Library and Information Science Commons^™

An Optimization Analysis Of The Subject Directory System On The Medlineplus Portal - An Investigation Of Mental Health, Children, Teenagers, And Older Adults Related Health Topics, Yifan Zhu

Theses and Dissertations

The Internet is a common means for people to search for health information. The subject directory of MedlinePlus offers Internet searchers a browsing environment so that those seekers could start from a broad term and refine their search terms to meet their real information needs, thus resulting in a better information search. For those novice users who are not familiar with relevant domain knowledge, MedlinePlus’s directory can be of great assistance and enable the portal to adopt to a more general population. Such a subject directory system and its involved health topics in the MedlinePlus portal formed a network where …

@Houstonpolice: An Exploratory Case Of Twitter During Hurricane Harvey, Seungwon Yang, Brenton Stewart

Faculty Publications

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Houston Police Department (HPD)’s public engagement efforts using Twitter during Hurricane Harvey, which was a large-scale urban crisis event.

Design/methodology/approach

This study harvested a corpus of over 13,000 tweets using Twitter’s streaming API, across three phases of the Hurricane Harvey event: preparedness, response and recovery. Both text and social network analysis (SNA) techniques were employed including word clouds, n-gram analysis and eigenvector centrality to analyze data.

Findings

Findings indicate that departmental tweets coalesced around topics of protocol, reassurance and community resilience. Twitter accounts of governmental agencies, such as …

Patterns Of Iran’S Research Collaboration In The Field Of Pharmacology And Pharmacy: A Bibliometric Study, Mehdi Ansari, Abbas Pardakhty, Oranus Tajedini, Ali Sadatmoosavi, Ali Akbar Khasseh

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Purpose: This research aims to analyze and visualize the structure of Iranian scholarly networks in the field of “pharmacology and pharmacy”. This study includes an overview of co-authorship, efficiency and ranking of the researches, visualizing the co-authorship network, changes in the main core of the publications and macro and micro-level metrics such as social influence.

Methods: This research utilizes social network analysis (SNA). The preliminary data of this research includes all the Iran’s documents in Web of Science in “Pharmacology and Pharmacy” during the period of 2005 to 2016. After the preprocessing of 6204 records and creating relational matrix, …

An Investigation Of Autism Support Groups On Facebook, Yuehua Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

Autism-affected users, such as autism patients, caregivers, parents, family members, and researchers, currently seek informational support and social support from communities on social media. To reveal the information needs of autism- affected users, this study centers on the research of users’ interactions and information sharing within autism communities on social media. It aims to understand how autism-affected users utilize support groups on Facebook.

A systematic method was proposed to aid in the data analysis including social network analysis, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and inferential analysis. Social network analysis method was adopted to reveal the interaction patterns appearing in the groups, …

The Evolution Of The Personal Networks Of Novice Librarian Researchers, Marie Kennedy, David P. Kennedy, Kristine R. Brancolini

LMU Librarian Publications & Presentations

This article describes for the first time the composition and structure of the personal networks of novice librarian researchers. We used social network analysis to observe if participating in the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL) affected the development of the librarians’ personal networks and how the networks changed over the course of one year. Four times during the year, we used EgoWeb 2.0, open-source software for social network analysis, to gather the data used in the study. We found that the size of the research networks of the participants dramatically increased after the IRDL summer workshop and continued …

What Can Social Networks Tell Us About Learning Ecologies?, Caroline A. Haythornthwaite

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The ecology metaphor is drawn from the biological sciences and refers to the “scientific study of the distribution, abundance and dynamics of organisms, their interactions with other organisms and with their physical environment” (British Ecological Society, 2016). In recent decades, the metaphor has become useful for tackling the complexity of new information and learning environments, particularly as driven by the increasing quantity of information, the growing number of available media and means of communicating, the extended reach of information technologies, and the new practices arising from these configurations. This paper brings to the discussion of learning ecologies the research and …

The Information Landscape Of A Wicked Problem: An Evaluation Of Web-Based Information On Colony Collapse Disorder For A Spectrum Of Citizen Information Seekers, Reid Isaac Boehm

Masters Theses

The following research takes a mixed method approach to understanding the information landscape of a wicked problem. Wicked problems are defined as being uncertain in cause, having many stakeholders with conflicting interests, and inevitably have no foreseeable solution. Through the study a framework is implemented that assesses a portion of the landscape of colony collapse disorder information from the federal government via the web. Using a government information valuation framework that takes into account a spectrum of citizen user needs, the research was able to look at the information content within the context of the public sphere and to apply …

Semantic Analysis For Monitoring Insider Threats, Svetlana Symonenko, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Ozgur Yilmazel, Robert Del Zoppo, Eric Brown

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Malicious insiders’ difficult-to-detect activities pose serious threats to the intelligence community (IC) when these activities go undetected. A novel approach that integrates the results of social network analysis, role-based access monitoring, and semantic analysis of insiders ’ communications as evidence for evaluation by a risk assessor is being tested on an IC simulation. A semantic analysis, by our proven Natural Language Processing (NLP) system, of the insider’s text-based communications produces conceptual representations that are clustered and compared on the expected vs. observed scope. The determined risk level produces an input to a risk analysis algorithm that is merged with outputs …