Social information access is defined as a stream of research that explores methods for organizing the past interactions of users in a community in order to provide future users with better access to information. Social information access covers a wide range of different technologies and strategies that operate on a different scale, which can range from a small closed corpus site to the whole Web. The 16 chapters included in this book provide a broad overview of modern research on social information access. In order to provide a balanced coverage, these chapters are organized by the main types of information access (i.e., social search, social navigation, and recommendation) and main sources of social information.

This volume summarizes the author’s work on social information seeking (SIS), and at the same time serves as an introduction to the topic. Sometimes also referred to as social search or social information retrieval, this is a relatively new area of study concerned with the seeking and acquiring of information from social spaces on the Internet. It involves studying situations, motivations, and methods involved in seeking and sharing of information in participatory online social sites, such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, and Twitter, as well as building systems for supporting such activities. The first part of the book introduces various foundational concepts, including information seeking, social media, and social networking. As such it provides the necessary basis to then discuss how those aspects could intertwine in different ways to create methods, tools, and opportunities for supporting and leveraging SIS. Next, Part II discusses the social dimension and primarily examines the online question-answering activity. Part III then emphasizes the collaborative aspect of information seeking, and examines what happens when social and collaborative dimensions are considered together. Lastly, Part IV provides a synthesis by consolidating methods, systems, and evaluation techniques related to social and collaborative information seeking. The book is completed by a list of challenges and opportunities for both theoretical and practical SIS work. The book is intended mainly for researchers and graduate students looking for an introduction to this new field, as well as developers and system designers interested in building interactive information retrieval systems or social/community-driven interfaces.

"This book provides a source for definitions, antecedents, and consequences of social informatics and the cultural aspect of technology. It addresses cultural/societal issues in social informatics technology and society, the Digital Divide, government and technology law, information security and privacy, cyber ethics, technology ethics, and the future of social informatics and technology"--Provided by publisher.

The wealth of information accessible on the Internet has grown exponentially since its advent. This mass of content must be systemically sifted to glean pertinent data, and the utilization of the collective intelligence of other users, or social information retrieval, is an innovative, emerging technique. Social Information Retrieval Systems: Emerging Technologies & Applications for Searching the Web Effectively provides relevant content in the areas of information retrieval systems, services, and research; covering topics such as social tagging, collaborative querying, social network analysis, subjective relevance judgments, and collaborative filtering. Answering the increasing demand for authoritative resources on Internet technologies, this Premier Reference Source will make an indispensable addition to any library collection.

Social Information Research, co-edited by Gunilla Widen and Kim Holmberg communicates current research looking into different aspects of social information as part of information behaviour research. There is a special emphasis on the new innovations supporting contemporary information behavior and the social media context within which it can sit.

Survey researchers have long been aware that the way in which questions are asked determines the obtained responses. However, the exact processes that mediate response effects remained elusive. In the present volume, cognitive psychologists and survey methodologists explore the cognitive processes that underlie respondents' answers to survey questions. The contributors provide an introduction to information processing theories for survey researchers, review current knowledge of response effects in the light of recent theorizing in cognitive psychology, and report a number of experimental studies on question context and question wording. In combination, the chapters provide a theoretical framework for the analysis of response effects in surveys and raise a number of applied and theoretical issues that have so far not been addressed in cognitive psychology.

This comprehensive and balanced text has been written so that the "doing" of social research is closely and consistently linked to important social issues by using real social data. End-of-chapter discussion questions, research proposal development exercises and SPSS exercises help measure and enhance students’ understanding.