Previously, video streaming sites were at the fringes of online social media. In the past two years, live streams of video games, on sites such as Twitch.tv, have become very popular. Live streams serve as meeting grounds for player communities. The Twitch streaming medium combines broadcast video with open IRC chat channels. In conjunction with gameplay, viewer participation and community building gain emphasis. Twitch streams range in size and nature, from intimate communities with fifty viewers, to massive broadcasts with tens of thousands. In this paper, we present an ethnographic investigation of the live streaming of video games on Twitch.We find that Twitch streams act as virtual third places, in which informal communities emerge, socialize, and participate. Over time, stream communities form around shared identities drawn from streams' contents and participants' shared experiences. We describe processes through which stream communities form, the motivations of members, and emergent issues in the medium. Finally, we draw from our findings to derive implications for design of live mixed-media environments to support participatory online communities.

Evaluating creativity support environments is challenging. Some approaches address people's experiences of creativity. The present method measures creativity, across conditions, in the products that people make.This research introduces information-based ideation (IBI), a paradigm for investigating open-ended tasks and activities in which users develop new ideas. IBI tasks span imagining, planning, and reflecting on a weekend, vacation, outfit, makeover, paper, internship, thesis, design, campaign, crisis response, career, or invention. What products do people create through engagement in IBI? Curation of digital media incorporates conceptualization, finding and choosing information objects, annotation, and synthesis. Through engagement in IBI tasks, people create curation products. This article formulates a quantitative methodology for evaluating IBI support tools, building on prior creative cognition research in engineering design to derive a battery of ideation metrics of curation. Elemental ideation metrics evaluate creativity within curated found objects. Holistic ideation metrics evaluate how a curation puts elements together.IBI support environments are characterized by their underlying medium of curation. Curation media include lists, such as listicles, and grids, such as the boards of Pinterest.An in-depth case study investigates information composition, an art-based medium representing a curation as a freeform visual semantic connected whole. We raise two creative cognition challenges for IBI. One challenge is overcoming fixation-for instance, when a person gets stuck in a counterproductive mental set. The other challenge is to bridge information visualization's synthesis gap, by providing support for connecting findings. To address the challenges, we develop mixed-initiative information composition (MI 2 C), integrating human curation of information composition with automated agents of information retrieval and visualization.We hypothesize that MI 2 C generates provocative stimuli that help users overcome fixation to become more creative on IBI tasks. We hypothesize that MI 2 C's integration of curation and visualization bridges the synthesis gap to help users become more creative. To investigate these hypotheses, we apply ideation metrics of curation to interpret results from experiments with 44 and 49 participants.

While sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often use information resources in intellectual and creative tasks that can include comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information, but also seeing relationships among collected information resources, and developing new ideas. Our hypothesis is that how information is represented impacts the magnitude of human creativity in information discovery tasks. How can we measure this creative cognition? Studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creative discovery.We develop a new experimental method, which measures the emergence of new ideas in information discovery, to evaluate the efficacy of representations. We compare the efficacy of the typical textual list representation for information collections with an alternative representation, combinFormation's composition of image and text surrogates. Representing collections with such compositions increases emergence in information discovery.Measuring Emergence in Information Discovery 3

Fire emergency responders rely on team coordination to survive and succeed in high-stress environments, but traditional education does not directly teach these essential skills. Prior simulations seek the highest possible fidelity, employing resources to capture concrete characteristics of operating environments. We take a different tack, hypothesizing that a zero-fidelity approach, focusing on human-centered aspects of work practice, will improve team coordination learning. Such an approach promotes simulation focus by developing an alternative environment that stimulates participants to engage in distributed cognition. The costs of simulation development are reduced.To supplement preparation for burn training exercises, 28 fire emergency response students played the Teaching Team Coordination game (T 2 eC), a zero-fidelity simulation of the distributed cognition of fire emergency response work practice. To test our hypothesis, we develop quantitative evaluation methods for impact on team coordination learning through measures of communication efficiency and cooperative activity. Results show that participants improve cooperation, become more efficient communicators, differentiate team roles through communication, and leverage multiple communication modalities. Given the context of the study amidst the educational process, qualitative data from the students and their expert instructor supports the ecological validity of the contribution of the T 2 eC zero-fidelity simulation to fire emergency response education.

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Abstract.We generate requirements for time-critical distributed team support relevant for domains such as disaster response. We present the Radiation Response Game to investigate socio-technical issues regarding team coordination. Field responders in this mixed-reality game use smartphones to coordinate, via text messaging, GPS, and maps, with headquarters and each other. We conduct interaction analysis to examine field observations and log data, revealing how teams achieve local and remote coordination and maintain situational awareness. We uncover requirements that highlight the role of local coordination, decision-making resources, geospatial referencing and message handling.

Collection understanding shifts the traditional focus of retrieval in large collections from locating specific artifacts to gaining a comprehensive view of the collection. Visualization tools are critical to the process of efficient collection understanding. By presenting simple visual interfaces and intuitive methods of interacting with a collection, users come to understand the essence of the collection by focusing on the artifacts. This thesis discusses a practical approach for enhancing collection understanding in image collections. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS