Hi and welcome to our presentation. The primary purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept
of “news informatics” by explicating its meaning, suggesting some ideas for
operationalizing it and demonstrating an empirical user test of one particular operationalization.
The arrival of big data has provided both opportunities
and challenges for the practice of journalism. News organizations need to find ways to better
utilize and present the enormous amount of data and engage users with the data-rich news content.
We are witnessing a growing trend of data-driven journalism, or, as others might call it,
computational journalism, or precision journalism. Interactive data visualizations are widely
used news applications to assemble, organize and present data as a part of news content. We propose
this concept of news informatics in this paper, basically an infrastructure that allows users to
interactively consume and use the newsworthy data information with particular reference
to their own selves. We argue that for users to be engaged with data-driven public information,
sites ought to incorporate interactive tools so that users can extract personally relevant
information. Our study is based on a theoretical model of interactivity effects published 15 years
ago in the Oxford Handbook of Internet Psychology, which identified three species of interactivity.
Interactivity as a feature of the medium, also called Modality Interactivity. Interactivity as
a Source feature, and Interactivity as a Message feature, each with its own distinct psychological
mechanism. We used this model to propose design of interactive media in a full paper
that we presented in CHI 2010. We conceptualize interactivity as a medium feature in terms of
different interaction techniques on the interface of the medium, such as clicking, tapping,
swiping, zooming, and so on. Provision of such interaction techniques can enhance the bandwidth
of user perceptions of the site and thereby engage users more deeply in it. Source interactivity
refers to tools that allow users to serve as sources of content, by customizing, curating and
creating content. It provides more agency to users and allows them to express themselves. Message
interactivity refers to reciprocal and contingent exchanges between the user and the system.
While our prior studies have shown evidence for the effects of each type of interactivity, the
current study explores their combination effects and wonders whether they are additive. We also
test for individual differences, which I won’t go over here, but you can find that in our paper.
We conducted a between-subjects experiment with 12 websites that we especially created for this
study. The website pertained to global attitudes and one of the 12 versions of the sites was
randomly assigned to each of the 166 participants. The site featured public opinion data from 19
countries, pertaining to four international topics. It had varying levels of different
aspects of interactivity on the interface. Modality interactivity, in terms of click in
the low condition, and with the addition of slide and mouse-over in the high condition.
Source interactivity, with just cosmetic customization of colors in the medium condition
and blogging in the high condition. And message interactivity, with the presence of saved graphs
and recording interaction history of the user with that site. Study participants were asked to
browse the site and conduct data comparisons between countries and create a blog post
or take personal notes, depending on the condition to which they were assigned.
A wide range of outcomes were assessed, pertaining to the interface and their perceptions of
engagement. As also their information processing, attitudes toward the site and behavioral
intentions to revisit, share and recommend the site. The effects of modality interactivity
was overwhelmingly positive on several outcomes, but we will focus on interaction effects for this
presentation. So as you can see, We discovered that the effect of high message interactivity
on information recall is better than low message interactivity only when modality interactivity is
high. In other words, for interaction history to be cognitively consequential, the interface needs
to afford more ways to interact in addition to simply clicking. Likewise, we found that
the positive effect of customization, which is medium source interactivity,
on elaboration and attitudes is evident only when modality interactivity is high.
We also tested a structural equation model with perceived interactivity as the exogenous variable
and found that it predicted all three proximate mediators of the interactivity effects model,
with perceptual bandwidth leading to positive attitudes, perceived contingency
contributing to behavioral intentions through user engagement, and perceived customization predicting
behavioral intentions directly. The experiment reveals complex effects of the interactive tools
on individuals’ competence to use the news informatics interface, their perception of
communication reciprocity, as well as the cognitive
load that they experience when they process the data-rich content.
Echoing our prior research, modality interactivity and cosmetic customization, both of which offer
bells and whistles, seem to work very well in the context of a data-rich website used in our study.
And, as mentioned before, the effects of message interactivity are contingent upon the presence of
high modality interactivity. The effects of source interactivity turned out to be tricky,
quite dependent on individual differences, which we didn’t discuss here. We discuss in
our paper that enabling self-expression works well for highly involved users, but can be
counter-productive with less involved ones. In sum, this study underscores the need to consider
interaction effects of different interactivity features rather than simply focus on the effects
of individual interactivity features. It also calls for considering individual differences
in power usage and numeracy skills. As such, it opens up new avenues for research and design.
The crux of news informatics is the use of interactivity on media interfaces to enable
dynamic presentation of personally relevant information, with tools
for users to make sense of that information. This approach has many useful applications,
especially in the current era of misinformation, when the need for personally verifying facts
has never been greater, not to mention the need for creating personally relevant narratives.
We would like to thank you, and thank the National Science Foundation for supporting this research.
On behalf of my co-authors, I thank you for watching the presentation.
To learn more about our study, please check out our paper in the proceedings of CHI’2022.