Communication Commons^™

A Checklist For Mortals: Preparing For Death’S Arrival, Becky Daniel

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Professional Projects

We learn everything from our parents—how to walk, talk and treat potential life partners. Yet our culture in the United States makes it difficult to talk to our parents about death and those consequences have a real impact. Closing a loved one’s estate can stretch from months to years without proper planning. While death is constant, the death industry is not. It is ever changing. And while all lives have equal value, there are many preparations that one person may need (veteran, parent, lotto winner) while another does not. The best way to prepare for death is to know its …

Inferring Social Media Users’ Demographics From Profile Pictures: A Face++ Analysis On Twitter Users, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this research, we evaluate the applicability of using facial recognition of social media account profile pictures to infer the demographic attributes of gender, race, and age of the account owners leveraging a commercial and well-known image service, specifically Face++. Our goal is to determine the feasibility of this approach for actual system implementation. Using a dataset of approximately 10,000 Twitter profile pictures, we use Face++ to classify this set of images for gender, race, and age. We determine that about 30% of these profile pictures contain identifiable images of people using the current state-of-the-art automated means. We then employ …

Multilingual Sentiment Analysis : From Formal To Informal And Scarce Resource Languages, Siaw Ling Lo, Erik Cambria, Raymond Chiong, David Cornforth

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ability to analyse online user-generated content related to sentiments (e.g., thoughts and opinions) on products or policies has become a de-facto skillset for many companies and organisations. Besides the challenge of understanding formal textual content, it is also necessary to take into consideration the informal and mixed linguistic nature of online social media languages, which are often coupled with localised slang as a way to express ‘true’ feelings. Due to the multilingual nature of social media data, analysis based on a single official language may carry the risk of not capturing the overall sentiment of online content. While efforts …

"Active Team" A Social And Gamified App-Based Physical Activity Intervention: Randomised Controlled Trial Study Protocol, Sarah Edney, Ronald Plotnikoff, Corneel Vandelanotte, Tim Olds, Ilse De Bourdeaudhuij, Jillian Ryan, Carol Maher

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Background

Physical inactivity is a leading preventable cause of chronic disease and premature death globally, yet over half of the adult Australian population is inactive. To address this, web-based physical activity interventions, which have the potential to reach large numbers of users at low costs, have received considerable attention. To fully realise the potential of such interventions, there is a need to further increase their appeal to boost engagement and retention, and sustain intervention effects over longer periods of time. This randomised controlled trial aims to evaluate the efficacy of a gamified physical activity intervention that connects users to each …

An Analysis Of Rumor And Counter-Rumor Messages In Social Media, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Alton Y. K. Chua, Hanyu Shi, Wenju Wei, Haiyan Wang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media platforms are one of the fastest ways to disseminate information but they have also been used as a means to spread rumors. If left unchecked, rumors have serious consequences. Counter-rumors, messages used to refute rumors, are an important means of rumor curtailment. The objective of this paper is to examine the types of rumor and counter-rumor messages generated in Twitter in response to the falsely reported death of a politician, Lee Kuan Yew, who was Singapore’s first Prime Minister. Our content analysis of 4321Twitter tweets about Lee’s death revealed six categories of rumor messages, four categories ofcounter-rumor messages …

#Nodapl: Social Media, Empowerment, And Civic Participation At Standing Rock, Hayley Johnson

Faculty Publications

The struggle for environmental and social justice within American Indian communities is one that has been ongoing since the beginning of United States history, but the main catalyst to effect change and to promote and disperse the American Indian narrative has emerged through the power of social media in today's hyperconnected society. This article examines the power of social media to effect change, as well as a hyperconnected society's ability to empower historically disadvantaged groups that have often been misrepresented within traditional media outlets. The historic movement occurring at Standing Rock, North Dakota, and the #NoDAPL protests illustrates the capacity …

Youth Workers' Use Of Facebook For Mediated Pastoralism With Juvenile Delinquents And Youths-At-Risk, Sun Sun Lim

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Youth work seeks to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents for re-entry into mainstream society and to prevent youthsat-risk from falling into delinquency, thus necessitating that youth workers assiduously monitor their clients. With the avid use of social media by youths, youth workers must also adopt these communication platforms to reach out to their young clients. Drawing from interviews with youth workers, this study analyses how they use Facebook to communicate with their clients and monitor their activities. Surveillance forms a key thrust of youth workers' professional use of Facebook, enhancing their ability to oversee these youths' personal development for the purposes of …

A Framework For Recommendation Of Highly Popular News Lacking Social Feedback, Nuno Moniz, Luís Torgo, Magdalini Eirinaki, Paula Branco

Faculty Publications

Social media is rapidly becoming the main source of news consumption for users, raising significant challenges to news aggregation and recommendation tasks. One of these challenges concerns the recommendation of very recent news. To tackle this problem, approaches to the prediction of news popularity have been proposed. In this paper, we study the task of predicting news popularity upon their publication, when social feedback is unavailable or scarce, and to use such predictions to produce news rankings. Unlike previous work, we focus on accurately predicting highly popular news. Such cases are rare, causing known issues for standard prediction models and …

Crossing The #Bikinibridge: Exploring The Role Of Social Media In Propagating Body Image Trends, Jenna M. Drenten, Lauren Gurrieri

School of Business: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A book chapter written by Jenna Drenten and Lauren Gurrieri for The Dark Side of Social Media: A Consumer Psychology Perspective (2017).

An Unsupervised Multilingual Approach For Online Social Media Topic Identification, Siaw Ling Lo, Raymond Chiong, David Cornforth

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media data can be valuable in many ways. However, the vast amount of content shared and the linguistic variants of languages used on social media are making it very challenging for high-value topics to be identified. In this paper, we present an unsupervised multilingual approach for identifying highly relevant terms and topics from the mass of social media data. This approach combines term ranking, localised language analysis, unsupervised topic clustering and multilingual sentiment analysis to extract prominent topics through analysis of Twitter’s tweets from a period of time. It is observed that each of the ranking methods tested has …

Demographics Of News Sharing In The U.S. Twittersphere, Julio C.S. Reis, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Johnnatan Messias, Benevenuto Fabrıcio.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The widespread adoption and dissemination of online news through social media systems have been revolutionizing many segments of our society and ultimately our daily lives. In these systems, users can play a central role as they share content to their friends. Despite that, little is known about news spreaders in social media. In this paper, we provide the first of its kind in-depth characterization of news spreaders in social media. In particular, we investigate their demographics, what kind of content they share, and the audience they reach. Among our main findings, we show that males and white users tend to …

A Domain Based Approach To Social Relation Recognition, Qianru Sun, Bernt Schiele, Mario Fritz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social relations are the foundation of human daily life. Developing techniques to analyze such relations from visual data bears great potential to build machines that better understand us and are capable of interacting with us at a social level. Previous investigations have remained partial due to the overwhelming diversity and complexity of the topic and consequently have only focused on a handful of social relations. In this paper, we argue that the domain-based theory from social psychology is a great starting point to systematically approach this problem. The theory provides coverage of all aspects of social relations and equally is …

College Students And Online Political Expression During The 2016 Election, Kenneth W. Moffett, Laurie L. Rice

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

While college students traditionally exhibit low levels of political participation and interest in politics, they are more likely to engage in some forms of political expression than their elders. Their greater familiarity with online forms of political expression and engagement potentially lowers their barriers for political involvement. In turn, this potentially draws more young adults into the political process. We compare the precursors of expressive forms of online political engagement to those of talking to someone offline and trying to persuade them to vote for or against a candidate or party among college students. We find that both activities are …

#Reviewbowlinggreen: Food And Attractions Guide For International Students, Kanyawee Skulsillapakorn

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Being in a different country, far away from home, surrounded by strangers that speak a different language than your mother tongue is daunting. Most international students often feel out of place when they arrive in America for the first time. What can we do to change international students’ perspective of Bowling Green from one of being a “boring, small town” to a vibrant growing community? This project will use social media platform like Facebook to promote restaurants and other attractions. Users can write reviews of restaurants, shops, and places to visit in Bowling Green. By including the hashtag #ReviewBowlingGreen on …

Improving The Cala's Social Media Experience: The First Cala Social Media Survey, Sai Deng, Melody Leung, Anlin Yang, Chenwei Zhao

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA) currently uses three social media channels, CALA Facebook, WeChat, and YouTube. In order to improve their presence and better serve the CALA members, CALA's first social media survey was conducted at the end of 2016 to seek feedback from its members and friends. This poster will present the background information for the survey, its methodology, findings, recommendations and follow-up. 18 questions were compiled, added to LimeSurvey and distributed to the CALA members via its Listserv. These questions attempted to address the users' social media usage, participation level, time spent on the CALA's social media …

What Motivates Young Adults To Talk About Physical Activity On Social Network Sites?, Ni Zhang, Shelly Campo, Jingzhen Yang, Petya Eckler, Linda Snetselaar, Kathleen Janz, Emily Leary

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Background:
Electronic word-of-mouth on social network sites has been used successfully in marketing. In social marketing, electronic word-of-mouth about products as health behaviors has the potential to be more effective and reach more young adults than health education through traditional mass media. However, little is known about what motivates people to actively initiate electronic word-of-mouth about health behaviors on their personal pages or profiles on social network sites, thus potentially reaching all their contacts on those sites.
Objective:
This study filled the gap by applying a marketing theoretical model to explore the factors associated with electronic word-of-mouth on social network …

Culturally-Grounded Analysis Of Everyday Creativity In Social Media: A Case Study In Qatari Context, D. Fox Harrell, Sarah Vieweg, Haewoon Kwak, Chong-U Lim, Sercan Sengun, Ali Jahanian, Pablo. Ortiz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In deploying social media and other information technologies often not designed with MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) cultures in mind, users generate creative approaches to self-representation using virtual identities while preserving their cultural values. To understand and further empower such approaches, we present a mixed-method of computational and qualitative study, focusing on Qatar as a case of such communities in the MENA region. We analyzed a dataset of over 42,000 publicly available social media profiles using computational approaches (archetypal analysis) and qualitatively analyzed a separate set of 255 profiles. We augmented our descriptions with semi-structured interviews. As a …

What’S Your Brand? Teaching Students To Leverage Social Media To Launch Their Careers, Alexandra Gomes, Gisela Butera, Anne Linton

Himmelfarb Library Faculty Posters and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Messaging Without A Message: Executive Value And Social Media Activity, Ru Gao, Gilles Hilary, Rencheng Wang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We show that executives who start tweeting benefit from better career options. We motivate this finding using the well-established theory of limited attention. Consistent with this explanation, we find that content is irrelevant. Comparative statics are also consistent with our framework. In particular, the effect of Twitter is greater for executives who were largely unrecognized and who were underpaid before they started tweeting, who garner greater public attention from their social media activity, who enjoy higher professional mobility, and who operate in environments where compensation setting is less structured.

We Don't Hope That Helps: Satirical Facebook Pages As Counter-Institutional Resistance, Gavin Lawrence Kirkwood

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Through the examination of a satirical Facebook page called Hope that Helps (HTH) this study filled a gap in communication research on humor and resistance within online communities. The qualitative content analysis of the HTH page showcased satire’s role in acts of resistance. Using jokes, impersonation, and ridicule HTH resisted large corporations, government institutions, messages from public figures, and entitled American consumers. HTH also used humor to resist social constructs including Whiteness, transphobia, and American nationalism. Along with page creators, HTH followers were active participants in the humor and resistance acts on the page. HTH served as a space for …

Modeling Topics And Behavior Of Microbloggers: An Integrated Approach, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging encompasses both user-generated content and behavior. When modeling microblogging data, one has to consider personal and background topics, as well as how these topics generate the observed content and behavior. In this article, we propose the Generalized Behavior-Topic (GBT) model for simultaneously modeling background topics and users' topical interest in microblogging data. GBT considers multiple topical communities (or realms) with different background topical interests while learning the personal topics of each user and the user's dependence on realms to generate both content and behavior. This differentiates GBT from other previous works that consider either one realm only or content …

Act Now For A Limited Time...One Easy Session Of #Bookface, Videos And More!, Anne Stenzel, Jamie Dalbey

Library Services Publications

You can do it! Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter too. But that’s not all! We’ll double the offer. There’s hot dudes reading, tbt, cats, gifs and Pokémon Go. Wondering how the MNSU library became such social media superstars? Ok, that may be an exaggeration, but come hear about our successes. Learn from our mistakes. Not available in stores, at this session, we’ll offer easy, low-cost tips and tricks to maximize your social media campaigns. You won't want to miss out because ONE lucky winner will receive their very own #bookface! But wait, there’s more--we want to hear about your successes …

Creating Collaborative Connections Through Conversation, Community, And Cranes, Jamie Dalbey, Caroline Mcgowan

Library Services Publications

The Common Read program at Minnesota State University, Mankato created a collaboration of cranes across campus to help connect the community. We will be discussing how we, Library Services, connected one story with a diverse population through partnerships, promotion, engagement, and art! Come learn how we took the solitary endeavor of reading and added a creative hands-on component to increase campus and community connections and participation. We created videos for promotion and education using our in-house resources – and you can do it too! Learn from our successes and also learn what didn't work. Find out more about how we …

Inferring User Consumption Preferences From Social Media, Yang Li, Jing Jiang, Ting Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social Media has already become a new arena of our lives and involved different aspects of our social presence. Users' personal information and activities on social media presumably reveal their personal interests, which offer great opportunities for many e-commerce applications. In this paper, we propose a principled latent variable model to infer user consumption preferences at the category level (e.g. inferring what categories of products a user would like to buy). Our model naturally links users' published content and following relations on microblogs with their consumption behaviors on e-commerce websites. Experimental results show our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly …

A Retrospective On State Of The Art Social Media Research Methods: Ethical Decisions, Big-Small Data Rivalries And The Spectre Of The 6vs, Anabel Quan-Haase, Luke Sloan

FIMS Publications

This concluding chapter offers critical reflections on some of the key themes covered in the Handbook. Ethics emerged as a concern for many scholars, both for those engaging in quantitative and qualitative approaches. Scholars agree in that there is no overarching set of rules that can be applied to all projects blindly, rather they see ethical decisions as being grounded in the specifics of the data being collected, the social group under study, and the potential repercussions for subjects. A second central theme was the value of qualitative approaches for understanding ‘anomalies’ within larger data sets. Qualitative approaches are seen …

Examining Collaborative Knowledge Construction In Microblogging-Based Learning Environments, Tian Luo, Lacey Clifton

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of the study is to provide foundational research to exemplify how knowledge construction takes place in microblogging-based learning environments, to understand learner interaction representing the knowledge construction process, and to analyze learner perception, thereby suggesting a model of delivery for microblogging.

Background: Up-and-coming digital native learners crave the real-time, multimedia, global-interconnectedness of microblogging, yet there has been limited research that specifically proposes a working model of Twitter's classroom integration for designers and practitioners without bundling it in with other social media tools.

Methodology: This semester-long study utilized a case-study research design via a multi-dimensional approach in a …

Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis Of Social Media With Emotion Sensing, Zhaoxia Wang, Chee Seng Chong, Landy Lan, Yinping Yang, Beng-Seng Ho, Joo Chuan Tong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media is arguably the richest source of human generated text input. Opinions, feedbacks and critiques provided by internet users reflect attitudes and sentiments towards certain topics, products, or services. The sheer volume of such information makes it effectively impossible for any group of persons to read through. Thus, social media sentiment analysis has become an important area of work to make sense of the social media talk. However, most existing sentiment analysis techniques focus only on the aggregate level, classifying sentiments broadly into positive, neutral or negative, and lack the capabilities to perform fine-grained sentiment analysis. This paper describes …