Communication Commons^™

The Fuzzin' Facts, Rebel Alliance, Mitch Ohnstad, Rebekka Erks, Erin Prohaska, Ryan Mueksch, Rachel Foehlinger, Laura Bergen, Sean Davis

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Student Advertising Projects

The challenge for this campaign is to expose the facts about sexual health and safe sex practices in a light-hearted manner in order to make it a more comfortable topic to talk about so that more people understand the need to get the facts, get tested and get involved to help prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in Nebraska.

You Are What You Tweet: Connecting The Geographic Variation In America's Obesity Rate To Twitter Content, Ross J. Gore, Saikou Diallo, Jose Padilla

VMASC Publications

We conduct a detailed investigation of the relationship among the obesity rate of urban areas and expressions of happiness, diet and physical activity on social media. We do so by analyzing a massive, geo-tagged data set comprising over 200 million words generated over the course of 2012 and 2013 on the social network service Twitter. Among many results, we show that areas with lower obesity rates: (1) have happier tweets and frequently discuss (2) food, particularly fruits and vegetables, and (3) physical activities of any intensity. Additionally, we provide evidence that each of these results offer different and unique insight …

Exploring How Social Media Can Be Used To Promote Space Awareness: A Case Study Of The Yuri's Night Web 2.0, Alan Steinberg, Jeffrey Alles, Ryan L. Kobrick

Publications

Despite the importance of social media as an inexpensive and efficient means of communication, it is not clear to what degree space advocacy groups are making a strong organized effort to use the resources available to them. Moreover, there is no previous literature that specifically examines the use of social media tools by space organizations. This study seeks to start a larger dialog regarding how the space advocacy community can make use of these tools to promote their mission. Using a case study approach, this article focuses specifically on the organization of Yuri’s Night to explore how this group is …

Re-Examining Resistance: Fan-Produced Queer Readings And Teen Wolf, Joshua J. Espinoza

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

MTV's popular television series, Teen Wolf (2011), has amassed a large online following of fans that create their own queer narratives through fan-fiction, subverting the show's hegemonic heteronormativity. Through a textual thematic analysis of Teen Wolf, this case study illustrates how online fandoms can subvert hegemony through queer readings of literary characters, resisting the dominant heteronormativity on network television. This article argues that rearticulating the showâ??s narratives into queer readings functions as a form of LGBT resistance, effectively counteracting the heteronormativity and hegemony portrayed on screen. This study examines how Teen Wolf approaches queer content, including homoeroticism and LGBT themes …

Technology And Political Participation, Chris Molina

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The most efficient way to get people to take action has always been a big topic of discussion when it comes to political mobilization. Technology has greatly affected the way that people mobilize; it has created a platform for people to have easier access to those of like minds. With social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter it is very easy in today's era to get your point across to thousands of people and if need be mobilize them into a political rally or protest. It is important to see if technology has actually had an impact in the …

The Effects Of Social Media And The Internet On Political Participation, Leslie Orozco

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The 21st century has been a century of many changes and technological advancements. Arguably the most important and influential technological advancement of this century has been the internet. With the internet came other branches of the internet such as social media that have now become extremely prominent in American daily life and culture. In the last few Presidential elections, candidates have used the internet and social media as an important part of their political campaigns.

This research project looks at the effects that social media and the internet has had on political participation during the most recent Presidential elections using …

What’S Cookin’ Good Lookin’: The Rise And Phenomena Of The Female Foodie Performer Through Social Media, Alison Weiss

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Once seen in black and white terms as human sustenance or luxury, eating has become not only a hobby, but an obsession. Whereas chefs and cooks were previously regarded as average, behind-the-scenes workers, they have now stepped out from the kitchen and into the spotlight, becoming celebrated public idols – and performers. With images tailored to different demographics right down to their clothing and hairstyles, chefs and cooks no longer merely prepare food: they put on a show. The foodie phenomena has been pioneered by females, largely in part to the parallel-running infatuation with health, fitness, and food trends that …

Maximizing Sharability And Persuasiveness On Web 2.0, Yuhua (Jake) Liang, Christina Lopez, Tim Seavey, Shelby Stanton

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Online marketing efforts usually focus on the persuasiveness or sharability of a message. However, research has not established where these two concepts overlap. The current study explores this overlap. Web 2.0 platforms facilitate the delivery of different content and statistics to convey the persuasiveness and the sharability. An original experiment varied message quality (high argument strength, direct message, and emotional message) and web cues (i.e., ratio of views, likes, and shares) to signal self-presentation (favorable and unfavorable). Prospective participants will view mock webpages for internet news and donation collection, followed by measures of the content persuasiveness and sharability.

Is The Smartphone Smart In Kathmandu?, Seth Bird

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This is the extensive study of the smartphone in the developing country of Nepal, specifically the Kathmandu valley. Throughout my research I conducted various interviews with businesses, Tibetan refugees, and Nepali millennials (18yrs-33yrs) with the goal of identifying how the smartphone is used and understood. I chose the Kathmandu valley as my main area of research because the usage of smartphones in rural Nepal is extremely limited, and the valley represents the economic hub where progressive thinking flourishes. As a main objective I sought to understand how, if at all, the smartphone is used differently between Nepal and America. All …

Fundraising Techniques Of San Luis Obispo Nonprofit Organizations, Samantha Suyemoto

Graphic Communication

The purpose of this study was to identify the strengths and weaknesses of using direct mail and electronic media in the fundraising techniques of local San Luis Obispo nonprofit organizations. The intended audience includes the nonprofits interviewed in each case study as well as the other organizations that fundraise within the San Luis Obispo area. Three case studies of nonprofit organizations within the area were conducted in conjunction with research on various types of funding. Results of this study are intended to benefit the nonprofits by providing more information on successful fundraising habits.

Anomaly Detection Through Enhanced Sentiment Analysis On Social Media Data, Zhaoxia Wang, Victor Joo, Chuan Tong, Xin Xin, Hoong Chor Chin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly detection in sentiment analysis refers to detecting abnormal opinions, sentiment patterns or special temporal aspects of such patterns in a collection of data. The anomalies detected may be due to sudden sentiment changes hidden in large amounts of text. If these anomalies are undetected or poorly managed, the consequences may be severe, e.g. A business whose customers reveal negative sentiments and will no longer support the establishment. Social media platforms, such as Twitter, provide a vast source of information, which includes user feedback, opinion and information on most issues. Many organizations also leverage social media platforms to publish information …

Social Media In The Church, Derick Ray Mckinney

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project examines the effectiveness of social media in the church. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have the potential to shape the way the world communicates. Many churches have even begun utilizing social media in their ministry efforts. They publicize, pray, encourage, and promote events, all using social media. This paper argues that Bible believing churches can effectively use social media to communicate to their members by announcing upcoming events, sharing audience specific information, and knowing the best time to post on these sites. This project shows a social media strategy implemented into New Heights Church in …

Data Preparation For Social Network Mining And Analysis, Yazhe Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation studies the problem of preparing good-quality social network data for data analysis and mining. Modern online social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have rapidly grown in popularity. The consequent availability of a wealth of social network data provides an unprecedented opportunity for data analysis and mining researchers to determine useful and actionable information in a wide variety of fields such as social sciences, marketing, management, and security. However, raw social network data are vast, noisy, distributed, and sensitive in nature, which challenge data mining and analysis tasks in storage, efficiency, accuracy, etc. Many mining algorithms cannot …

Docam 2014 Founders Lecture: Photocutionary Acts, Selfies And Public Knowledge, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper is drawn from the DOCAM 2014 Founders Lecture Selfies and Public Knowledge: DOCAM 2014 Founders Lecture, "Selfies and Public Knowledge: Technology & Situational Documents"

Issues Of Social Data Analytics With A New Method For Sentiment Analysis Of Social Media Data, Zhaoxia Wang, Victor J. C. Tong, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Social media data consists of feedback, critiques and other comments that are posted online by internet users. Collectively, these comments may reflect sentiments that are sometimes not captured in traditional data collection methods such as administering a survey questionnaire. Thus, social media data offers a rich source of information, which can be adequately analyzed and understood. In this paper, we survey the extant research literature on sentiment analysis and discuss various limitations of the existing analytical methods. A major limitation in the large majority of existing research is the exclusive focus on social media data in the English language. There …

Participatory Democracy In The Chinese Cyber World: Case Studies From Weibo, Duyi Li

Master's Theses

This thesis discusses features of citizen communication on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform, and its relationship to participatory democracy in China. Weibo is a complex social space due to the interplay of different forces and social actors. On the one hand, Weibo provides the space for bottom-up political participation: it expands the horizontal discursive space where plural discourses coexist and interact; provides a social sphere where counter-discourses are created; a space where the culture of resistance is formed; and serves as an alternative source for information. On the other hand, the vertical political control of the state, and the …

It's All In A Meme: A Content Analysis Of Memes Posted To 2012 Presidential Election Facebook Pages, Bobbie Foster

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis was an exploratory study to understand how Democrats and Republicans design memes, use traditional media framing, and how memes fit into modern humor theories. The study explores the relationship between the traditional media frames of the ideal candidate, populist campaigner, and the sure loser (Grabe & Bucy, 2009) and the commentary added by Internet users to these images in the memes.

The study also applies the benign-violation theory (McGraw & Warren, 2010) to the analysis of memes to understand the design choices made by meme creators. The benign-violation theory states that a physical or psychological violation is benign …

Extracting Interest Tags From Twitter User Biographies, Ying Ding, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter, one of the most popular social media platforms, has been studied from different angles. One of the important sources of information in Twitter is users’ biographies, which are short self-introductions written by users in free form. Biographies often describe users’ background and interests. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been much work trying to extract information from Twitter biographies. In this work, we study how to extract information revealing users’ personal interests from Twitter biographies. A sequential labeling model is trained with automatically constructed labeled data. The popular patterns expressing user interests are extracted and …

Social Media Marketing For The Medical Industry: Best Practices To Avoid Legal And Ethical Issues, Jessica Padilla

Journalism

This study analyzes the best social media practices for medical industry professionals and the proper and ideal uses for social media. It analyzes the public relations functions of social media—relationship building, reputation management, and crisis communication. With the constant rise of social media as a widely-used medium for marketing comes increased potential for damage to a medical business’ reputation, loss of medical licensing, or lawsuits if practitioners do not act within the lines of legal and ethical standards. Medical offices must have an online presence to remain relevant and build and keep relationships with new and current patients. This study …

Emotional Disclosure On Social Networking Sites: The Role Of Network Structure And Psychological Needs, Han Lin, William Tov, Lin Qiu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

We conducted three studies to understand how online emotional disclosure is influenced by social network structure on Facebook. Results showed that emotional disclosure was associated with both the density and size of users’ personal networks. Facebook users with denser networks disclosed more positive and negative emotions, and the relation between network density and emotional disclosure was mediated by stronger need for emotional expression. Facebook users with larger networks on Facebook disclosed more positive emotions, and the relation between network size and emotional disclosure was mediated by a stronger need for impression management. Our study extends past research by revealing the …

Correlates Of Social Anxiety, Religion, And Facebook, Lee Farquhar, Theresa Davidson

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

This study examined how religiosity, network homophily, and self-monitoring relate to social and Facebook-specific anxiety, role conflict, and Facebook Intensity. Correlation analyses indicate a connection between Facebook use and anxiety, as well as a link between religiosity and anxiety. We found that Role Conflict correlates with Facebook Intensity, Facebook specific Anxiety, and Social Anxiety. Regarding religiosity, those who prefer aliteral interpretation of the Bible, attend church more frequently, and pray more often have higher anxiety. Facebookers who are higher self-monitors have a less homophilous Facebook network and are less likely to identifytheir religious views on Facebook.

Identifying The High-Value Social Audience From Twitter Through Text-Mining Methods, Siaw Ling Lo, David Cornforth, Raymond Chiong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Doing business on social media has become a common practice for many companies these days. While the contents shared on Twitter and Facebook offer plenty of opportunities to uncover business insights, it remains a challenge to sift through the huge amount of social media data and identify the potential social audience who is highly likely to be interested in a particular company. In this paper, we analyze the Twitter content of an account owner and its list of followers through various text mining methods, which include fuzzy keyword matching, statistical topic modeling and machine learning approaches. We use tweets of …

We Need To Talk, Neal Deroo

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Posting about gender issues and Yik Yak from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/we-need-to-talk/

It's Not Unusual: Glee And The Mainstream Acceptance Of Spontaneous Public Performance, Elizabeth M. Downey

UL Publications

When Glee debuted in 2009, the genre of the television musical series had a shaky history. Traditional episodic programs had previously aired musical episodes but these were seen as rare absurdities; the genre was an oddity to exploit on occasion, not something that could sustain an entire series (a belief proven when previous attempts had failed). The flash mob culture that emerged in the mid-2000s alongside the groundswell of social media changed this environment. The absurdity of people “bursting into song” in a public place was no longer a completely unrealistic scenario, and this reopened the door for the musical …

Web 2.0 Use And Knowledge Transfer: How Social Media Technologies Can Lead To Organizational Innovation, Namjoo Choi, Kuang-Yuan Huang, Aaron Palmer, Lenore Horowitz

Information Science Faculty Publications

The concept of Web 2.0 has gained widespread prominence in recent years. The use of Web 2.0 applications on an individual level is currently extensive, and such applications have begun to be implemented by organizations in hopes of boosting collaboration and driving innovation. Despite this growing trend, only a small number of theoretical perspectives are available in the literature that discuss how such applications could be utilized to assist in innovation. In this paper, we propose a theoretical model explicating this phenomenon. We argue that organizational Web 2.0 use fosters the emergence and enhancement of informal networks, weak ties, boundary …

On Joint Modeling Of Topical Communities And Personal Interest In Microblogs, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose the Topical Communities and Personal Interest (TCPI) model for simultaneously modeling topics, topical communities, and users’ topical interests in microblogging data. TCPI considers different topical communities while differentiating users’ personal topical interests from those of topical communities, and learning the dependence of each user on the affiliated communities to generate content. This makes TCPI different from existing models that either do not consider the existence of multiple topical communities, or do not differentiate between personal and community’s topical interests. Our experiments on two Twitter datasets show that TCPI can effectively mine the representative topics for …

Book Review: Twitter: Social Communication In The Twitter Age, By Dhiraj Murthy, Sue Burzynski Bullard

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

Twitter has helped to shape social communication in today’s world. In his book, Dhiraj Murthy recognizes Twitter’s impact as a communication medium and puts it in context.

Improving The Efficacy Of Web-Based Educational Outreach In Ecology, Gregory R. Goldsmith, Andrew D. Fulton, Colin D. Witherill, Javier F. Espeleta

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Scientists are increasingly engaging the web to provide formal and informal science education opportunities. Despite the prolific growth of web-based resources, systematic evaluation and assessment of their efficacy remains limited. We used clickstream analytics, a widely available method for tracking website visitors and their behavior, to evaluate 60,000 visits over three years to an educational website focused on ecology. Visits originating from search engine queries were a small proportion of the traffic, suggesting the need to actively promote websites to drive visitation. However, the number of visits referred to the website per social media post varied depending on the social …

The Effect Of Social Media On Public Awareness And Extra-Judicial Effects: The Gay Marriage Cases And Litigating For New Rights, Sarahfina Aubrey Peterson

Dissertations and Theses

When the Supreme Court grants new rights, public awareness is a crucial part of enforcement. Gerald N. Rosenberg and Michael J. Klarman famously criticized minority rights organizations for attempting to gain new rights through the judiciary. The crux of their argument relied heavily on the American media's scanty coverage of Court issues and subsequent low public awareness of Court cases. Using the 2013 United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry rulings as a case study, I suggest that the media environment has changed so much since Rosenberg and Klarman were writing that their theories warrant reconsideration. Minority rights groups …

Entity Linking On Microblogs With Spatial And Temporal Signals, Yuan Fang, Ming-Wei Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogs present an excellent opportunity for monitoring and analyzing world happenings. Given that words are often ambiguous, entity linking becomes a crucial step towards understanding microblogs. In this paper, we re-examine the problem of entity linking on microblogs. We first observe that spatiotemporal (i.e., spatial and temporal) signals play a key role, but they are not utilized in existing approaches. Thus, we propose a novel entity linking framework that incorporates spatiotemporal signals through a weakly supervised process. Using entity annotations1 on real-world data, our experiments show that the spatiotemporal model improves F1 by more than 10 points over existing systems. …