Social Media Commons^™

A Study Of Age Gaps Between Online Friends, Lizi Liao, Jing Jiang, Ee Peng Lim, Heyan Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User attribute extraction on social media has gain considerable attention, while existing methods are mostly supervised which suffer great diffi- culty in insufficient gold standard data. In this paper, we validate a strong hypothesis based on homophily and adapt it to ensure the certainty of user attribute we extracted via weakly supervised propagation. Homophily, the theory which states that people who are similar tend to become friends, has been well studied in the setting of online social networks. When we focus on age attribute, based on this theory, online friends tend to have similar age. In this work, we take …

An Exploratory Study On Software Microblogger Behaviors, Yuan Tian, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging services are growing rapidly in the recent years. Twitter, one of the most popular microblogging sites, has gained more than 500 millions users. Thousands of developers are also using Twitter to communicate with one another and microblog about software-related topics such as programming languages, code libraries, etc. Understanding the behaviors of software microbloggers is one of the needed first steps toward building automated tools to encourage software microblogging activities and harness software microblogging to improve various software engineering activities. In this paper, we investigate the behaviors of software microbloggers in terms of their microblogging frequency, generated contents, and interactions …

Clear: A Real-Time Online Observatory For Bursty And Viral Events, Runquan Xie, Feida Zhu, Hui Ma, Wei Xie, Chen Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe our demonstration of CLEar (Clairaudient Ear), a real-time online platform for detecting, monitoring, summarizing, contextualizing and visualizing bursty and viral events, those triggering a sudden surge of public interest and going viral on micro-blogging platforms. This task is challenging for existing methods as they either use complicated topic models to analyze topics in a off-line manner or define temporal structure of fixed granularity on the data stream for online topic learning, leaving them hardly scalable for real-time stream like that of Twitter. In this demonstration of CLEar, we present a three-stage system: First, we show …

The Perfect Storm: The Convergence Of Social, Mobile And Photo Technologies In Libraries, Wendy Abbott, Jessie Donaghey, Joanna Hare, Peta J. Hopkins

Jessie Donaghey

The intersection of mobile and photographic technologies with social networks has produced platforms such as Instagram. The way libraries are using these platforms has not been investigated in depth. This research aims to discover trends in the use of Instagram by libraries, reporting on selected libraries’ experiences and intentions behind capturing and sharing images on Instagram. Recommendations will be made on how librarians can transform relationships and engagement with their communities through mobile photo sharing, taking advantage of ‘the perfect storm’ of technological convergence.

It's Complicated: The Role Of Facebook In Romantic Relationships Concerning Relational Certainty, Attachment, And Self-Esteem, Jenna Rae Tucker

Dissertations and Theses

Facebook is among the top used websites in the world, and research has shown that Facebook use is related to individual personality characteristics such as well-being and self-esteem. This study builds on previous research, expanding to investigate attachment-related anxiety and avoidance and relational certainty. The current study examined relationships between Facebook use (both general and for surveillance) and relational certainty, attachment-related anxiety and avoidance, and self-esteem in undergraduate students (N = 261). Online methods were used for data collection, and individuals with their relationship displayed on Facebook reported more relational certainty; however, the more time they spent on the site, …

Creating Social Media Policies In Public Libraries, James P. Allen

UVM Libraries Conference Day

James, as a librarian and as a trustee, talks about the benefits and pitfalls of creating social-media policies for a small public library in Vermont.

Opinion Mining Of Sociopolitical Comments From Social Media, Swapna Gottipati

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Opinions are central to almost all human activities by influencing greatly the decision making process. In this thesis, we present the problems of mining issues, extracting entities and suggestive opinions towards the entities, detecting thoughtful comments, and extracting stances and ideological expressions from online comments in the sociopolitical domain. This study is essential for opinion mining applications that are beneficial for policy makers, government sectors and social organizations. Much work has been done to try to uncover consumer sentiments from online comments to help businesses improve their products and services. However, sociopolitical opinion mining poses new challenges due to complex …

On Macro And Micro Exploration Of Hashtag Diffusion In Twitter, Yazhe Wang, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This exploratory work studies hashtag diffusion in Twitter. The analysis is conducted from two aspects. From the macro perspective, we study general properties of hashtag diffusion, and classify hashtags into three main classes based on their temporal dynamics referred as 'single spike', 'multi-spikes', and 'fluctuation', and find that each of these classes has some unique characteristics. From the micro perspective, we investigate individual diffusion.We adopt Edelman's 'topology of influence' theory to identify four type of users with different influence levels in diffusion based on their dynamic retweet behaviors. The results of our study are useful for gaining more insights of …

Toward A Uses And Gratification's Model Of Twitter, Philip Ryan Johnson

Theses - ALL

This study proposed a uses and gratifications model of Twitter, an internet medium and micro-blog--a platform with both mass and interpersonal communication features for sending short messages to others. A survey was conducted among 242 Twitter users to test the model, including a standard investigation of gratifications sought and gratifications obtained of Twitter usage. In addition, expectations and availability of usage behaviors from McLeod and Becker's (1981) uses and gratifications model were examined. In the model, expectations were conceptualized as user expectations of satisfaction and operationalized as the difference between users' gratifications sought and gratifications actually obtained. Usage behavior availability …

Framing Urban Change: Gentrification Discourses In The Media Coverage Of The Gülbol Eviction In Berlin, Eric Daniel Gedenk

Masters Theses

This thesis examines gentrification discourses in Berlin by highlighting an extraordinarily large protest sparked by the eviction of the Gülbol family—long-time residents of Berlin who immigrated to Germany from Turkey. Media outlets chose to frame the event in very different ways. I analyze articles from various media sources in an attempt to discover how these sources chose to frame this event, then analyze how these frames are applied to the general gentrification discourse in Berlin. Non-traditional, or “advocacy” media outlets used technology to break away from mass media frames on the subject and frame the event as governmental oppression and …

Millennial Alumni Perceptions Of Communications Media Utilized By The Dale Bumpers College Of Agricultural, Food And Life Sciences, Amanda Nicole Anthony

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Alumni relationship cultivation serves as the foundation of higher education and must be maintained to keep graduates and alma maters connected. To evaluate the success of communications media in reaching recent graduates, classified as Millennials, this study sought to determine Millennial alumni perceptions of media distributed by the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences (Bumpers College) from 2012 through 2014. Assessed communications media included The Graduate and AR Culture magazines, The Graduate e-newsletter, tailgate and mocktail party invitations, College website, and social media presences. Active and inactive Millennial alumni (N = 20) responses were gathered through …

Generating Supplementary Travel Guides From Social Media, Liu Yang, Jing Jiang, Lifu Huang, Minghui Qiu, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we study how to summarize travel-related information in forum threads to generate supplementary travel guides. Such summaries presumably can provide additional and more up-to-date information to tourists. Existing multi-document summarization methods have limitations for this task because (1) they do not generate structured summaries but travel guides usually follow a certain template, and (2) they do not put emphasis on named entities but travel guides often recommend points of interest to travelers. To overcome these limitations, we propose to use a latent variable model to align forum threads with the section structure of well-written travel guides. The …

The Midas Touch: In The World Of Network Television, Peter Golden Casts A Magic Spell., Kevin Cool

Colby Magazine

Peter Golden '80, head of casting at CBS, turns actors into stars.

Danlait’S 2013 Social Media Crisis In Vietnam: A Case Study To Explore Online Crisis Scanning Criteria, Tuong-Minh Ly-Le

Tuong-Minh Ly-Le

Social media has changed the way information is sought and collected. Everyone has potential to influence others through social media. Therefore, social media is used increasingly in crisis communication. Crisis managers must be able to identify warning signs and enact effective strategic responses faster and more accurately. However, research on social media in crisis communication is mostly focusing on how management and public relations forces use social media to respond to a crisis. In most research, stakeholders, media and general audiences are neglected. This paper examines the use of social media by those other publics during crisis, through a case …

Student-Directed Blended Learning With Facebook Groups And Streaming Media: Media In Asia At Furman University, Tami Blumenfield

Asian Studies Publications

Furman University prizes itself on being an engaged learning, liberal arts institution with extensive faculty-student interaction. 96% of students live on campus, leading some to question whether reducing face-to-face instructional time makes any sense pedagogically. Coming from a different institution that encouraged faculty to create hybrid courses, and seeing the creativity and freedom that offered, I wanted to experiment with the format in this new institutional environment. Would it still be effective? What adaptations would be necessary, and how would students react to this different course format?

In Fall 2013, I taught a carefully designed blended learning course that met …

On Predicting Religion Labels In Microblogging Networks, Minh Thap Nguyen, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Religious belief plays an important role in how people behave, influencing how they form preferences, interpret events around them, and develop relationships with others. Traditionally, the religion labels of user population are obtained by conducting a large scale census study. Such an approach is both high cost and time consuming. In this paper, we study the problem of predicting users' religion labels using their microblogging data. We formulate religion label prediction as a classification task, and identify content, structure and aggregate features considering their self and social variants for representing a user. We introduce the notion of representative user to …

Influences Of Influential Users: An Empirical Study Of Music Social Network, Jing Ren, Zhiyong Cheng, Jialie Shen, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Influential user can play a crucial role in online social networks. This paper documents an empirical study aiming at exploring the effects of influential users in the context of music social network. To achieve this goal, music diffusion graph is developed to model how information propagates over network. We also propose a heuristic method to measure users' influences. Using the real data from Last. fm, our empirical test demonstrates key effects of influential users and reveals limitations of existing influence identification/characterization schemes.

Predicting The Popularity Of Web 2.0 Items Based On User Comments, Xiangnan He, Ming Gao, Min-Yen Kan, Yiqun Liu, Kazunari Sugiyama

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the current Web 2.0 era, the popularity of Web resources fluctuates ephemerally, based on trends and social interest. As a result, content-based relevance signals are insufficient to meet users' constantly evolving information needs in searching for Web 2.0 items. Incorporating future popularity into ranking is one way to counter this. However, predicting popularity as a third party (as in the case of general search engines) is difficult in practice, due to their limited access to item view histories. To enable popularity prediction externally without excessive crawling, we propose an alternative solution by leveraging user comments, which are more accessible …

"Warning: This Is A Must Read": Participation And Disruption In Social Artifacts And Spaces, Angela M. Harrison Eng

English Theses & Dissertations

As I show in three separate case studies, content, technology, and participant relationships are key components in the design of social artifacts and spaces. One study highlights the invention and evolution of content across multiple spaces. The second shows content used as leverage for authority. The last case study examines the relationship between content and technological interfaces and how disruption may not always be successful.

All of these components make up what I refer to as disruption. Disruption describes participant acts that are executed to change existing power-based structures of information sharing. Using the insights gained from this research, I …

Refusing A Spoiled Identity: How The Swinger Community Represents On The Web, Barbara Kreston

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines whether and how Websites provide a way for the unique community of swingers, also called Lifestylers, to represent a new (and revise an old) deviant identity without risk to their social and employment standing. Unlike many marginalized social groups who publically rally, swingers have had to take advantage of virtual space to safely appeal to their audiences. The time period studied includes the history of the swingers "spoiled" identity via academy articles, newspaper headlines, and moral turpitude clauses from the 1950s to the current use of the Web to showcase swingers and their clubs. The study used …