We study patterns in social media data; who is talking to who? What are they talking about? What is their sentiment? We discover latent community structures, their topics and trends. We explore not only text in blogs but also connectivity through comments. For personal media management it could be argued that social context contains the set of conceptions most often brought to bear on their contents: Where was this? Who is that? What activity were we all doing there? Who do I want to share this with? This project aims to use signals obtained from unobtrusive data sources available with today’s devices, such as location information (e.g. GPS), to extract socially meaningful indices for personal media. Social spheres are locations of significance, such as Home, Work and Recreational Area. Social networks of social ties capture the dynamic web of relationships in which we are embedded. Social rhythms arise as patterns across these former elements and allow even finer resolution categorization of activities that occur within them in space and time. All of this information can then be used, at the very least, to provide new ways to index and interact with our own, or others’, media collections. Initial work in this area focused on discovering the social spheres Work, Home and Other from raw, noisy GPS traces of everyday life, and used this information together with the presence of known persons to provide a novel personal media exploration environment called Socio-Graph. The interface aimed to allow simple search and filtering on the concepts most people innately bring to their personal media. We do this project jointly with our colleagues at Curtin University.
