Social and Behavioral Sciences 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 …

An Ethnographic Exploration Of Pokémon Go, Ketzia Abramson

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The mobile app game, “Pokémon GO” became a worldwide phenomenon immediately following its initial release in the summer of 2016. Now, more than a year later, despite its fall from social domination and decline in popularity, POGO is still at the forefront for better understanding the future of communication and socialization in today’s ever growing digital age. This ethnographic study, aided by field research, observations, and literature review of both the app itself as well as the ‘Poké-verse,’ provides an in-depth analysis of how and why a mobile gaming app that utilizes no new forms of technology (augmented reality combined …

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 …

Democratic Engagement In The Digital Age: Youth, Social Media And Participatory Politics In Kenya, Samuel Kamau

Graduate School of Media and Communications

As the communication world becomes more complex and participatory, social networking sites (SNSs) have emerged as a platform with the potential to invigorate democracy and political engagement. However, the value of SNSs in politics remains contested among researchers. The study reported on in this article was based on a survey of 600 university students, aged between18 and 35, to examine the relationship between social media use and political engagement among the youth in Kenya. The study focused on the extent to which SNSs facilitate consumption of political information and the role of SNSs in influencing political interest, knowledge and behaviour …

A Study Of The Urban Red Fox (Vulpes Vulpes) Population In Baton Rouge, Louisiana Using Social Media, Ahsennur Soysal

LSU Master's Theses

Foxes are timid yet resourceful animals that are integrated into many urban environments. Because they are elusive, collecting information about the number of urban foxes, their diet and spatial distribution, their interactions with the ecological community in their urban habitat, as well as residents’ response to them, is difficult. Involving stakeholders to participate in the data collection on wildlife via citizen science on social media is one way to overcome this complication, while simultaneously engaging residents in the ecology happening around them. Therefore, we used social media as the platform to engage the public to document and map the foxes …

Resources Review: Adaptive (Podcast), Montreal*In/Accessible (Mobile App), Accessible Arcade Tables (Diy Project), Giuliana Cucinelli

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Thisresourcesreview spotlights a variety of DIY (do-it yourself) innovative media projects. Examples of these projects include: a podcast series on adaptive technologies, building mobile applications that allow participants to publish images, text and sound recordings, an interactive map that documents disability discrimination in the certain cities and the DIY creation of accessible arcade tables.

The social production of disability is seen in barriers created by society to restrict access to certain places or even certain cultural forms. The internet offers a space to share media productions and social media initiatives that use digital media to intervene, creatively, in theableistassumptions embedded …

"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 …

Weather Communication On Twitter: Identifying Popular Content And Optimal Warning Format Via Case Studies And A Survey Analysis, Joshua D. Eachus

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The use of Twitter as a channel for weather information inspires a deeper analysis of key information nodes during episodes of high impact weather, especially local meteorologists. To optimize communication on the channel, it is important to understand what kinds of messages produce exposure and attention among users—which translates to knowledge that could improve the reach of a warning. Literature identifies two key models that well describe the cognitive processing of tweets and warnings. The Protective Action Decision Model (PADM) describes risk perception and the factors that enable or disable one from acting on a warning. Particularly through environmental and …

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 …

Is Every Tweet Created Equal? A Framework To Identify Relevant Tweets For Business Research, Thad Chee

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Theses & Dissertations

It is a life or death matter for a firm to observe its environment and identify new threats or opportunities quickly. Information technology has increased firm’s speed and agility in responding to environmental changes. Social media offers a vast and timely source of environmental information that firms can readily use gauge public sentiment. Twitter is a high-speed service that allows anyone to “tweet” a message to any interested parties. Firms can access near instantaneous changes in the public mood about any topic by using Sentiment Analysis. These topics range from predicting equities prices to predicting election outcomes. A gap exists …

Trolling Twitter, Eric Vorst

Dissertations

Political polarization is a defining feature of the contemporary American political landscape. While there is little doubt that elite polarization levels have risen dramatically in recent decades, there is some debate over the existence of a corresponding rise in mass polarization. Recent scholarship on mass polarization has cited evidence related to citizens’ positions on public policy issues, party sorting, and geographic polarization; however, questions remain as to the nature and extent of mass polarization in online spaces. Specifically, more needs to be known regarding how expressions of elite polarization influence the formation of polarized communities within social media.

This dissertation …

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).

Tweeting The Anthropocene: #400ppm As Networked Event, Lauren E. Cagle, Denise Tillery

Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies Faculty Publications

Social media platforms have been widely available for over 10 years, and communication research has responded in part by exploring how Facebook and other social media sites are used for advocacy and public discourse. Environmental issues, including climate change, have also been the focus of recent work on social media, including Environmental Communication's 2015 special issue on Climate Change Communication and the Internet. Bruno Latour's actor-network theory allows people to account for the roles played by users, links, hashtags, and other actants in the effort to move information through a larger network. The high percentage of tweets in the dataset …

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 …

Tackling ‘Bias’ And Fake Coverage In The Indian Media, Buroshiva Dasgupta

First Global News Literacy Conference

In India, there are a vast number of vernacular newspapers and TV channels in addition to the standard English newspapers and channels. Their strategies for covering news differ from place to place, language to language as well as their political or business “affiliations”. Unfortunately, in recent times most of the media platforms in India have moved away from their ‘objective’ standpoint. To understand or decipher fact from fiction the first method would be to go for a comparative study of the news items and then try to source out their ‘affiliations’ ! both political and business – to place the …

Says Who? Challenges Of Teaching News Literacy In A Culture Of Secrecy, Kanchan Kaur

First Global News Literacy Conference

India might be the world’s largest democracy, but it is still fraught with challenges that plague the underdeveloped world. India is quickly moving to a digital democracy—the ability to receive information in almost real time through mass media and to make one’s voice heard through social media (1) --with complex consequences. One of them has to do with a post-fact environment and non-state actors who try to influence public opinion to serve their own ends. Social media, especially WhatsApp, serves their purposes well, for instead of exposing people to diverse views, it mainly creates an echo chamber (2). Making matters …

Overcoming The Dark Side: Seeing Through The Spin Of Public Relations In The News, Samantha Stanley

First Global News Literacy Conference

In its current state, news literacy curriculum covers all the information types that consumers will see when they read, watch, listen to, and interact with news content. While current lessons do explain how press releases distribute information in the “promotion / publicity” neighborhood, there is much more nuance to the practice of PR that impacts information people read as ‘news’. In today’s climate of political spin cycles, it is more important than ever for news consumers to understand what public relations is and how its strategies influence news content. Because the practice of public relations is so often misunderstood and …

Marketing Strategy Of School Of Professional Studies In China, Jiahui Liu, Jing Wang, Shuo An, Wengxing Wang, Yiwei Wang

School of Professional Studies

Chinese students are the most visible international presence at many universities across the United States, and the number continues to grow. Since 2010, The number of graduate students studying abroad has entered the period in which the increase has been declining. Under the circumstance of the weak global economy and high cost of education, the administration needs to attract the attention of Chinese students. In the process of competing for applicants, how to develop marketing strategies to attract students’ eyeballs has become an important means of trying to increase school income through Chinese students. The marketing strategy mentioned in this …

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

Wendy Abbott

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.

Global Promotion Of Lgbtq Resources And Services Through Social Media, Rachel S. Wexelbaum

Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

Reconceptualizing The Work Of A Content Provider For An Online Audience: A Case Study For How Pedagogical Strategies Can Provide Models Of Engagement For Producers Of Entertainment, Diane Cooke

English Theses & Dissertations

With the interconnectivity of the Internet, and the availability of affordable media compositional tools, the proliferation of online media continues to grow exponentially. However, each day is still comprised of a fixed 24 hours, with far fewer hours spent in active media consumption. Considering the global potential for content to be found (Moreville), discovered (Cormier) or spread (Jenkins), content providers are looking for ways to attract, cultivate and hopefully expand their audiences amid all this digital clutter. In the field of entertainment, this challenge is complicated when small content providers are not aligned with an online, curated network such as …

#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 …