Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Citizen Journalism: From Thomas In Boston To Twitter In Tamaulipas, A Case Study, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, Maria Fernanda Machuca, Ruth Ann Ragland

Public Affairs and Security Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

As violence spiked in Mexico in clashes between drug trafficking organizations and law enforcement, news media were systematically silenced by cartels and cowed legitimate governments. Reliable information on street battles and their consequences ceased to flow through traditional channels to an anxious citizenry on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border 10 miles from McAllen, Texas. In Reynosa, Tamaulipas, a noted “plaza” territory contested by the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, ordinary citizens became journalists in 2010, reporting under the umbrella of the pioneer #ReynosaFollow hashtag on the Twitter social media platform. This gave frightened citizens a sense of anonymity …

Network Engagement Behaviors Of Three Online Diet And Exercise Programs, Hillary Stark, Abdulrahman Habib, Duha Al Smadi

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Online diet and exercise programs offer individuals many benefits not previously afforded, such as convenience and an increased network of like-minded individuals who share relevant information, while at the same time providing different levels of anonymity and engagement. While studies conducted of users engaging in groups on the popular social media platforms of Facebook and Twitter, when dieting have produced notable results, including the most frequent content shared between users, research has not yet been published regarding this topic, in relation to the social media site Instagram. There is also a lack of literature regarding the most engaging type of …

Subjectivity Filtering: Finding Cognitive Authority In Online Social Media Opinion Posts, Laurie J. Bonnici

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The technological explosion of information ushered in by the Internet, and more so with online social media (OSM), has provided a forest of personal opinions from which hunters forage. Personal opinions abound in OSM, serving as secondhand knowledge sources that inform everyday decisions. This research proposes a new lens, Cognitive Authority Framework – Quality Information Source (CAF-QIS), to explore the nature, tone, intentions, and believability of OSM postings. The conceptual framework is informed by Wilson’s four dimensions of cognitive authority (CA) combined with the five traditional criteria used as a common (unnamed) model for the identification of information quality in …

Strategic Insights: Think Before You Post: A Message To Those In Uniform, Heidi A. Urben

Articles & Editorials

No abstract provided.

Social Media For Senior Citizens: An Introductory Course, Cheryl Raistrick

Instructional Design Capstones Collection

The Woburn Council on Aging is a municipal, volunteer board appointed by the Mayor of Woburn. The Woburn COA operates the Woburn COA Senior Center as a resource for the community's senior citizen population. The Senior Center provides information, referrals, information, outreach, advocacy, transportation, health screening, nutrition, education, peer support, recreation, volunteer development and intergenerational programming for members of the community. Educational programs on the use of technology are offered monthly at the Woburn COA Senior Center though members have expressed interest in learning more about social media applications and how they can be used to communicate with family and …

"I Can Haz Applicants": An Analysis Of Police Recruitment And Marketing Through Social Media, Kelly Lee Helldorfer

Master's Theses

In recent decades, the Internet has flourished with the advancement of social media: apps, blogs, social networking, multimedia sources, podcasts, and more. Consequently, the Millennial Generation has grown up immersed in both the Internet and social media networks differently than previous generations. Due to the rapid expansion of social media outlets and their effects on future employees, police departments must consider their agency “brand” and how effectively they market their departments to this generation for the purpose of recruitment both on the Internet and with social media platforms.

This research analysis employed a netnography to examine 500 police websites and …

Social Media And Learning At The Ferguson Municipal Public Library, Madelynn Dickerson

Library Staff Publications and Research

This brief article highlights the way in which the Ferguson Municipal Public Library harnessed social media, specifically Twitter, to provide opportunities for learning in the community during the August 2014 protests after the death of Michael Brown, a black teenager shot and killed by a white police officer. The article presents data from the Ferguson Library’s Twitter account and looks at community reception of the library’s educational efforts.

“Follow Me So I Can Dm You Back”: An Exploratory Analysis Of A Female Pro- Isis Twitter Network, Joseph A. Varanese

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of this study is to explore a network of female pro-Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) supporters on Twitter. To do so, I identified twenty Twitter accounts (n=20) through snowball sampling, and analyzed their network comprising 5,861 vertices and 12,034 edges. I studied the network using three social network analysis metrics—Freeman’s normalized betweenness centrality, average geodesic distance, and tie strength. Females in the sample were more influential than males, and as a result, had a greater ability to radicalize other females within their network. Further, I observed that it took females longer than expected to …

Networked Co-Curation In Virtual Museums: Digital Humanities, History, And Social Media In The Toledo’S Attic Project, Arjun Sabharwal

Arjun Sabharwal

Networked co-curation is an innovative outreach practice in archives and museums using social media with other Web 2.0 technologies in order to curate digital heritage collections. It relies on crowd-sourced curation, which results in richer discourse through globally dispersed public participation and intersubjective perspectives. The theoretical framework for networked co-curation consists of three dimensions: digital history, digital humanities, and social network theory. Historical representation, intertextuality, and remediation play a vital role in networked co-curation, forming a bridge between digital content and a transforming virtual audience. Networked co-curation present three significant concerns for archives, libraries, and museums: provenance verification, knowledge representation, …

Harnessing Yik Yak For Good: A Study Of Students’ Anonymous Library Feedback, Mark Robison, Ruth Connell

Library Faculty Publications

This study explores academic libraries’ potential uses of the mobile application Yik Yak, with particular focus on patrons’ anonymous feedback about library services and spaces. Over a 232-day period, the authors observed the Yik Yak feed for their university and recorded all yaks related to the library. A content analysis of the 249 library-related yaks found six distinct purposes that these library-related yaks served, from the perspective of the patron, that are of interest to the library: asking questions about library services; reporting problems with library spaces; reprimanding violations of and encouraging adherence to library policies; sharing compliments about library …

An E-Government Analysis Of State Legislatures' Social Media Use, Karen Sue Connell

Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzes the use of social media by state legislative bodies, broken down by a combination of legislative body (House, Senate, or general legislature) and by party (Republican or Democrat). I analyzed Twitter and Facebook posts for each of these groups during the week of January 11-15, 2016, specifically looking for four improvements: transparency, policy making, public services, and knowledge management and cross-agency cooperation. The research questions are: RQ1: Which social media platforms are state legislatures using? RQ2: What improvements are the state legislatures using in their social media output? RQ3: Is there a significant difference in the improvements …

Spiteful, One-Off, And Kind: Predicting Customer Feedback Behavior On Twitter, Agus Sulistya, Abhishek Sharma, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media provides a convenient way for customers to express their feedback to companies. Identifying different types of customers based on their feedback behavior can help companies to maintain their customers. In this paper, we use a machine learning approach to predict a customer’s feedback behavior based on her first feedback tweet. First, we identify a few categories of customers based on their feedback frequency and the sentiment of the feedback. We identify three main categories: spiteful, one-off, and kind. Next, we build a model to predict the category of a customer given her first feedback. We use profile and …

On Profiling Bots In Social Media, Richard J. Oentaryo, Arinto Murdopo, Philips K. Prasetyo, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter has led to the proliferation of automated bots, creating both opportunities and challenges in information dissemination, user engagements, and quality of services. Past works on profiling bots had been focused largely on malicious bots, with the assumption that these bots should be removed. In this work, however, we find many bots that are benign, and propose a new, broader categorization of bots based on their behaviors. This includes broadcast, consumption, and spam bots. To facilitate comprehensive analyses of bots and how they compare to human accounts, we develop a systematic profiling …

What Do Chinese Really Think About Democracy And India?, Devin K. Joshi, Yizhe Xu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

There has been much speculation about whether China will democratize and avoid conflict with India in the twenty-first century. Yet, few studies have investigated how contemporary Chinese view India and its democracy. Addressing this gap in the literature, the authors examined Chinese media coverage of India’s two-month long April–May 2014 parliamentary election, the largest election in world history, through systematic analysis of over 500 articles from ten major mass media outlets and over 27,000 messages transmitted on Sina Weibo social media. As might be expected, Chinese mass media generally portrayed India and its elections in a condescending fashion while avoiding …

Harnessing Yik Yak For Good: A Study Of Students’ Anonymous Library Feedback, Mark Robison, Ruth S. Connell

Mark Robison

Harnessing Yik Yak For Good: A Study Of Students’ Anonymous Library Feedback, Mark Robison, Ruth S. Connell

Ruth S. Connell

What Is Love? A Needs Assessment To Identify A Relevant Teen Dating Violence Education Curriculum For A High School, Nicole Pina

IdeaFest: Interdisciplinary Journal of Creative Works and Research from Cal Poly Humboldt

No abstract provided.

Content Mining Techniques For Detecting Cyberbullying In Social Media, Shawniece L. Parker, Yen-Hung Hu

Virginia Journal of Science

The use of social media has become an increasingly popular trend, and it is most favorite amongst teenagers. A major problem concerning teens using social media is that they are often unaware of the dangers involved when using these media. Also, teenagers are more inclined to misuse social media because they are often unaware of the privacy rights associated with the use of that particular media, or the rights of the other users. As a result, cyberbullying cases have a steady rise in recent years and have gone undiscovered, or are not discovered until serious harm has been caused to …

Reframing Management Education With Social Media, Charles Wankel

Organization Management Journal

The current and forthcoming generations of students in higher education are digital natives, having been born into a world of computing that has provided them with a high level of comfort and wherewithal with social media. Business and other organizations recognize the importance of creative proficiency in social technologies as an important dimension of human capital. This article is an overview of popular social media platforms and their practical use in higher education. Specifically, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, wikis, Meetup, and Second Life are discussed with examples of use in fostering effective management education. The continued lowering of barriers …

Brand Tracking On Social Media: The Role Of Country Of Origin Perceptions, James Pokrywczynski, Hang Lu

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

Marketers are now almost a decade into using social media as another outlet in developing brand relationships with consumers. Yet an understanding of how consumers interact with brands online is still in its infancy. This paper compares the social media and brand-tracking habits of consumers in three parts of the world: Asia, the Middle East and the USA. In addition, the study attempts to explain what motivates consumers to follow brands on social media, focusing on the role of products’ country of origin in explaining the relationship. The results show that US consumers spent the most time on social media …

Copyright, Fair Use, And Social Media Instruction For Undergraduates, Elizabeth Kelly

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Undergraduate students are increasingly expected to navigate the world of posting both original and reused content to social media. But how do students know what they should and shouldn’t share on social media? And how does this change depending on whether the student is using a personal account versus one made for school or for a job? An understanding of the ethics and legality of sharing copyrighted content is essential to the third frame, “Information Has Value,” of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Much of student use of copyrighted materials for coursework is covered by Educational …

Nonprofit Use Of Social Media: Insights From The Field, Justin Greenleaf Ph.D.

Leadership Faculty Publications

This study focuses on social media use in nonprofit organizations and how nonprofits perceive and strategize about the use of social media platforms. The study was open to any nonprofit organization actively engaged in the use of social media and fifteen different nonprofit organizations were purposefully selected for inclusion in the study. Through interviews with the social media strategists employed by the organizations, the researcher created a foundation for understanding perceptions of effective strategies for social media use in these nonprofits. While participants described a variety of social media platforms, discussion revolved primarily around the use of Facebook and Twitter. …

Affect And Value In Critical Examinations Of The Production And ‘Prosumption’ Of Big Data, Daniel G. Cockayne

Geography Faculty Publications

In this paper I explore the relationship between the production and the value of Big Data. In particular I examine the concept of social media ‘prosumption’—which has predominantly been theorized from a Marxist, political economic perspective—to consider what other forms of value Big Data have, imbricated with their often speculative economic value. I take the example of social media firms in their early stages of operation to suggest that, since these firms do not necessarily generate revenue, data collected through user contributions do not always realize economic value, at least in a Marxist sense, and that, in addition to their …

Introduction: Spatial Big Data And Everyday Life, Agnieszka Leszczynski, Jeremy Crampton

Geography Faculty Publications

Spatial Big Data—be this natively geocoded content, geographical metadata, or data that itself refers to spaces and places—has become a pervasive presence in the spaces and practices of everyday life. Beyond preoccupations with “the geotag” and with mapping geocoded social media content, this special theme explores what it means to encounter and experience spatial Big Data as a quotidian phenomenon that is both spatial, characterized by and enacting of material spatialities, and spatializing, configuring relations between subjects, objects, and spaces in new and unprecedented ways.

Review Of Start A Revolution: Stop Acting Like A Library, Philip Shackelford

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Start a Revolution: Stop Acting Like a Library is a convenient and thought-provoking manual for libraries and other cultural institutions interested in enhancing their community presence and marketing efforts. Technology Director Ben Bizzle offers insights gained from experience, marketing results, and other individuals who contribute appendices on related topics.

Understanding Social Media Program Usage In Public Transit Agencies, Jenny H. Liu, Wei Shi, O. A. Elrahman, Xuegang Ban, Jack M. Reilly

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Social media has been gaining prominence in public transit agencies in their communication strategies and daily management. This study aims to better understand recent trends in social media usage in public transit agencies, to examine which agencies use what kind of social media programs for what purposes, and how they measure their programs. A survey was conducted of the top transit agencies in the nation, and results are examined through descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis and regression modeling. We found that while most agencies still lack clearly-defined goals and performance metrics to guide their social media development, many are increasing …

"Support For Sisters Please": Comparing The Online Roles Of Al-Qaeda Women And Their Islamic State Counterparts, Hillary Peladeau

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study evaluates female roles in pro-jihadist terrorism by examining online content. Data was collected from 36 Twitter accounts of women associated with al-Qaeda (AQ) affiliated groups for a period of six months. The purpose for collecting this data was to: 1) compare how traditional female roles, as constructed within a jihadi-Salafist ideology, are reproduced and challenged on social media; 2) and determine the extent that AQ-affiliated women conform to roles outlined in Huey’s classification of females in pro-Islamic State (IS) Twitter networks. The results of this study reveal that women’s traditional roles in pro-jihadist activities are reproduced on Twitter. …

Terror On Twitter: A Comparative Analysis Of Gender And The Involvement In Pro-Jihadist Communities On Twitter, Eric W. Witmer

MA Research Paper

Social media has become the milieu of choice to radicalize young impressionable minds by terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State. While a plethora of research exists on the recruitment and propaganda efforts by terrorist organizations there is limited number of quantitative studies that observe the relationship of gender and the involvement in online radical milieus. This current research will build upon prior studies through the comparative analysis of 750 unique Twitter accounts supporting the IS and the affiliates of al-Qaeda that were non-randomly sampled between January and September of 2015. The research aimed to address the …

Understanding Dialogue And Engagement Through Communication Experts’ Use Of Interactive Writing To Build Relationships, Betsy Anderson, Rebecca Swenson, Nathan Gilkerson

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

Dialogic communication is an important public relations theory, yet scholarship has found few organizations using it to its full potential. Meanwhile, multiple overlapping definitions exist for related terms like engagement, interactivity, and responsiveness, causing potential confusion for researchers and professionals. This research reports the results of in-depth interviews with top digital public relations professionals regarding how they use interactive writing, a form of social media engagement, to build relationships. Through their own unprompted words, the research also describes how professionals use terms such as dialogue, engagement, interactivity, and responsiveness, and corresponding definitions, to refer to their …

Data Mining Twitter For Cancer, Diabetes, And Asthma Insights, Kimberly Chulis

Open Access Dissertations

Twitter may be a data resource to support healthcare research. Literature is still limited related to the potential of Twitter data as it relates to healthcare. The purpose of this study was to contrast the processes by which a large collection of unstructured disease-related tweets could be converted into structured data to be further analyzed. This was done with the objective of gaining insights into the content and behavioral patterns associated with disease-specific communications on Twitter. Twelve months of Twitter data related to cancer, diabetes, and asthma were collected to form a baseline dataset containing over 34 million tweets. As …