Social Media Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

Social Media & Revolution: The Importance Of The Internet In Tunisia’S Uprising, Aamna Dhillon

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Our world has entered a digital age, where technology has made leaps and bounds and is accelerating in development. With this digital age came the widespread use of the internet and the emergence of “social media”—online platforms for communicating with others. Though the initial use of these social media platforms was to stay connected with friends and family, a sect of users have used the platforms to share news and important information. In the past few years, people have come together to demand change in their countries by protest and eventually even revolution, all of which is said to have …

On Air With The Community An Exploration Of Five Community Radio Stations In The Western Cape, Kelsey Warren

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The closing of apartheid in South Africa was brought by new measures for democracy in 1994. Community radio stations were seen as measures for local communication and involvement in giving different communities voices that has formerly been lost. This paper attempts to discover the relevance of community radio stations twenty years after democracy and just how citizens are participating.

The paper begins with a review of history of community radio on different levels around the world through the use of literature. The arguments made centralize around the necessity of specialized community stations, the effect of community engagement, the lack of …

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. …

Effect Of Convergence Culture On Spectatorship, Amanda Marcus

e-Research: A Journal of Undergraduate Work

Media convergence has changed how we receive and process information. No longer are we passive spectators, but we are part of the media we consume. Because of the explosion of technology since the turn of the century and a new definition of spectatorship, producers of media can no longer control how their messages are received; they have to engage their audience and listen to feedback in order to remain functioning. Fellow peers serve as informants or as a new source of media. This also affects our individual identities, which shapes our cultural identity. Social media enables us to present ourselves …

Community Connections: Exploring The Constructive Potential Of Facebook For Civic Engagement, Sarah Ruth Martin

Dissertations and Theses

Recognizing the importance of civic engagement to the health of local communities and the overall success of a democracy, this research sought to better understand the relationship between online media use and civic engagement. Specifically, the constructive potential of the social networking site Facebook was explored using the theoretical framework of communication infrastructure theory (CIT; Ball-Rokeach, Kim, & Matei, 2001). Results of a cross-sectional survey with a national sample of 375 participants indicated that Facebook does hold potential for civic engagement. The two most important findings of the research were that Facebook facilitated connection to neighborhood storytelling and that connection …

A Crowdsourcing Approach To Identify Common Method Bias And Self-Representation, Margeret A. Hall, Simon Caton

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

Pertinent questions on the measurement of social indicators are: the verification of data gained online (e.g., controlling for self-representation on social networks), and appropriate uses in community management and policy-making. Across platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogging services, users (sub)consciously represent themselves in a way which is appropriate for their intended audience (Qui et al., 2012; Zhao et al., 2008). However, scholars in the social sciences and computer science have not yet adequately addressed controlling for self-representation, or the propensity to display or censor oneself, in their analyses (Zhao et al., 2008; Das and Kramer, 2013). As such researchers …

Sharing Political News: The Balancing Act Of Intimacy And Socialization In Selective Exposure, Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Meeyoung Cha, Krishna Gummadi, Jon Crowcroft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One might think that, compared to traditional media, social media sites allow people to choose more freely what to read and what to share, especially for politically oriented news. However, reading and sharing habits originate from deeply ingrained behaviors that might be hard to change. To test the extent to which this is true, we propose a Political News Sharing (PoNS) model that holistically captures four key aspects of social psychology: gratification, selective exposure, socialization, and trust & intimacy. Using real instances of political news sharing in Twitter, we study the predictive power of these features. As one might expect, …

Clear: A Real-Time Online Observatory For Bursty And Viral Events, Runquan Xie, Feida Zhu, Hui Ma, Wei Xie, Chen Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe our demonstration of CLEar (Clairaudient Ear), a real-time online platform for detecting, monitoring, summarizing, contextualizing and visualizing bursty and viral events, those triggering a sudden surge of public interest and going viral on micro-blogging platforms. This task is challenging for existing methods as they either use complicated topic models to analyze topics in a off-line manner or define temporal structure of fixed granularity on the data stream for online topic learning, leaving them hardly scalable for real-time stream like that of Twitter. In this demonstration of CLEar, we present a three-stage system: First, we show …

A Study Of Age Gaps Between Online Friends, Lizi Liao, Jing Jiang, Ee Peng Lim, Heyan Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User attribute extraction on social media has gain considerable attention, while existing methods are mostly supervised which suffer great diffi- culty in insufficient gold standard data. In this paper, we validate a strong hypothesis based on homophily and adapt it to ensure the certainty of user attribute we extracted via weakly supervised propagation. Homophily, the theory which states that people who are similar tend to become friends, has been well studied in the setting of online social networks. When we focus on age attribute, based on this theory, online friends tend to have similar age. In this work, we take …

An Exploratory Study On Software Microblogger Behaviors, Yuan Tian, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogging services are growing rapidly in the recent years. Twitter, one of the most popular microblogging sites, has gained more than 500 millions users. Thousands of developers are also using Twitter to communicate with one another and microblog about software-related topics such as programming languages, code libraries, etc. Understanding the behaviors of software microbloggers is one of the needed first steps toward building automated tools to encourage software microblogging activities and harness software microblogging to improve various software engineering activities. In this paper, we investigate the behaviors of software microbloggers in terms of their microblogging frequency, generated contents, and interactions …

Interestingness-Driven Diffussion Process Summarization In Dynamic Networks, Qiang Qu, Siyuan Liu, Christian Jensen, Feida Zhu, Christos Faloutsos

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The widespread use of social networks enables the rapid diffusion of information, e.g., news, among users in very large communities. It is a substantial challenge to be able to observe and understand such diffusion processes, which may be modeled as networks that are both large and dynamic. A key tool in this regard is data summarization. However, few existing studies aim to summarize graphs/networks for dynamics. Dynamic networks raise new challenges not found in static settings, including time sensitivity and the needs for online interestingness evaluation and summary traceability, which render existing techniques inapplicable. We study the topic of dynamic …

It's Complicated: The Role Of Facebook In Romantic Relationships Concerning Relational Certainty, Attachment, And Self-Esteem, Jenna Rae Tucker

Dissertations and Theses

Facebook is among the top used websites in the world, and research has shown that Facebook use is related to individual personality characteristics such as well-being and self-esteem. This study builds on previous research, expanding to investigate attachment-related anxiety and avoidance and relational certainty. The current study examined relationships between Facebook use (both general and for surveillance) and relational certainty, attachment-related anxiety and avoidance, and self-esteem in undergraduate students (N = 261). Online methods were used for data collection, and individuals with their relationship displayed on Facebook reported more relational certainty; however, the more time they spent on the site, …

Opinion Mining Of Sociopolitical Comments From Social Media, Swapna Gottipati

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Opinions are central to almost all human activities by influencing greatly the decision making process. In this thesis, we present the problems of mining issues, extracting entities and suggestive opinions towards the entities, detecting thoughtful comments, and extracting stances and ideological expressions from online comments in the sociopolitical domain. This study is essential for opinion mining applications that are beneficial for policy makers, government sectors and social organizations. Much work has been done to try to uncover consumer sentiments from online comments to help businesses improve their products and services. However, sociopolitical opinion mining poses new challenges due to complex …

Toward A Uses And Gratification's Model Of Twitter, Philip Ryan Johnson

Theses - ALL

This study proposed a uses and gratifications model of Twitter, an internet medium and micro-blog--a platform with both mass and interpersonal communication features for sending short messages to others. A survey was conducted among 242 Twitter users to test the model, including a standard investigation of gratifications sought and gratifications obtained of Twitter usage. In addition, expectations and availability of usage behaviors from McLeod and Becker's (1981) uses and gratifications model were examined. In the model, expectations were conceptualized as user expectations of satisfaction and operationalized as the difference between users' gratifications sought and gratifications actually obtained. Usage behavior availability …

Millennial Alumni Perceptions Of Communications Media Utilized By The Dale Bumpers College Of Agricultural, Food And Life Sciences, Amanda Nicole Anthony

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Alumni relationship cultivation serves as the foundation of higher education and must be maintained to keep graduates and alma maters connected. To evaluate the success of communications media in reaching recent graduates, classified as Millennials, this study sought to determine Millennial alumni perceptions of media distributed by the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences (Bumpers College) from 2012 through 2014. Assessed communications media included The Graduate and AR Culture magazines, The Graduate e-newsletter, tailgate and mocktail party invitations, College website, and social media presences. Active and inactive Millennial alumni (N = 20) responses were gathered through …

Generating Supplementary Travel Guides From Social Media, Liu Yang, Jing Jiang, Lifu Huang, Minghui Qiu, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we study how to summarize travel-related information in forum threads to generate supplementary travel guides. Such summaries presumably can provide additional and more up-to-date information to tourists. Existing multi-document summarization methods have limitations for this task because (1) they do not generate structured summaries but travel guides usually follow a certain template, and (2) they do not put emphasis on named entities but travel guides often recommend points of interest to travelers. To overcome these limitations, we propose to use a latent variable model to align forum threads with the section structure of well-written travel guides. The …