nucleation

THEORY-1181: The content of a crowd-built r/place artwork is decided off the canvas, in negotiation through shared design images, where a few central members admit or refuse additions, and carried out by placers who mostly never join the discussion, so the placement record shows the outcome of coordination but not who directed it or who cooperated

2 min read

Properties5
StatusProposed
Tagssocial-science, society-and-governance, complex-systems
SourceLIT-1037 — Instruction vs. emergence on r/place: Understanding the growth and control of evolving artifacts in mass collaboration
ExtendsTHEORY-218 — In one case study of the 2017 r/place Mona Lisa, what was added to or removed from the image was, once its forum opened, decided off the canvas, in a forum of 161 accounts negotiating through linked design images, where a few central members admitted or refused additions, and the forum's changes then appeared in a region where about 77,000 accounts placed tiles, most of whom never posted; how many placers followed the designs is not measured, and the authors argue that the placement record alone cannot show who directed the image or who cooperated
Bears onQUESTION-306 — Across many artworks of one crowd-built canvas, do placements follow revisions of each artwork's design made or approved by a small identifiable set of accounts, rather than the designs recording what placers had already done, and does the coordination record assign to other groups placements that a behaviour-only method gives to one?

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Source

Litherland & Mørch (2021), LIT-1037, read in full in NOTE-733. What the case study showed for the 2017 Mona Lisa is THEORY-218, which this entry extends.

The claim

The paper proposes a three-level framework in which a visual artifact, the image, and a social artifact, the forum, evolve together. “The decision of what to add or replace was (for the most part) made at the group interaction (meaning) level, whereas actions were carried out on the user action level.” Design images linked in the forum carry the decisions; central members “had the power to allow and/or stop suggestions from being acted” on; whether an addition is vandalism or part of the image is “a tradeoff to be negotiated”. And the authors argue generally that “quantitative methods cannot identify whether the visual images were the result of collaboration or conflict”, so that “community affiliation cannot be identified with quantitative measures alone”. They point to similar negotiated composites elsewhere on the canvas (Fig. 4).

The evidence is one artwork. About 77,000 accounts placed tiles in its region and the forum had 161, most placers never posted, and how many followed the designs was not measured: “the causal relationship between WAD or power and user action remains unclear”. THEORY-218 holds that case.

What would settle it

The promote_when, which QUESTION-306 also asks: a study across many artworks of one canvas, pairing the placement log with time-stamped coordination records, showing design revisions leading placements, a small identifiable core making or approving them, and placements a behaviour-only method would misassign. More excerpts from single artworks cannot settle it.

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