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 …

The Dynamics Of E-Petitioning Behavior In We The People : An Exploration Of Online Mobilized Collective Action, Catherine Dumas

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of the impact of e-petitioning as a collective mobilized action taken to express policy preferences and the way that signing behavior takes place. Previous studies have analyzed e-petition signature data to track and understand the relationship between signing activity, time, and success of a petition (Hale et al., 2013; Yasseri et al., 2014). By using data mining techniques, namely market basket analysis and social network analysis, this research will explore three case studies that consist of three sets of similar petitions that were initiated on the US e-petitioning platform, …

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 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 …