Hi Jason, Duncan Watts (a physicist gone sociologist) has done a large scale experiment on the collective emergence of taste, not really via direct GroupLens-like technologies but a system based on voting (not that dissimilar, really): http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?_r=1&ref=mag... You will normally find quite a lot on usage experiments in certain CS papers (normally follow up surveys to show that one algorithm is more useful than another), just skip the formal discussion... best, Bernhard -- Bernhard Rieder Laboratoire Paragraphe Université de Paris 8 ++33 6 60 87 80 54 bernhard.rieder@univ-paris8.fr http://bernhard.rieder.fr http://thepoliticsofsystems.net Jason Mittell wrote:

Hi all - inspired by the excellent Clive Thompson article in today's NYT on Netflix & collaborative filtering (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html ), I want to bring a research project off the backburner about collaborative filtering and taste cultures. Does anyone know of any research from a more cultural/social perspective on CF? The research that's I've found via searches is all about algorithms - since I don't want to build a system, but rather study their use & significance, those articles are less than useful (and utterly incomprehensible to my humanistic mind). I'd appreciate any references about recommendation systems and collectivized taste that you know of.

And on a related note, if other people are interested in the topic, might we want to put together a panel for IR 10.0? If so, contact me off-list.

Thanks, -Jason