Using Conversational Media Objects, Social Photography, and Community to Understand and Organize Modern Information Systems

Today, beyond content and metadata, information is organized by the online social actions taken upon it. These social activities contribute to the overall conversational nature of media that we create, store, and share. From this, there exists many opportunities to build a new class of social-visual systems to aid in the organization and retrieval processes; these opportunities rely heavily on the both tacit and explicit communicative nature of social multimedia. In this talk, I will discuss the new practice of photography and how the media we create have become conversational media objects. Further, I will present a multifaceted human-centered computing system used to surface geo-located weather photos for editorial inclusion in a mobile application. Using the Flickr photosharing service, we can identify explicit group behavior, implicit photo viewing patterns, and apply modern deep learning computer vision techniques to surface photos for curatorial editors. Further, I will outline new findings and challenges in social media organization including geographic annotation of photographs and regions, community congregation online, and social engagement.