where event organizers and participants benefit from the platform while influencing each other. Among various factors, niche overlap, an ecological feature, has been studied as a key factor that shapes the success of online communities.

Mapping Information Ecology: Understanding the Fragmentation of Disability Service Information

As organizations and individuals provide various information to multiple systems within a region, the information becomes fragmented, making it difficult for people to access the necessary information. Individuals have limited resources to navigate all the sources and use only part of the available ones. Disability service information is further fragmented due to diverse actors, ranging from government agencies to for-profit organizations, who often provide only partial information.

How Do YouTubers Collaborate? A Preliminary Analysis of YouTubers’ Collaboration Networks

Online videos such as those streamed through YouTube are largely produced by individual users rather than traditional mass media, partly due to the incentive structure of the platforms. As part of the strategy to increase the audience, many content creators collaborate with other creators to attract subscribers and diversify their content. This behavior can be conceptualized as “coopetition” as they cooperate for their channels’ success while competing with one another for the limited pool of audience.

Towards an Expectation-Oriented Model of Public Service Quality: A Preliminary Study of NYC 311

The 311 system has been deployed in many U.S. cities to manage non-emergency civic issues such as noise and illegal parking. To assess the performance of 311-mediated public service provision, researchers developed models based on execution time and the status of execution. However, research on user satisfaction suggests that the level of individuals’ perception is asymmetric with respect to the quality of services, because negative experiences have a stronger impact on people’s dissatisfaction than positive experiences do for satisfaction.

Exploring How Convergence Methods Foster Shared Accountability to Reveal, Map, and Mitigate the Sources and Dynamics of Bias across Social Service Provisioning Systems

Social services, traditionally, have been organized around their missions, such as education or safety or health. A newer approach, called "wrap-around services" or "systems of care," organizes services around individuals and their specific context and needs. These systems face many challenges when applied in real-world settings. Application processes often focus more on the potential of technologies and less on the realities, histories, and needs of communities. The proposed research addresses this gap by evaluating the implementation of a system of care in a real-world setting.

Social Justice & Technical Efficiency: The Role of Digital Technology in Boston's 311 System

Does digital technology help or hinder the realization of social justice in government services? Applying theories of distributive justice, we analyzed data from Boston's 311 system (for residents to make requests for non-emergency services) paired with data from the American Community Survey. We found that, as residents used the system's digital channels (website and mobile app) more frequently, the number of requests they submitted increased.

In Search of Social Justice: The Role of Digital Technology in a Government Information System

In producing and providing services to local residents, municipal governments increasingly incorporate digital technology into their Information Systems (IS). In these digitally-enhanced government IS, how does digital technology affect social justice in the use and outcomes of the systems? By applying theories of distributive justice and analyzing data collected from Boston's 311 system for residents to request non-emergency services, we have found significant and lasting disparities between wealthy and poor communities in the use of the system's digital channels (mobile app and website).

The Effects of Socioeconomic Deprivation on Public Library Book Circulation: A Community-level Study

This study analyzes the effects of community-level socioeconomic deprivations (SED) on public libraries’ book circulation in the Seoul metropolitan area. The study design draws upon the theory of local information landscapes, which explains the relationship between community characteristics and information behavior. Using four-year (2015-2018) open government and public library circulation data, we constructed a socioeconomic deprivation index by adjusting a multi-dimensional deprivation index and generated other variables.

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