Social Media Commons^™

Twitter In A Spanish Conversation Course (And Maybe In Yours), Pilar Munday

Languages Faculty Publications

Dr. Pilar Munday describes her use of twitter in teaching students Spanish language and culture at Sacred Heart University.

Networking Young Citizens : Learning To Be Citizens In And With The Social Web, Suzanne Mellor, Terri Seddon

Civics and Citizenship Assessment

Many claims are made, both in the popular press and the professional education literature, about the significance of the social web in enabling civic participation. However empirical evidence supporting these claims is sparse and contested rather than strongly-indicative. The Monash University pilot research project, Networking Young Citizens, relates to the discussion about the ways in which the social web might support the civic participation, especially of young people, by examining the ways in which Web 2.0 was integrated into teaching and learning in the school, and any other processes of civic socialisation that were consciously adopted in three schools.

This …

A Unified Model For Topics, Events And Users On Twitter, Qiming Diao, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid growth of social media, Twitter has become one of the most widely adopted platforms for people to post short and instant message. On the one hand, people tweets about their daily lives, and on the other hand, when major events happen, people also follow and tweet about them. Moreover, people’s posting behaviors on events are often closely tied to their personal interests. In this paper, we try to model topics, events and users on Twitter in a unified way. We propose a model which combines an LDA-like topic model and the Recurrent Chinese Restaurant Process to capture …

Social Media And Journalism: What Works Best And Why It Matters, Sue Burzynski Bullard

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

As more Americans turn to social media sites for news and information, news organizations respond by using social networks as platforms to deliver content. This study examines how news outlets use social media platforms, the positive impact and concerns raised by social media use, and the best practices editors identify for effective social media use. The study aims to help editors understand which approaches to social media attract audiences and increase reader or audience interaction.

Public Relations Models And Dialogic Communication In The Twitterverse: An Analysis Of How Colleges And Universities Are Engaging Their Publics Through Twitter, Jason Antwuan Beverly

Dissertations

Colleges and universities throughout this world are realizing the importance of engaging in and building mutually-beneficial relationships with their key publics through social media. The introduction of the microblogging tool known as Twitter extends the use of social media in higher education, beyond the classroom, and into the realm of public relations where it can be just as effective. Now, colleges and universities are capitalizing off of its potential as a public relations tool. Twitter allows colleges and universities to better connect with their technology-consumed publics trough dialogic and interactive two-way communication. This study examines how 155 colleges and universities …

Real Time Event Detection In Twitter, Xun Wang, Feida Zhu, Jing Jiang, Sujian Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Event detection has been an important task for a long time. When it comes to Twitter, new problems are presented. Twitter data is a huge temporal data flow with much noise and various kinds of topics. Traditional sophisticated methods with a high computational complexity aren’t designed to handle such data flow efficiently. In this paper, we propose a mixture Gaussian model for bursty word extraction in Twitter and then employ a novel time-dependent HDP model for new topic detection. Our model can grasp new events, the location and the time an event becomes bursty promptly and accurately. Experiments show the …

Social Media And Medical Students: What Are They Thinking?, Alexandra Gomes, Gisela Butera, Terry Kind, Katherine C. Chretien

Himmelfarb Library Faculty Posters and Presentations

This poster provides a review of interim results from a qualitative study on first year medical students' attitudes and perceptions of their definition of medical professionalism in social media. Included in the study is an evaluation of changes in perspective since becoming a medical student and after participating in an E-Professionalism and Social Media instructional session.

Social Media And The Transformation Of The Humanitarian Narrative: A Comparative Analysis Of Humanitarian Discourse In Libya 2011 And Bosnia 1994, Ellen Noble

Political Science Honors Projects

Within humanitarian discourse, there is a prevailing narrative: the powerful liberal heroes are saving the helpless, weak victims. However, the beginning of the 21^st century marks the expansion of the digital revolution throughout lesser-developed states. Growing access to the Internet has enabled aid recipients to communicate with the outside world, giving them an unprecedented opportunity to reshape discourses surrounding humanitarianism. Through a comparative discourse analysis of Libyan Tweets, 1994 newspaper reports on Bosnia, and 2011 newspaper reports on Libya, this paper analyzes whether aid recipient discourse can resist the dominant humanitarian narrative and if that resistance can influence dominant …

Structures Of Broken Ties: Exploring Unfollow Behavior On Twitter, Bo Xu, Yun Huang, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study investigates unfollow behavior in Twitter, i.e. people removing others from their Twitter following lists. Considering the interdependency and dynamics of unfollow decisions, we use actor-oriented modeling (SIENA) to examine the impacts of reciprocity, status, embeddedness, homophily, and informativeness on tie dissolution. Focusing on ordinary users in tightly-knitted user groups, the results show that relational properties play key roles in the emergence of unfollow behavior: mutual following relations and common followees reduce the likelihood of unfollowing. And unfollow tends to be reciprocal: when a user is unfollowed by someone, he or she will unfollow back. However, there is no …

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 …

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.

Twitter And #Television, Rachel M. Bellwoar

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

This essay discusses the significance of the hashtag phrases that now appear in the corner of television screens during shows. Television networks are trying to utilize Twitter to promote watching their programs live and generate discussion among fans, as well as potential new fans. Other uses for the social network that are being explored is the collection of feedback, for use in renewal and creative decisions, and viewer numbers, to entice advertisers.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

Visualizing Media Bias Through Twitter, Jisun An, Meeyoung Cha, Gummadi, Krishna, Jon Crowcroft, Daniele Queria

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional media outlets are known to report political news in a biased way, potentially affecting the political beliefs of the audience and even altering their voting behaviors. Therefore, tracking bias in everyday news and building a platform where people can receive balanced news information is important. We propose a model that maps the news media sources along a dimensional dichotomous political spectrum using the co-subscriptions relationships inferred by Twitter links. By analyzing 7 million follow links, we show that the political dichotomy naturally arises on Twitter when we only consider direct media subscription. Furthermore, we demonstrate a real-time Twitter-based application …

#Epicplay: Crowd-Sourcing Sports Video Highlights, Anthony Tang, Sebastian Boring

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During a live sports event, many sports fans use social media as a part of their viewing experience, reporting on their thoughts on the event as it unfolds. In this work, we use this information stream to semantically annotate live broadcast sports games, using these annotations to select video highlights from the game. We demonstrate that this approach can be used to select highlights specific for fans of each team, and that these clips reflect the emotions of a fan during a game. Further, we describe how these clips differ from those seen on nightly sportscasts.

Designing Microblogging-Based Class Activities, Tian Luo, Fei Gao

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Microblogging tools such as Twitter have been frequently adopted in educational settings to facilitate learning. This study examined how a microblogging tool, Twiducate, was incorporated into a graduate-level class of ten students. During the 1.5 hour lesson, students participated in a series of Twiducate-supported collaborative and reflective activities. The analysis of in-class discussion transcripts, text-based posts on Twiducate and a pre- and post-test survey results revealed that students were highly engaged in classroom collaborative learning and there is a high level of interaction. Students reported the challenges of using microblogging tools, such as the possibility of creating distraction and disorder …

"You Got To Be Follow-Worthy Or I Will Unfollow You!” Students’ Voices On Twitter Integration Into Classroom Settings, Tian Luo, Teresa Franklin

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This research centers on a case study where Twitter was integrated in an undergraduate level course. Under the instructor’s specific guidance and ongoing feedback, students actively participate in the course both in and outside of classroom. They perceived the incorporation of Twitter into classroom to be highly engaging and contributive to their learning. During the 10 week course, students’ initiatives in developing self-defined codes of conduct for tweeting, creating user groups, and assisting one another to become proficient in using Twitter, demonstrated a high degree of autonomous social learning in both formal and informal learning environments. Not only were they …

Community Affair: Social Inclusion And Swapping, Jowanza Joseph

Student Works

Swapping has become primitive economic behavior with the advent of currency. However, with the increase in concern about the environment swapping has emerged in many forums including swap meets, free cycle and online swapping forums. We perform an exploratory investigation of this behavior through an imperial investigation of Twitter. We test the connectedness, and the popularity of people who are involved in swap meets and farmers markets. Finally, we discuss the implications and future directions for swapping.

Comparing Twitter And Traditional Media Using Topic Models, Wayne Xin Zhao, Jing Jiang, Jianshu Weng, Jing He, Ee Peng Lim, Hongfei Yan, Xiaoming Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter as a new form of social media can potentially contain much useful information, but content analysis on Twitter has not been well studied. In particular, it is not clear whether as an information source Twitter can be simply regarded as a faster news feed that covers mostly the same information as traditional news media. In This paper we empirically compare the content of Twitter with a traditional news medium, New York Times, using unsupervised topic modeling. We use a Twitter-LDA model to discover topics from a representative sample of the entire Twitter. We then use text mining techniques to …

Twitterrank: Finding Topic-Sensitive Influential Twitterers, Jianshu Weng, Ee Peng Lim, Jing Jiang, Qi He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper focuses on the problem of identifying influential users of micro-blogging services. Twitter, one of the most notable micro-blogging services, employs a social-networking model called "following", in which each user can choose who she wants to "follow" to receive tweets from without requiring the latter to give permission first. In a dataset prepared for this study, it is observed that (1) 72.4% of the users in Twitter follow more than 80% of their followers, and (2) 80.5% of the users have 80% of users they are following follow them back. Our study reveals that the presence of "reciprocity" can …