eppfel / rose

Research Tool for Online Social Environments

ROSE 3.0

Synopsis

ROSE is a browser extension for researchers to capture in situ data on how users actually use online social networks.

Please see the project page for more detailed information.

Features

• Currently supported social network sites: facebook.com, (experimental: reddit.com)
• Capturing user interactions such as likes, unlikes, comments, sending chat messages or sharing content.
• Capturing addtional information about the content users interacting with (e.g. posts, sharer, etc.)
• Capturing user activity by mouse move distance, scroll distance, OSN tab focus time, click amount and login status
• Comment function enables study participants to comment on their own or others' actions right in the OSN
• Privacy by Design: With the ROSE control center study participants have full control over the data collected. No shared content such as chat messages or images is collected. Captured events have privacy-respecting identifiers to correlate them among study participants (if required), and to relate events and comments. ROSE's privacy-aware design aims on minimizing interferences with the field.
• Easy to adopt to changes in the structure of OSNs or even add new sites by standardized observer definitions with push update functionality
• Bilingual: English(US) and German(DE)
• Cross-browser compatibility through the Kango - Cross-browser extension framework

References

In the following paper we describe how we use ROSE in our empirical field studies:

Andreas Poller, Petra Ilyes, Andreas Kramm: Designing privacy-aware online social networks - A reflective socio-technical approach. CSCW ’13 Measuring Networked Social Privacy Workshop, February 23-27, 2013, San Antonio, Texas, USA.

[PDF]

Build

To build ROSE you need node, npm, bower, ember-cli and gulp installed.

We use the kango framework, which has to be integrated manually.

1. Download from http://web.archive.org/web/20160623024659/http://kangoextensions.com/kango/kango-framework-latest.zip
2. Extract the archive into the rose root folder
3. Rename it to kango

You can build your own copy of ROSE with the following steps

1. Install dependencies with npm

   npm install
   

   During install you may get asked a few questions. Just choose the defaults. If progress is halted just press return once.

2. Build ROSE UI based on Ember (You can skip this step. A precompiled version is in the repository)

   cd rui/
   npm install
   bower install
   ember build
   cd ..
   

3. Build packages for Chrome and Safari with Kango into respective folders in dist

   gulp build
   

During development you can make use of watch processes:

1. Rebuild UI with watch in rui/

   ember build -w
   

2. Rebuild ROSE with watch and reload

   gulp
   

About

ROSE is developed by:

Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT
Rheinstrasse 75
64295 Darmstadt
Germany

For questions about ROSE feel free to contact Andreas Poller, [e-mail]

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.