Communication Commons^™

Rewriting Web 2.0 Discourses Of The Local For Socio-Spatial Literacy Theory, Erin Daugherty

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to provide a framework for engaging with two spatial concepts that have been foundational to theorizing literacy across time but have often been taken for granted as passive backdrops to the social action of literacy practice: the notions of “the local” and “the global.” By interrogating the histories, both past and ongoing, of these two spatial concepts as they are interwoven into the sociocultural paradigm of literacy theory, research, and pedagogy, this project identifies new ways that literacy researchers and educators can attend to spatial concepts so as to promote and encourage literacy research and learning that …

Using Large Pre-Trained Language Models To Track Emotions Of Cancer Patients On Twitter, Will Baker

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Twitter is a microblogging website where any user can publicly release a message, called a tweet, expressing their feelings about current events or their own lives. This candid, unfiltered feedback is valuable in the spaces of healthcare and public health communications, where it may be difficult for cancer patients to divulge personal information to healthcare teams, and randomly selected patients may decline participation in surveys about their experiences. In this thesis, BERTweet, a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) model, was used to predict sentiment and emotion labels for cancer-related tweets collected in 2019 and 2020. In longitudinal plots, trends in …

Sentiment Analysis, Quantification, And Shift Detection, Kevin Labille

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on event detection within streams of Tweets based on sentiment quantification. Sentiment quantification extends sentiment analysis, the analysis of the sentiment of individual documents, to analyze the sentiment of an aggregated collection of documents. Although the former has been widely researched, the latter has drawn less attention but offers greater potential to enhance current business intelligence systems. Indeed, knowing the proportion of positive and negative Tweets is much more valuable than knowing which individual Tweets are positive or negative. We also extend our sentiment quantification research to analyze the evolution of sentiment over time to automatically detect …

Collaborative Speculation And Overvaluation: Evidence From Social Media, Adam Barrett Booker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I use data from StockTwits and Twitter to provide evidence that investor attention on social media in the period before earnings is related to short-term overvaluation, consistent with bullish investors herding around common information. In the 2 to 60 days after earnings, returns for companies in the highest quintile of pre-earnings announcement investor attention are 4.2 percent lower than those of companies in the lowest quintile. I find evidence that the negative post-earnings drift result found in this study is related to investors waiting until after earnings are announced to enact costly arbitrage strategies. I further examine intra- and inter-network …

Black Lives Matter: Understanding Social Media And The Changing Landscape Of Social Trust, Diana Carolina Cascante

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to understand how social media is changing the landscape of social capital. Current research indicates a paradox between the growing use of mediated sources that are building social capital and low levels of social trust found in social media. People are skeptical of whether social media is trustworthy because there is no mechanism for fact-checking or verifying the information posted online. Since traces of social capital postulate social trust, it is needed to promote communal change. To understand this paradox, the Black Lives Matter movement is examined as an online platform that brings people together who have …

Political Speech On Twitter: A Sentiment Analysis Of Tweets And News Coverage Of Local Gun Policy, Mohamed Lemine M'Bareck

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While the gun debate has been one of America’s most politically contentious issues, Twitter has become, in recent years a popular venue for politicians to carry out the debate. The present thesis is aimed at better understanding of political speech on Twitter, as well as the ways in which political frames and sentiment on Twitter differ from those of news media coverage regarding gun policy in the state of Arkansas.

The study uses framing theory, which assumes that both news media and individuals use frames to construct perceptions and narratives about issues. Adopting an automated content analysis as a method, …

How College Campuses Are Using Social Media During Severe Weather Events, Emmale Davis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explores how college campuses are using social media during severe weather events. This topic surfaced after a tornado devastated Moore, Oklahoma in May 2013 and those displaced flocked to the University of Oklahoma campus after a post made on Twitter went viral prior to an official message being sent out by the university. In order to further explore this topic, a qualitative phenomenological case study was conducted at the following sites: University of Alabama, Missouri Southern State University, University of Oklahoma, and Florida State University. This study included observations of social media posts on Facebook and Twitter on …

It's All About Me: How Self-Brand Connection And Social Media Interactivity Influence Purchase Intent, Shannon Taylor Mccarthy

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social media is ubiquitous and allows consumers to display identity by through possessions through posts, images, and interactions. The self is all the individual calls their own and is expressed outwardly through everything visible, including possessions, relationships, and interactions. They tell their story through the display of envy-inducing artifacts, and create a perfect, photoshopped life. Consumers seek a connection to positively viewed brands they feel are self-representative through interaction. This dissertation seeks to better understand consumer rationale for and gratification from online brand engagement and how that, in turn, impacts the brand. Three studies examined the effects of self-brand connection, …

Why We Follow: Exploring How Culture Shapes Users’ Motivation For Following Sport Organizations On Twitter And Weibo, Bo Li

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore how culture shapes Social media users’ usage as they follow sport organizations on two similar microblogging services - Twitter and Weibo. In particular, the study attempted to measure whether Social media users exhibited different usage pattern, points of attachment, and usage motivations within two different cultural environments known as individualism and collectivism.

The Los Angeles Lakers’ Social media followers were selected and invited to participant in this study. There were 839 the Lakers’ Weibo followers and 334 Twitter followers who completed an online survey facilitated on Qualtrics. The results of Multivariate analysis …

Understanding How The Southeastern Conference Football Teams Use Twitter Through A Content Analysis, Kristin Elise Pearson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The influence of Social media on intercollegiate athletic departments has been prominent in the past few years. With tight budgets, the departments are forced to find different means of marketing and promoting their brand – through embracing Social media platforms. Research on Social media and intercollegiate athletics is limited; therefore, it is necessary to research how the departments are utilizing Social media. With the agenda setting theory as a foundation, this study explores how the 14 SEC football teams are utilizing Twitter. A total of 3,176 tweets were collected from two constructed weeks. Overall, the findings show that the information …

An Exploration Of Social Media Use In Local Television News Stations: An Evaluation And Development Of A Successful New Media Strategy, Aniseh Ebbini

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the ways in which Social media have gained popularity over the last decade, amongst the public, and especially in the television news industry. After evaluating the current ways Social media are being implemented and observing national trends, I developed a comprehensive new media strategy to serve as a guide and reference for any television station wanting to incorporate these tools into its regimen.