Citizen Science
New Facebook App TagPuss
Jul 19th
Attention Cat Lovers!
The Lincoln Social Computing (LiSC) Research Centre, in collaboration with the University of Lincoln Animal Behaviour, Cognition and Welfare Research Centre, have created TAGPUSS, a web project that is
investigating how people interpret the emotions of cats. We are inviting you to contribute by tagging cat photographs – simply click here and follow the instructions. Each picture tagged will support the research so even sparing just a few seconds would be helpful. Anyone can help and there is no need for any special skills. The website is free, easy to use, and is currently available to everyone.
This application forms a part of ongoing research conducted by LiSC into positive uses of online social media. Your responses and usage data will be stored anonymously – it will not be possible to identify which data came from which user – and will be not be used for any other purposes except for this specific research. We will not record any information other than your usage of the application, unless if we contact you at a later date and specifically ask for it.
The images on tagPuss have gratefully been donated to support the scientific study of cat behaviours. Images subject to individual copyrights. For more information contact admin@tagpuss.com. If you wish to have more information about the study or the wider research agenda then please contact Derek Foster, *defoster@lincoln.ac.uk*, who is the lead researcher on this project.
Journal Club Meeting 19th of March – Building on the Tagliatelle idea
Mar 22nd
This friday’s meeting was probably not as productive as the previous one, so we’re going to try harder to control the creativity in future! The topic discussed was our photographic food diary-based healthier eating application called Tagliatelle. We have a work-in-progress paper on this topic accepted at the upcoming CHI2010 conference.
Discussions were focused on the difficulties that we have found in designing the system. Indeed, there are a number of challenges that face the project that cover a large number of the hot topics in HCI and social computing today. The challenges include motivating people to take pictures of daily activities, motivating people to tag online photographs with useful information, mining collections of tags for useful nutritional information, and presenting information in a way that is useful, or likely to change behaviour.
We also discussed the usefulness of the tagliatelle concept for helping people make choices over behaviours other than dietary intake. For instance, the field of sustainability appears to be in vogue right now and a project like tagliatelle may prove useful in helping people make choices rearding the sustainability of their food choices. We intend to pursue this idea in the coming weeks.