Motivated by the significant amount of successful collaborative problem solving activity on the Web, we ask: Can the accumulated information propagation behavior on the Web be conceived as a giant machine, and reasoned about accordingly? In this paper we elaborate a thesis about the computational capability embodied in information sharing activities that happen on the Web, which we term socio-technical computation, reflecting not only explicitly conditional activities but also the organic potential residing in information on the Web.

This paper is an attempt to lay out foundations for a general theory of coincidence in information spaces such as the World Wide Web, expanding on existing work on bursty structures in document streams and information cascades. We elaborate on the hypothesis that every resource that is published in an information space, enters a temporary interaction with another resource once a unique explicit or implicit reference between the two is found. This thought is motivated by Erwin Shroedingers notion of entanglement (...) between quantum systems. We present a generic information cascade model that exploits only the temporal order of information sharing activities, combined with inherent properties of the shared information resources. The approach was applied to data from the world's largest online citizen science platform Zooniverse and we report about findings of this case study. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate a method for constructing cascades of information co-occurrence, which is suitable to trace emergent structures in information in scenarios where rich contextual features are unavailable. Our method relies only on the temporal order of content-sharing activities, and intrinsic properties of the shared content itself. We apply this method to analyse information dissemination patterns across the active online citizen science project Planet Hunters, a part of the Zooniverse platform. Our results lend insight into both structural and (...) informational properties of different types of identifiers that can be used and combined to construct cascades. In particular, significant differences are found in the structural properties of information cascades when hashtags as used as cascade identifiers, compared with other content features. We also explain apparent local information losses in cascades in terms of information obsolescence and cascade divergence; e.g., when a cascade branches into multiple, divergent cascades with combined capacity equal to the original. (shrink)