Communication Commons^™

Technology Innovations In Publishing: New Directions In Academic And Cultural Communication., Elisabeth Tappeiner, Kate Lyons

Publications and Research

Over time, publishing technologies have not only influenced how people read, but also how knowledge is evaluated and authority is established. Social and mobile technologies represent relatively recent developments that have transformed the trade publishing world, but the extent to which they have affected academic publishing remains an open question. This article examines the rapid and disruptive transformations in the trade and digital publishing world, discusses how these developments have already intersected with the work of academics and considers how these changes might continue to transform the dissemination of academic research in the future.

Glidden At Walmart: There For You, University Of Nebraska–Lincoln Nsac Team, Cody Elmore, Adam Kroft, Rachel Leitschuck, Brittany Rypkema, Jordan Oddo, Derek Niewohner, Matthew Anderson, Mitchell Benes, Meg Brannen, Griffin Gale, Devin Mcdermott, Grant Weber, Jennifer Gortik, Geremy Gortemaker, Katie Hottovy, Matt Wengert, Toan Chu, Devin Specht, Rich Bailey, Michael Goff

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Student Advertising Projects

Hectic, busy, tiring—these are just a few words our target markets use to describe their day-to-day lives. Millennials, young families, and Baby Boomers all feel the pressure of life. With jobs, schoolwork, and family, they find it hard to keep up. Because of these busy lifestyles, savvy consumers crave home improvement solutions that are both quick and reliable. Glidden offers a solution to these issues by placing its top-quality paint in the most convenient store on Earth, Walmart. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln NSAC Team has created a plan to promote this symbiotic relationship of Glidden’s quality and Walmart’s convenience as …

Research And Pedagogy In Business Analytics: Opportunities And Illustrative Examples, Ramesh Sharda, Daniel Asamoah, Natraj Ponna

Management Information Systems Faculty Publications

In recent times, business analytics and big data have gained momentum both in industry practice and academic research. The objective of this paper is to provide both a research and teaching introduction to business analytics in the context of both current and prospective perspective of the business analytics domain. It begins by providing a quick overview of the three types of analytics. To assist the future analytics professionals, we identify, group and discuss nine different participants of the analytics industry into clusters. We then include a brief description of some current research projects under way in our team. We also …

Why Don't I Look Like Her? The Impact Of Social Media On Female Body Image, Kendyl M. Klein

CMC Senior Theses

The purpose of this paper is to understand and criticize the role of social media in the development and/or encouragement of eating disorders, disordered eating, and body dissatisfaction in college-aged women. College women are exceptionally vulnerable to the impact that social media can have on their body image as they develop an outlook on their bodies and accept the developmental changes that occurred during puberty. This paper provides evidence that there is a relationship between the recent surge in disordered eating and high consumption of social media. I examine the ways in which traditional advertising has portrayed women throughout history, …

Keep Your Update To Yourself, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

An essay from Wired Magazine (UK)'s special edition, The Wired World in 2013. The essay makes the argument that frictionless sharing of reading habits should decline in 2013.

The Perils Of Social Reading, Neil M. Richards

Scholarship@WashULaw

Our law currently treats records of our reading habits under two contradictory rules: rules mandating confidentiality and rules permitting disclosure. Recently, the rise of the social Internet has created more of these records and more pressures on when and how they should be shared. Companies like Facebook, in collaboration with many newspapers, have ushered in the era of “social reading,” in which what we read may be “frictionlessly shared” with our friends and acquaintances. Disclosure and sharing are on the rise.

This Article sounds a cautionary note about social reading and frictionless sharing. Social reading might have some appeal, but …

Social Media And Prosumerism: Implications For Sport Marketing Research, James Santomier, Patricia Hogan

WCBT Faculty Publications

Social media arid the techniques and processes related to marketing using social media are changing at an incredible rate and will require continual monitoring for those involved in-social media research. As such, we identified the need for sport marketing researchers who are abductive thinkers who can design, combine and use innovative research methodologies as stimulated by the continually evolving technology. Ultimately, however, research prospects related to social media and sport marketing are vast for scholars and marketing professionals alike, and are replete with opportunities for designing new research methodologies.

Will "Smarter" Marketing End Social Discrimination? A Critical Review, Frances Grodzinsky, Andra Gumbus, Stephen J. Lilley

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

Purpose - There are two claims made by the web marketing/advertising industry. 1) By collecting, managing, and mining data, companies serve consumer’s best interests and 2) by adopting sophisticated analytics web marketers avoid discriminations that disserve individuals. Although we share an interest in ending social discrimination, we are more circumspect about pronounced individualism and technological fixes. Despite its appeal, or perhaps because of it, we should not accept the claim at face value. In this paper we argue that social discrimination may not disappear under smarter marketing; more overt forms may wane only to be replaced by more subtle forms. …

Book Review: Alphabet To Internet: Media In Our Lives, Sue Burzynski Bullard

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

Technology has changed virtually every aspect of communication. As more of us adapt to news and information delivered almost instantly on devices that handily fit into a pocket, we’ve become accustomed to new tools and quick changes. Irving Fang’s second edition of Alphabet to Internet puts it all in perspective, starting with the dawn of writing and including today’s 140-character Tweet. In a word, the impact is mind-boggling.

Going Offline: Personality And Its Effects On The Transition Of Online Relationships To The Offline World, Morgan Johnson

Honors Program Theses

Because the internet is a relatively new technology, few studies have researched the correlations between online behavior and personality. As such, this study set out to determine if online friendships and personality are related. In this study differences in personality were examined between individuals who have met their online friends face-to-face and those who have not. A survey was distributed online using the Five Factor Model to measure personality. Participants in this study were recruited from an online community called Nerdfighteria. The results found that the facets of the Five Factor Model of personality were largely found not to be …

"Single Girl Summer" Enterprise: Building A Successful Brand Using Social Media As A Branding Tool, Rashida Lyles-Cowan

Masters Theses

This is a creative thesis that examines the benefits of using an integrated public relations and marketing campaign for the novel, Single Girl Summer. The campaign was created during the fall semester of 2012, after determining that the novel lacked a clear and concise brand identity. This document outlines important factors that happened during the campaign including; literature research, plan of implementation, promotional work, and more. Finally, this paper discusses the implications of the campaign and results, examining the effectiveness of the integrated public relations and marketing campaign for Single Girl Summer.

Using Twitter To Facilitate Case-Based Instruction In A Nursing Classroom, Sherleena Ann Buchman, Patricia Burke Snider, Tian Luo, Kaboni Gondwe

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This paper is a report on the use of Twitter within a sophomore level course in the baccalaureate nursing program at a rural Appalachian university. Students enrolled in the Foundations of Nursing course were in their second year of a traditional nursing program. Meeting the challenge of providing students with a ubiquitous learning environment that extends beyond their rural environment is important in the education of many students in the Appalachian region. The preliminary study looks at the usability of Twitter as the medium that will assist nursing students to build the confidence that comes from completing a case study …

The Personal, Political, And The Virtual? Redefining Female Success And Empowerment In A Post-Feminist Landscape, Linda Elizabeth Chardon

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Impact Of Multimedia In Sina Weibo, Xun Zhao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Multimedia contents such as images and videos are widely used in social network sites nowadays. Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service, is one of the first microblog platforms to incorporate multimedia content sharing features. This thesis provides statistical analysis on how multimedia contents are produced, consumed, and propagated in Sina Weibo. Based on 230 million tweets and 1.8 million user profiles in Sina Weibo, we study the impact of multimedia contents on the popularity of both users and tweets as well as tweet life span. In addition to consider the multimedia impact on popularity, we also compare the user influence …

Short And Tweet, Sue Burzynski Bullard

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

The goal is to help students learn to write clearly and concisely. It reinforces William Zinsser’s advice in “On Writing Well.” He said, “Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.” The exercise helps students learn to find the focus of stories. It helps editing students write concise, clear headlines that pull readers into stories. It also helps reporting students learn to summarize stories accurately and briefly — a skill they need as they craft their own ledes.

Authentication Of Social Media Evidence, Paul W. Grimm, Lisa Yurwit Bergstrom, Melissa M. O'Toole-Loureiro

Faculty Scholarship

The authentication of social media evidence has become a prevalent issue in litigation today, creating much confusion and disarray for attorneys and judges. By exploring the current inconsistencies among courts' decisions, this Article demonstrates the importance of the interplay between Federal Rules of Evidence 901, 104(a), 104(b), and 401-all essential rules for determining the admissibility and authentication of social media evidence. Most importantly, this Article concludes by offering valuable and practical suggestions for attorneys to authenticate social media evidence successfully.

Cultural Differences And Switching Of In-Group Sharing Behavior Between An American (Facebook) And A Chinese (Renren) Social Networking Site, Lin Qiu, Han Lin, Angela K. Y. Leung

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Prior research has documented cultural dimensions that broadly characterize between-culture variations in Western and East Asian societies and that bicultural individuals can flexibly change their behaviors in response to different cultural contexts. In this article, we studied cultural differences and behavioral switching in the context of the fast emerging, naturally occurring online social networking, using both self-report measures and content analyses of online activities on two highly popular platforms, Facebook and Renren (the “Facebook of China”). Results showed that while Renren and Facebook are two technically similar platforms, the Renren culture is perceived as more collectivistic than the Facebook culture. …

The 2008 Us Presidential Election And New Digital Technologies: Political Campaigns As Social Movements And The Significance Of Collective Identity, Stephanie Takaragawa, Victoria Carty

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

The growing role of the Internet social networking sites (SNS) has served as a flash point for debate about the democratization of information, particularly in light of their perceived roles in the 2008 presidential election. This horizontal sharing of information undoubtedly facilitated the revival of the youth vote and volunteerism in many ways mimicking traditional grassroots approaches. While the role of the Internet SNS in mobilization efforts and information-sharing cannot be overstated, its effectiveness in creating a new “public sphere,” or transforming traditional electoral campaign strategies and communicative practices must be closely examined before generalizations about the democratization of media …

Finding Thoughtful Comments From Social Media, Gottipati Swapna, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online user comments contain valuable user opinions. Comments vary greatly in quality and detecting high quality comments is a subtask of opinion mining and summarization research. Finding attentive comments that provide some reasoning is highly valuable in understanding the user’s opinion particularly in sociopolitical opinion mining and aids policy makers, social organizations or government sectors in decision making. In this paper we study the problem of detecting thoughtful comments. We empirically study various textual features, discourse relations and relevance features to predict thoughtful comments. We use logistic regression model and test on the datasets related to sociopolitical content. We found …

A Survey Of Recommender Systems In Twitter, Su Mon Kywe, Ee Peng Lim, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter is a social information network where short messages or tweets are shared among a large number of users through a very simple messaging mechanism. With a population of more than 100M users generating more than 300M tweets each day, Twitter users can be easily overwhelmed by the massive amount of information available and the huge number of people they can interact with. To overcome the above information overload problem, recommender systems can be introduced to help users make the appropriate selection. Researchers have began to study recommendation problems in Twitter but their works usually address individual recommendation tasks. There …

Community-Based Classification Of Noun Phrases In Twitter, Freddy Chong Tat Chua, William W. Cohen, Justin Betterridge, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many event monitoring systems rely on counting known keywords in streaming text data to detect sudden spikes in frequency. But the dynamic and conversational nature of Twitter makes it hard to select known keywords for monitoring. Here we consider a method of automatically finding noun phrases (NPs) as keywords for event monitoring in Twitter. Finding NPs has two aspects, identifying the boundaries for the subsequence of words which represent the NP, and classifying the NP to a specific broad category such as politics, sports, etc. To classify an NP, we define the feature vector for the NP using not just …

On Recommending Hashtags In Twitter Networks, Su Mon Kywe, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter network is currently overwhelmed by massive amount of tweets generated by its users. To effectively organize and search tweets, users have to depend on appropriate hashtags inserted into tweets. We begin our research on hashtags by first analyzing a Twitter dataset generated by more than 150,000 Singapore users over a three-month period. Among several interesting findings about hashtag usage by this user community, we have found a consistent and significant use of new hashtags on a daily basis. This suggests that most hashtags have very short life span. We further propose a novel hashtag recommendation method based on collaborative …

Nonprofit News, News Industrial Subsidies, And The Rise Of Citizen Journalism, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

In this article three important policy questions are suggested in light of signs of recent growth of nonprofit news and the possibility of a great deal more similar growth in the future: 1) Does nonprofit news production pose a plausible solution to the economic troubles of the U.S. news industry? 2) Would industrial subsidies of nonprofits, like those for “welfare state” health and human services co-production offer a potential solution to the economic problems of the U.S. news industry? 3) Can the currently evolving internet-based system of news production by volunteer citizens be sustainable in the long run?

Us Presidential Election 2012 Prediction Using Census Corrected Twitter Model, Junyu Choy, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Nang Laik Ma, Ping Shung Koo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

US Presidential Election 2012 has been a very tight race between the two key candidates. Therewere intense battle between the two key candidates. The election reflects the sentiment of theelectorate towards the achievements of the incumbent President Obama. The campaign lastedseveral months and the effects can be felt in the internet and twitter. The presidential debatesinjected new vigor in the challenger's campaign and successfully captured the electorate of severalstates posing a threat to the incumbent's position. Much of the sentiment in the election has beencaptured in the online discussions. In this paper, we will be using the original model described …

A Probabilistic Graphical Model For Topic And Preference Discovery On Social Media, Lu Liu, Feida Zhu, Lei Zhang, Shiqiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many web applications today thrive on offering services for large-scale multimedia data, e.g., Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos. However, these data, while rich in content, are usually sparse in textual descriptive information. For example, a video clip is often associated with only a few tags. Moreover, the textual descriptions are often overly specific to the video content. Such characteristics make it very challenging to discover topics at a satisfactory granularity on this kind of data. In this paper, we propose a generative probabilistic model named Preference-Topic Model (PTM) to introduce the dimension of user preferences to enhance the …

Influentials, Novelty, And Social Contagion: The Viral Power Of Average Friends, Close Communities, And Old News, Nicholas Harrigan, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

What is the effect of (1) popular individuals, and (2) community structures on the retransmission of socially contagious behavior? We examine a community of Twitter users over a five month period, operationalizing social contagion as ‘retweeting’, and social structure as the count of subgraphs (small patterns of ties and nodes) between users in the follower/following network. We find that popular individuals act as ‘inefficient hubs’ for social contagion: they have limited attention, are overloaded with inputs, and therefore display limited responsiveness to viral messages. We argue this contradicts the ‘law of the few’ and ‘influentials hypothesis’. We find that community …

Putting Their Best Foot Forward: Emotional Disclosure On Facebook, Lin Qiu, Han Lin, Angela K. Y. Leung, William Tov

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Facebook has become a widely used online self-representation and communication platform. In this research, we focus on emotional disclosure on Facebook. We conducted two studies, and results from both self-report and observer rating show that individuals are more likely to express positive relative to negative emotions and present better emotional well-being on Facebook than in real life. Our study is the first to demonstrate impression management on Facebook through emotional disclosure. We discuss important theoretical and practical implications of our study.

Does Paying For Online Product Reviews Pay Off? The Effects Of Monetary Incentives On Content Creators And Consumers, Andrew Stephen, Yakov Bart, Christilene Du Plessis, Dilney Goncalves

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that although incentivizing product reviews results in more helpful content, disclosing payment lowers review consumers’ product quality expectations. This effect occurs because disclosure induces doubt in product quality and persists when more objective information is available, irrespective of disclosure specificity, across product categories and even after product trial.

Social Learning Theory In The Frontline Documentary “The Merchants Of Cool”, Alixe A. Wiley

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

In the Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool, the relationship between major media conglomerates and their hedonistic teenage customers is examined through exploring the different tactics industries use to discover and market the next “cool” thing. Industries maintain what the documentary refers to as a “feedback loop” with their customers, which is a cyclic, supply-and-demand relationship that blurs the line between fiction and reality. It has become impossible to tell which side is imitating the other: who do the products and trends that define popular youth culture belong to? What's more, are the sexual and aggressive hormone-fueled behaviors on …

To Facebook, Or Not To Facebook, John Hilton Iii, Kenneth Plummer

Faculty Publications

A significant shift in computer-mediated communication has taken place, in which in some cases, social media is becoming the dominant form of communication. Organisations who wish to communicate effectively are turning to social media; however, there are challenges associated with using it. This article chronicles the attempts of one educational institution to implement the use of social media in their organisation.