Edits & Credits: Exploring Integration and Attribution in Online Creative Collaboration - alt.chi 2010
•
2 likes•451 views
Presented by Kurt Luther (GVU Center, Georgia Tech) in the alt.chi session "Imagine All the People" at the 2010 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2010), in Atlanta, GA.
![Why contribute to online creative collaboration? Learning Political motives Altruism Financial gain Increased reputation [Benkler 2006; Bryant et al. 2005; Hertel et al. 2003] 2 wikipedia.org mozilla.org linux.org](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Viewers also liked
Viewers also liked (9)
Similar to Edits & Credits: Exploring Integration and Attribution in Online Creative Collaboration - alt.chi 2010
Similar to Edits & Credits: Exploring Integration and Attribution in Online Creative Collaboration - alt.chi 2010 (20)
More from Kurt Luther
More from Kurt Luther (6)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Edits & Credits: Exploring Integration and Attribution in Online Creative Collaboration - alt.chi 2010
- 1. Edits & Credits:Exploring Integration and Attributionin Online Creative Collaboration Kurt Luther, Georgia Tech Nick Diakopoulos, Rutgers University Amy Bruckman, Georgia Tech
- 2. Why contribute to online creative collaboration? Learning Political motives Altruism Financial gain Increased reputation [Benkler 2006; Bryant et al. 2005; Hertel et al. 2003] 2 wikipedia.org mozilla.org linux.org
- 3. Attribution It’s important Enables online reputations to form [Kollock 1995] Motivates many contributions to online creative collaboration It’s complex Automatic attribution, per se, not enough[Diakopoulos et al. 2007; Thom-Santelli 2009; Monroy-Hernandez et al. 2010] Online creative communities, like offline ones, develop social norms and professional standards [Becker, 1984] It’s poorly understood 3
- 4. Background Newgrounds.com Founded in 1995 by Tom Fulp Over 1.8 million members 160,000+ member-uploaded Flash animations (movies and games) Collabs[Luther & Bruckman, 2008] Online, collaborative animation projects Organized on discussion forums One leader plus 1-50+ artist(s) Modularized, not specialized 4 newgrounds.com
- 5. Methods In-depth interviews [Seidman 2006] 17 participants 14 interviewed via phone, three via email Ages 16-29 All had experience with collabs, most as leaders Questions and analysis focused on criteria, challenges, strategies for integration and attribution Shaded box = had leader experience 5
- 6. Integration Criteria Quality First-come, first-serve “If…everyone can join up and do a piece, and everything gets in…. You’ll get a lot of pieces and a lot of people will join, but the quality won’t necessarily be as high.” —James, 16, Australia 6
- 7. Integration Challenges Aesthetic Variety vs. continuity “I’ve seen some collaborations where the styles just kind of looked the same… and there wasn’t really a reason to watch.” —Joseph B., 24, USA “[Variety is] one of the best parts about collaborations, different people’s art styles coming together…but it’s still important [that], like, in some way it flows.” —James, 16, Australia 7
- 8. 8 All images fromnewgrounds.com
- 9. Integration Challenges “If you don’t like something, you just tell the person to change it themselves rather than changing it for them…. How would you feel if someone…changed your work without telling you?” — Anders-Martin, 16, USA Aesthetic Variety vs. continuity Social Ownership Individual vs. group 9
- 10. Integration Challenges “If you don’t like something, you just tell the person to change it themselves rather than changing it for them…. How would you feel if someone…changed your work without telling you?” — Anders-Martin, 16, USA Aesthetic Variety vs. continuity Social Ownership Individual vs. group Technical Differing techniques [Integration] drove me insane! Since each artist has a different style, of course they have a different [way] of animating…a different format, a different setup.” — Hans, 17, Spain 10
- 11. Integration Strategies Aesthetic Transitions Social Integration “etiquette” Technical Bug testing cf. Wikipedia Featured Article reviews [Viégas et al. 2007] 11
- 12. Attribution Criteria Quality Best submissions, as judged by leader or vote Quantity Artists with the most accepted submissions Attitude Artists deemed the most helpful or friendly Role Certain roles (e.g. menu creator) are guaranteed credit 12 newgrounds.com newgrounds.com
- 13. Attribution Challenges Describing everyone’s contributions Generic “Author” titles “When the game was released, the creator didn’t coauthor Bill, and his argument was that Bill wasn’t an author, he was a programmer. And he refused to basically have him listed as a coauthor of the game. That’s not how he saw the relationship.” —Tom, 29, USA 13 newgrounds.com
- 14. Attribution Challenges Recognizing everyone’s contributions 10-coauthor maximum “[If a collab has more than 10 people], no way to make everybody happy that way. Somebody’s going to get screwed on that one…. If you’re part of the project, you definitely deserve the credit for it. If you get screwed out of the credit, that just sucks.” —Tyler, 19, USA “I think it worked better when they had five [coauthors], to be honest…. People are really working to become one of them. If there’s less, then people aren’t really struggling. They don’t need to work as hard to get the coauthor spot.” —Kester, 21, UK VS. 14
- 16. Design for Cr-editing Integration (editing) and attribution (crediting) often separated, but really one process (cr-editing) Need better ways to link authoring systems (e.g. Flash), collaboration systems (e.g. forums, email) and publication systems (e.g. Newgrounds) APIs for exchanging attribution metadata Tools for lightweight integration in collaboration systems 16
- 17. 17
- 18. Design for Collaborative Authorship Interfaces/architectures supporting multiple authors are rare Assumption: uploader = creator, who acted alone Newgrounds multi-author system limited, but better than most 18 youtube.com
- 19. Design for Community Values Norms, and standards evolve, are influenced by design Values towards cr-editing differ across communities Solutions may generalize to communities with shared values Separate recognition and commendation e.g. Wikipedia “history” tab vs. barnstars [Kriplean et al. 2008] 19 typophile.com wikipedia.org wikipedia.org
- 20. Final Thoughts Integration and attribution are important, complex Can be thought of as one process: cr-editing We can design for cr-editing, collaborative authorship, and community values Generalizing beyond Newgrounds Practice: designs that work across communities with shared values Theory: Benkler’s [2006] social production? 20
- 21. Thank You Participants and members of online animation communities National Science Foundation CreativeIT-0855952 ELC Lab and GVU Center Chris Howse Newgrounds.com staff You! 21 http://www.kurtluther.com
Editor's Notes
- This is work I’ve done with my collaborator, Nick Diakopoulos at Rutgers, and my advisor, Amy Bruckman at Georgia Tech. Let’s start with a question…
- Why contribute to online creative collaboration? Why do people fix typos in Wikipedia or fix bugs in Firefox?Well, the research tells us there are many reasons, but one of the most common is to increase your reputation within a creative community. But to have a reputation online requires two things: you need a persistent identity, and you need your contributions to be linked to that identity. In other words, attribution – giving someone credit for their actions – is essential for online reputation, and for motivating many contributions to online creative collaboration.
- It seems reasonable to think that because so many websites keep track of everything a user does, attribution would be a solved problem. But it turns out it’s not that simple. Studies have shown us that automatic attribution, by itself, isn’t enough. Just like traditional creative communities, like filmmaking and science, have developed social norms and professional standards around attribution, so have online creative communities. However, we know very little about what these norms and standards look like, what problems they cause, and how people deal with them. We attempt to address this gap by looking at these issues in the context of one particular online creative community, Newgrounds.
- The focus of our study was Newgrounds.com, an online community of Flash animators. It’s been around since 1995, it has over 1.8 million members, and over 160,000 member-uploaded Flash animations (movies and games).On the Newgrounds forums, people organize collaborative projects called “collabs.” Most collabs have one to fifty artists, who create the content, and one leader, who does everything else.Also, in most collabs, the division of labor is modularized, not specialized. This means making a collab is kind of like writing a conference paper – the leader divides up the work into sections, everyone finishes his or her section more or less individually, and the leader puts it all together at the end and decides on the author order. It’s this final integration and attribution process that I’ll talk about today.
- We interviewed 17 members of Newgrounds who had experience working on collabs, mostly as leaders. We asked participants to tell us about the selection criteria, challenges, and strategies they encountered during the integration and attribution process. For the sake of time, I’ll focus on challenges and strategies, but you can read the selection criteria in the paper.
- Leaders face three major challenges when integrating artists’ submissions. The first challenge is aesthetic. You might expect the goal is a single consistent style, but that’s not the case. Rather, most leaders strive for a balance of variety and continuity. Joseph argues that collabs with similar styles aren’t worth watching. On the other hand, James acknowledges that variety is important, but a smooth visual flow is just as important. Finding the sweet spot can be tough, since artists work independently and leaders have to make it work.
- Here’s an example of a collab with a single narrative – the story of the 1929 St Valentine’s Day massacre – but diverse artistic styles. Five artists worked on this collab, and you can see the variety in their interpretations of the different characters and settings.
- In addition to aesthetic challenges, there are social challenges. Artists want the integrity of their work to be preserved, and generally don’t want anyone changing it but them. But leaders are more concerned with the collab as a whole. Tensions arise when leaders want to cut out or reorder content and artists feel like their creative vision has been violated.
- Finally, there are technical challenges, most of which stem from artists using widely differing techniques to create their artwork. Leaders like Hans complain that figuring out all these techniques can drive them “insane.”
- Collab participants have developed a number of strategies for lessening these integration challenges.To help improve continuity among really diverse artists, leaders can create transitions to smooth the flow from one artist’s submission to the next.To deal with the tensions created by artists’ sense of ownership, many leaders practice a kind of integration etiquette, where leaders make minor changes without consulting artists but ask the artists themselves to make any major changes to their work.Finally, some leaders deal with technical challenges by sharing a pre-release version of the collab with artists and asking for feedback and bug reports. This process resembles Wikipedia Featured Article reviews, except that collab leaders aren’t obligated to reach a consensus before publishing.
- After integration, the leader has to decide who gets credit for their work, and how.Newgrounds lets the leader specify up to ten people as “coauthors” in a collab, but this system is far from perfect. One issue was that for years, coauthors were listed simply as “authors,” a pretty generic title. This created conflicts, such as Tom’s story here.(click)After our interviews, Newgrounds upgraded their system to support a variety of titles, like “collab organizer”, “artist” and “programmer,” so it will be interesting to see if this alleviates this challenge.
- Another authorship challenge is the 10-coauthor maximum. The Newground staff set the limit to prevent abuse, but many legitimate collabs have more than 10 authors. Some people, like Tyler, see the limit as unfair because some artists have to be left out. Others like the limit of 10, or in Kester’s case, would actually prefer to see fewer coauthor slots, because it motivates artists to impress the leader with their best work.
- One solution that has emerged is a kind of attribution hierarchy, which provides alternative ways for artists who aren’t coauthored to be credited in other ways. (click) At the top of the hierarchy is coauthorship, which is considered most desirable because it ties the artist’s Newgrounds account to the collab, meaning the collab shows up in his/her profile, its ratings and reviews affect his/her position on the leaderboard, etc.(click) Less prestigious is the visual overlay, which is basically the artist’s name displayed in the corner of his/her submission while it plays. This is an extremely common convention.(click) At the bottom of the hierarchy, some leaders list the names of artists who weren’t coauthored in a text field that accompanies the finished collab. These aren’t searchable, they can be hard to find, and many leaders don’t bother with them, so it’s not considered very prestigious.
- We can bring some design considerations out of this study. One is the idea of designing for cr-editing. We’ve seen integration and attribution as two sides of the same coin: deciding who is included and who is credited are deeply interwoven decisions. We use the term “crediting” to describe this as one process. Yet, crediting is often separated between authoring, collaboration, and publication systems, and moving between them is often painful. We could imagine ways of streamlining the transition, for example, with APIs for exchanging attribution metadata, or tools that let leaders do lightweight integration before jumping into authorship systems.
- An example of this can be seen in a system we’re developing for collab leaders called Pipeline. Leaders can use the Mixer tool to include, exclude, rearrange, and view submissions in their browser, and then export an archive of just the included submissions, in the correct order, with attribution data attached, for integration in the Flash development environment.
- Another suggestion we have is to design for collaborative authorship. Even though online creative collaboration is increasingly common, most online hosts don’t support multiple authors (NG being a rare exception). Instead, the assumption is often that the uploader and creator are the same person, and s/he acted alone.Although the NG system has issues, it stands alone for offering any collaborative authorship features, and most interviewees told us they wanted even more. We wouldn’t be surprised to similar needs across other types of online creative collaboration. For example, this screenshot from YouTube shows the uploader of a short film listing the cast and crew in the “description” field, much like the artists listed in the “author comments” of a collab.
- Finally, our study points to the need to design for community values. In Newgrounds, members held a variety of attitudes towards crediting, but they could also articulate a clear set of norms that have evolved, for example, integration etiquette and the attribution hierarchy. On Newgrounds, design choices made by the staff (e.g. NG multi-author system) changed those norms, which in turn, led the staff to change the design.Values towards cr-editing differ across creative communities. One size doesn’t fit all. However, there may be socio-technical solutions that generalize across communities with shared values. For example, our study highlighted some of the problems associated with conflating recognition (who worked on a collab?) and commendation (who did a great job?). Wikipedia separates these concepts with a “history” tab that shows all contributions, plus a social convention of awarding “barnstars” for especially good contributions. A similar approach could resolve some of the conflicts we described on Newgrounds.